Read a fascinating story overnight, about corporate tax rates. Although the rate is allegedly 35 percent — AND CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S THAT HIGH? WHAT IS THIS, THE SOVIET UNION? — it should not surprise you to know that many companies pay far less, and some collect fat…well, you can’t exactly call them refunds, as there was nothing paid to be refunded in the first place. “The thanks of a grateful nation,” perhaps.

Here’s a chart. I notice that many of the biggest refunders are utilities, including my own, DTE Energy. I’d imagine that comes from exploiting energy policy that rewards some sources of power over others. Here’s a jaw-dropper, however:

The report said that many other companies took advantage of tax breaks that favor certain industries, including drilling for oil and gas, making video games, building NASCAR racetracks, producing ethanol, and making movies.

Video games, movies and NASCAR. If you wonder why lobbyists are as rich as Midas, wonder no more.

Rick Snyder, the new governor of Michigan, drastically reduced our film tax credits, on the grounds that governments shouldn’t “pick winners and losers” for special treatment. (Then he turned around and top-downed a bunch of other ideas and “best practices,” which goes to show we all have a different idea of what constitutes a winner and a loser.)

What I don’t know about tax policy could fill the Grand Canyon, but I do know I studied the wrong thing in college. A lawyer friend of mine likes to say he wouldn’t trade his B.A. in economics for anything, that no single field of study explains the world as well as econ. I’d say he’s right.

So what’s your major, anyway?

I have an interview to do in 45 minutes, and I intend to ride my bike to it, because what’s the point of doing hyperlocal journalism if you can’t do hyperlocal transportation along the way. I haven’t been doing as much cycling as I usually do in the fall, but that’s to be expected, considering the near-constant rain we’ve been having. I have to remind myself to be alert to autumnal cycling hazards; one year in Fort Wayne I nearly came to ruin after thoughtlessly riding fast under an aesculus glabra tree that had dropped its fruit all over the Rivergreenway. I use the Latin name so I don’t wreck the punchline: It would be ironic indeed for an Ohio native to be felled by a buckeye.

Fortunately, I have some bloggage:

Mitch Albom, infamous crafter of over-the-top obituaries, stays his hand (mostly) and does one I actually enjoyed reading — about his piano teacher. It’s good because he mostly keeps himself out of it, although it has enough head-smacking phrases for a few winces; the man’s cancer battle had “gone to a minor key,” not to mention this entire paragraph:

Sing a song of Matt Michaels. Make it sweet and melodic as the best jazz tune, make it funny and smart and a little whimsical, a trill note here or there. Make it smoky and coffee-stained and gently inspiring to anyone who hears it. The old expression goes, “Those who can’t do, teach,” but that is false. Sometimes, those who can do teach anyhow, and the world is better for it.

Ugh. But the guy left behind a million stories, and Mitch wrangled a few of them. Kate’s wonderful bass teacher gets to tell one, so there’s that.

Mark my words: At some point in the near or distant future, Kim Kardashian is going to claim her whole joke of a marriage was planned for just this reason.

Jim at Sweet Juniper’s other kid — that would be “Juniper” — was a ghost for Halloween. But not a sheet ghost.

My phone just alerted me that it’s time to head out. The weekend is drawing so, so near, I can almost taste it.

“Patchy dense fog,” the guy on the radio said this morning. I guess they can’t say “lovely wisps of water vapor will cling to low-lying areas, including creek bottoms and golf courses, catching the early morning light in opaque streaks of loveliness that remind us of the dying of the season,” but that’s what it looked like as I drove Kate to school this morning. I’m not supposed to drive the morning shift, but as I said yesterday, it’s good to get out of your rut from time to time. Sometimes you see the morning light in new ways.

Then I came home and read this story, from AnnArbor.com, which replaced the daily newspaper there a few years back, and discovered I’m the same old grump. On just one readthrough, I spotted facts repeated in adjacent paragraphs, the governor’s name misspelled and windy quotes that needed a trim. Argh:

Dennis says, if passed, the bill would be an insurmountable blow to U-M.

“Surmount” and its variants apply to obstacles and other things you have to get over or around, not blows, even figurative ones. I’m sure two or three more reads would turn up more fat and gas, but editing brave new experiments in journalism isn’t my job. (Well, yes it is, but not this one.) Point these things out to people who aren’t in the journo-biz, and they look at you funny, but dammit, EDITING MATTERS. Proper use of quotes matters a lot. This is how you don’t do it:

“I am concerned for the university as a whole,” Dennis said. “It would be a really damaging blow to the university’s reputation as a fair and humane employer. I think it would cause us to lose faculty and never get them back.”

