Easy one. 1984. I was browsing my favorite bookstore and my eye fell upon the first Cecil Adams Straight Dope book. Bought it, loved it, I still have it, along with all the subsequent books.
Although I never bothered with the old alt. newsgroups (or whatever they were called) I started reading the SD website as soon as I became aware of it (1995?). One click led me to this here Message Board.
Great story, Lancia. Thanks for sharing.
Looks like all of Cecil’s books are available on Amazon, BTW; just search under “straight dope adams” and you’ll see 'em.
Early 80s, in Chattanooga.
I just started colleg3e, & was mostly broke, but I splurged on the first Cecil book.
I’d been reading the SD in Baltimore’s City Squeeze alternative newspaper in the late 70’s. I saw the book one day a book store, and bought it. Pretty straighforward
A roommate from college gave me one of Cecil’s books in the late 80’s/early 90’s and it was so funny I couldn’t put it down. I’m not a non-fiction reader, so that demonstrates how much I enjoyed it. Some years later I was browsing this new thingie called the Internet and stumbled upon the website. Sometime after that I clicked on threadspotting and, well, here I am.
I can’t remember which (probably the first), but it was one of the books found in the library circa 1985. It included this column asking if it was true brontosauruses never really existed. Then this gem of a paragraph,
There was just one problem: one head was found four miles away from the main skeleton, the other one 400 miles away. Moreover, the skulls were found near the skeletons of another type of dinosaur called the camarasaurus, and in fact looked an awful lot like camarasaurus skulls. O.C. was thus asking the world to believe, in essence, that a whole passel of camarasauruses came along, spied Mr. Bronto, noticed how much he looked like themselves, slipped him a mickey, sawed off his noodle, and dragged it along with them until such time as they too departed this vale of tears.
convinced me I had found my kind of columnist. I read the other book or two in the library and that was that. So far as I knew, TSD was not available in any of the local papers. Forward to about 1998 and I was perusing AOL when a miracle happened…