Sam and Bernard and Ted and Rick
Apr. 3rd, 2022 01:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThat is not a weird foursome, but are among the stories I've been putting off talking about along with one new one from yesterday. (I promise, whatshername will get her own!)
Starting with Sam, as in Uncle....
It's two weeks until Tax Day. here in the good ol' US of A. For unknown-to-me reasons, it is pushed back from the traditional April 15th this year to the following Monday. We used to get a break every year when we sent our federal returns to Taxachusetts because "Patriots Day" is a state holiday there- think Revere, not Brady- but they now go someplace else. Is it because of Good Friday falling on it? Got me swingin', hangin', somethin'.
For the first time in years, thanks to some actual pre-planning of things, we're looking to be able to fire off the entire balance due, plus make the due-the-same-time first payment toward 2022, on time. It's dependent on at least one court hearing going well at the beginning of next week, but I have no reason not to expect it to.
This weekend, though, I finally took on the much easier and happier task of doing my sister's taxes. Easier because it's just the same couple of entries every year, happier because she gets refunds from both Uncle Sam and Auntie Kathy. It's also a test run of sorts before doing ours, which have many more schedules and compications (as our mother would have said), so if hers doesn't work, we're likely to have a problem.
And,.... hers didn't work.
We've alternated over the years between the Coke and Pepsi of the tax self-preparation industry. Both are behemoths who lobby like crazy to keep the gummint from offering any kind of free(r) alternative like most Western democracies do. Neither even bothers anymore to participate in the IRS's own ::koff:: public-private partnership to offer "free" filing ::giggle::, which was a scam anyway since they almost always sent eligible "free filers" to more expensive products (oxymoronically called "freemium"), often only after they'd started the filing process, entered sensitive information and are told "pay up or give up." I switched from Coke to Pepsi one year after I got an hour into their "premier" program before discovering they'd removed the self-employment earning schedules from it and I would need an upgrade to the even more expensive "superyduper" version. They put it back the following year after many complaints, but I still don't trust either of them further than I can file them.
Donna's shouldn't have any of those issues. It's as plain vanilla as you get. The hardest part is manually copying over data from a handful of paper tax forms, which usually doesn't take long because the program saves the addresses and ID numbers from previous years. (You'd think there would be a way to import these directly from the issuers. Technically, there is, but Coke and Pepsi compete with each other and each has only its own list of "partners" who make this service available. Neither Wegmans for Eleanor's wages, or Paychex for my part time ones, are on this list.) Making it worse this time, one of her accounts switched providers, and that meant the address and ID numbers had to be revised in the software. Which I thought I did, until we got to the dreaded ACCURACY CHECK:
Your data entry in box 16 of form 4224 stroke 5 uppercase B-14 needs to be corrected. We're not going to give you a quick drop-down for it. Instead, you need to close these instructions, open Forms on the top menu, scroll to Form 4224blahblah, select copy 2, and enter the number that's on the paper form in box 16. If you can't enter it, tough toenails. You will have to file the return by snail mail and you might see the refund sometime before Picard comes back to change the timeline in 2024.
I decide I'm going to give it a shot. Donna has two forms 4224etcetc. One of them has nothing in box 16. The other has the letters NY in box 16. I tried both. Neither worked. I tried their chat function. It's a bot built into the software. I called their 800 number. Siri's evil twin wanted to talk to me, then told me I'd have a 45 minute wait to speak with a sentient human. I opted for the callback within 30 and 60 minutes. By the time the return call came several hours later, I'd figured out on my own how to combat the software. I put in the same number on line 16 that appeared on line 1, even though it did not appear that way on the paper form. It accepted the change, it did not change the figures in any way, and five minutes later the returns were filed and have since been accepted.
Based on this experience, I am planning to finalize our returns well before Tax Day, even though they won't get a penny until then, so I can navigate this maze when the last-day wait will probably be 30-60 hours.
Meanwhile, we've both spent hours today trying to connect our newish computers to either of two pairs of wireless headphones via Bluetooth. We think they're seeing them and pairing with them but not connecting to them. Meanwhile, my ancient old laptop, still awaiting a new hard drive, sees it and connects with it just fine.... eventually. I may take the headphones over to Ye Olde Geek Squadde, along with the aforementioned old laptop, to see if they've got any bright ideas.
----
Making Books with Bernard....
I briefly mentioned the other day that we were tipped off to an older UK series co-starring Bill Bailey, one of the regular panelists on QI that we've missed seeing since losing whatever our pipeline was to that BBC quiz show. It was supposed to have come to their American cousin a few years ago, but it lasted about three minutes and I've never been able to find the current season without getting into pirating territory I'd rather not swim in.
The earlier series is called Black Books. The title character, Bernard Black, runs a Bloomsbury bookshop of that name with a sign out front wot say
That's outside. Inside, is an indecipherable blackboard of more rules that Manny, Bill's character, can't even read:
"No mobiles" is definitely the first, while the second turns out to be "No Walkmans," which dates the piece quite nicely.
Anyway, Eleanor instantly identified a pre-fame appearance of Martin Freeman in the pilot, playing a doctor who is definitely not Watson. Other beloveds will also be making appearances, including Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Olivia Colman. It only ran for three seasons, and the second and third are working their way through various bookmobiles to our local library for pickup.