“It would just be tragic for the university,” he added.

I tell my students: Avoid using quotes to carry information. Use them to comment on the information. They are the pinpoint spotlights of storytelling, drawing your eye to important or interesting facts. The first and last lines of that four-sentence quote are unnecessary. In a squeeze, so is the second one.

Everybody loves the last scene of “A River Runs Through It,” but my favorite is the Zen writing lesson:

NARRATOR: Each weekday, while my father worked on his Sunday sermon, I attended the school of the Reverend Maclean. He taught nothing but reading and writing. And being a Scot, believed that the art of writing lay in thrift.

REV. MACLEAN: Good. Now throw it away.

Throw it away! Now that’s a man who knows the value of words on paper. Every so often a group of Buddhist monks show up at the Allen County Public Library and spend several days making a sand mandala in one of the public spaces, after which it is poured into the river. That’s all we do, although newspaper people have the added thrill of knowing their words are now lining my rabbit cage.

Let’s hop quick to the bloggage, so I can get a workout in today:

The Onion proves, once again, that it is America’s truly indispensable news source:

A team of leading archaeologists announced Monday they had uncovered the remains of an ancient job-creating race that, at the peak of its civilization, may have provided occupations for hundreds of thousands of humans in the American Northeast and Midwest.

The latest from Chest magazine (yes, it exists): Your blue jeans may have killed Turkish garment workers. Have a nice day!

One for Connie, Beth and the rest of you librarians and archivists, via MMJeff, a library mystery that reminds me, a little bit, of the guy who leaves cognac and roses on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave every year.

Jon Corzine, financial genius, nearly bails out of the company he ruined with a measly $12 million severance package. I can’t stand it.

Happy Tuesday to all.

The new biography of Steve Jobs confirms what was already pretty well known about the pancreatic cancer that killed him earlier this month. That is, that the man widely hailed as a genius did a pretty dumb thing when diagnosed with cancer in 2003 — he denied he had it.

Or rather, he denied he had anything serious enough to need treatment with serious medicine. Rather:

His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Apple employees, executives and shareholders, who were misled.

Later, Jobs did turn to Western medicine to fight his cancer. But from the fall of 2003 to the summer of 2004, when he finally had surgery, he dithered. Everything we know about cancer stresses early detection and treatment as key to long-term survival. So it’s not a leap to conclude that Jobs may have acupunctured himself into an early grave.

It’s unclear whether Jobs thought acupuncture and juice were a real treatment, or if something else was going on in his famously intelligent head. He wouldn’t be the first person who, when faced with a deadly threat in the prime of his life, simply refused to see it as such. In the world Jobs lives in, there’s certainly no shortage of this sort of thinking, and California’s reputation as the center of it is well-earned.

My doctor friend Frank and I would occasionally bat this ball around over beers. Why were some people so ready to believe practitioners of quackery like iridology, Reiki and at least some chiropractic — yes, I think it can be effective for back and neck pain, but asthma? Please — and not their doctors? Why is a guy who went to the Colon Cleanse Academy more believable than one who interned at Johns Hopkins? We ran down the list of million reasons, but Frank, unlike most MDs, was always willing to put a big part of the blame on doctors themselves, the most visible actors in the insane ongoing stage play of American health care. They helped build their own prison, then complained the view was obscured by iron bars. Doctors are, speaking generally, very smart control freaks (like Steve Jobs, come to think of it), and patients frequently are not. After the thousandth emphysema patient who refuses to quit smoking but still complains of symptoms, it’s easy for a doctor to get high-handed, and that arrogance can seep into interactions with all patients. Pretty soon, you are the doc whose patients desert him for a nutritionist. And you have lots of company.

“Doctors like to complain about the patient who comes in with a sheaf of printouts from the internet,” he would say. “But that patient is the one who is taking responsibility for their own health. It’s all in how you look at it.”

In some ways, knowing Jobs was one of those patients humanizes him as much as his other widely reported flaws. Life is a terminal disease, after all.

The Huffington Post got their hands on an early copy, too. This is the story they pulled from it:

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Yes, regulations and unnecessary costs, like federal laws on how hard you can whip your workforce, and how many pollutants you may dump into the soil and waterways and air around your factory. I hate to say it two days in a row, but that’s f’ing rich. Yes, Jobs was “prickly,” the root of which is “prick.”

