"Academe"

My powers of observation must be a bit dulled by the holidays, subfreezing temperatures, etc., because it wasn't until yesterday that I discovered the "random article" function on Wikipedia. So I clicked away, and these are the opening lines for the first ten articles I found:

Giuseppe Peroni (c. 1700 -1776) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period.

Chung Jae-Hun (born January 1, 1980 in Seoul, South Korea) is a South Korean starting pitcher who plays for the Doosan Bears in the Korean Baseball Organization.

Fatsia is a small genus of three species of evergreen shrubs native to southern Japan and Taiwan.

2007 in British radio: This is a list of events in British radio during 2007.

Story Paper Collectors' Digest was a journal published from November 1946 until May 2005.

Raizdos or Roigos was a king of the Odrysians of Thrace after ca. 280 BC. He was possibly the son of Cotys II.

Boofzheim is a commune in the Bas-Rhin department in Alsace in north-eastern France. It's name is probably derived from the French "boeuf" (bull or ox).

Nottingham Cooperative (or Nottingham as referred to by its residents) is a 21 room housing cooperative located at 146 Langdon St. in Madison, Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Mendota.

Dimmer is a musical group from New Zealand. The driving force behind the band is Shayne Carter, a prominent New Zealand musician and member of such bands as Straitjacket Fits and Double Happys.

Carpophthoromyia scutellata is a species of tephritid or fruit flies in the genus Carpophthoromyia of the family Tephritidae.

A truly random and electic collection. This got me thinking what could possibly be the common denominator (if any) among the ten subjects, but then I realized that such a project would likely short-circuit my limited intellect or at least keep me gainfully unemployed for the rest of my life. So instead, I spent ten or fifteen minutes creating my own common denominator; that is, incorporating all ten into a flash fiction piece. So here 'tis.

Academe
In his third floor room at Nottingham, Billy turned down the volume on Dimmer's debut album and fired up the shortwave radio. Though Billy - a devoted botany/entomology double minor - knew he would soon return to his studying, where he was simulteneously reading about both the carpophthoromyia scutellata species of fruit flies and the fatsia evergreen shrubs of southern Japan and Taiwan, he still could not resist fiddling with the radio's tuner. He finally settled on a station from York, England, which was rebroadcasting a 2007 report on the Korean major leagues and the remarkable no-hit, twelve-walk shutout thrown by Chung Jae-Hun. But by the time the announcer had moved on to a chat with the avid collector of old issues of Story Paper Collector's Digest, Billy had lost interest, switched off the shortwave and turned Dimmer back up. He had done all of this while his roommate Rog chatted in the corner on his cellphone, complaining to his girlfriend about the tedious Peroni lecture he endured during art history class that afternoon before musing on his upcoming summer excursion to the Alsatian commune of Boofzheim, where he would be studying the ancient Thracian myths. Though mostly annoyed at Rog's banter, Billy couldn't help smiling at the latter, because while everyone else in Madison assumed Rog's name was short for Roger, Billy knew it was actually Roigos, after the Odrysian king. This revelation would have undoubtedly brought ridicule on Rog, even amongst their hyper-educated colleagues, and Billy's smile was for the knowledge that their secret could always be used as a weapon of blackmail against his roommate.