Vital stats:
Format: questions and answers about what the story is with various things
Duration: ~5m
Frequency: on average, weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all
Back in high school, I thought the archives of The Straight Dope were just about the coolest internet thing ever. Stored therein were answers to burning questions I didn’t even how I had: “Was the legendary liqueur absinthe hallucinogenic?” “What’s equus eroticus all about?” “What’s Kwanzaa?” Truly — and I say this as someone who writes a lot on the web — some of the most interesting reading on the web. (I also drew no small amount of enjoyment out of the site’s message board, until it started charging. I’m web 1.0 enough not to pay for a message board on principle.)
The Straight Dope actually has a long, storied history, especially by the standards of enterprises you can call “internet things.” It’s a question-and-answer column that’s run in the Chicago Reader and elsewhere for nearly 40 years. The answers ostensibly come from Cecil Adams, “world’s smartest human” — a shadowy, wisecracking figure whose existence has always been debated — and the questions from Cecil’s public, which he refers to as the “teeming millions.” Most of the millions’ inquiries take the “What’s the story with… ?”/”What’s the deal with… ?”/What gives with… ?” form, demanding explanations of often mundane but sometimes exotic phenomena that public education inexplicably fails to address.
Two qualities make The Straight Dope so compelling: the curiosity-satisfying, hey-I-always-wondered-about-that nature of the topics, and the Cecil Adams writing style. Adams (or whatever hive mind of scholars labors under the Adams banner) combines clarity, intelligence, jauntiness, and mild-to-strong disdain for the questioner, somehow winningly. Some might call it “snarky,” but I find it higher-class than that; Adams makes sport of his readers, sure, but he also takes their concerns seriously. For instance, here he is beginning to respond to a writer-in who wants to know why Shakespeare is better than Tom Clancy:
Shakespeare versus Tom Clancy, eh? I admire you, Mark. You’re a bozo, but you’re a bozo with brass. What’s more, you raise a question that deserves an answer. Fact is, neglecting the handful of fey creatures who claim they grokked Shakespeare upon first hearing “to be or not to be,” few people get him right out of the box. The obstacle is his lofty language, much of which can only be grasped with footnotes, and sometimes not then.
Here’s his opener to a column addressing a question about what kind of fart it would take a 180-pound man to achieve liftoff:
You realize, K., that this question is idiotic. However, that’s never stopped us before, and there’s no doubt that from a scientific perspective the subject has its points of interest. So I assigned the job to my assistant Una, a professional engineer, who quickly obtained the relevant thrust equations from NASA and got to work computing the necessary forces. While Una and I found the results enlightening, for you — assuming you’re the 180-pound man here — it wasn’t such a good day.
It came as no surprise when I found out The Straight Dope, like many originally text-based internet things, now has a podcast [RSS] [iTunes]. On purely formal grounds, I can’t in good conscience recommend it: it’s just some guy — not, needless to say, the mysterious Adams — reading Adams’ words out loud. (Given infinity more resources, though, I imagine it could make a killer Radio Lab-type audio spectacle.) But if you’re not much for the written word, by all means, don’t hesitate consume a column this delightful ear-style. You even still get “Slug” Signorino’s accompanying goofy illustrations — which, say what you will, I actually find really funny — albeit squished to the dimensions of your mobile audio device’s screen.
You will, however, have to deal with beer ads every five minutes. I think the genius of Cecil Adamsian prose, which I’ve long worshipped as an exemplar of high weekly-column style and which maybe works even better spoken than written, is worth it. But I’m still trying to find a way to expunge from my mind slogans about how it takes characters to brew beer with character. Beer. With character. It takes characters. To brew it. To brew a beer. A beer with character. Which takes characters.
[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas, the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]