I see now that the greatest mistake of my career was not moving to Florida straight out of college. It is certainly the nation’s most fertile soil for weird stories, which grow like its tropical vegetation.

Whenever news breaks in south Florida, I think of my old pal Carolyn, who is surely at her desk at the Palm Beach Post as we speak, directing coverage of both the family-values Republican pervert and the sticky-fingered priests, both local stories.

And to think, she prepped for this in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where you’re lucky to get a yarn like this once every two years, if not five. Courage, Carolyn! I’m sure you’ll get a few hours of sleep before local resident Rush Limbaugh is found walking naked down Ocean Drive.

Thanks to all who offered advice, especially on the wi-fi problems. I did, indeed, make the change Ash and Jay suggested, and it made my connection noticeably quicker, but I’m still having the drop-out problem, so. Probably time for a system upgrade.

And as for the ashcanned snark, well, someone else wrote it. Good for him. It’s better than what I wrote, since what I wrote was banged out in 20 cross-eyed screechy minutes on my couch yesterday morning. As for why I ashcanned it, well, it’s because I’m a coward.

(If you don’t want to click the link, here’s the money quote: (Mitch Albom is) a huckster evangelist for the soccer-mom set. Truer words, etc.)

I do a little work here and there for the Freep, and while losing it wouldn’t really dent my income, it just seemed like a test of my so-called adulthood to leave this bridge unburned, although I realize there’s a good chance no one would even notice it, or care. Mitch is on the staff at the Freep, but I get the feeling he’s not so much of the paper as he is a dirigible that floats over it, lightly tethered. Many of the people below resent that it often blots out the sun, but they’re not in control, and so they shrug and say what-can-you-do.

Unlike Bob Greene, Albom seems to behave himself, most of the time. There was that incident with the column about the two basketball players who didn’t go to the game, and there was the Curious Case of the Spiked Bad Review, and there are stories people tell you over beers, but I’ve never heard anything involving teenage girls and the Marriott Hotel, so that’s good. Journalism is full of cheerful hacks who laugh all the way to the bank, from screeching pundits like Ann Coulter to the warmer-and-fuzzier sorts who trade in dog stories, and the first thing you learn about them is this: 68 percent of the collegial bitching about them is rooted in jealousy. People say “I’d never write sentimental bullshit like that,” but what they really mean is, “Why didn’t I think of it first.” Albom has jerked easy tears for years, collected them in a golden bucket, and taken them to the bank, where he’s traded every one for a fistful of C-notes. His slight, repackaged tales of feel-good spirituality are routinely savaged by critics, but sell and sell and sell some more, and I don’t know about you, but nobler souls than I have made that bargain and sleep well at night over it. (It’s easy to sleep well on high-thread-count sheets.)

But where my eyes start to cross and steam emerge from my ears is when I read stories like this, about the kickoff for Mitch’s book in Detroit the other night:

(Singer Tony) Bennett was moved to tears as he spoke about one portion of Albom’s novel, which went on sale earlier this week.

“This book,” Bennett told the gathering, “teaches you if you apologize to the people you hurt…” before he covered his face in his hands and wept, unable to continue until host Albom offered comfort.

Man, just reading about it makes me want an apology from Mitch Albom. Let’s start with, “I’m sorry I keep writing treacly books that reduce 80-year-old singers to public tears” and go from there. I don’t mind the guy making his money however he can, but is it too much to ask that he lay off the Dr. Phil-meets-the-Dalai-Lama crap? How long before someone asks him to lay hands on a sick child?

It’s an open secret — not even a secret at all — that the man who stayed on the best-seller list for years with a book that revealed how important it is to stop and smell the roses does nothing of the sort. He’s working harder than ever, with radio, TV, fiction, even playwrighting. He’s in the paper at least twice a week, not just in Sports, and by my measure he’s phoning it in; having written columns for years, I know exactly how to pull one from my nether regions, and many of Albom’s Sunday pieces smell like that’s where they came from. (I recall one in recent months, which took off from a half-baked proposal to exhume Mozart’s corpse for some reason. Mitch disapproved, and suggested it would be better to “honor him by playing his music.” Noted.)