A pivot into the bloggage, and then I’m on to other things:

When I was younger, and would fantasize about exchanging faces with other women in the world, one who always ended up on my top-five list was Charlotte Rampling. Those amazing cheekbones. Those incredible, hooded eyes. That jawline. So beautiful. I saw a trailer for a new documentary about her yesterday. My oh my, but she’s gotten old. (Still looks great. It’s the bone structure.) I have a feeling that of all the women of a certain age who say they’ve never had work done, she is telling the truth.

Marco Rubio, truth-stretcher.

I agree with James Fallows: Good for WDAV, an NPR station that for once acted with common sense when considering the after-hours work of one of its employees.

A morning’s worth of work to do, and then I’m going to rake leaves. Have a great weekend.

I was covering a local candidate forum last night, and missed the latest GOP debate. I understand that in a brilliant move to round up Sarah Palin’s little lost lambs, Rick Perry located the American revolution in the 16th century. Awright. Between this, Herman Cain’s skatting on Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, Michele Bachmann’s vaccine-caused retardation and the seven or eight embarrassing moments yet to come in the next month, Barry’s got the second term all but sewed up.

Or not. Max Headroom Romney still floats above the fray. Way to pick your opponents, Mittens.

The local forum was put on by our chapter of the League of Women Voters. What mensches those folks are, arranging these deals every year so that none of us need go into the voting booth ignorant. Not that it makes much difference to most people, alas. Every term I discover how much my students — college students — don’t know about participatory democracy. Most of it is a function of simply not having lived very long; they don’t know how city councils work because they have never given a thought to city council, period. Nothing like buying property, paying taxes and having children to pique a person’s interest in public affairs. But I also wonder how much civics education is going on in schools these days. I took it in junior high. Today it might be wrapped into a general social-studies curriculum. I hope some of it is sinking in.

The warm weather will be leaving in a matter of hours, and it’s already cloudy and threatening rain. Leaves are falling like snowflakes, but it sho’ is purty out there.

I have quite a bit of tasty bloggage today, so let’s hop to it, shall we?

Your daily funny: Elizabeth Warren promises revenge vouchers.

Richard Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists in the world, was booked to appear tonight at a local fundraiser for the Center for Inquiry. But he was dropped at the last minute, when organizers learned — yes, learned — that he was an atheist. (From watching Fox News!!!) He’s complaining, but I’d consider myself lucky. If they can’t read a newspaper, they certainly can’t hire a decent caterer.

OID: A city so broke that the power company comes in and repossesses its streetlights. I didn’t think that was even possible.

Rochelle Riley is African-American, so this punchline doesn’t quite work, but it’s close enough for me, after reading this titanically dumb column: What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

I haven’t been linking to NYT stories as much, knowing most of you can’t get behind the pay wall, but this story was so weird I can’t resist: Remember Professor Irwin Corey? “The world’s foremost authority?” I guess you’d call him a comedian, although as I recall, his schtick was to go on bubbly talk shows like Mike Douglas, Joey Bishop and maybe Carson, where the host would play straight man, asking him questions, which he would answer in long, convoluted bursts of verbiage. (We were so easily amused back then, but as I often think, watching contemporary comedy: It beats semen jokes.)

Anyway, Corey is still alive, lives in New York and is something of a panhandler, only the money he collects is sent to children’s charities in Cuba. He’s 97 years old. You really can’t make this stuff up, can you?

Off to work for me.

Such a freakish October we’ve been having so far. Summerlike temperatures, absolutely perfect weather, and the Lions are 5-0. This is what you might call a textbook lesson in “things that will not last, but should be enjoyed while they do.” Normally I do groundwork for the week ahead on Sunday evenings; instead I had dinner with the Hare Krishnas. I should be at work inside all day today, but odds are, I’m going to get a long bike ride in there somehow. And sooner or later the Lions will lose, but for now? I join my fellow Detroiters in celebrating their winning streak.

