free tax preparation (as far as you know)

There’s a lot of online tax preparation websites.  Personally, I stick with one of the reputable ones, but to each their own.  Anyway, while reading about taxes and extensions this week, I saw this on a website, promoting one of those online tax preparation services:

Use online Taxbrain to prepare your tax return, It’s FREE!  Only pay to print and file.

So it’s “FREE!” to prepare it, but then they charge you if you actually want to do something with it, like printing it or filing it online.  So really it’s not free.  Isn’t that false advertising?   That’s like Burger World offering free burgers, and they let you order it and they’ll prepare it, but if you actually want to eat it, you have to pay them.  They tell you it’s free to get you in the door, then they make you pay anyway.

Easter eggs falling from the sky

Speaking of Easter eggs, a couple of years ago a church in South Carolina dropped 50,000 plastic Easter eggs from an airplane, for people to find.  They claimed that some eggs had prizes fit for adults.   As you might expect, we had an interesting discussion based on this:

That would have been hilarious, a field full of people waiting for the eggs to arrive, and then 50,000 eggs falling from the sky like pastel colored hail. I can see the news headlines now — “Easter bunny takes to sky, kills three”, “When Eggs go bad, the Easter Weekend Massacre”, and a Mythbusters episode where they not only prove that the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are real, but they can kill you too.   And when you say with prizes fit for adults, I’m imagining a TV wrapped in a giant eggshell, and a couch, car, and boat done the same way. ~ Turtle Dundee, 4/9/07

Now I have a bonus Easter-related link for you.  This story is about a couple who hid real, hard-boiled Easter eggs around their house for their kids.  They hid two dozen, but found only 13.   I’ll leave the hilarious explanation for your reading, because it’s really funny how he explains what happened.  Here’s the link: Smells like Easter.  [link broken]

lots of Easter eggs

One of my neighbors put out a LOT of plastic Easter eggs on Easter morning, as evidenced by this picture.

Easter Eggs everywhere (click for larger image)
Easter Eggs everywhere (click for larger image)

Now, I don’t have kids, but I do have some memories from my childhood of hunting Easter eggs, and it was never this easy.  To me, this isn’t even hunting or finding — it’s just picking them up.  What sense of accomplishment is that?  You might as well just throw the eggs at them.  🙂

I have a younger brother, so eventually I got to help hide the eggs for him, and I never made it that easy on him.  In fact, sometimes I’d make it hard for him to find them all.  Being challenged like that helps people develop diligence and thoroughness.  I’m sure my brother would thank me now if he realized how much that contributed to his development.  🙂  (Actually, he’d say he’s cool on his own and I had nothing to do with it, but that’s just because he refuses to give me any credit.)  🙂

caption contest, Kobe Bryant yelling around reporters

It’s Monday, and you look like you could use a caption contest. So let’s do this.

This week’s photo features Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers, yelling with reporters around him. Since we’re getting close to the NBA Playoffs, I figured this might be appropriate. But even if you’re not a fan of professional basketball, remember that the caption doesn’t have to be about basketball — it can be anything. So let your mind wander into the depths of creativity and randomness. 🙂

Kobe Bryant yelling around reporters

(To see the other caption contests, click on the “Say What?” category in the sidebar.)