I first became aware of TSD when I was a senior in high school back in 1988. I discovered The Straight Dope and More of the Straight Dope at my local library, and, let me tell you, they were sheer nirvana for me.
So you can imagine I was extremely excited when, six years later, a new collection of columns (Return of the Straight Dope) came out.
And then I read the thing.
Now, truly, the late period SD books don’t suck, exactly, but the column had by that time seemed to lose more than a little of its previous hyper-addictive readability (I’ve read through those first two tomes, oh, let’s say at least five or six times each). “Cecil’s” writing style had changed, and not exactly for the better.
Of course, the issue may be that, after reading those first two volumes, I had unrealistic expectations of the column (I mean, after reaching the lofty heights of the Vlad the Impaler and penile fracture columns, it’s kind of all downhill from there). Nonetheless, my borderline maniacal enjoyment of TSD cooled down, never to warm up again, sadly.
So, does anyone else share my (blasphemous) opinion on this?
It jumped the shark when Cecil backed off of his claims from the “Gerbil stuffing” column when it was reprinted in the book. But it’s still entertaining.
When Cecil stopped copping an attitude and giving people stuff back
Seriously the first two books and colums from that era were far more entertainingly written because of the “attitude.” Now it’s way too PC, but in the SD’s defense, what isn’t?
I remember reading the columns in the alternative paper back in the 80s and really loving it, looking forward to each new column. I also bought the books.
For at least the past year I don’t even read the weekly columns anymore. I don’t know what changed behind the scenes, but it definitely isn’t the same. I don’t think it is the writing style, but the issues that are being addressed are lame or uninteresting. Or maybe my years of reading the SDMD have left me jaded.
I won’t pin down when, or even if, this happened – however, I will say that it’s been at least six or seven years since I replaced my Straight Dope front page bookmark with one for the SDMB.
Another thought just occurred to me – time was that a new column came out on Wednesday, and that was it. Once a week a new column came out, and it was a Big Fricking Deal to me – a midweek “something to look forward to” kinda thing. When they changed it so that every day had new (or reprinted-but-new-to-me) content, the mystique was lost. I still read it, but it was no longer a big deal.
I’d say when The Masquerade was continued far past its sell-by date. Kind of like your slightly-barmy uncle, who keeps trying to scare you with his Frankenstein mask on Halloween, even tho you are 20 years old now and haven’t been the least bit terrified by it since you were 10. But it’s hard to put an exact date/year on that.
Well to be fair, a lot of the really interesting topics got pretty wall covered in the 70s. (calories in semen, sparks from Life Savers, etc.) Mopping up the remaining dull questions is bound to feel anticlimactic.
In other words, The Dope is still big; it’s the questions that have gotten smaller.
I feel the same way about The Onion. It was something I looked forward to on Thursday.
It’s not that we’ve run out of questions, IMHO. It’s that now, we’ve got other resources easily at hand that we can use to find the answers. I’ll say there were two sharks the SD jumped over; one in the early 2000s when Google became the preeminent search engine and the amount of content on the Web was increasing exponentially, and another later in the decade when Wikipedia started to include more articles on mundane topics.
Darn it, elmwood, I was coming in to say pretty much the same thing. I think it’s when the World Wide Web became prominent. Now there are other ways to find out the answers to things you want to know. I also think we are jaded to a degree because there is an information overload.
This. I, like many of you I suspect, found out about this website because I had previously been reading the books. That was back in 1998 when my internet was dialup and I rented these paper website dealies from a store called the “Library.”
Nowadays, with Mythbusters and Wikipedia and Snopes, nobody cares what happened to channel one. Heck, thanks to digital cable, I have channel one. As a result, the column becomes a bit more esoteric. I thought binaural beats and the effects they had on marketing was a really cool read, but I don’t know how many people would share that sentiment.
I admit to some bias, since I work for the STRAIGHT DOPE and I help sort the mail (to find interesting questions), and it’s become harder but I don’t see any shark-jumping. I think it’s more that we live in an era of information overload. As an example: last night after dinner with friends, someone asked a trivia/nostalgia question. Ten years ago, that would have engendered interesting and fun discussion/recollections as we tried to remember the name of Tonto’s horse (or whatever.) We’d have remembered all the old western horses we could, and laughed and enjoyed the discussion. Last night, as soon as the question was asked, someone pulled out an iPhone and looked it up. No further discussion, no fun.
I do miss the classic snark. When a rare occurrence showed up in the column 
