It makes sense on slashdot, as he's one of the admin over there.

Why it took off, I have no idea. I always preferred 'There are spiders in my hair! There are spiders in my hair!' response from The Asylum (at Georgia Tech, I think), unfortunately, that site closed shop in the 1990's, and most people these days never saw it. They had a poll archive, but I can't remember the exact URL to check if archive.org has a copy of it. (and searches for the above response or 'favorite features of Microsoft Bob' don't find anything)

The asylum had an interesting take on polls -- each response had [+] and [-] buttons next to it, and each poll could have 20 responses -- people would add responses 'til it filled up, and if a response was voted to -20, it was deleted, and someone could add a new response.

(updated to fix typo)