Dear Vincent O'Hern

Dear Vincent O'Hern,
I read in last week's Isthmus that it was to be the last issue to carry The Straight Dope. Reading those words seemed so unreal to me. "Could they really be dropping it?" I asked myself.

Well, with the arrival of this week's issue, I see now that it is true. You really have gone AWOL from Uncle Cecil's army and have dropped out of that fight against ignorance. For shame!

I first began reading The Straight Dope in the 6th or 7th grade when I lived in Chicago. When I moved to rural Wisconsin, I missed it deeply and was overjoyed to find that your paper carried the column when I moved here to Madison in 1990.

When Isthmus went from broadsheet to tabloid, I stuck by it and have continued to do so as the paper has shrunk over the years to its comparatively anorexic incarnation. I've enjoyed reading The Straight Dope on my bus rides home on Thursdays for some time and now you have deprived me of this.

Have you read the current issue? Isthmus used to be something for me to look forward to. First there was a lethal dose of investigative reporting and then I could read a film review by Kent Williams which would make me want to buy the entire Criterion Collection. This was followed by one of Tom Laskin's music reviews that generally made me want to strangle him. My perusal would be topped off with some chuckle-inducing personal ads and Uncle Cecil's humorous nuggets of knowledge.

But recently Isthmus became almost bereft of writing with any flair. It's as if you sent everyone to a business writing class to make sure that no one would have a unique writing style and that everything was written at an 8th grade level. And now you've taken away the last bit of humor your publication had (PS Mueller is decidedly not funny.) and replaced it with Linda Falkenstein's food cart tweets. Gee, thanks for the "upgrade".

Isthmus remains informative but it's no longer fun. Please bring back The Straight Dope.

Signed,
An Angry Reader