Mnemonical Bel-LER-ophonical & k’-MER-ical Miracle
January 27th, 2012| And thereupon, Bellerophon smote thrice Chimera, serpent-goat whose lion head fell to the ground which, whereupon, Bellerophon inscribed, That’s all she wrote. |
|
Moving Targets
January 25th, 2012| Excerpted from Tax Shelters (filed under “Structurals”) |
|
Some homes are prefabricated, like cars. At the other extreme, some campers, trailers, and motor homes are lovingly carpentered with wood siding, cedar shakes, gables, exposed beams, or redwood decks. Are they buildings on wheels? Or vehicles with odd fenders? In their bafflement over this paradox, taxing bodies in several states have tacked together a crazyquilt of tax assessing and licensing methods. For tax purposes, a mobile home is real estate in Maine, Louisiana, Idaho, and South Caroline. Move it to Rhode Island, Connecticut, or Arkansas, and it becomes a vehicle, subject to personal property tax. Think twice about stopping for long in Virginia or Ohio, where all the vehicular fees and real estate taxes apply. In Hawaii, it’s a vehicle until you hook it up to utility lines. In some states, your mobile home is a vehicle if it’s parked on someone else’s land but a house if it’s parked on your own. In most states, the vehicle becomes real estate when it’s attached to a permanent foundation. * For a well appointed motor home, the choice might come down to a $60 or $80 vehicle registration fee or a $3,000 or $4,000 real estate tax; so keep some air in those tires. * Careful. Some state laws have no doubt changed since this was written. |
|
|
|
Snoops
January 23rd, 2012| Written for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |
|
Aside from being an impeachable offense, warrantless wire tapping didn’t seem too alarming to me because by the time they actually listen to all those calls and transcribe them, the Whigs or the Roundheads will be in power instead of the Know-Nothings. Nor did data-mining seem to pose much of a threat. We have a government of ideologues who steadfastly look in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong thing and then blame somebody else when they don’t find it, so how much damage could they do? Then came the quixotic campaign to subpoena library records. Another fool’s errand, I thought, though I did take the precaution of including a couple of red-herring selections in each batch — a Horatio Alger and Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal — which celebrate everything Republicans stand for. Finally, the snoops apparently wanted to know how many abortions I’ve had, but they’ll never be able to prove it’s any more or any less than most men my age. To be sure, it was all sinister and unconstitutional and certain to be condemned by posterity, and if the Evangelicals are right about divine justice they’ll all fry forever in hell; but, beyond that, why worry about a bunch of blithering incompetents? Well, more fool I. It turns out they know more about me than I do. For example, they know when I’ll die. A stockbroker handling one of my IRAs sent me the IRS marching orders on how much I have to withdraw (and pay taxes on) each year; and there, in black and white, is a table showing that I have 26.5 years left. I’ll live to be 97-1/2, although to get there I have to give them a whole lot of money every year. I’m supposed to add up my IRAs and divide the total by 26.5 to find out how much to withdraw and declare as income. (They call it a “distribution,” but we all know whom they plan to distribute it to.) True, they’ve bungled everything they’ve touched, so they could be wrong about this one, too. But that won’t get their noses out of my tent or their fingers out of my pie. If I beat all the odds and reach the age of 115, then they say I’ll have 1.9 years left. And if by some miracle I reach that age in possession of a million dollars, I’m to divide that by 1.9, so then I have to withdraw — and declare as taxable income — $526,315.79. They must look at that and drool like a 115-year-old. My only consolation is that their table stops at 115. The 1.9 applies at age 115 and thereafter. From then on, if you’re still in the Thereafter rather than the Hereafter, you just keep dividing by 1.9 every year. Let’s call it 2, which for an old person is close enough to 1.9. No matter how many times you divide your dwindling net worth by 2, it never reaches zero. You can always try to get along on half of what’s left. Unfortunately, the same thing seems to apply to halfwits. |
|
|
Aw, Wind!
January 21st, 2012|
The wind picked his pocket and airmailed his paycheck to the far side of the boulevard where it was endorsed by a crosstown bus. Unfair wind, |
|
|
Comma Lode
January 19th, 2012| MAJOR COMMA LODE SIGHTED Diacritical geologists exploring the relationship between punctuation and crustal fault lines have unexpectedly discovered a major comma deposit in northern Nevada. Test borings suggest that the Nevada vein is one of the richest ever sighted, and one of the highest in carbon content. Commas are a granular form of silicon graphite, normally bearing 85% to 90% carbon plus a fraction of double-banded silicon concentrated in their tapering tail sections. Once commercial exploitation of the new lode begins, refineries will have to be built near the mine site to separate pure commas from their naturally occurring state, bound into semicolons. It’s expected that the commas will be shipped to printing facilities of The New York Times, which has suffered a comma shortage since the late Sixties. The residue of periods will be sold to various publishers for use as halftone dots in reproducing black and white photographs. A spokesman for the Times confirmed that the newspaper’s style sheet will be rewritten to call for commas to separate the last two items in a series. This practice had been dropped when the paper ran short of commas as its pages increased following World War II. The first Times articles to appear without the final comma were two 1971 items, one on famous comedy teams such as Nichols and May, Burns and Allen and Rowan and Martin and the other on advertising agencies including Benton and Bowles, Fuller and Smith and Ross and Young and Rubicam. |
|