I generally confine my criticism of Mitch Albom to his weekly forays into the non-sporting world, mainly because I don’t read his sports columns, mainly because I don’t read sports coverage, period. I had a brief period of reading it, when I was on the copy desk in Fort Wayne, and handled the early-closing pages, i.e., business and sports. My takeaway was that I’d been wrong to feel any sympathy whatsoever for sportswriters who objected to the traditional newsroom moniker for their corner — the Toy Department. For every Frank DeFord or…who’s that funny guy at ESPN? Bill Simmons? Yeah. For every sportswriter like them, with talent and wit and insight, there were two score hacks who earned a living presenting high-school football rivalries as the latter-day equivalent of the Peloponnesian War. Sometimes a very good living. Having edited my share of his columns, I can tell you the downfall of Stephen A. Smith from his sinecure at the Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the very few times in recent memory I thought newspaper management got it right. (EDIT: OK, I was too harsh here. There are many fine sportswriters, and even the hacks work pretty hard, traveling constantly, not seeing their families for days on end. My hat is doffed to their brother- and sisterhood, but there are still plenty of lousy ones.)

So I check in on Mitch’s sports output rarely, but hey, the Lions’ unlikely streak is a bonafide talker outside of sports, so what the heck, and whaddaya know:

Change. On a sports night of epic proportions — playoff baseball team in action, undefeated football team on national TV — it was the Lions who provided the exclamation point, staying perfect by taking down the rival Bears, 24-13, the way they’ve taken down a lot of teams this year, emerging at halftime, righting the sails, sinking the battleship.

“Change” is Albom Trick No. 34, the Dramatic Repetition of Faux-Profundity, right before he swerves off Metaphor Highway and into the Ditch of Hackitude. Of course it was a sports night of “epic proportions,” because like fights of the century, they happen every few months or so. (Note to Mitch’s editors: Epic, in this usage, generally means long. If the Tigers had been playing at home, it’s a word that would have applied to the post-game traffic jams. Then they provide an exclamation point by righting their sails (and as a sailor, I have no idea what that even means) and sinking the battleship. OK, whatever. I bet they all gave 110 percent along the way, too.

No, but this:

From the jump, the human amplifiers in Ford Field were dialed to the point of explosion. The whole first quarter had the feeling of a building on fire. The stands were 5,000 volts of nervous energy. Players soared and crashed furiously. Yellow flags flew so fast you thought they were being thrown by Kevin Bacon at the riotous end of “Animal House.” Stay calm! All is well!

And we move on to exploding amplifiers, burning buildings, 5,000 volts, flying penalty flags, Kevin Bacon (six degrees!) and “Animal House.”

I have sympathy for these guys, I really do. Pity the modern sportswriter, tasked with reporting news everyone already knows — the Lions won in front of a crazy-excited hometown crowd on the first “Monday Night Football” to visit their venue in 37 years. (Wait a minute. Mitch says it’s the first MNF to play in “our city limits” in that time. Surely they made it to the Pontiac Silverdome sometime in that time.) You have to do one of two things — find an angle or story within that no one else is reporting, or convey the man-that-was-a-game feeling of bros at the water cooler the next morning. But he doesn’t have the ease of a Simmons (or the space), and he’s not the craftsman DeFord is, but he’s too much of a superstar to take a risk. He’s used to them holding Page One for him, or a room that falls silent when he enters. He’s Mitch, and we’re not. And so we get this. Well, he was on deadline.

You know what? Today would be a great day to Occupy something. There’s a local protest scheduled, but not until Friday. When it will be raining.

Occupy Detroit — it’s sort of a joke, isn’t it?

Speaking of occupying Detroit, I see today is Elmore Leonard’s 86th birthday. Best wishes to a true Detroit gem, and OMG, it just occurred to me that he won’t live forever, and when he goes, Mitch Albom will write something about him.

Hold me.

Have a happy Tuesday, all. I’m off to ride my bike.

I don’t have much time to write this morning; I used up 23 minutes of my allottment on email, venting about a particularly annoying Free Press columnist (not you-know-who) and asking Hank Stuever how I might get to see the rest of “Homeland” without subscribing to Showtime. The first episode is on iTunes, and it’s much better than I expected. I was able to get past the oh-sure-Claire-Danes-is-a-CIA-analyst thing fairly easily; it helped that the producers styled her against her beauty, at least a little. I’ve been watching “My So-Called Life” lately, and it’s interesting to see how losing the last few pounds of adolescent fleshiness seemingly made her eyes grow three sizes.

Oh, hell, why not say, “the usual actress diet starved her into a Keane kid,” but she’s good at what she does.

So let’s go for bloggage today, because I don’t have the steam for much else.