----
Believe....
Staying in England, we finally caught up to the end of the first series of Ted Lasso. This US production set in London is funny, but also often sweet and profound. The title character's aw-shucks demeanor never gets old, the stereotypes of athletes and fans and hangers-on are preserved but broken up at just the right moments, and the ending of AFC Richmond's season wound up presaging a certain 13 seconds that would occur in the real world over a year later, which made those moments even more bittersweet for those of us in Buffalo.
----
And weee are going to ceremonnnnnytimmmmmmme......
Finally, we had plenty of sweet coming after more than a decade of bitter, as downtown Buffalo came alive Friday night with the first Sabre sellout crowd in over two years. Almost all of them were there mainly to say goodbye to a legend of the microphone.
I've been blessed and spoiled to have had longtime voices for the three teams I love. The Mets had a trio of broadcasters from their inception into the late 70s, with two of them continuing on- Bob Murphy on the radio, Ralph Kiner adding color and malaprops to the telecasts- for decades beyond. They've been succeeded with Howie Rose on the radio side and the trio of Gary, Keith and Ron in the home TV booth, for almost as long. The Bills also have their "Murph"- the former sidekick of the late Van Miller, who did almost all of their radio play-by-play from 1960 until 2003. His analyst John Murphy took over the microphone from him and has been a fixture for the two decades since. But none of them match the longevity of Rick Jeanneret, the voice who joined the Sabres in 1971 and was there for almost every moment of their existence, through near-triumph and tanking-disappointment and his own battle with throat cancer, until finally announcing that this season would be his last. He's only done a handful of home games this year, and has a few left to call before the year is out, but the team decided to make Friday night its on-ice tribute to him. The whole ceremony is here at their website, and it's 20 minutes of mutual love and gratitude for the voice behind so many catch phrases that have gone beyond the rink and into our civic consciousness:
Top shelf where Mama hides the cookies!
NOWWWW do you believe?
MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!
Lalalalala! LaLaFontaine!
That last one, a tribute to one of RJ's predecessors in being raised to the rafters of the arena, accentuates how strong the love is for this master of the microphone. Pat LaFontaine had a major falling out with ownership a few years ago, never resolved publicly, but he was there Friday night to join in the tribute. Also there were all of Rick's still-living broadcast partners, current and former, including Jim Lorentz (the longest-tenured), Harry Neale (who Eleanor worked with and met many times) and the current Rob Ray. Best of all, the ragtag team of mostly newcomer kids fed off the enthusiasm and won the game that followed the ceremony. It was a fitting end to an amazing career.
Starting with Sam, as in Uncle....
It's two weeks until Tax Day. here in the good ol' US of A. For unknown-to-me reasons, it is pushed back from the traditional April 15th this year to the following Monday. We used to get a break every year when we sent our federal returns to Taxachusetts because "Patriots Day" is a state holiday there- think Revere, not Brady- but they now go someplace else. Is it because of Good Friday falling on it? Got me swingin', hangin', somethin'.
For the first time in years, thanks to some actual pre-planning of things, we're looking to be able to fire off the entire balance due, plus make the due-the-same-time first payment toward 2022, on time. It's dependent on at least one court hearing going well at the beginning of next week, but I have no reason not to expect it to.
This weekend, though, I finally took on the much easier and happier task of doing my sister's taxes. Easier because it's just the same couple of entries every year, happier because she gets refunds from both Uncle Sam and Auntie Kathy. It's also a test run of sorts before doing ours, which have many more schedules and compications (as our mother would have said), so if hers doesn't work, we're likely to have a problem.
And,.... hers didn't work.
We've alternated over the years between the Coke and Pepsi of the tax self-preparation industry. Both are behemoths who lobby like crazy to keep the gummint from offering any kind of free(r) alternative like most Western democracies do. Neither even bothers anymore to participate in the IRS's own ::koff:: public-private partnership to offer "free" filing ::giggle::, which was a scam anyway since they almost always sent eligible "free filers" to more expensive products (oxymoronically called "freemium"), often only after they'd started the filing process, entered sensitive information and are told "pay up or give up." I switched from Coke to Pepsi one year after I got an hour into their "premier" program before discovering they'd removed the self-employment earning schedules from it and I would need an upgrade to the even more expensive "superyduper" version. They put it back the following year after many complaints, but I still don't trust either of them further than I can file them.
Donna's shouldn't have any of those issues. It's as plain vanilla as you get. The hardest part is manually copying over data from a handful of paper tax forms, which usually doesn't take long because the program saves the addresses and ID numbers from previous years. (You'd think there would be a way to import these directly from the issuers. Technically, there is, but Coke and Pepsi compete with each other and each has only its own list of "partners" who make this service available. Neither Wegmans for Eleanor's wages, or Paychex for my part time ones, are on this list.) Making it worse this time, one of her accounts switched providers, and that meant the address and ID numbers had to be revised in the software. Which I thought I did, until we got to the dreaded ACCURACY CHECK:
Your data entry in box 16 of form 4224 stroke 5 uppercase B-14 needs to be corrected. We're not going to give you a quick drop-down for it. Instead, you need to close these instructions, open Forms on the top menu, scroll to Form 4224blahblah, select copy 2, and enter the number that's on the paper form in box 16. If you can't enter it, tough toenails. You will have to file the return by snail mail and you might see the refund sometime before Picard comes back to change the timeline in 2024.
