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How Do You Explain This?Daniel Engber holds court on the Explainer Question of the Year and the art of explaining.

Posted Thursday, Jan. 8, 2009, at 3:56 PM ET

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Kansas City, Mo.: I love the Explainer!

How often do you come up with a question you can't come up with an answer for?

Daniel Engber: That rarely happens. I wrote the column almost every day for three years, and I can only remember canceling a column a handful of times. Sometimes we tweak the question midway through, so it's more answerable. Sometimes we just publish a less-than-perfect answer.

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Brooklyn: "What do you make of the 'good stock' theory?"

It's rubbish. We're not talking about some lost gospel. The lyrics are there on the Net easily found. The song says Woodstock, not good stock. It doesn't even sound like good stock. And the words good stock don't make much sense in this context. You come from good stock, not educated. It's a school. The theory is forced.

Daniel Engber: I agree with you. Although I'm holding tight to my Woodstock College theory, in spite of the mounting evidence against it.

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Daniel Engber: I'd like to share another one of the unanswered questions from 2005, from back before we published the end-of-year list. This is an exclusive, people!

"What about a person who has 7 ferrets for pets? Is that a little too much? Have a great day, Greek Helen"

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DC: I love the explainer, and I'd love to write for the column. Do you take freelancers? And if so, how do I apply?

Daniel Engber: We do work with freelancers from time to time. We also had a contest to be the next Explainer last year. If you want to pitch ideas for the column, send me a note at , with a (brief!) description of your background and writing experience.

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Blues Bros changed lyrics: From bluesbrotherscentral.com—Soul Man Words & Music by David Porter & Isaac Hayes.

Someone needs to ask the surviving bro

Daniel Engber: Good link

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Brooklyn: I have the Woodstock answer confirmed!

I was completely wrong about the lyrics and what I said before. It is good stock, not wood stock. You have to look at copyrighted sheet music with the lyrics. I checked with Sheetmusicdirect.com and sure enough it is good stock.

Daniel Engber: I feel like we've really accomplished something here on this "Soul Man" issue. And yet, I also think we're still confused. Do we have official confirmation that Isaac Hayes wrote it as "Woodstock" in the first place?

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Conflicting answers?: I wonder if you ever have questions where in your research you end up with multiple conflicting answers from credible sources? Also, what do you consider a credible source?

Daniel Engber: Great question. If we have multiple conflicting answers from credible sources, we try to report both of them. But the goal of Explainer is to go beyond dueling-expert journalism. So whenever possible, we make the best judgment we can, and present that. What constitutes a credible source varies from question to question, of course. But we often rely on academics, policy wonks, and published research papers.

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Daniel Engber: Okay, I'm signing off. Thanks for all your questions, and for reading the Explainer column. I'm reasonably satisfied with our resolution of the "Soul Man" controversy, but we didn't make much progress on the escalator question. Perhaps fodder for a future chat....