DEATHWATCHBriefly: His Majesty's blog ne'er existed

Besieged by resignations, dogged by transparent p.r. masquerading as legitimate coverage and inundated with student complaints, Medill Dean John Lavine now gets his very own deathwatch.

Once upon a time in a crabby old building called Fisk, Medill Dean John Lavine decided to complement his sea change — excuse me "blow up" — of the curriculum by blogging about his decision-making. There were even periodic posts!

Anyways. I was going to write that it had been 100, 200, 500 days since his last post, but Medill now has no records of any such Dean's blog. Come on! It had that happy-go-lucky logo, that formal prose, those obsequious descriptions of meaningless changes. Stop trying to hoodwink me, Michele Bitoun.

YOU ARE SO FUCKEDMedill consults thesaurus, knows what you did at Time for Kids this summer

It's a sad consequence of our little cottage industry's ongoing transition that not even I bothered to read "john"'s e-mail about the new Medill integrity code. When you get to an explanatory sentence about Jayson Blair, totally unnecessary dependent clause here, what do you do? You stop reading. And you should.

Moving on. The new Integrity Code replaces what I believe was an Honor Pledge, which proves what Michele Bitoun lacks in cerebral matter she makes up for with thesaurus skills.

Surprise, though! There are substantive changes here. I am actually not joking. Now, whatever you do on your time away from Medill, be it p.r. or journalism (the days of those as separate words and not as a market-tested blanket phrase appear to be some time off as yet) will be subject to the code.

Well. This is all because some dumb bitch whose name no one remembers plaigarized a story in the Daily last Fall. This was not her fault! She wrote Devo.

O.K., anyway, everyone was having a Paula Abdul-on-crack reaction to this in Fisk, especially the freshmen. It was all like, Oooh, is she gonna get kicked out?

Now we have our answer! No word yet on whether it's retroactive, but if anyone remembers this girl's name, I will sooooo call her for a quote.

The other interesting thing here is that it applies to marketing. That's going to create a lot of rough situations, don't you think? Like, all those people who work at Mattel, what are they supposed to do when it turns out they totally lied about the safety of the products they market?! The ethical quandaries!!!