This morning, I’m waiting for my advisor to send me my PhD preliminary exam questions, and as I wait, I thought I’d show

a) 4 ways how taking the preliminary exams is like having sex for the first time:

1. There’s a divide between people who’ve gone through with it and those who haven’t. All the advice that the experienced can give you is to “close your eyes and barrel your way through it.”
2. Before, your entire identity can be summed up as someone hasn’t gone through it. On the other side of the fence, people say it’s now just . . .

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Crocodile-Hunter extraordinaire Steve Irwin died yesterday in a freak accident involving a stingray. If you didn’t know, he was the Australian dare-devil environmentalist that appeared non-stop on the Discovery Channel, wrestling crocodiles, poking venomous snakes with sticks, etc.

My dad worked in Australia for a year in 1993 and, when he came back, found Steve Irwin on late, late night TV (one of his first shows). My dad loved watching this guy manhandle horrifically poisonous snakes with nonchalance. For him, I think, Irwin was a mix of the Australian cultural bravado . . .

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