I give thanks for my wife, Melanie, and our happy marriage; for the love and friendship of our families; for those who protect and defend our world; and to God who gives me life and faith, hope, and love.

I wish you peace and prosperity in this holiday season!

And, let’s Go-oooooo, Mountaineers!  Beat Pitt!

What’s the statute of limitations on potential NCAA violations? Just look at this picture from the WVU Media Day in 1988.

Hey, that’s the tailback from a team that will go 11-0 and play for the National Championship against Notre Dame. Don’t I look like one of those sleazy sports agents or party boy entourage hangers or, even worse, Dr. Feelgood? Yet, I was only a highly respected and poorly paid doc student who just liked football. I’d met Eugene Napoleon two years earlier in my Comm80 large lecture course where Eug served as a Sports Beat reporter. I had most of WVU scholarship athletes in that class at one time or another from 1986 to 1999. The class got so famous that WVU Presidents would come in for a Star Turn during Rock Break; the conspiracy runs that deep, wide, and high. And, we can’t forget the Playboy Girls of the Big East! Sorry, no pictures, but they were all hotter than Michelle Pfeiffer, and believe me, while I’m no Jack Kennedy, I knew Michelle Pfeiffer.

Next year, Eugene’s son will join the Mountaineers football team as a scholarship athlete. Maybe QB. The son’s smarter than the father. He must have watched the game tape of Eugie hitting the hole. “Gonna be like this all day, baby.” Markus Paul, Syracuse, to Eugene Napoleon, WVU, 1988.

My thoughts and prayers are with those who have sacrificed for me, my family, and our country. I appreciate your service.

God bless America.

The difference between thoughtfulness and intelligence is the difference between persuasion and a computer.

The prestigious Oxford Bibliographies Online – Authority and Innovation for Research lists one of my publications as an expert source for Advertising.  And you thought I was just another jabbering yahoo with a blog.  Tah!  Oxford.  Dons.  Tea and crumpets.  Rowing on the river, not to be confused with rolling down the river (YouTube).  Reading Euripides in the original Greek to appreciate the nuances.  Yeah.  Those guys.

They note.

An annual vetting process conducted by an area expert Editor in Chief, an Editorial Board of renowned researchers, and top scholars or ”peer reviewers” in the field ensures current, comprehensive, and authoritative coverage of a given subject.  Organized hierarchically, and seamlessly linked internally as well as externally to works cited, OBO will be every scholar’s first stop when starting the research process.

Some of the benefits of your work being featured in OBO include:

• Your work is identified as essential reading in the field by top scholars in your area of study
• OBO’s linking to the full text of your work will allow new researchers to discover your scholarship –increasing the number of times it is viewed, cited, and referenced
• Professors use OBO to teach students about the research process, increasing exposure to newcomers in the field and introducing them to your work

Of course, you have to subscribe to the service to get the benefit of my expertise, but nuance ain’t cheap, baby.  Or you can chase down my expertise (along with my equally esteemed and famous co-author, Jennifer Welbourne) at a good research library and read all about it here:

Booth-Butterfield, Steve, and Jennifer Welbourne. (2002.) The elaboration likelihood model: Its impact on persuasion theory and research. In The persuasion handbook: Development in theory and practice. Edited by James Price Dillard and Michael W. Pfau, 155–174. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Or, if you ask, Can You Please Cut the Academic Fru-Fru and Just Tell Me The Main Point So I Don’t Have To Go To a Library?, then try the ELM Primer chapter.

Hey, I was famous with Switch and now this.  Fortune cannot be far behind!

I should tell my Mom about this.  Oxford.  Of course, she’ll worry that I’m moving to England and what will Melanie do and will I have to get shots and do I have clean underwear.

Man, it’s tough being an expert.

Let’s just roll down the river!