My first reaction to this was to look and see if the date were April 1. It was not.
Still not quite believing it, my second reaction was to go check whether the story appeared in the generally much duller Chronicle. It did.
As the kids say, I can’t even.
Bonus: As a solid midwesterner, I’d prefer we not express ourselves in the coffee pavilion.
Checking the date, you’ll note that the alligator incident occurred during finals. As the first Hanszen guy into the zoo and the first exiting over the fence when we were shot at by the zoo guard, I can tell you the Post got the story wrong. We weren’t going to put the gator in one of the College Commons, we were going to put it in Roy Meals bed to discover when he came back from studying for finals.
The mind is strange. I was a freshman at that time and have no memory whatsoever of the event. Must have been studying for finals.
Didn’t Rice students “borrow” an elephant for a football parade once? The Zoo must have been considered an informal “lending library” for wildlife by the Rice students of the day…