Only one day later, and I’m already tiring of the Steve Jobs tributes, even as they move on to second-day stretches like this: Jobs understood our individualistic culture, and that is applicable to politics somehow, which I’m going to show with a lot of sweeping generalizations. Watch how I do it:

At the same time, while Mr. Jobs saw a society moving inexorably toward individual choice, he also seemed to understand that such individuality breeds detachment and confusion. And so Apple sought to fill that vacuum by making itself into more than a manufacturer; it became a kind of community, too, with storefronts and stickers and a membership that enabled you to get your e-mail, or video-conference with your friends, or post a Web page of your vacation photos.

But that’s nothing compared to the Corndog, at National Review Online, where the ideologues do what ideologues do: Seek to see the whole world through their special glasses:

That old Motorola cinderblock (cell phone) would cost about $10,000 in 2011 dollars, and you couldn’t play Angry Birds on it or watch Fox News or trade a stock. Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy. Not all of them, but a great many.

OK, I’m going to try to “figure this out”: A cell phone is not like public education because? One’s a cell phone, and one’s public education! What do I win?

I don’t always visit Sweet Juniper’s occasional posts on children’s literature, but I should, because of this explication de texte of “Goodbye Rune.” Killer line: I do feel like I understand Lars von Trier a little bit better now. Me, too!

OK, gotta run. We’re pulling the boat today, a bit early, in preparation for Alan starting a demanding new job at the paper later in the month, one that may well dictate that he never see his beloved sailboat again. Kidding. But at least we have good weather for it — Indian summer with a vengeance. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you after it’s over.

Someone has probably sent you videos of the Occupy Wall Street protests this week in New York. This clip is popular, 40 seconds that ostensibly shows two women being pepper-sprayed for no apparent reason, although I’ve run it a few times and can’t find the moment of truth. Besides, I’m sure someone has it from another angle. Every other person there was carrying a camera.

We live in a world more photographed every day, and still, we miss stuff all the time. All the cameras in New York City, and only one captured the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. Probably hundreds were trained on the buildings when the second plane hit, and yet, conspiracy theorists continue to insist we don’t really know what happened. Did anyone ever see the plane that hit the Pentagon? The command center of the vast American military, and all I recall was a grainy security-camera image of a blur and a fireball. No wonder the truthers were able to beat that dead horse for a decade.

I knew a photographer in college who was summoned to testify about some photos of alleged police brutality he’d taken at a demonstration. As he remembered the experience, the cross-examination was short. How many frames can your camera shoot? Five per second with a motor drive. How many frames on a roll of film? Thirty-six. How many frames does a film camera capture? Twenty-four per second. Thank you, that is all.

A plane crash-lands in the Hudson River, in a city packed with tourists and cameras, and one building’s security cam gets a clear shot, and only a glimpse between buildings. Today’s cell phones can capture video in high-definition. I can have mine out and ready to roll in a matter of seconds, and I don’t think I’ve ever shot anything worth shooting.

And yet, does a day go by when someone isn’t embarrassed or done in by a single photo? Scarlett Johansson can’t resist snapping a private shot of her fine fanny, and soon it’s out there and nearly crashes the internet. Two Detroit cops are on the hot seat for photos taken outside a traveling strip club/party bus called the Booty Lounge. I don’t even see where they did anything wrong; the picture could have been a photobomb for all I can tell. But it was on the club’s Facebook page, and so it must be atoned for.

Last night NPR had a piece on the crackdown on anonymous internet commenters; more newspapers are making a connection with Facebook or some other real-name network, and now comments on stories must be made under one’s actual name. Part of me applauds this — a self-respecting sewer rat wouldn’t hang in most newspaper comment section — while the rest wonders what this will mean in a world where we’re supposedly accountable for every utterance, online or off, along with every embarrassing photo ever taken of us, ever.

My guess is, soon it won’t matter. Or maybe we’ll all simply change our names.

The final day of my hell week, and pals, I can’t wait for it to end. Happy Thursday.

There are two schools of thought on small-town America — no, three. Briefly:

School 1: Heaven
School 2: Hell
School 3: It’s more complicated than that

See if you can guess which one I favor.

Anyhoo, school no. 2 got a big boost today from the biggest town in the world’s fave newspaper, the New York Times. With the homespun dateline of Mountain Grove, Mo., we learn:

One of the established places here for trading the gossip of the day is Dee’s Place, a country diner where a dozen longtime residents gather each morning around a table permanently reserved with a members-only sign for the “Old Farts Club,” as they call themselves, to talk about weather, politics and, of course, their neighbors.

But of late, more people in this hardscrabble town of 5,000 have shifted from sharing the latest news and rumors over eggs and coffee to the Mountain Grove Forum on a social media Web site called Topix, where they write and read startlingly negative posts, all cloaked in anonymity, about one another.

