Month: March 2006

A Message from your Friendly Neighborhood Tax Preparer

Another couple weeks and the blog postings will pick up again.

But here's a tip to share with my friends with children out there.

I-Bonds.

You can buy them from the bank or from TreasuryDirect. You pay face value for the bond and as of this posting they are earning 6.73%. They can be cashed in 5 years if necessary without penalty. With penalties they can be cashed as soon as 1 year.

But the clincher is this. The interest earned on these would be tax-free if used for your child's education, but ONLY if the owner of the bond is 24 or older at the time of purchase. in other words, DO NOT BUY THEM IN YOUR CHILD'S NAME.

Since it is tax season and I've got plenty of work going on here, I will leave it at that. Food for thought for parents out there. But before purchasing, please research for yourself and decide whether investing in I-Bonds makes sense to you.

It does for me, so I bought some yesterday.

I Predict a Riot

No, I don't. It's just a cheap use of a recent song title. And there's no links in this post, because it's Saturday night and that makes it alright, so honey what do I got to lose. If you catch my drift.

Anyway French riots were all over the damn tv today. I am uninformed on this matter, because I am in 1040 Hell. I am the Taxman, in case you didn't know. Apparently the French government has passed some law to make it easy to fire younger employees.

And if that's what's going on, to speak in my native Jersey tongue…that fuckin' sucks! Riot away I say. But what amazes me is the amount of news media airtime given to the French riots, and what few minutes of airtime any of the Iraqi war protests in the United States have received from the mainstream media.

Yes the French kids are losing jobs, but guess what they're still alive. They're not losing sons and daughters.

And I'm wondering if Bill O'Reilly has tried to connect this whole thing to his frickin' French buoycott. (Is it buoy or is that just for the floating stuff?) Bill, I'd check the Paris Business Review, except for the fact that it doesn't fucking exist. Keep drinking the punch, buddy.

shannon's arty arty, Undead Metal Mascots, Chiptunes…etc.

Occasionally people that don't know me read this blog. Occasionally people who do know me read this blog. Occasionally people do wear white after Labor Day.
One of those people is Shannon Palmer. (And I'm sure she wears what she wants, Labor Day be Damned!) Normally I don't have a reason to out a reader. It's not all about blog nepotism. I read her blog. And it's good. She blogs about music, art and other things that are neither and some that are both.
After falling down the rabbit hole I found her blog. It wasn't exactly chasing a white rabbit, but close. Somehow I even landed on her blogroll. If I sound giddy as a schoolgirl, it's because someone reads this. And perhaps the Catholic school uniform and pigtails I'm sporting right now.
Yes, humor and creepiness can co-exist. And if for nothing else except one more reader, this writer will live to blog another day. (I think I actually paraphrased a line from “The Trooper” just there. But then I read the lyrics and think, “No, not really.”) Eddie Lives. Guy crossing the street dies.

As a contrarian sidebar, I'm listening to the microradio from micromusic.net. Homefront for a good portion of homegrown 8-bit Gameboy jams.