CPR 3-11-2012 SPECIAL WEEKEND EDITION:  DARNELL RETURNS FROM COLLEGE

Darnell, Dominic's cat, returned to 540 Paddock Friday night, ostensibly because he is having surgery on Monday.  No sooner had he arrived home than rumors began circulating among the Pets that he had been asked by the administration at Union College to leave the  school because of his heavy partying.  Apparently, he had fallen in with an older cat named Marley at the fraternity house he had  been living at, and the two were seen late night mousing in some sketchy areas of Schenectady. Purportedly, he had been sleeping through his economic classes, and when he did bother showing up, there was an odor of catnip on his breath, and his attentions were focused not on the Professor but on the coeds, who didn't particularly appreciate his attentions, which largely consisted of his spraying them.  Catsby for one welcomed Darnell's return, as Darnell having attended classes at Union College automatically put him in a different educational league than Lady Emma, who of course is a graduate of Doggie Kindergarten, and who of course by reason of having graduated from Doggie Kindergarten has the equivalent of a human post graduate degree, a year of a dog's education being worth 16-17 years of a human's education, or so it is claimed. By Lady Emma. Mainly and only.  (Of course the post  graduate degree is in tail chasing, not a master's, of course, as Lady's master's tail has never been chased, to his knowledge and regret, but Lady's degree is the equivalent of a  Ph.D (the "D" standing for "Dog" of course, and the "PH" for Ph-ido).) Darnell, by virtue of having slept through several economics lectures, as well as on top of Dominic's college text books, is viewed by the pets as even more highly educated than Lady Emma. Accordingly, after Darnell has his surgery,   Catsby plans on offering him a high level job with the Jay Catsby and Pharoah the Cat Haka Pet Karaoke Machine Manufacturing Company, as well as a position within the Empire as Chancellor of the Supply Chain (or Leash), or something economic like that.  Darnell for his part insists he will be returning to Union;  that his return to Connecticut was due to the need for his surgery, and nothing more;  and that far from being asked to leave by Union's administration, he has actually been offered a Teaching Fellowship (or as he claims, a Teaching Felineship) by the Engineering Department, to structure and teach a  course in "How to Build a Better Mousetrap".  The latter claim seems a bit far fetched to your reporter, although Union was one of the first liberal arts colleges to offer Engineering, doing so in 1820 or thereabouts, and of course was also one of the first colleges in the country to admit cats, doing so in the late seventies, shortly after going co-ed. And of course since cats as a species are under represented in the Engineering profession, there is of course some institutional advantage to Union's putting felines like Darnell on a engineering teaching track, as the smartest cats coming out of the nation's high schools are more likely to want to attend a college to study engineering if there are Feline Professors to teach them. So perhaps Darnell might indeed be welcome to return to Union, although it is highly likely that after his surgery tomorrow, he isn't going want to do much but lie around and lick his wound(s).

SPONSORED BY UNION COLLEGE.  TEACHING CATS ENGINEERING SINCE THE LATE SEVENTIES.