To recap our last episode, Ike is graduating from pre-kindergarten and his grandmother is rewarding him with a Disney cruise. (Lord, please call me home before Ike gets a college diploma. I can't imagine what swell parting gifts he will get for that one.)

So grandmama couldn't wait for the Mouse to roar and instead spilled the beans to Ike about the cruise by giving him a box with brochures and badges sent by Mr. Disney.

“Do you know what this means?” she asked, breathlessly.

Ike, whose attention had been drawn to a brochure listing recent Disney film releases, said, “Can I get this video?”

I'm hoping, for her sake and his, that Ike is more animated when we get shipside. But the signs weren't good last week.

Ike asked if he could bring an iPad along in case he got bored onboard.

Perhaps we will see a catalina, or a catamaran on our cruise. They are making such things out of real cats these days, you know.

At least, that was what I gathered from the photo on our back page last Wednesday. It showed a cat corpse whose Dutch owner loved (?) kitty so much that he made the late “Orville” into a remote-control “Orvillecopter.''

The story said Orville had been hit by a car. Perhaps he didn't see the car? Cataract, maybe?

Did he go quietly or was there a lot of caterwauling?

Or, if the dreadful pollen that we have had in these parts had made it to Holland, perhaps kitty had succumbed to catarrh. (You can look that one up, but Daniel Webster suffered and may have died from it.) Which leads me to wonder, given their reputed nine lives, whether kitty got a CAT scan before he was pronounced fit to fly.

Since there was no burial, a catafalque seems unlikely. But I did wonder whether initial launch of the Orvillecopter might have been assisted by a catapult.

When I saw the photo, the cat had my tongue for all of about 20 seconds before I started thinking aloud of captions we could have used. Our editor used the rather prosaic and straightforward “Flying (dead) cat.”

Cat's up seemed to me too good to resist, as did catastrophe, with catatonic losing out to those two by just a whisker.

Cat's pajamas and cat's meow seemed too much of a stretch. But I think it more than coincidental that our Ask Us column ran the same day as the kitty copter. Why? I guess we should ask the author, Cat Pragoff.

Write to Joe McQuaid at publisher@unionleader.com