Legendary column ends

This newspaper is called an alt-weekly, meaning an alternative weekly—usually alternative to a daily or long established newspaper. Alt-weeklies around the nation have a lot of accomplishments to their credit. In Chicago, the Reader is the proud home of Cecil Adams and the Straight Dope, a column that answers readers’ weird questions (“If everyone in China jumped off chairs at once, would the earth be thrown out of its orbit?” “Is it true about Catherine the Great and the horse?”). It has appeared in alt-weeklies around the nation.

Cecil has now hung up his column with a final piece on June 27 (“Do brain supplements do anything?”). His first column—February 2, 1973—dealt in part with the 1968 Democratic National Convention and also with Aaron Russo, who later became a short-lived Donald Trumpish political figure in Nevada. The column archive will remain online, and there are several books of Straight Dope columns in print.

Nevada appeared regularly either in the column or Straight Dope reader message boards, with discussions of astronaut training in Nevada, why there is a naval research lab in this desert state, who or what is Chevy Chase (a couple of Nevada U.S. senators founded an all-white Maryland town with that name), mid-20th century permeation of the world’s iron by radiation from Nevada atom bomb tests, the record for North American mallard ducks colliding with airliners (21,000 feet over Elko), and a variety of prostitution questions.