Well I hope everybody managed to file their tax returns on time Wednesday. For several years in a row now, I’ve not only been on time, but have filed early – thank goodness for TurboTax. When I was younger, I could file the “short form” for people who didn’t make any money or have any deductions. Not that I’m old and living the American Dream®, though, things are a lot more complicated. Leading up to April 15th, they always show the tax volunteers helping the old people fill out their forms on the local news (I think they teach it in Eyewitness News 101 – along with sending a reporter and camera crew out into the same fucking blizzard we all just drove home through in order to show us that, yes, it’s snowing out, and sending the Action News Team out to the mall on the day after Thanksgiving so those of us with common sense can sit and scoff at the morons trampling each other at Wal-Mart in an effort to save 25% on shit nobody really needs so they can give it to people they don’t really like), and I never know who to feel more sorry for – the people trying to get their taxes done, or the people asking the same questions over and over again.

I don’t know how anybody manages without software (or, I suppose a “tax guy”). I’m sure I leave a lot of money (relatively speaking – it’s not like I’m a Romney or anything) on the table every year because I possess neither the patience nor the receipts required to squeeze every nickel and dime out. I just go with whatever I can look up online – mortgage interest, property taxes, and whatever I gave to the CNY SPCA. I don’t write off what I have to the Salvation Army or stuck in the Fire Fighter’s boot or gave to the Old News Boys for a paper or whatever. That way I figure if I ever get audited, I won’t need to actually bring anything with me.

Every once in a while, the IRS sends me a check for $2.34. They’ve been doing this for years now. Every time I move and file a return with the new address, they try to send it to me. No explanation, just a check for $2.34. I figure it’s a fucking trap, and I’m not falling for it. Like, I cash it and then they tell me I did something wrong on my return from 1983, and the statute of limitations is 10 years so they can’t get me – until I cash their damn check, that is. Then the clock starts again and pretty soon I’ll be breaking rocks at Leavenworth.

Of course, even with the 24 hours of overtime I was working back then, I probably made about $17,000 in 1983 and took whatever the standard deductions were, but still.

Assuming you weren’t in a coma or something this past week, I guess you got the big news that not only is Sir Edmund Hillary Clinton running for Preznit, but that she also stopped at Chipotle for some authentic simulated Mexican food. Of course, the day Hillary “announced,” the Republicans (particularly GOP Oberstgruppenführer Reince Priebus) were out with their knives attacking her.

I’m not really a huge Hillary supporter myself, but, geez, can’t they let her have one happy day before they unleash the dogs of war?

As I said, I’m not really down with Hillary, but I can’t possibly imagine how I could vote for whatever mook the Republicans will toss out there. Cruz? Puhleeeze! Marco “Polo” Rubio? I don’t think so. Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Mike “I Heart” Huckabee, Lily Lindsey Graham?

That cast of characters would all be scary to think of, if I thought any of them could actually win. But I don’t. Maybe Jeb Bush could win in the general, but I can’t see him winning the teabag primary?

You know who would scare me? Condi Rice. She ticks all the boxes – woman? Check. Black, check. Rightwing Nutjob – check and check.

Whatever the case, it’s gonna be a long annoying election season, and I’m not looking forward to it.

So, sorry if the spam thingie has been blocking your comments. I just saw a bunch and released them, for what it’s worth. This morning I updated to a new version in hopes that whatever algorithm it uses would be improved, but it promptly deactivated itself because this site was using an older version of php. In the two hours it took me to figure out what the deal was and get on a newer version, I got 8 bogus user registrations (1 the first hour, 2 the second, and 5 more in the third – at that rate, we’d have been up over 8 million users by the end of the day). They can’t actually post a comment until I approve one, but I get an e-mail for every new registration and that gets annoying pretty quickly.

So, anyway that’s why that spam filter thing is there. Now if I could only figure out why it thinks some rather harmless comments are spam, we’d be all set.

Well, time to see about this week over.