Author Archives: Dick

Decorating Tips

Posted on by

“Have you been inside?” my friend Ashley Proctor gushed. “It is really something!”

A new house went up on my block in South Puffin. The architecture is interesting in that generic nouveau-riche-Keys-stucco style. It has large windows that do not open, square pillars defining a 1-1/2 story entry, and a scant foot or two on each side for dense landscaping. And we are blessed that it is not another hacienda.

Ms. Proctor is a young social engineer in Madison, Wisconsin. She dropped in to get away from the frozen north; my neighbor took her on “the tour.” Upmarket furnishings had never before turned her head.

I’ve discovered where McMansion builders get their decorating tips.

I spent the weekend in Las Vegas where we passed a Russian mobster blipping the throttle on his Lamborghini Gallardo and checking the time on his Rolex. Later, we watched an old-style, 30-something Vegas mobster in a sharkskin suit busing tables at the restaurant. (It was a better meal than the $60 Kobe hamburger, by the way).

Hotel Decor - Public Spaces

Tranquility isn’t the word most visitors would use to describe Las Vegas. In fact, there are 12.5 million LED lights across the barrel roof to accompany the high octane music and light show of Fremont Street. And then there’s the Strip, the 4-mile stretch of Las Vegas Boulevard South with many of the largest casinos in the world and over 62,000 hotel rooms, where the night is bright and brash and glittering and loud.

Eat Mo Glitter.

And mo marble.

Hotel Room Decor

Just like the MGM Grand or the Venetian, that new house in South Puffin has a broad expanse of marble floors, recessed lighting for that intimate football stadium feel, and moldings. Ornate skirting boards. Beading at the chair rails. Ropework, dentils, and egg-and-dart details on the crown moldings. One room, done in black-and-white, cries out for a zebra-skin rug and zebra-striped linens. They did exercise restraint. There was no gold leaf or other gilt.

I’m not sure whether to blame the decorators the McMansion builders hire or the owners themselves but I’m hoping they buy the entire 21 piece living room set so at least everything matches.

 

A Message of Faith

Posted on by

Yesterday was Easter Sunday. Tomorrow is Earth Day. In between, we can find a message of faith.

“God has the last word,” Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, reminded television viewers yesterday.

One of those last words has long been, Don’t poop where you perch.

I saw Hurricane Hazel annihilate a larch tree in my front yard. I saw the 1998 ice storm decimate the forests around North Puffin. I watched Hurricane Wilma drown my South Puffin neighbors and Irene flood and sink and forever change the southern half of Vermont.

That was a more than a little bit of rain.

I’ve watched pilots shoot flares of silver iodide and dry ice, and liquid propane, and even table salt into a cloud in a vain hope of making it give up just a little bit of rain.

Rainmaking attempts go way back. A typical Tübatulabal shaman’s rain making bundle contains the all important quartz crystals plus charm stones, biface fragments of obsidian, a fossil fish vertebra, pebbles, some stibnite, milky quartz, and steatite, a small tobacco bag, a piece of rawhide, some plant material tied with a bit of denim, some soil and a denim sack. Oddly, the great southwestern American desert is still a desert in spite of those best efforts to make rain.

I’d say nature has the other last word over man.

Lily -- the Flower of Easter(from the Moon) Earth -- the Flower of ScienceToday, rain isn’t (quite) the issue. Temperature is. Over the millennia, the climate has and does change as solar activity varies, the magnetic poles shift, the moon wobbles, and Earth’s axis tilts a few degrees one way or the other. Right now, the planet is cooling (slightly) from what the alarmists said was the all time high but it had been rising precipitously. Despite the alarmists, it hasn’t gotten as warm as during Roman and Medieval times, but it is warmer than 100 years ago.

There are two schools of thought about what drives global warming. On the one side are a small but growing number of scientists who have found wider swings in the fossil record before homo sapiens walked upright. They’re looking at drivers like the sun now. On the other side are a large number of scientists who believe man and only man has driven every variation in planetary temperatures. They’ve stopped looking for the drivers.