I don’t know the guy, though. Maybe he has “roses, stop and smell” in his BlackBerry somewhere. Maybe he’s the world’s most efficient multi-tasker, able to wedge his relationships into neat blocks of time between the radio show and lunch with Jeff Daniels. I once took a writing seminar at the Freep, and Albom led a session with warmth and apparent humility, touting not his own work but Joan Didion’s. He also paid us the ultimate modern-age compliment; when his cell phone rang, he pulled it from his briefcase and turned it off.

I do know this, though: I’ve never read anything by the guy that felt true to me, that didn’t feel manipulative and false and sentimentalized for my protection. I don’t follow sports, and so I’m talking about his non-sports, post-Morrie work here, and to give him his props, people who read him pre-Morrie say that a lot of his sports work was excellent. But what I recall are the columns that gave my head cramps from the eye-rolling. There was one he wrote around the time the TV-movie version of “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” was on the air, which a writer to Romenesko boiled down to, “Thanks for loving me, Detroit,” and that’s pretty much on the money.

I see a lot of his books in garage sales, along with “The DaVinci Code” and “The South Beach Diet.” I try to imagine the impulse that sorted them into the garage-sale pile rather than the keepers. I think of a woman who read “Five People,” wept at the ending and later felt bad about it, sort of the soccer-mom version of post-coital remorse. I think of someone who was given “Tuesdays With Morrie” when their father was dying, read it and thought, “Jesus Christ, is this ever a load of crap” and tossed it aside. (And I consider the very real possibility that someone gave them the book and they already had three copies, the way people kept giving me “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” when I was pregnant. There’s a reason books become best-sellers.)

I saw one in a sale last week, and it reminded me Albom had a book coming out soon. The Freep story says he’s off on a 10-week — ten-freakin’-weeks — book tour. Which means Mitch on Oprah and Mitch on the Today Show and Mitch at charity readings to raise money for the homeless. Which means more people crying like Tony Bennett. It’s going to be a long, long autumn.

Hey, is that a siren I hear? Fire trucks? Looks like someone set the bridge ablaze.

Well. I think you should know I just wrote and ashcanned a lengthy post on a subject about which I can summon a great deal of petulant snark. Reading it over, it occurred to me that:

1) I felt better just having written it down, like the therapists say, and;

2) I need to grow up. I’ve been invited to write a short essay on a topic I enjoy for a new venue, and it’s something I ought to be devoting my time to. Also, I need to strip a wallpaper border. Both seem like a better use of my time.

So.

I’m opening the floor to comments on two subjects. People keep telling me my readers are smarter than I am, so it’s time to prove it. I want expert opinions on two questions.

First question: Can wi-fi wear out? I’ve been having a problem with our wi-fi network and my laptop. The signal dwindles, fades and drops out entirely, then roars back at full strength and immediately drops again. This happens intermittently. Trouble-shooting the problem, I find it’s only happening to me, with my G4 PowerBook. Alan’s somewhat newer (by eight months or so) iBook, with its plastic case and far less punishing use schedule, is not having problems. I know that the aluminum-case laptops generally are less sensitive than the plastic ones, but I’m befuddled. What could be happening here?

(If it matters, last night I had a close call with my laptop, a strange sort of e-mail crash that necessitated a restart-from-DVD and other scary stuff. If it were an ER episode, it would have ended with the patient smiling but a defibrillator would have been involved, too.)

Second question: Cashmere — what the hell? Every girl knows that cashmere is everywhere these days and never more affordable. What once used to be a $400 sweater can now be had for around $80, if you’re not picky about labels. I bought one of these sweaters three years ago, at a Loehmann’s-type shop in Toronto. I love it and wear it constantly. (Kate loves it, too, because it’s soft and it encourages snuggling. What mommy doesn’t love her little girl cooing against her ribcage?) But. In the last year it has started to pill. Pill! I hate pilling. It’s the surest sign of cheap clothes, and it’s something I thought cashmere was never, ever supposed to do. I’m beginning to think some angora is involved here. Someone who knows wool, please solve this mystery.

