A Journal of Humor and Verbal Anarchy

 
EZ tax

Having trouble figuring out your taxes? Not sure if you qualify for an Alaska Permanent Fund dividend? (Tip: If you live in Texas, own an oil refinery or have been out to THE RANCH for barbecued ribs, you qualify!) Having trouble with the 1040EZ form? Only hours to file?

Well, here’s help! EZ stands for Ezra Kidder’s easy tax filing service. Forget going down to the local post office to pick up your forms. There’s likely to be a sign on the door telling you that the Post Office doesn’t provide tax forms anymore. Truth of the matter is that the Post Office has been bought out by Staples. That explains all the glitzy kiosks filled with mailing accessories. You can even use your credit card to buy a 37cent stamp. By way of preparing you for the not so distant future when a first class stamp will cost $13. 70.

Don’t stress! You can now download your tax returns from Napster along with the new Screaming Chickens cd.

Let’s get started. You’ll see how EZ it is to file your taxes using Kidder’s Robo-Tax. All that’s required is answering a few simple questions. Ezra will calculate your taxes automatically and, if you belong to that lucky 1% of the population that already owns the whole fucking universe in the first place, make sure that a big fat juicy tax refund is deposited in your Swiss account.

Question 1 Did you earn over $2.8 billion in taxable income last year? (We’re not talking about earnings from overseas investments in the Afghan drug trade, profits from the sale of enriched uranium to North Korea, or the Thai sex trade.) Did you contribute more than $1.2 million to the Republican National Committee?

Congratulations! You’re entitled to an Earned Income Credit of $23 million, a free tank up at any of 32,000 Exxon stations, a McRibs sandwich at the Crawford Ranch and a chance to get your picture taken with Condoleeza Rice in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Question 2 Did you earn less than $30,000 last year, eat more Macaroni n Cheese in the last 12 months than you have eaten in the previous 34 years, consider selling a kidney on the black market to pay down your credit card debt? Do you drive a car that has logged more miles than the Voyager space probe? Have you considered asking your boss for a longer lunch hour so you can break bread at the local suup kitchen?

Oops! Your tax bill has just increased dramatically. The war’s not going so well, the troops may have to stay another 6 years in Iraq, the cost of privatizing social security will cost trillions (forget retirement!) and the economy isn’t doing that well, so toughen up and bite the bullet – why don’t ya? We’ll see you down in line at the post office a minute before the filing deadline
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 9:47 PM

 

heart of darkness

They speak a different kind of language up there on the hill – short, garbled sentences filled with words like ipod, mp3, virtual this, viritual that - and punctuated with names of bars, eateries, exotic latte drinks, Club Med lingo, buzzwords for having sex in physically challenging locations, and the verbal detritus of early 21st Century consumer society. It’s like all the students at Cornell were equipped at the same time with a brain implant – a neuro-Norstar equivalent to what General Motors puts into the dashboard of their new models. This device serves as a multi-purpose translator, dictionary, archive for menu and drink specials all around town, a homing device for potential mates who share the same class knowledge, zodiac sign and ipod downloads.

Ez had to spend some time up at Cornell recently. He won’t tell you why but keep in mind that he’s been working on a thermonuclear device for some time. This may be too much of a hint but maybe he needed to spend some time with the ghost of Hans Bethe, one of the godfathers of implosion theory. There, Ez gave away his secret.

After spending a couple of hours on campus, Ezra got this strong sense of dread – much the same as characters do in 19th Century novels. People who inhabit contemporary fiction don’t get the same sense of angst or foreboding – probably because they consume too many pharmaceuticals. Drugs like Prozac, and all the other uppers and downers in the modern mood changing arsenal, take the edge off things. So you can’t really compare the kind of Victorian sensibility manifested in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach with the whacked out mental world of a Hunter S Thompson. Arnold dreamt it, Thompson lived through it.

But Ezra started getting this strong vibe up at Cornell – like he was floating down some kind of virtual Congo, the powerful, dark brown waters carrying him past cyber communities of Born Again headhunters, pizza-and-Diet Coke ingesting pygmies videoconferencing on their cell phones, dancing around their ceremonial laptops, juiced up on hiphop streaming in through their Walkmans. Every mile that Ezra traveled down this violent flood, filled with Pac-Man like crocodiles and 100 ft constrictors took him closer to the vortex of the world seemingly shared by all those Cornell students up on the hill – the ever evolving future.

Holy Shit! What’s that on the horizon? It looks like some kind of weird episode of Buck Rogers meets Harvey Potter meets Blade Runner. All these people are running around with weapons that resemble a cross between light wands and Waring Blenders, zapping each other all over the place as they try to get closer to this scary thing at the edge of the jungle. You can barely make it out in the mist. What is that? It’s some mishmash of corporate logo – golden arches merging with a red bullseye combined with a gigantic W, standing next to an equally huge A. Wait – is that an L? Could that be a 200 ft high Smiley Face lurching over the whole bizarre gig?