Color me…unsurprised. I’ve lived too long to be shocked by the fact shiny surfaces sometimes hide ugliness within, or that Mayberry was a myth, or whatever. The part of the story I find interesting is on the second page, in which the chief executive of Topix looks around the room and says, “Who, me?” Like this:

Mr. Tolles …defended it on free-speech grounds. He said the comments are funny to read, make private gossip public, provide a platform for “people who have negative things to say” and are better for business.

At one point, he said, the company tried to remove all negative posts, but it stopped after discovering that commenters had stopped visiting the site. “This is small-town America,” he said. “The voices these guys are hearing are of their friends and neighbors.”

Mr. Tolles also said the site played a journalistic role, including providing a place for whistle-blowing and candid discussion of local politics.

He noted that the Mountain Grove Forum, which had 3,700 visitors on a single day this month, had 1,200 posts containing the word “corruption,” though it was unclear how many of them were true. One resident used the site to rail against local officials, helping build support for a petition-driven state audit of town government.

Only an internet executive could use the presence of a single word to argue that a scuzzy poison-pen message board somehow qualifies as journalism. (Never work harder than cntrl-F, I always say.) Actually, I’m amazed the NYT was able to get him on the horn at all, although hey — they’re the NYT. I bet the people who’ve been the victims of their nastier neighbors on Topix sites haven’t been so fortunate. Perhaps they’ve been told, instead, to start their own thread, to fight words with words, and other helpful advice.

As you know, my experience in journalism runs from lamestream to present-day, and one of the things I struggle with, weekly if not daily, is how much the latter has to learn from the former. I used to be a fan of anonymous posting; I’m not so much anymore. I used to believe a lot of that Jeff Jarvis spiel about throwing it all out there in the name of immediacy and letting the self-correcting internet sort it out; not so much anymore. I’ve learned that readers are busy and time-starved and all that stuff they told us pretty much throughout the ’80s, but they’re also lazy and disinclined to dig deeper for truth, because they have to race down their Facebook news feed to find out what the slacktivist meme of the moment is — change your profile picture to raise awareness of something, or whatever.

I’ll give you an example: We recently went through a bruising battle here over the hiring of a new superintendent of our local schools. A minority of the board didn’t like the internal candidate, pushed hard from the beginning by the majority, and the vote to hire him was 4-3. At the meeting to approve his contract, one of the minority members tossed out the figure $700,000, which he said was the total value of his 2.5-year contract. As near as I can tell, that figure was arrived at by taking his salary, bennies, retirement and office-coffee consumption and multiplying by 2.5, then rounding generously, sort of like the calculation of the street value of a pound of marijuana.

But he said it at the meeting, and the other online news source, Patch, reported it. (My online news source wasn’t there, because this meeting happened between WSU terms, which meant I had no reporters. I was at another meeting, thinking the contract approval would be pro forma and less newsworthy. So in our semi-hiatus month, we didn’t have a story.) They had to, and I don’t blame them — their mandate is immediacy, and it came out of the mouth of a board member. But there it was: The new superintendent is costing the district $700,000, in the subhead.

This then gets bundled into the social-media presentations, and the comments start. Wow! $700,000 — that’s a lot of money! And so on. Where do I apply? I could use $700,000, etc. Two days later, the reporter files a deeper dive into the contract, broken down by salary ($175,000, about what the last supe was making, and entirely in keeping with the marketplace for districts of our size and quality) and other benefits, and now the estimates for the total compensation are about $200,000 per year, or $500,000 over the length of the contract. This story, I should add, gets far less Facebook chatter, perhaps because the original amplifiers are chastened, or maybe because it’s more reasonable.

But I remain convinced there are people in this community who read no further than the subhead and Facebook comments, and believe the new superintendent is earning $700,000 in salary alone. If we had a Topix board here, there would probably be speculation about on-call massage therapists and other, you know, CORRUPTION. What is it they say about truth and lies and which one puts its shoes on faster?

I’m starting to see the benefit in the ol’ skool, where if you wanted to write a letter to the editor, you had to use your full name, the letter was carried by the ponderous U.S. Postal Service and the paper called to verify your identity, all of which gave you many stops on the path to reconsider.

OK, time to go to work, so how about a 180-degree turn with the bloggage?

What we had with our roast chicken Saturday night. Super-duper yum factor. Which should remind us that it’s probably time to fix something from the Minimalist’s greatest hits. Not many wrong turns there.

