No shit. As of this morning we have slightly over 80,000 members. What was the last meaningful cultural trend that started in a city of 80,000 people?
As of this morning, slightly over 80,000 user names have been registered. Among those are many thousands of socks, trolls and spammers who are forever banned. There are also many thousands of people who came in to ask one question and never returned as well as people who never posted at all. I’d be surprised if there were more than several hundred regular posters at any given time.
I had a similar, but not as specific, idea! Good going 
OK, how about Barney Stinson winking a “Hi, Opal”? 
Hey!
I mean, I know, but did you have to?
Wow! Sorry…didn’t realize I was being such an asshat! Actually, I made a VERY similar comment once before and not only did most people agree with me, no one accused me of jr. modding. I’ll try to find it if someone asks for a cite (imagine that!)
I think this sort of post is to the SDMB’s place in Pop Culture as the wings of a real ostrich to its flying ability.
I think you forgot a word there, Dodo.
I think the most probable mainstream connection to the SDMB I’ve seen is on the commercials for The Nation magazine that runs on the cable news channels. The voice over guy puts a real emphasis on when he says “…the straight dope”. I imagine that there is a lot of crossover between each’s readership.
Well possibly… I think it changes the meaning of the analogy, but:
“I think this sort of post is to the SDMB’s place in Dodo Pop Culture as the wings of a real ostrich to its flying ability.”
Thing is, Dodos didn’t fly either. So Dodo Pop Culture would presumably be at ostrich-level already.
Oh for fuck sake. This is getting ridiculous. The phrase “the straight dope” has got to be over 100 years old.
Hey now, I didn’t say that it really was a connection, just more probable than pork. It is really just in the way that he says it. I don’t think, however, that is entirely unrealistic that they could be trying to market to readers of Cecil’s column, as they(we) are probably right in The Nation’s key demographic.
I think that it is totally unrealistic. A secret shout out to the readers of an obscure newspaper column? That’s insane. Why not just advertise on the web page?
Super secret even! Hell, I even heard that if you play the commercial backwards and slow it down to be exactly twenty minutes long, there are hidden plans to build a death ray. :rolleyes:
Secret, clever, or cliché? I just don’t know how I’m ever going to sleep with this on my mind.
Yet, funnily enough, the only place I’ve ever heard it is on these boards or in direct reference to the column (which I’ve only ever seen on this website as it’s not published in print here).
Not that I’m saying every single mention of the phrase is a reference to these boards (and the example quoted earlier seems to be reaching to make a connection… in fact, it’s just silly to try and connect the two), but certainly my first thought on hearing the phrase will be something in connection to the messageboard or the column, not a piece of obsolete jive slang from way back. YRMV, of course.
When I did this Google search, it seems that I had the remote access windows for one of our pieces of test equipment opened and ran the search on that PC rather than mine. Today I was in a meeting with my boss and the rest of the senior engineering staff and we were looking at that piece of equipment remotely during a meeting. The software guy wanted to cut and paste something from one of the log files and hit paste first and “bacon pie” came up. Shit. Everyone was pretty puzzled and laughed about it but couldn’t for the life of them figure out why that would be there.
A meme is born.
Half the reason I hang out hear is that it’s like having a window onto a psych ward – you get to witness meltdowns and mouth frothing that you just don’t have much of a chance to see anywhere else.
I was gonna say the other half is all the funny stuff – except the meltdowns can be pretty damn funny.
So it’s all about funny.
We lost a lot of our ability to create memes when post parties and other mindless activities were cut out. Randomness is popular culture’s friend.
The more we were moderated, the less viable the board became. When we became a pay site, our relevance in popular culture, such as it was, essentially ended.
Do we want that cachet back? Can we get it back? How?
Those are the questions we need to answer.
What cachet? And how can we get back something we’ve never had.
The Dope has never produced a meme that caught on outside the Dope. We’ve got a few original ones, but aside from Dopers posting those things on non-SDMB sites, they have little Internet cache.
Basically, the biggest seems to be a reference to “Gaudere’s Law” as an alternate name for “Muphry’s Law” in Wikipedia.