Have a nice day.
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:50 PM

 
tabloid

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Ezra will once again attempt to fill the void in his readers’ consciousness known as Sunday. He knows you’re hurting, Ithacans. Ezra feels your pain. During the week, you punch out for lunch and race over to Center Ithaca to get a free copy of The Ithaca Urinal, hoping to find one lying on a table, pristine and virginal as the moment it rolled off the press. Occasionally your hopes are crushed as the only copy unattended resembles a 3-D menu with gobs of lo mein book marking the editorial page and curry smudges effacing the sports scores.

On Saturday you wrestle with the 30lbs version of the Urinal loaded with all those advertising inserts from the big boxes out on Rt 13. Ok, for 15 years you were part of the choir, waving your fist at the big retail chains that threatened your little ecotopia. But, now there’re here so you might as well load the kids into the Ford Explorer, head over to Target or Wal-mart or wherever. You rationalize that it’s raining, how many times can you visit the Sciencenter or the Museum of the Earth and you need some ice melt anyway because another 45 inches of snow is predicted for April. Oh, and by the way, you get to be a good citizen of the earth by recycling the Ithaca Urinal at the dump along the way.

But Sundays, crazy Sundays. There’s nothing to do in Ithaca that you haven’t already done on Saturdays. Back in the days when there was very little grey in your ponytail, you’d head out to Plum’s where the Mahogany Grill is now on Sundays to hear Peggy Haines and the Low Down Alligator Jazz Band reprise the New Orleans sound right there on Aurora Street. After a few bloody mary’s and cantaloupe rounds, you’d swear you had stepped out on Bourbon Street except that streetcar named Desire was really a pick up truck with a VFW decal on the bumper, honking his horn at you.

Peggy Haines left to work for Cornell and buy up all the Victorian cookie cutter mansions on East Hill. The Mahogany Grill is just another rich college kid bar with no class, no music on weekends, and the same basic menu as Ponderosa. But the real truth is that the Ithaca Urinal doesn’t publish on Sunday. Not that much ever happens in Ithaca, New York to fill up a whole Sunday issue. What would you put in a Sunday edition ? List all the Labrador Retrievers in Tompkins county side by side with their photographs and you still wouldn’t fill up one section of a Sunday paper. Somebody would make a fortune if they came up with a Sunday Ithaca Urinal cover sheet that wrapped around the NY Times or Syracuse Post Standard! Imagine coming in from Omaha and seeing that sucker on a newsstand? Until you opened the paper, you’d think you actually were somewhere! Surprise!!!!

A couple of years ago, if you recall, Ezra tried to launch his own Sunday rag right here at Ithaca Sucks. It wasn’t quite journalism – call it gestalt shock therapy – and it didn’t catch on – like no one eve wrote in to complain that a virus had eaten their copy of the Sunday Ithaca Sucks. Nobody cared! Ezra never quite got over that disappointment but --getting over doesn’t matter – what counts is getting even! So –

Extra! Extra! Get your first issue of the Ithaca Sucks Outhouse! Ithaca’s own lurid tabloid style journal of hyperreality, mytho-conscious bullshit, lies and UFO sightings.

Read all about it! Nostradamus predicted that Ithaca would get a Wal-mart, that Cayuga Lake would be sucked up in a big straw and that a race of small men, read robots, would appear in the early 21st century somewhere in upstate New York. That damn Nanotechnology center!

Read all about it! Martin Bormann actually lived in Ithaca, New York for 5 years starting in 1951. He taught German up at Cornell and ate sauerkraut and hotdogs everyday at the Rosebud. The Outhouse has exclusive photographs.

Read all about it! A 50ft high violet and green dragon-like creature has been sighted repeatedly swimming around Cayuga Lake by fishermen and boat owners. Nessie, move over. The Outhouse has the only reliable snapshot taken by a Trumansburg couple who were illegally dumping their garbage at the time.

Read all about it! Scientists at Cornell University have cloned a chicken with a tofu pup. Watch out, vegetarians!

Read all about it! Research into early settler accounts has revealed several possible UFO sightings in Tompkins County around the 1830’s. One particularly detailed account describes what might have been a crop clearing on East Hill. Ezra Cornell might have been a Martian! Does that explain things? Those astrophysics dudes are sending shit back home!

Read all about it! Carolyn Peterson is really Al Cohen! Or vice versa! This explains why smiling Al has not been seen around town lately. The Outhouse has studied the photographs, obtained fingerprint samples and talked to confidential insiders. We are going public for the first time with the news! His honor is really her honor. Read all about it next week in the Outhouse!

Exclusive to the Outhouse! Michael Jackson owns a house along Cayuga Lake! Do you want to see pics showing what Michael does when he’s visiting? Send $1,500.00 to POB#47124, Ovid, New York.

Outhouse News Extra! The Pope isn’t dead. He was sighted at Friendly’s on Rt 13 this morning! Read all about it!
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 11:28 AM