Something has been puzzling me since graduation and I thought my blog would be a good place to seek the wisdom of others. During the ceremony, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences conferred degrees upon about a hundred Doctors of Audiology. It seemed that there was an unending line of them, all giggling and giddy (most were women), ready to be hooded and marched across the stage. Which is all fine, of course, nothing wrong with that. What puzzled me is this: what exactly is a Doctor of Audiology? What does that person do? What, in fact, does their degree allow them to do? On that day, the University of Florida released about a hundred Doctors of Audiology out into the world, armed to.... do what? A fellow historian who sat next to me during the ceremony posited that perhaps these were the people who administered hearing tests at public schools. A logical assumption, I'll admit. But isn't there a theoretical maximum to the number of Doctors of Audiology the world can employ? Let's assume, for example, that every school district in the country needed one hearing tester. And that of those, only a handful retired each year. If the University of Florida graduates 150 Doctors of Audiology a year (assuming a hundred in the spring and fifty in the fall), and other universities with similar programs graduate an equal number of Doctors of Audiology at the same time, isn't the world going to be overrun with these people? Aren't we going to have an overabundance of highly trained unemployed people on our hands? If someone knows the answer, I'd really like to know. I could look it up myself, of course, but I'm busy trying to put the finishing touches on a lecture about the Spanish-American War. It's a topic I know little about, so I'm well-equipped to speak with authority about it.

No, not schwetty balls. Jolly Balls. When we first got Luke, we took him to the dog park every morning and every damn morning he would steal this other dog's toy. It was a Jolly Ball. Basically, it's a big rubber ball with a handle on it. John and I quickly realized that Luke wasn't going to stop until he had his very own. So we caved and bought him one. Then another. Then another. The problem was first, they're not cheap. They run about $14 at PetCo. Second, Luke is what dog breeders call an "aggressive chewer," which means that he goes through a Jolly Ball about every three weeks. So I started looking online to see if someone else had them cheaper. Amazingly, a place in Marysville, Kansas sells them online (with free shipping, no less!) for about $8.50 a pop. But you have to buy $50 worth of goods to get out from under the $5 "handling fee." Naturally, John and I ordered a half dozen Jolly Balls for our spoiled canine. And they arrived today. Just for fun, I dumped all of the Jolly Balls onto the living room floor and, like a toddler at Christmas, Luke jumped from one to another, licking and squishing each of them with glee. Then I put them back in the box and now, consequently, he's trying desperately to shove his head through the top of it. I took pictures, just for kicks. In the second picture, you can see his current Jolly Ball in the background.

KFC is running ads for their new "bowls": mashed potatoes on the bottom, topped with corn, fried chicken, gravy, and cheese. And then you're supposed to eat it. Whose idea was this?

I think the word "dog walk" is a bit of a misnomer. When Luke and I go out in the mornings, it's not so much a "dog walk" as it is an "Emily pull." There's a subtle but key difference.

Paris Hilton has big feet. They're huge. So gargantuan are they, in fact, that her handlers have had to teach her how to minimize their appearance by standing only in certain positions. Apparently you'll never see her two feet together (ba dum bum) because that would simply draw too much attention to the fact that they deserve their own zip code.

There's something mildly comforting in all this, but I'm not sure what.

On the first day of each semester, I ask my students to fill out index cards giving me their contact information and, for kicks, their favorite movie. It helps me remember their names. Take a kid I have this semester. We'll call him Bob. My whole life, I'll never forget what Bob's favorite movie was and, hence, his name. As I was going through the index cards (I do this in class, while everyone is there), I read aloud what his favorite movie is. It was Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I'm sure I couldn't control my astonishment. I'm sure my jaw dropped a little. What 20-year-old duuuuude has Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as his all-time favorite movie? I'm waiting for the punch line. My faith in humanity hinges on it.