And finally, another huge thank-you to Mindy for turning me on to the Zip-It, despite my earlier problem. We had a slow-running shower drain the other day. Water was still standing when I stuck the toothy shaft of the Zip-It down the drain. With no effort whatsoever, I pulled out…a hair clog the approximate length and girth of a gym sock. The standing water went out so fast it left skid marks, and with a great, satisfying sucking sound, just like Ross Perot promised.

I threw the whole thing away and told Alan the happy news: The drain snake could stay in its lair for a while. “But I’m throwing the Zip-It away, too,” I said. “We can buy another.”

“Why?” he said. “You can use it again.” I should say at this point that I was talking to his back; he was working on his computer.

“OK, you clean it off, then,” I said, holding up the whole disgusting mess, now encased in a clear plastic newspaper bag.

We decided spending $3 for another was a bargain after all.

Ron’s series continues. Today’s focus is Big Pharma:

When General Motors Corp. CEO Rick Wagoner has nightmares, they might be about Toyota. Then again, they might be about Mae Gumbinger.

General Motors will pay about $16,000 for drugs this year for Mae and her husband, GM retiree Ralph Gumbinger, the equivalent of giving the couple a new Chevrolet Malibu.

The story is full of little jaw-droppers; every story about GM is full of jaw-droppers. Most Americans simply don’t understand just how big this company is, which is the underlayment for a certain what-can-you-do attitude you find around here among GM workers (most people) and those whose fortunes are tied to it (everyone). The company is the Nimitz, a giant aircraft carrier plowing through heavy seas. It can take a few torpedoes. If it can’t exactly turn on a dime, well, it’s unsinkable too.

Or so people believe. Please, no Titanic jokes.

Anyway, those jaw-droppers: GM spends $17 million a year — $17 million! A year! — on erectile dysfunction drugs. Sixty percent of the money spent on antibiotics is flushed down the toilet, because they’re prescribed for conditions that don’t respond to antibiotics. In 1999, seven years ago, half of GM employees were getting name-brand drugs, even when generics were available. The introduction of a generic equivalent for Zocor, a cholesterol-lowering statin drug, presents the opportunity for GM to save $100 million a year.

(Again: $100 million. For one drug. This is one big company.)

The passage about Zocor is unclear, but seems to imply that workers have a choice to switch to the generic; “education and financial incentives” are the plan to get more of them to do so. How about this for a financial incentive: Switch to the generic or pay for it out of your own pocket, bub. I’ve had drug plans like that, and I know they’re out there. The day Zocor went off-patent earlier this year, pharmacy benefits managers all over the country were on the phone to the generic drug plants in India at 12:01 a.m., wondering when those pills were going to start rolling out, and how soon could they get them. When $100 million is at stake, you play hardball.

Unless of course, the choice is part of a labor contract, which is entirely possible. Defiance, Ohio, my husband’s hometown, is a GM town, and its retirees are common in my mother-in-law’s social circle. They whine like toddlers over the idea of a $5 co-pay for prescription drugs, because they used to pay nothing, and now they have to pay something.

As this NYT column points out, Most families in the 1950’s paid their medical bills with ease, but they also didn’t expect much in return. After a century of basic health improvements like indoor plumbing and penicillin, many experts thought that human beings were approaching the limits of longevity. “Modern medicine has little to offer for the prevention or treatment of chronic and degenerative diseases,� the biologist René Dubos wrote in the 1960’s.

But then doctors figured out that high blood pressure and high cholesterol caused heart attacks, and they developed new treatments. Oncologists learned how to attack leukemia, enabling most children who receive a diagnosis of it today to triumph over a disease that was almost inevitably fatal a half-century ago. In the last few years, orphan drugs that combat rare diseases and medical devices like the implantable defibrillator have extended lives. Human longevity still hasn’t hit the wall that was feared 50 years ago.

