his week's Nom d'Aplomb meeting was pretty brief. In fact, it was nonexistent. Seems that Mal is voluntarily freezing to death this weekend. Miss Information is still pouting about the SACSually explicit holiday contest. What she says is that last season's batch of dewberry brandy hasn't finished "working" (which I assume means "aging") & her antimacassars still haven't been ironed since the Ladies Missionary Society progressive supper last month, so she's unwilling to entertain the Ad Hoc Committee. A flimsy excuse, if you ask me. That leaves yours truly to do the dirty work & with Miss I out of the picture for the nonce, I'll certainly try to keep the work dirty! (SFT is such an inspiration!)

So without further ado, let's Meet the Fokkers who've been nom-inated this week. (Sorry, Miss I!)

USM employees must think, "These are the times..." that try men's souls. Women's souls, too, for that matter. They've gone through the looking glass & Down the Rabbit's Hole. More and more faculty & staff can no longer tolerate Toxic Trade-offs, instead counting down One . . . Two . . . Three . . . GO! before shouting, "I'm History!" & heading out Thunder Road for Hernando's Hideaway. A few consider themselves Interested goners, but the truth about the loss of faculty & staff isn't In the News nearly enough. It should leave everyone in Hattiesburg Hot under the collar about all the jobs that have gone, if nothing else. It may be true that a Country Boy Can Survive, but might he not be better served by some real leadership at the top? Doesn't anybody understand that shared governance is a Competitive Advantage for a university?

Is USM-GC just another episode of The Apprentice? It's hard to Trump the Kenbot's job snowball, that's for sure. Of course, we all know the second part of the title, "Jack of All Trades"... Watch for a meltdown if it turns out that Shelby isn't really Here to stay.

What about SACS? Heck, it's an Abomination that USM's on probation, really. But what's there to do about it? You might as well Let your fingers do the walking through the Sunday Comics or sit in front of a TV watching old Bullwinkle cartoons, rooting for the original Moose & Rocko. (The inside scoop is that SFT roots for Boris Badinoff & Natasha.) The operative question is whether SACS (or anybody else) thinks USM is engaged in Idiocy or Brilliance? But for now, everything's under control. There's nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Nobody seems to Overlook opportunities to criticize the administration, but they're being given free ammunition. We hear insurgent x whisper, "Just Heard This Last Night." Tales seem to fly in by carrier pigeon. Lately, it's been a sad fact that while libraries rise and fall, ours is falling. Even the big new signs were greeted with Banner Banter. Everybody has their own version of The 7 Ps, but nobody pays 'em any mind any more. More & more, people are getting PO'd about how things are run at the university. Bakunin's Ghost is not forgotten. It looks like it's just a not-so Divine Design cooked up by the IHL board to see exactly how long it can keep USM stuck in it. What can we expect, when the rule is always GIGO? Even though they both run lumber yards, Roy Klumb is no Ma Perkins.

And students. Let's not forget Shelby's most prized possessions. How many students might look up an article about Etymology of Hattiesburg while researching an essay on butterflies? Will they get $100 for dropping the course? What this says about the University of Southern Miss'ippi, young people in general, or the overall decline of western civilization remains open for debate. Just this week, a student posted that s/he was "Not on scholaship". It's not hard to figure out why...

And now for this week's winner. <sotto voce>The envelope, please...</sotto voce>

Acting unilaterally on behalf of the Emergency Ad Hoc Committee for Sobriquet Superiority, I am proud to award this week's Nom d'Aplomb to an alias that is truly at the heart of what universities are supposed to be about. By adding some punctuation, this poster turned it from a mere concept into the question that's on everyone's lips around these parts: Academic Freedom?

The lucky (non-Aramark) weiner may pick up the suitable-for-framing & airplane construction certificate at the usual place.