On canine entrees

At dinner tonight, I was chatting with two of the hundreds of thousands of readers of this blog, and I was mentioning that I really don't have 10 minutes anymore before bed to post -- my life in the summer is overscheduled, and I won't have a brief respite until the week of June 25. I'm in my office now because I'm scheduled to give a presentation at 10pm (seriously), so I figured I'd put off the mountain of work to mention an excellent email I received today.

As I said last time, I'm teaching this summer, and I have a crop of students that have not yet ceased to amaze me. Unfortunately, I do not mean because of their endless dedication to the subject of my course. No, I mean because of their creativity in coming up with excuses.

Student A is three weeks into my course, and needs to improve significantly to hope to sniff the D level. He did not turn in this week's work and his excuse boiled down to (and I'm *not* joking at all) -- the dog ate my computer. Seriously.

Maybe it's time that all students are required to switch to cats. They have much more refined palates.