What an awful story: Not one, but two U of M students hit and killed by a pickup truck as they tried to cross a busy road in the dark.

On the one hand, there was no crosswalk outside a popular cultural center heavily attended by carless students, one situated on a busy, five-lane road.

On the other hand: Two young women dressed in dark clothing. At night. They doubled back in front of an oncoming vehicle.

I doubt the driver will be cited, but what a waste of life. And the miracle is, the way pedestrians conduct themselves around here, that it doesn’t happen every day. Every drive near campus includes people walking blithely in front of oncoming traffic, trusting that the car will somehow be repelled by the force field of their personality, perhaps.

The rules of engagement: Pedestrians usually have the right of way. But they always lose the battle. It’s not worth it.

Mankoff did not disappoint. How often do you get to sit through a PowerPoint slide show that doesn’t put you to sleep? Not often.

He had some interesting things to say about a lot of stuff, including the New Yorker’s post-9/11 cartooning. The editors decided to publish cartoons again in the second edition after the tragedy, believing that if you choose to rejoin the human parade, then you have to buy into the jokes, too. One of the first: A man and a woman at a bar. The woman says, “I thought I’d never laugh again, and then I saw your jacket.”

But this one’s my favorite.

He also revealed a couple of anecdotes about famous people, not cartoonists, trying to sell cartoons to the magazine, for what reason I’m not sure although I guess if you’re Norman Mailer, it’s another scalp for your bag. (His cartoons were rejected; they were not “what we call, ‘good.'”) And he said some interesting things about the creative process, and showed the evolution of several artists’ work over the decades. The most interesting? Charles Addams’. He went through a naked-lady phase, it seems.

I asked him about a cartoon from a couple years ago: A man is getting dressed after a physical exam, and his doctor is pulling off the latex gloves. The man asks, “Does this make me your bitch?” He said if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t have run that one. And it made Alan laugh out loud!

Mankoff’s a cartoonist himself, and founded the Cartoon Bank, good for hours of time-wasting. Go waste some now.

Bonus: As things were breaking up, I was interviewed by a reporter for the Michigan Daily, who, helped by his notes, will probably do a better job telling the story than I just did.

Deb pointed me to this story on the impossible business of finding a bra that fits, something you wouldn’t think would be such a big hairy deal, but is, particularly when you get into the larger sizes.

As any man can tell you, every woman is different, and we’re accustomed since birth to telling outselves the problem is not with the garment, but with our bodies, which are too… something. The absurdity of this thinking is pointed out in Jessica Siegel’s story:

The fitter brought out six under-wire models bearing cups big enough to serve a grande latte – 34DD’s and E’s (in some styles, they’re the same size. Who knew?) Most gaped on me. Several fit, but the wires pinched my diaphragm. The fitter’s diagnosis: “It’s because your breasts are too low on your chest.”

Her running critique of my body was the patter of someone who believes (or wants you to believe) that the fault lies not in the bra, but in you. I got the same drill from four fitters and two bra designers I spoke with, who all spun their own theories, including, “It doesn’t scratch, you only think it scratches,” and my personal favorite: “Your ribs are in the wrong place.”

Greg Beato examines the claims made by Rush Limbaugh and others about his drug addiction, and finds them …verrrry interesting.

OK, so now Springsteen is coming to the Fellowship. Not really, but Tuesday brings a seminar by Bob Mankoff, the New Yorker’s cartoon editor. He’ll be in AA most of the week, promoting the magazine’s cartoon issue, which comes out tomorrow.

He’s actually doing five different talks around campus, starting with one tomorrow at noon on the history of the magazine’s cartoon tradition, with a slide show of 100 of the best from the ’20s on. This is a must-see for me, and unless someone stands up and says, “It’s all off the record,” I am so blogging it.

When I was a kid, my parents had a New Yorker cartoon anthology now in my possession, and I used to pore over it. Much of what I know about mid-century American pop culture I picked up there, not to mention my familiarity with the works of Peter Arno, James Thurber, Charles Addams and other greats. If he’s half as interesting as I hope he’ll be, it’ll be a great time.

Details t.k.

If you have time for it, there’s a great WashPost magazine story today on the trials and errors — and successes — of including severely mentally disabled children in regular public-school classrooms. Having been acquainted over the years with people on both sides of this question, both parents struggling with options for their disabled children and teachers charged with “educating” kids so far away from the rest of us that there’s no possible measure of achievement, I know it’s a thorny question.

As an occasional viewer of HBO’s “Real Sex” series, I never turn it off without thinking, “Where the hell do they find these people?” Alex answers that question, and others, with a deftly drawn reminiscence of his time as a freelancer for Libido magazine.

The editors of Libido had Jack Horner’s dilemma (not the one with the plum on his thumb, the one in “Boogie Nights”): How do you keep ’em in the seats after they’ve gotten what they came for? According to Alex, are still trying to solve it — when we visited his apartment in Chicago last month, he showed us one of their more recent endeavors, a three-story porn tape. The plot synopses on the back reveal characters who are not hot ‘n’ horny sluts, but women’s studies professors, although the story lines end the same way they do in more mainstream dirty movies.

Alex thinks his parents will disapprove of this entry, and probably they will, but if they’re reading this one? The tape was unopened.

Well, what the hell. While we’re kicking around the NPR ombudsman, let’s at least give him this: There’s a reason he got that way. Apparently dealing with NPR listeners can make a man cray-zay.

Yep, there’s a new hilarious ombudsman’s column up. (Dude, I am so bookmarking this.) What does it do to a man’s soul to deal with nitpickers of this sort day after day? You be the judge:

Andrew D. Smith, of Hartford, Conn., thinks that the use of the term “interpreter” is wrong:

Mr. Smith is right. President Chirac speaks to us through a ‘translator,’ not an ‘interpreter.'”

Glad we got that cleared up. But there’s more:

I listen to NPR because it is the only place to get the quality and amount of news I want, that is why the speaking style of many of your newsreaders and reporters bothers me.

Many of them say “aw” instead of “o,” as “ecawnomy” for “economy.”
Some readers say “sojers” for “soldiers.”
Some say “industrul” for “industrial”
Some say “jer” for “juror.”
Most say “tearist” for “terrorist.”
Some say “tore” for “tour.”
Some say “Bawb” for “Bob.”
Others say “tode” for “told.”
Some say “veekle” for “vehicle.’
Some say “busted” when they mean “broken:” “…boarding up busted windows…”

But not one letter about “NEEK-a-raw-hwa,” with the full-espanol pronunciation? I guess we don’t hear much news out of there anymore.

A profile of the Christian soldier, Gen. William Boykin, discussed here some days back:

“And then when I thought that things could not get any worse than they already were,” Boykin recounted, “my wife of 25 years . . . walked in and said, ‘I don’t love you anymore, you’re a religious fanatic, and I’m leaving you.’ “

Huh.

Jim Romenesko’s letters page is as good as his index page. Everybody knows this. Here’s one reason: A reader letter that turned out to be a joke, but managed to make every point the writer was trying to make in the reaction it got.

The capsule: The writer, Brian Gilmer, forwarded a typical job posting from his college j-school newsletter, a position that paid all of $12 an hour, for people holding one of the most expensive and (supposedly) prestigious diplomas in the field. He complained that the money was insulting. Because this business has no shortage of masochists, the responses scolded him for expecting to be paid anything more for such a good learning experience.

He wrote back, revealing the prank, and asking, The main problem is that well educated journalists who want to be thought of as professionals continually demean themselves by accepting these positions at these rates of pay. Shouldn’t we all insist that a professional writer is worth more?