What the heck else is he doing? Take the current column about rhino horns. There’s a lot of good info there, some of it new to me (like rhino horn is not really that popular for an aphrodisiac). He could have popped in to this thread (for example) and made a valuable contribution. But noooo, the worlds smartest human with all this knowledge at his fingertips just sits back and watches us wallow in our ignorance.
My guess is that he’s gotten lazy. I’ve been following his syndicated columns from the days of clay tablets. Back when he had to actually make calls and visit the library… you know, work for a living. But with the advent of the internet, answers are usually just a click away. And when they’re not he usually delegates these “difficult” tasks of actual research to (the more than likely indentured - and no doubt star-struck ) Una Persson.
I picture him lounging on the Riviera, awash with all the proceeds from his books getting fat and lazy. Flush with success he probably just calls in his columns these days letting the ‘teeming masses’ and the ‘minions and underlings’ carry his banner. As Carl once put it, “How about a little something, you know, for the effort?”
You don’t want to know what Cecil does when he’s not working on SD related tasks. You just don’t. Once you know, you cannot unknow. It’s sort of like goatse, once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. Bleach doesn’t help.
> I picture him lounging on the Riviera, awash with all the proceeds from his
> books getting fat and lazy.
I picture him either working some entirely different full-time job or mostly retired and not willing to put in a lot of work when researching the columns. In all likelihood, Cecil has made only a moderate amount of money from the columns in all the forms that they have appeared. You don’t get paid that much for a column appearing in a few free newspapers. You don’t get paid that much for several books that never sold more than modestly well. Cecil is now presumably in his sixties and looking back at a life that made have given him a sort of cult fame but never paid him very well.
Cecil is not the one reposting the old columns. Classic columns are rerun more or less in order, without a lot of decision-making about relevance. For some, the information is really unchanged. For others, of course, it would be nice for some updating, but that takes time and effort.
It’s purely volunteer. Neither SDSAB, nor Board Moderators or Administrators are paid.
Both Cecil and Ed have separate identities on the board. Each user name has posted. So no violation of the sock rule, or else the one permissible violation - the owner can do what he wants.
I’m sure it’s been mentioned before, but is there any reason why They haven’t simply asked if any of the board members are interested in helping update some of the “Classic” columns? I’ve often said I think it’s patently silly, in this era of Wikipedia and Google, to be running 20+ year old columns (which are supposed to be and indeed held up to be The Definitive Truth of the subject) which are now embarrassingly outdated.
