I like to think of Cecil as the intelligent option to Flattus Maximus. 
But does anyone lick Licec and live?
Long long long ago, on an internet far far far away …
…One man rose to teach Truth to a few pupils willing to listen, while surviving the ripples, tides, and eddies stemming from near constant grabs for power from those content with petty corruption… within an Enormous but Decaying Empire…
I’m more worried about the Reader than Cecil. The Reader has been awful the past couple of years and I just can’t see it surviving. Red Eye has pretty much shut down.
A GQ level question: who at this point actually own the IP rights to the name “The Straight Dope” and the character “Cecil”?
Creative Loafing?
??? Your answer is right at the bottom of this page.
Creative Loafing as a company no longer exists. After bankruptcy, parts were sold off until it was gone. The Chicago Reader was sold to Sun-Times Media and the various <city> Creative Loafings were sold to various companies. Many of those CL’s no longer exist. The Atlanta CL still exists and is a shadow of its former self. The formerly profitable classified section is barely there.
Creative Loafing only owned The Reader for a year before going bankrupt. It took another 4 years for the sale of The Reader to go thru. CL ownership of the Straight Dope mega-empire was just a blip over the last 44 years.
Flattus Maximus died in 2011, RIP.
Never scrolled that far!
Thanks.
So that’s the copyright on “The Straight Dope”. Is the character “Cecil” covered under that copyright? I would presume so but I am ignorant of this stuff.
Let us assume that Sun-Times Media at some point either gives up on The Reader and shuts it down (odds are in that circumstance there is no one else willing to pay much for The Reader brand as a paper) or merely retires the column. I suspect the online SD presence is not worth very much. Would there be, you suspect, a buyer interested in the SD and the character Cecil as IP to own, and would Sun-Times Media even be interested in making the effort of selling something worth so little?
Maybe you could do it?
Perhaps the board could migrate to a user who has access to the necessary capacities and tools. This happened to the formerJREF Forum. it was relatively painless and seems to be working.
Mike Lenehan. One of life’s unforgettable characters. Who once told a roomful of SDMB moderators, “I sincerely don’t understand why you f*****g do this.” (He brought us coffee and doughnuts just the same.)
But the Dope owes a lot of Mike. He was very cool, mostly in that even though he didn’t understand he let us do stuff for a long time. There were comments just like the above, such as “I dunno why you would want to do a message board, but okay.” When that Chicago Reader culture got swept away by changing times and advancing technology, by events and corporate sale, everything changed and not for the better.
The alternative newspaper business, like all dead tree publishing, is ailing. (And not the most fabulous invalid at that.) The Reader has a great history and all of you are a tiny but meaningful part of that history. The Straight Dope community grew out of something truly wonderful that has ceased to be and will never be again. (The *Reader * is still publishing but it’s all so different now.
You can see more of the story, here’s the documentary, including Lenehan’s comments.
There ought to be a Dopefest sometime where us old timers can come in and give testimony … we got so many stories and so much history, it should be stored somewhere besides in our heads. I’m imagining a tableful of us oldsters sitting around and telling tales of our jackbooted days. With big drinks.
I’m afraid I don’t get the joke. I do tend to get your jokes, even if I don’t tend to find them all that funny.
Anyways, my life is so fucked up that I doubt I could be counted on to pull off any work with a deadline.
Have several scattered as wide as the Old Silvertips are scattered. Record them to DVD like they do with the WW II vets; seriously. Burn some copies and make them available with the benefits going to the board. Heck - I’d buy an extra set or three as presents.
For the benefit of the Straight Dope Moderators Pension Fund … maybe they can buy us a farm where we can live the rest of our lives with our Xanax gumball machines and our many many memories. Remember, PTSD (Post-Traumatic-Straight-Dope) is a terrible thing. 
The SDMB Mods Retirement Farm ----- the only zoo where the exhibits trank themselves. 
Are you dreaming of chasing rabbits?
Or goats?