The U.N.-operated sanctioning body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says it is too late. They arrived at this conclusion not by making startling new discoveries but by tweaking the data they already have.

But wait! We can fix it if we just give up meat and cars and our iPhones!

Those who pray at the altar of Al Gore have faith that man has the last word over nature.

Humans
Unaware of
Basic
Real
Icky
Science

The solar deniers who pray at the altar of Al Gore tell us that “the science is fixed” but all we have to do is return to the Stone Age and the planet may get back to normal. After all, those biface fragments of obsidian (“stone knives” to the rest of us) brought a lot of rain to the desert, they did.

I have great faith in two certainties: good science and man’s hubris.

Tomorrow is Earth Day. I have great hope that good science will triumph over great hubris in the long run. Day-to-day? I’m not so sure.

 

Why I Hate Tubbo

Posted on by

Today is the day.

Although 64% of individual tax returns filed electronically this year were done by tax professionals (as of April 2), the total number of electronically filed, self-prepared returns was up 6.7%. More than 36 million people used tax software this year.

E-filed returns account for about 80% of individual tax returns filed.

Tubbo Tax Review

Sales of Intuit’s TubboTax, the largest, bulkiest, most annoying tax software available, rose 10%.

I started tax prep in January this year, since I have to report sales tax then. It gave me a nice jump on louts like Rufus who hope the post office will stay open until midnight.

Except.

There were a couple of glitches.

I couldn’t finish until Vermont sent SWMBO a W2. January came and went. February came and went. Much of Marchuary came and went. We couldn’t even log into her employee account online to get the electronic copy.

They did eventually give her a new login so we discovered they had addressed her W2 to the street address of her former (and now defunct) employer, not to her home. That was useful.

She called to get a “corrected” W2.

“Oh, you don’t need that,” the State of Vermont Payroll Division rep told her. “The IRS won’t look at that.”

<sigh>

It looked as if we’d gotten everything straightened out until I discovered that there was no longer a mortgage interest deduction on Anne’s return and that !@#$%^ Tubbo had “forgotten” some of the personal info checkboxes. She has claimed that mortgage interest on every return we’ve used !@#$%^ Tubbo. The 1098 for the bank was right there in the Forms. Blank. It wouldn’t let her enter the interest until she created a new 1099.

I found the most recent round of errors by going line by line through the tax return PDFs rather than through the pages in !@#$%^ Tubbo. It’s easier in !@#$%^ Tubbo because I can quick link to other pages but I keep discovering that what it shows me on screen may not match what it prints. The PDF does.

I was taking a “last look” at my tax return when I wondered about something I simply had not noticed before: a data error in a 1099.

I looked up the proper numbers and overrode the Tubbo values.

The $282,834 !@#$%^ Tubbo reported as my tax due certainly got my attention.

There is no easy way to correct imported data because the “forms view” doesn’t have a copy of the 1099 it came from. I found it by going back through the “interview” and correcting it there. That’s when !@#$%^ Tubbo decided my income was $1,203,147.14. Ya know, if I had made a million bucks, I’d pay the tax in a heartbeat and retire.

Estupido.

I did eventually find a hidden link to the right data entry point.

Then we tried to e-file.

Worked great for the federal return, sort of.

The “Congratulations! Your Returns Have Been Sent! (Your current e-file status is pending)” emails did drift in but I had to go to IRS.gov to be sure the IRS had accepted them.

And e-filing didn’t work for SWMBO’s state return. Seeing “Federal State Returns” plus “E-File” in bold letters on the box led me to expect I could e-file our Federal and State returns.

Noooooo.

!@#$%^ Tubbo demanded $24.99 to file her first (and only) state return electronically.

She has printed and mailed her Vermont return, complete with a printout of the W2 the State of Vermont sent to the wrong address.

Tax Freedom Day is not until April 21, three days than last year.

We have a voluntary tax system. It’s the law that people pay, but the government doesn’t calculate it for you.

Not until after you file, anyway.