Is That a Motion To Move the Previous Question in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

Those among my readers to whom this blog is meat, drink, their after-dinner mint will have noticed below and to the left a new link to a new blog. The blog is the USF Journalism Forum, a renaming -- to facilitate a discussion of the future of journalism at my university -- of the blog originally created in honor of my cat Oliver. (Which is neither here nor there but which explains the URL which contains the phrase oliversmojo. Just clearing the underbrush, Keep going.)

We may be at a turning point. I will not vex you with the details, but we may be ready to take yet another giant step toward creating a journalism major in the department of Media Studies. Or we may not. I can promise you that we will talk, we'll reflect, we'll simmer, we'll pronounce and inveigle and finally we'll vote. And then we will go down the road happy boys and girls together.

I'm talking about the full-time faculty. It's a sight to see us going down the road happy boys and girls together after a full and frank discussion.

It's politics. It's academic politics, which can be, uh, zesty. When you are first in the academic game, academic politics is like your first discovery of sex: in the halls, in the offices, in the closets, under the table over coffee, anywhere and anytime, you just can't get enough of horse trading, trial balloon floating, vote pairing, argument parsing, doomsday scenario-ing and general global positioning. You just can't get enough.

And as you grow older, yes, it's still like sex, a powerful force, even a necessary force, but no longer quite so all-consuming. And then at the end -- your scrawl grown shaky on the wipeboard, the crumbs trailing down your belly's ample swell -- well, I have to admit my god this just is too good to give up.

I will give up my academic politics when they pry my Roberts Rules of Order out of my cold dead hand.

Is there a second?