When your PhD originally was packaged as a prize in a Cracker Jack box

With all due credit to the people at Language Log - who published it first - and the folks at XKCD webcomics - who created it in the first place - I have to offer you this little gem. The post at Language Log where it originated is worth a read for its discussion of Labov's test.

Even better - if you're looking for a little satire - is this passage Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media by Susan J. Douglas:

I am a professor of media studies. You know what that means. I probably teach entire courses on the films of Connie Francis, go to academic conferences where the main intellectual exchange is trading comic books, never make my students read books, and insist that Gary Lewis and the Playboys were more important than Hegel, John Dos Passos, or Frances Perkins. All I do now, of course, is study Madonna. The reason I chose media over, say, the Renaissance or quantum mechanics is that I don't like to read, don't know much about history, and needed desperately to find a way to watch television for a living.