I decide I'm going to give it a shot. Donna has two forms 4224etcetc. One of them has nothing in box 16. The other has the letters NY in box 16. I tried both. Neither worked. I tried their chat function. It's a bot built into the software. I called their 800 number. Siri's evil twin wanted to talk to me, then told me I'd have a 45 minute wait to speak with a sentient human. I opted for the callback within 30 and 60 minutes. By the time the return call came several hours later, I'd figured out on my own how to combat the software. I put in the same number on line 16 that appeared on line 1, even though it did not appear that way on the paper form. It accepted the change, it did not change the figures in any way, and five minutes later the returns were filed and have since been accepted.
Based on this experience, I am planning to finalize our returns well before Tax Day, even though they won't get a penny until then, so I can navigate this maze when the last-day wait will probably be 30-60 hours.
Meanwhile, we've both spent hours today trying to connect our newish computers to either of two pairs of wireless headphones via Bluetooth. We think they're seeing them and pairing with them but not connecting to them. Meanwhile, my ancient old laptop, still awaiting a new hard drive, sees it and connects with it just fine.... eventually. I may take the headphones over to Ye Olde Geek Squadde, along with the aforementioned old laptop, to see if they've got any bright ideas.
----
Making Books with Bernard....
I briefly mentioned the other day that we were tipped off to an older UK series co-starring Bill Bailey, one of the regular panelists on QI that we've missed seeing since losing whatever our pipeline was to that BBC quiz show. It was supposed to have come to their American cousin a few years ago, but it lasted about three minutes and I've never been able to find the current season without getting into pirating territory I'd rather not swim in.
The earlier series is called Black Books. The title character, Bernard Black, runs a Bloomsbury bookshop of that name with a sign out front wot say
That's outside. Inside, is an indecipherable blackboard of more rules that Manny, Bill's character, can't even read:
"No mobiles" is definitely the first, while the second turns out to be "No Walkmans," which dates the piece quite nicely.
Anyway, Eleanor instantly identified a pre-fame appearance of Martin Freeman in the pilot, playing a doctor who is definitely not Watson. Other beloveds will also be making appearances, including Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Olivia Colman. It only ran for three seasons, and the second and third are working their way through various bookmobiles to our local library for pickup.
----
Believe....
Staying in England, we finally caught up to the end of the first series of Ted Lasso. This US production set in London is funny, but also often sweet and profound. The title character's aw-shucks demeanor never gets old, the stereotypes of athletes and fans and hangers-on are preserved but broken up at just the right moments, and the ending of AFC Richmond's season wound up presaging a certain 13 seconds that would occur in the real world over a year later, which made those moments even more bittersweet for those of us in Buffalo.
----
And weee are going to ceremonnnnnytimmmmmmme......
Finally, we had plenty of sweet coming after more than a decade of bitter, as downtown Buffalo came alive Friday night with the first Sabre sellout crowd in over two years. Almost all of them were there mainly to say goodbye to a legend of the microphone.
I've been blessed and spoiled to have had longtime voices for the three teams I love. The Mets had a trio of broadcasters from their inception into the late 70s, with two of them continuing on- Bob Murphy on the radio, Ralph Kiner adding color and malaprops to the telecasts- for decades beyond. They've been succeeded with Howie Rose on the radio side and the trio of Gary, Keith and Ron in the home TV booth, for almost as long. The Bills also have their "Murph"- the former sidekick of the late Van Miller, who did almost all of their radio play-by-play from 1960 until 2003. His analyst John Murphy took over the microphone from him and has been a fixture for the two decades since. But none of them match the longevity of Rick Jeanneret, the voice who joined the Sabres in 1971 and was there for almost every moment of their existence, through near-triumph and tanking-disappointment and his own battle with throat cancer, until finally announcing that this season would be his last. He's only done a handful of home games this year, and has a few left to call before the year is out, but the team decided to make Friday night its on-ice tribute to him. The whole ceremony is here at their website, and it's 20 minutes of mutual love and gratitude for the voice behind so many catch phrases that have gone beyond the rink and into our civic consciousness:
Top shelf where Mama hides the cookies!
NOWWWW do you believe?
MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!
Lalalalala! LaLaFontaine!
That last one, a tribute to one of RJ's predecessors in being raised to the rafters of the arena, accentuates how strong the love is for this master of the microphone. Pat LaFontaine had a major falling out with ownership a few years ago, never resolved publicly, but he was there Friday night to join in the tribute. Also there were all of Rick's still-living broadcast partners, current and former, including Jim Lorentz (the longest-tenured), Harry Neale (who Eleanor worked with and met many times) and the current Rob Ray. Best of all, the ragtag team of mostly newcomer kids fed off the enthusiasm and won the game that followed the ceremony. It was a fitting end to an amazing career.