Most of those retirees, once upon a time, would have taken their gold watch, shuffled off to Florida, played a little golf and quietly expired by their 70th birthday or thereabouts. Now they’re living to vast old ages, helped along by technological and pharmaceutical wizardry. Now it’s time to pay. Especially if you’re taking drugs for restless legs syndrome.

Oh, well. Don’t want to bore you all silly.

Last Saturday was a fine, sunny one, and I spent my Saturday bike ride stopping at garage sales. (Does this negate the aerobic exercise? I choose to believe it doesn’t.) Scored a nice cut-glass wine coaster and a silverplate serving piece, seen here:

It holds a 9-by-13 baking dish; you can practically see the potatoes au gratin in it now, can’t you? It was black with tarnish, and as you can see, a little elbow grease works wonders. I paid $6 for the two items, and overheard a conversation among the proprietors:

“Can you imagine? He offered me a dollar. I told him, ‘I would rather throw this away than let you have it for a dollar!’ He made me so mad.”

This is not a useful attitude to have in business, is it? Certainly not in garage sales. The bargain in a garage sale is simple: You offer crap you don’t want anymore, in hopes that others will not consider it crap, and will pay you a little bit of money for it. “A little bit of money” — this is the garage-sale bargain, at least my garage sales. You can set your prices wherever you want, but you’d better be willing to come down a little. Many don’t seem to understand this. Case in point: I stopped at a sale not long ago, and immediately spotted a small nightstand. I can use one of those. It was from the L.L. Bean cottage collection, and was brand-new, still wrapped in plastic. A hand-lettered sign said: “Amazing bargain! Was $299, now $199!” Which seemed pretty damn high, but OK, let’s take a look. I opened the drawer, which slid out smoothly, and revealed the original price tag: “WAS $299, NOW $199.”

In other words, someone made a bad purchase, couldn’t use it, and now wants to get their money back. All of their money back. You’ve got to be kidding.

The silver piece was priced at $5. I offered $4. She agreed. Now it has a new home and Thanksgiving to look forward to. I bet that nightstand is still in the original seller’s basement, waiting for the next inflationary spike to make $199 look like a bargain.

Not happening. There’s a generic equivalent now: Ikea. It’s the 21st century, and it’s every man for himself.

Today is a writing/reporting day for me, meaning I’ll be clattering keys and making calls, but not in the service of you, dear blog readers. But fear not — I have something else for you to take a look at.

It’s my friend Ron French’s long-awaited (by some of us, anyway) Detroit News project on how health care costs are strangling General Motors. But wait, wait, there’s a bigger picture here, and this is it:

Because of its aging work force and army of retirees, GM has reached a health care crisis before the rest of the country. But GM’s battle with the health care beast may well be a preview of what America will be facing in coming years.

If health care costs are driving one of the most powerful companies in the world deep into financial difficulty, how bad will the health care crisis be for the rest of us?

Every American who pays attention knows that one reason the auto companies want to meet with President Bush is to sell him on a vision of nationalized health care. Here’s a figure, for example, that people in Detroit know by heart:

The price tag of every vehicle GM builds in the United States includes about $1,525 just for the medical care of the nearly 1.1 million Americans the automaker insures. Toyota’s health care tab for each vehicle it builds in Japan is $97; it’s $400 to $425 in the United States.

(Before you wonder why Toyota can do it for $425 vs. $1,525 for GM, I can tell you it’s because Toyota has only been building cars in the U.S. for a short time, relative to GM, and doesn’t yet have the army of retirees and aging workforce that GM does.)

