IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN HERE. Wednesday morning's Northern Star reports, ASSAULT SHOCKS CAMPUS. The students who were beaten up over a pizza have been released from hospital. Their neighbors wish the students a speedy recovery, and the consensus is that the perpetrators, all of whom have been detained and signed confessions, were out of line.

"Some of those people didn't even go to school here. It was our Homecoming, and they ruined it. Why would you invite someone to do that?"

The article has stimulated an electronic bull session, at which one commenter suggests, in my view correctly, that the security measures requiring students to meet the pizza vans at the security perimeter (Baghdad-by-the-West Lagoon?) generate targets of opportunity for miscreants, invited or otherwise.