What Was There, a site that layers historic photos onto Google street-view shots. Oh, you librarians will love this one.

Finally, late-breaking news from Toledo: FBI raids several local IHOPs, reportedly on suspicion of TERRORIST ACTIVITY. I am not making this up. Big hat tip to our treasure, Dexter.

And I think that’s it. Happy Tuesday to all.

Welcome to Sunday morning, every newspaper fan’s biggest day. The morning stretches before you, with thousands and thousands of words to choose from. Here are the two that arrived at my house this week:

As you can see, the Freep took its 9/11 package pretty seriously. They’re doing this more often of late — making a magazine-style front page, with only one story, rather than the traditional layout. And for a day like Sunday, lots of papers did the same.

I gotta say, this photoillustration didn’t do much for me. Of the thousands of images to choose from — and you can see the other newspaper, above, for some lovely ones — they dig up the same old greatest hits and screen them over a flag, but OK, artistic choice, whatever. And as it turns out, the illustration is a perfect match for the copy. Anyone? Anyone?

How could we have possibly expected anything else? I knew you-know-who would have something to say about it; in the clever words of one of you on my Facebook page (Baldheaded Dork, I think), Mitch made his bones as the Grim Reaper’s toastmaster, and this was a very big banquet. But there were other people involved in this decision, to make this the most prominent story in the paper, to back it with the judgment of a dozen editors. Someone, many someones, read this and said, “Yep, this is what our readers want.”

I said the illustration perfectly captured the story. Mitch Albom’s column was a virtual cliché salad with a side of mush, served up with his standard tricks, italics, repetition and those dumb, one-sentence paragraphs he loves so much.

Like this.

And like this:

They are dead. He is dead. We are alive. We are changed.

They are dead.

You wish this anniversary could change that. You wish 10 years was some sort of MAGIC release date, that the murdered souls of Sept. 11 could return, their suffering ended, their incinerated bodies recreated from the dusty air of lower Manhattan and the rubble of the Pentagon and the muddy earth of a Pennsylvania field, allowed to pick up their lives wherever they were headed that morning, to the office, to the subway, to breakfast, to another city.

They are dead. That will never happen. Their children are teenagers now. Their teens are adults. They exist only in memories, in family stories, in photo albums and attic boxes and troubled dreams.

No roll call today will bring them back — not even one read by presidents and governors. No etching of their names in a memorial will re-animate them. They stand as the fallen.

What the hell is he talking about? I wish an anniversary could bring the dead to life? Sure, why not? I also wish I had a dog that didn’t poop or pee. I wish I had a money tree in my yard. I wish Ashley didn’t die. I wish I had some all-caps MAGIC I could call on, but most of all, I wish I had Mitch Albom’s job, which is to churn his MAGIC pot of hackneyed usage and faux-profundity once a week in the op-ed section of what was once a respected newspaper and is now just another heat ‘n’ serve from the Gannett kitchen.

I love some of these clauses — not even a roll call “read by presidents and governors” will bring them back. A better hack would have stopped at presidents. It’s the “and governors” that gives the line its comedy.

It so happens that all the columnists were called upon to contribute something, and no one, even the good ones, hit anything out of the park. But Mitch pegged the needle on the Smarm-o-Meter, once again, by observing that yes, yes, we have changed, and yet, life and love does, and always will, go on.

Because we weren’t sure about that before. You know, there was an attack on American soil, and maybe all life would have stopped, and taken the love with it.

This guy is paid $250,000 a year by the Freep, I’m told. For that sum, he is apparently not required to make a phone call to one of the dozens of smart people, many of them clergy, who would pick up for him, who might have offered a new perspective or original observation about this tragedy. He’s not required to say something that hasn’t been said a thousand times. He just phones this shit in, and collects the check.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this nonsense were confined to Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day and other more fitting holidays. But this was a profound national tragedy, and this is what he comes up with. I ask you.

Compare what he said with this brief passage from Bill Clinton’s speech at Shanksville, Pa. this weekend. That’s how you speak a simple message from the heart, people.

Ugh.

For a palate cleanser, I suggest you read Michael Heaton’s account of covering the story as a working reporter. Might be a little inside baseball for you civilians, but I enjoyed it. The hardhat gambit! Genius.

Or, you could read the final, definitive apology of the guy who started the “tourist guy” Photoshop hoax. He’s Hungarian, a nation that our own Alex often informs us has a distinct sense of humor. Let’s invade them, and fix that.