Some of you know about my steady-gig editing job, which I do as well as freelance writing. At night, I farm news for a single corporate client whose business is health care. In addition, I’ve spent a lot of August and September writing stories about health care, some of which haven’t run yet. Both jobs leave me believing we have entered the age of miracles, real miracles. One of the people I interviewed, for a story in October’s Hour Detroit (on newsstands now — buy two, tell your friends), had minimally invasive cardiac bypass surgery, using a robotic surgical tool; his doctor sat in another room staring into a monitor, operating tiny instruments introduced not through a gaping wound in his chest, but through five holes, each the diameter of a pencil. Another doc, an oncologist, talked about the amazing advances in biotech-engineered chemotherapy drugs, resulting in therapy that’s less debilitating and more effective. Some of his patients used to choose death over chemo, and now some don’t even lose their hair.

“And a course of chemo drugs used to cost $500,” he said. “Now it’s more like $50,000.”

I’m so stupid (how stupid am I?), I’m so stupid I thought health care would be the No. 1 issue the last presidential election, after the war. Instead, it was whether John Kerry spent Christmas in Cambodia in 1969.

Well, don’t want to get off on a rant here. Ron’s a great writer, and it’s a zippy read. There are several sidebars, all of which can be accessed from the the main DetNews page.

What is this lovely mixed grill we have? We have:

Yesterday the Kronk, tomorrow your grandma’s grave: Scrap-metal thieves target grave markers.

The best/worst thing about the internet is, it makes you care about the fates of strangers’ cats. Alas, Waffles didn’t make it. Damn Chows. Damn stupid Chow owners.

And finally, a recipe. This was sent to me from someone who attributes it to her “Michigan cousins.” If you believe, as I do, that recipes are a form of anthropology, well, many things about Michigan will reveal themselves to you in just a few short lines. So enjoy…

Caramel apple salad

1 cup sugar
1 tbs. flour
1 heaping tbs. cornstarch
4 tsp vinegar
2 eggs
1 - 20 oz can crushed pineapple (or tidbits)

5-6 cubed Granny Smith apples
1 cup chopped Snickers candy bars or crushed Heath candy bars or peanuts
1 - 8 oz carton Cool Whip

Cool Whip — the secret weapon of every Midwestern cook’s larder.

Prez gets an education. Omar gets breakfast — but not the one he wanted. (”No Honey Nut?”) The Major Crimes unit gets the next best thing to finished and Carcetti gets reacquainted with his conscience. It’s “The Wire” discussion thread — episode “Home Rooms.”

I’ll go first: Even if I weren’t inclined to love this show, I don’t know how I could quit watching after that last scene. In Prez’ classroom, a girl has been slashed across the face by another girl. The attacker rages for a bit, then is swiftly disarmed by another teacher, after which she resigns herself to her fate, and curls in an angry ball against the radiators. Dukie edges close and offers her a little hand-held fan he’s been messing with. She ignores him. He puts it down next to her, a small offering. She continues to ignore him. He sits quietly next to her. He understands. They’re two wounded little animals together.

It just occurred to me, watching that, that all four of these boys are not going to make it. I think Dukie’s not going to make it.

Every great teacher I know has been something of a lecturer. I once knew a guy, who left academia with bad memories and vows of never again, and yet, at parties, sooner or later there’d be a knot of people sitting on couches and chairs, and he’d be standing in front of them, leading a discussion. Someone would make a remark, and he’d nod at them and say, “That’s correct.” And he seemed utterly unaware of it, the way a sheepdog will cross back and forth in front of you, occasionally dropping behind if you slow down, to nudge you along. It’s just in the blood.

All this by way of saying Professor Lance Mannion (Ball State University, College of Hobart and William Smith, others) is at the lectern, using “Cheers” to discuss types in the human family. Start here, then go here and finish here, although I believe the lecture still has one more part.

There will be no test, but if you’re a “Cheers” fan, it’s a required course.

But not nearly enough.

That’s the thing about 1.5-income finances — there’s never enough left over for travel. I get out of town so infrequently I don’t even dream of things like getting on airplanes and using my passport. (Although I have high hopes for Istanbul in 2007. Somehow, some way.)

