On page 60 of Triumph of the Straight Dope there is an illustration by the illustrious Slug. I’ll be damned if I can tell which column it’s supposed to go with, though. It appears as if a man and the turkey-like-thing[sup]*[/sup] are playing a card game (with some very strange cards) and the turkey-like-thing is hitting the man over the head with a blackjack. I know it’s a blackjack because it says “BLACKJACK” right there in black and white.
If I had to guess I’d say it is intended to go with a column along the lines of “What does the card game blackjack have to do with the thing you hit people over the head with?” There is no such column in the book, nor could I find such a column online.
[sup]*[/sup] It’s more of a stork-turkey hybrid. I think of it as the Cecilbird, but I don’t really know if the bird is supposed to represent Cecil. It sometimes sports a C on its chest, but I don’t usually think of Cecil as a turkey who does a lot of really stupid things.
I agree that the Blackjack cartoon doesn’t appear to go with any of the columns in the book.
However, the turkey definitely is Slug’s most common depiction of our Uncle Cecil – the foreword to The Straight Dope reports that “Cecil over the years has been particularly peeved at Slug’s habit of depicting him as a turkey with a mortarboard, which he does not feel adequately conveys his stature in contemporary American culture”. (Slug also sometimes portrays Cecil as an individual with a bag over his head).
Slug also occasionally appears in the illustrations, as a stout, bearded fellow with a maniacal smile, wearing a beret. That’s him on page 15 of Triumph of the Straight Dope, poring GAS-O-LINE over Unca Cece, although no doubt only in the spirit of fun, since he would never harm his good buddy Cecil. I hope.
I dunno if I’m higher than Arnold, but I’m just as stumped. The only column I can find which mentions blackjack is one from 1991 (when was TotSD published?) about lottery odds, and it was really only an incidental mention. Furthermore, I searched on the boards for “blackjack” in the “Comments on Cecil’s Columns” forum, and the only hit I got was this selfsame thread. I find it hard to believe that there would exist any Cecilian column which had not drawn comments on the board.
We’ve seen this sort of thing before, just recently in fact. One of the online illustrations showed the illustration for rolling over on a baby–but the column had nothing to do with that. Instead, the online column was part of a two-part column, and the other part of the column was about rolling over on a baby, but it wasn’t included online.
So, maybe there was a two-part column in the dim past that discussed blackjack, and the other part made it onto those pages of TotSD. O, o, Ed is in trouble again.
Hmmm, The Powers That Be appear to be strangely silent about this important topic. I hoped maybe Bibliophage had stumbled across some sort of secret contest, and would win a new car and give us all rides.
In any event, I’d like to report another error that appears in the pages of Triumph of the Straight Dope – on page 198, in Has IBM discovered a way to teleport objects?, Slug, apparently forgetting the “except after C” clause of the “I before E” rule, labeled the catching device “RECIEVE” (italics added). A copy of the illustration is online at http://www.straightdope.com/art/1996/960607.gif (I’m assuming that Slug does the lettering on his illustrations. If he in fact farms that job out, then I apologize for jumping to conclusions, so to speak).
Anyway, this is our big chance to snap up all the defective copies of Triumph of the Straight Dope before they have a chance to recall and replace them. It wouldn’t surprise me if someday an original copy of Triumph was worth more that one of those wingless Beanie Babies…