Since we were talking about it last week, whaddya know — a piece on graphing calculators.

This I present without comment.

And with that, I should wrap up and move out.

* Today’s headline explained.

PBS reran a “Frontline” documentary on the 9/11 aftermath as part of its special programming this week. “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” is one for you armchair philosophers, or at least Jeff the Mild-Mannered. It’s “Frontline” and public broadcasting at its best, a deep dive into the big questions raised by that day, which all boil down to the biggest one: “Why, God?”

At two hours, it’s a long commitment, but the video online is broken into chapters, which lend themselves to watching in 15-minute chunks. But it takes at least two hours to do what “Frontline” does best, i.e., not settle. The throughlines are a handful of people who lost loved ones that day, and how they integrated the tragedy into their spiritual selves, how they were changed. One woman is still angry and bitter over the loss of her fiancé, and lost her faith over it. Another found it deepened. The climax of the piece comes when two opposing voices consider the most searing images of that day — the jumpers, of course. One says that if you want proof God is a fantasy, look at that, because surely no loving God would throw those innocent souls out the windows of a burning building to die that way. Another says that if you want proof of the divinity within ourselves, look at the people who jumped, holding hands, to give comfort to one another in the final seconds of life. The whole passage is set to Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” which was a bit much, but then again, if there’s ever been a time to use it, that’s the montage.

It all left me with the feeling that if we doubt that God is created in our image, here’s a nice bit of video evidence. I was struck by the remarks of a Lutheran minister who participated in the first healing service at Yankee Stadium, the one that featured clergy of all faiths, Christian and otherwise, even Islam, who joined hands to pray in a moment of spiritual solidarity. In the insanity of the aftermath, it could look, depending on your point of view, like everything from kum-ba-ya multiculti mush to a statement of our strength as a nation to something else. This particular minister got the something else — letters from his fellow Lutherans, calling him out for daring to stand on a stage with other religious leaders and present the dangerous heresy that they might be legitimate, too. They called for his collar.

It reminded me of the moment in my own newsroom, when a staffer offered an op-ed that said that very thing, more or less, a sentiment that would likely have gone over like gangbusters in Fort Wayne. The editor-in-chief put his foot down, however, and spiked it, earning the Strange New Respect Award from me, a moment that said, OK, this bullshit stops here. No Lutherans are flying planes into buildings, but if you can’t see the parallels with Islamist radicalism, I direct you to chapter 5 of “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.”

Watching those images of the interfaith service now, I’m heartened, the same way I was watching Jon Stewart’s post-9/11 monologue, where he said, “I grieve, but I do not despair.” We have better angels, and sometimes we get in touch with them.

Which seems a good turning point to the bloggage, because we start out with a bad fairy, from where else, Fox Sports! This is recommended, particularly for you Californians. I don’t get the point of the piece — seek out Asian students at USC who know nothing about football, because they’re such nose-to-the-grindstone types, bent on destroying grade curves everywhere, and get them to deliver highly accented wercomes to new Pac 10 members, Cororado and Utah. Is this funny? As the colleague who sent this to me noted:

I’m just dumbfounded. TV networks don’t just throw anything on the air. They discuss stories in meetings, they plan them and review them. Who on earth said let’s go target only Asians with a poor grasp of English, take advantage of that deficiency and then make fun of them on national television? Astounding.

Via Eric Zorn, yoga is annoying. Why? Well:

There are teachers and students who think flexibility is some kind of indication of how good a person you are. While we certainly hold tension, trauma and rigidity in our limbs and joints and muscles, there is no reason to imagine there’s some absolutely direct correlation between how well we can move and how functional or healthy our mind is. I seriously doubt that Albert Einstein or Susan Sontag had less flexible minds than, I don’t know, Rodney Yee. My point is, some physical limitations can be aided through the practice of yoga and some can’t and no one needs the increased pressure of someone telling them, every time they strain to get their heels on the floor in Downward Facing Dog, that this is because their mind is all screwed up.

So if your teacher tells you that we hold a lot of stuff in our hips and hamstrings and as we begin to let this stuff go and become our authentic selves we will be able to wrap our arms around ourselves eight times, look around the room. You will probably see a guy who can do that, while smiling, and I’ll bet that you will eventually hear from someone in the class about the time he flew into a rage and broke a car window.

And with that, I’m off to take advantage of a temporary break in the rain to get a bike ride in. Happy weekend, all.