I don't normally like to critique the outfits that others wear. Depending on the season, I'm either wearing a t-shirt and shorts, a t-shirt and jeans, or a t-shirt with a sweater and jeans. So I don't really feel that it's my right to comment. But sometimes I see something so flagrantly bad (or, I suppose, fabulously good) that it simply begs for a remark or two. Today was such a day. Driving home, I saw a man with sunglasses and a ball cap wearing sandblasted jeans that he had tucked into his boots, with a fanny pack slung around his waist and a gold pinky ring on his right hand. I couldn't help but wonder: did he look at his reflection in the mirror with admiration and pride, or did he just not look? I'm betting on the latter.

GE is running a new series of ads for "ecomagination." I don't so much care what it is, but they have a new ad out that I think is just fabulous. Set to the song "Singin' in the Rain," it's a little elephant dancing around in rain puddles in a tropical forest. It's honestly the cutest damn thing I've ever seen. You have to see it on TV to get the full effect, but you can also check it out on their website.

It's a beautiful day in Florida: the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the tree frogs are barking, and because of the nice breeze and relatively cool temperatures (the high for today is "only" 86!), we've got the windows open and the fans on. Unfortunately, the backyard neighbor is gardening with manure. So the smell of cow shit is wafting through my office window as I work. Ahhh, nature.

On Monday when I tried to check my grades, I found out that I had a financial hold on my account at UF which prevented me from getting my grades, enrolling for summer, and probably prevented me from wiping my ass with university toilet paper. I called the number listed on the screen and found out that I hadn't completed an exit interview for my student loan from my undergraduate years. Since I completed an exit interview for said loan when I graduated from my undergraduate institution, I couldn't figure out why I needed to do another one for the same damn loan, but I did it anyway and the hold on my account was lifted. Just now, I received possibly the most frustrating email ever: "Your online loan exit counseling is incomplete/incorrect, a hold has been put back on your records. Please contact me as soon as possible to complete/correct this info." When I call the number listed (about ten times in a row now), I get disconnected. Anyone have any clue what's going on here? Because my patience has pretty much been reached at this point.

Here's a fun story from my friend Amy at the University of Kansas.

One of the physics professors at KU is teaching a mid-level physics course this semester. Recently, the professor was called in to the Provost's office to explain why nearly a quarter of his class had signed a petition to KU's Chancellor begging to have their failing grades removed. As the professor explained to the Provost, however, these 75 students were not failing the class. Rather, the problem was that they hadn't read the grading scale properly: instead of failing, they were almost all getting Bs or Cs.

Graduation was Friday night at the Phillips Center here in Gainesville and I have to say, it was a lot of fun. Unlike my undergrad, we weren't bored to tears while a thousand names were read off, nor did we have to suffer through some hideous speech about red dots and green dots (okay, to be fair, that last part was during John's undergrad graduation), and nobody let loose with an air horn. Instead, it was a small celebration of all our accomplishments. And I'm very pleased to have taken part. I've attached a picture, just in case anyone was curious. It's a bit grainy, but that's me on the left shaking hands with the dean of the Graduate School.

The problem with Hallmark is that while you can easily find a birthday card for your uncle's best friend's sister-in-law (and at Hallmark, the card would be marketed as such), it is nigh impossible to find an age-appropriate, occasion-appropriate congratulatory card. It seems it would be almost easier to-- as my mother used to say-- cack it in the basement and make one myself.

Walking into the kitchen just now, I came across a spider in the hallway. Since I didn't have my glasses on, I couldn't tell what kind of a spider it was. But since we found a black widow spider lurking outside our house last weekend, I thought I'd better just go ahead and kill it. This is the part that makes my hair stand on end. When I whacked it with a rolled up magazine, our carpet started to crawl with what seemed like a hundred tiny spiders fleeing for their lives. What kind of a freak of nature did I just encounter???

At my hair appointment the other day, my stylist was talking to me about her husband. She mentioned that growing up in Brazil, she would meet attractive guys who had so little going on upstairs that they bored her to death when she tried to talk to them. Then she met her husband, an entomologist at UF. In her words, "He's not handsome, but he sure is interesting!"

If you imagine it in a thick Brazilian accent, it gives the story that extra oomph.