So I found one of those what-states-have-you-visited map generators, and it would seem that I have actually been around the block:

Create your own visited states map

Even if some of those were only drive-thru (Kansas, at 85 mph) or change-planes (Utah) visits, it seems I’m on my way to bagging 50. But how could I have gone this far in life and not made it to Maryland? This I don’t understand.

Something else you might not know about me: I went to high school with Justin Timberlake’s Uncle Mark. Or so I’m told. I remember him in junior high, but after that I sort of lose the thread.

Well. We can tell it’s Friday, can’t we?

So let’s go straight to the admittedly skimpy bloggage:

First, the copper problem, explained in the DetNews.

And second: I’m not a runner. Never will be a runner. Hate running in all its forms. Think running is overrated as both exercise and test of character, and yes, many think of it as a test of character. You can find marathon runners and ultramarathon runners throughout the executive suites, where the ability to train for and complete a long-distance race is seen as proof of the sort of flinty toughness needed in today’s business world, particularly when you have to lay off the doughy non-runners on the shop floor. (OK, that was a cheap shot.) The most boring people I know are runners. So are several of the most interesting, but if I lined up all the runners I know and sorted them into boring/interesting piles, the boring pile would tower over the other, especially when they talk about their training routines. (Another interesting set and subset: Crazy people who are also devoted chess players.) And the thing is, I like long sessions of boring, repetitive exercise. I love biking, love swimming laps, have flirted dangerously with rowing, and the closest I ever came to bodhisattva while exercising was on an erg, although I now know my form was all wrong. I once thought I should maybe train for a triathalon, and then remembered I’d have to run. And gave it up.

When I was a copy editor, one of my duties was editing — and slashing the crap out of — the running column. Definition of hell: reading 800 words about shin splints at 5:45 a.m.

Anyway, I know runners have their own issues, both within and without their community. A runner I know (interesting) fumed after overhearing a famous sportswriter bitching loudly on the topic of this Slate throwdown, about how “sluggish newbies” have ruined the marathon.

…this growing army of giddy marathon rookies is so irksome that I’m about ready to retire my racing shoes and pick up bridge. …The marathon has transformed from an elite athletic contest to something closer to sky diving or visiting the Grand Canyon. When a newbie marathoner crosses the finish line, he’s less likely to check his time than to shout, “Only 33 more things to do before I die!”

A fun read.

Now I’m going to get on the bike, before the rain starts.

On Wednesday mornings before I knock off my night-shift editing work, one of the last things I do is check the Metro Times and Jack Lessenberry’s column, so I can go to bed in the proper frame of mind — suicidal.

Jack is not a crepehanger, only a realist:

Last week the leadership of Ford Motor Co. went before the cameras. Remember those gloomy forecasts last January? Well, they were too optimistic.

There will be a snowball effect. And this is not your father’s recession-based round of auto layoffs. This is forever.

I lay this out not to make you suicidal — you don’t live here, after all, at least most of you — but to underline there is but one issue in Michigan this election season. One. Uno. The big enchilada. The big E. The economy. I am willing to vote for any candidate of any party, if I think they understand that nothing is as important as this. Everything comes back to the economy, and I want to hear sensible, no-b.s. ideas about how this state, this region, can diversify its economy and find its feet again, before my house is worth the same as a crack den in Detroit. OK? Everyone understand?

So I open my web browser today, and guess what the Republican nominee is suggesting?

Intelligent design. Surprise, surprise, he’s all in favor of teaching it in public schools:

“I would like to see the ideas of intelligent design that many scientists are now suggesting is a very viable alternative theory,� DeVos told the Associated Press this week during an interview on education. “That theory and others that would be considered credible would expose our students to more ideas, not less.�

We. Are. Doomed.

UPDATE: Open your mouth, lose your crummy, low-paying job: The corpse collector has been suspended. But of course. But that’s…OK. He really wants to concentrate on his career as a rapper.