Some columns you just know will catch fire. Clay Aiken is mean? A whale surfing the Delaware? Tomatoes - technically, fruit - as the state vegetable? People eat this stuff up.

That said, I was not expecting the international reaction to last Sunday's piece about M. Smith, an AIDS patient who fought off the grim reaper, only to feel the wrath of a company hoping to profit from her death.

It began Monday morning with Smith's lawyers getting calls from national and Canadian media intrigued by the saga of Smith, the Texas-based company Life Partners Inc. and the morbid, but normally lucrative, industry of buying life insurance policies of the terminally ill for a song, then cashing in when the seller checks out.

It continued with tens of thousands of people reading the column online, e-mailing it to friends, and posting it on sites like www.fark.com and www.pandagon.net - where citizen scribes penned unprintable diatribes of disgust.

Smith, you might recall, was diagnosed with both AIDS and cancer in the early 1990s. Talk about a death sentence: Her doctor gave her two years to live.

In 1994, she sold her $150,000 life insurance policy for $90,000 hoping to spend her last months in the comfort of her own home.

Had Smith died on time, LPI would have made $60,000 - a whopping 66 percent return on the investment.

It seemed like a sure thing as long as Smith died on schedule.

But live she did, thanks to the revolution in AIDS treatment.

And because of the terms of the contract, LPI has spent the last 12 years paying her health and life insurance premiums - to the tune of $100,000.

Now, having put more money into helping to keep Smith alive than it could ever collect when she dies, LPI wants out of the deal.

By Monday, the column had received more than 45,000 hits online - astonishing for a piece that had nothing to do with Brangelina or T.O.

Many of the most outraged saw the story on www.fark.com, a site that allows readers to view news of the weird and tee off at will.

Much of what the farkers had to say about LPI's approach to being Smith's "life partner" was unprintable, but I found a few posts that summed up their four-letter fury.

"If I were in her place, I'd eat their children," huffed someone calling him/herself kitabel.

"This company deserves to go six feet under," wrote E.S.Q.

Perhaps noticing that Smith's lawsuit was filed in New Jersey, elpepe55 offered a gambling analogy:

"It's like a casino refusing to pay off a winning roulette bet even though they have a huge edge on the game."

The folks at www.pandagon.net filed Smith's story in the aptly titled "Boggles the Mind" category.

Now, having put more money into helping to keep Smith alive than it could ever collect when she dies, LPI wants out of the deal.

By Monday, the column had received more than 45,000 hits online - astonishing for a piece that had nothing to do with Brangelina or T.O.

Many of the most outraged saw the story on www.fark.com, a site that allows readers to view news of the weird and tee off at will.

Much of what the farkers had to say about LPI's approach to being Smith's "life partner" was unprintable, but I found a few posts that summed up their four-letter fury.

"If I were in her place, I'd eat their children," huffed someone calling him/herself kitabel.

"This company deserves to go six feet under," wrote E.S.Q.

Perhaps noticing that Smith's lawsuit was filed in New Jersey, elpepe55 offered a gambling analogy:

"It's like a casino refusing to pay off a winning roulette bet even though they have a huge edge on the game."

The folks at www.pandagon.net filed Smith's story in the aptly titled "Boggles the Mind" category.

"I hope she lives to be 100," wrote j swift, adding hope that the "Karma Shark" takes appropriate action.

A reader dubbed piny was especially disgusted by the mysterious phone calls Smith has received from a man asking about her health and claiming to represent anxious investors.

"Still healthy, huh?" piny mocked. "I bet those protease-inhibitor cocktails are really helping, huh? You know, THOSE DON'T EXACTLY COME CHEAP!"

Let round two begin

LPI wants the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that it has not actually stopped paying Smith's insurance, despite threats and several close calls.

Smith's lawyer, Jacob Cohn, filed a scathing response last week in which he asks the court to force LPI to pay the next premium - $26,000, due in February - just to be safe.

Not doing so, Cohn wrote, "threatens Smith with the most irreparable sort of harm: sickness and death." And, lest anyone forget, LPI has a financial interest in "hastening Smith's demise."

Smith, an intensely private woman, says she's surprised by the outcry.

"My case is such an anomaly," she told me. "I never thought it would be interesting to other people."

And, strangely, the terminally ill woman has found comfort knowing that so many strangers are feeling her pain.

Contact Monica Yant Kinney at 856-779-3914 or myant@phillynews.com. Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/yantkinney.

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