Broke Mah Jong

Wow!, two post in one day.

Tonight I was playing Mahjong. Mahjong is a tile game, usually played on a computer these days, introduced into the west by Asian forces in an attempt to lull westerners into wasting incredible amounts of time so that when the time comes to conquer them, there will be no resistance.

Little did they know that we would hit them back with the even more powerful time waster, Free Cell, loaded into every copy of Windows since Win 95. I'd call it a draw so far, but with the way iPhones are selling in the east, we may yet come out ahead.

Anyhow, I was playing Mah Jong and listening to Pandora and just as I was about to declare victory, the program told me there were no more moves. I copied a picture of the screen for you to see and, damn it, there are more moves.

There are just enough moves for me to win. So, in an attempt to regain the high ground, they've decided to cheat. I'm very disappointed. But I'll probably keep playing.

Inspection

Recently, after an nice meal in downtown Chapel Hill, on the way home a policeman waved to my wife and asked her to roll down her window. He told her that our car registration, signified by the sticker on our license plate, was out of date. Yikes! When we got home we realized that, indeed, it was September and the registration expired in June. But the worse part was that on looking at the other car, YIKES!!, we realized that it's registration expired last December. Having gotten caught by this a couple of times in the past, I know that it can cost around $250/car.

It's funny how I hadn't noticed before, but there a cops everywhere. And they're always looking at people's license plates. Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Anyhow, I dutifully got the cars inspected ($35 ea.), one day at a time, since my wife was out of town for a week. And then I was able to register them online ($33 ea.). After about a week, the new stickers arrived in the mail and now I'm a law abiding citizen again. And I managed to not get caught in the process.

Unfortunately, you don't get credit for going a year without registration. So I'll be getting one of the cars inspected again in about 2 months. This time it's on my calendar.

Where Do Your Taxes Go?

I haven't written in a while for a number of reasons, none of them real good. I started a new job in August, which severely impinges on my free time. After almost 2 years, I'd almost forgotten that. And that leads us into today's post.

One usually has a job for two reasons. You make money and, if you didn't work, your wife would find even worse things for you to do around the house. This money making part is pretty important cause that's how you eat good food and have shelter from the elements. It also allows you to do other important things like watch "Dancing with the Stars" in HD on your 1080p 46" LCD TV, if that's what turns you on.

One of the challenges associated with making money is hanging on to it. In many jobs, before you even see a check or a direct deposit in your bank account, a big chunk of your money is taken away by the Fed and the state. I recently came across a blog that had a chart of where the average taxpayer's money goes and I found it somewhat enlightening. So I'll share it with you. I took the liberty of downloading the data and putting it into a spreadsheet so I could add the percentage column. Click on the chart to make it larger.


I found it pretty interesting. If you're worried about where your government is spending your money, this gives you an idea. If you have a pet peeve about how the money is spent and you think that if they would not spend so much on "So and So", you can see if your plan to save money would amount to anything substantial.

Here are the credits. I originally found this on a blog I read regularly called PharmaGossip, which got it from a different blog called Third Way, which would probably be called a somewhat liberal blog, given it's contributors, though there doesn't seem to be any political bias in the article. And the original article can be found here.

If you are interested in a bit more detail on the budget, look here.

Bye!