Two U.S. Senators are sponsoring a bill to lower and in some cases, eliminate what they call the "Death Tax." That term alone should always tip you that you're being snookered because a tax on inheritances is not a tax on death and it's also not, as they also lie, an attempt to eliminate double-taxation. Most of the income at issue here has never been taxed even once, and the super-rich have mounted this campaign to try and keep it that way.
The lies — and make no mistake about it; these are lies — include appealing to the dreams of the non-wealthy; to tell them that if they did someday inherit great wealth, as per their fantasies, the evil Death Tax would swoop in and take it all away from them, leaving them as poor as they were before...or poorer. Ergo, to protect that dream, they'd better throw their support behind the elimination of that tax. But in fact, taxes on small inheritances have already been eliminated. This is just about the Rupert Murdochs of the world trying to make certain that much of their wealth is never taxed at all.
My father was, unhappily, an Internal Revenue Agent. It was unhappy for him because he hated the job and hated what he sometimes had to do in that job. He did it because he had a family and didn't know how else to earn money...and he took some pride/comfort in that fact that he was a lot nicer to people than some of his colleagues, and that he was able to make an unfair system a bit fairer. But I'll tell you what really made him mad.
You may remember the famous line from the very wealthy, very villainous Leona Helmsley. Caught cheating on her taxes, she was quoted by an associate as saying, "We [wealthy people] don't pay taxes...little people pay taxes." That attitude enraged my father, not because he liked taxes but because he figured that every buck the Helmsleys of the world didn't pay was a buck more that their gardener had to cough up. He had cases against a lot of very, very rich people who were outraged that they had to pay any tax at all. They understood that taxes were necessary and they were all for the poor and middle class paying them. They just felt that if they were rich enough, they were privileged...and one of those privileges ought to be passing the tax burden on to others.
The current move against the "Death Tax" would make those folks and Leona very happy. Editorials today in The New York Times and The Washington Post agree...and lately, those papers don't agree on much of anything.
A few weeks ago, I succumbed to a whim and bought me one of them Magicjacks. This is a little device that you plug into the USB port of any PC that has an Internet connection of decent speed. You can then plug a telephone into your Magicjack and use it to make phone calls anywhere you like...or folks can call you on your new Magicjack phone number. I promised a review here and this is it.
How does it work? Decently. Sound quality is not quite as good as my conventional phones (which are digital) but it's quite acceptable. The first few times I used it, I had a couple of abrupt, inexplicable disconnects but that hasn't happened since.
How is it for price? Pretty good. The Magicjack device costs twenty bucks and then it's twenty bucks a year for the subscription...less if you buy multiple years at one time.
Are you going to keep using it? I don't think so. I can imagine situations where it would come in handy but they don't really apply to me. You have to have your computer on to use the Magicjack and you have to be at that computer. So if you have a home with multiple lines and/or phones in different rooms (both apply to me), you're not going to get rid of that. I suppose you could convert all your existing phones to the basic, cheapest service plan and then make all your toll and long distance calls from the Magicjack but that sounds like a lot of trouble.
Where it might come in handy is for travel: No matter where you go, you can take your phone number with you and make calls. That's assuming you get a fast Internet connection wherever you are...but again, you have to have your computer on to have the phone working. (If a call come in when your computer is off, the Magicjack system takes a voice mail message and e-mails it to you as a WAV file.)
I can imagine situations where this might come in handy. If I was commuting to an office or another city, it might be beneficial to forward all my regular incoming calls to my Magicjack number and then carry that number with me. It could also make it a lot cheaper to make calls on the road — a substantial savings if I went overseas, which I never do. But none of these scenarios applies at the moment.
The thing is probably ideal if you're living in one room with a good Internet connection and money is tight, and you might appreciate one if you travel a lot. But I'm not finding a whole lot of use for mine right now. And that's my report on the Magicjack.
As NBC ramps up to inaugurate Conan O'Brien as the new host of The Tonight Show, they've put together something on their website that may interest you. It's a Tonight Show retrospective complete with photos and video clips of all the past hosts. Naturally, the clips of Steve Allen and Jack Paar are the most interesting because they're the rarest. Most of those hosts' episodes no longer exist so any footage at all is something of a treat.
You'll want to go to the site itself and browse around but I'm going to embed two clips here. The first is of Steve Allen doing a bit he often did, reading aloud angry letters from The New York Daily News, giving them the outraged delivery that their authors intended. These were, apart from the gag name signatures, real letters. Here's that clip — and by the way, you may have to sit through a brief commercial for these...
The second clip is from the first Jack Paar Tonight, though it doesn't have Jack in it. It's the intro of Mr. Paar...and the man you'll see doing it is the bizarre character actor, Franklin Pangborn. Books will tell you that Hugh Downs was Paar's sidekick and that was true...eventually. When they started out, it was Pangborn.
Paar's show was thrown together in a hurry. Steve Allen had been replaced by a multi-host aberration called Tonight: America After Dark, a total and embarrassing flop. Paar was quickly hired and shoved out onto the air without a lot of lead time. Amazingly, they didn't even take an hour or two to meet the man they selected as his announcer-sidekick before hiring him. Someone got the idea that Mr. Pangborn would be the perfect choice. Pangborn was a very funny presence in a lot of movies, including (memorably) W.C. Fields' The Bank Dick, usually playing little effete, prissy men.
The actor was then living in Los Angeles and not working much. The producers contacted him and made an offer which Pangborn immediately accepted, even though it meant moving to New York. No one on the Paar show had met him in person. No one had screen-tested him to see how he'd come across on a (mostly) unscripted live TV show, playing opposite the new host. It turned out he was terrible. He couldn't ad-lib and without a script, he couldn't even replicate his old screen character. He also turned out to be, according to several accounts, very nervous and paranoid backstage, unsettling everyone with paranoid fantasies of unnamed people trying to kill him. They got rid of him in a hurry and eventually, Mr. Downs — who'd been hired just to be an announcer doing commercials — eased into the sidekick role.
This only runs a few seconds but I was amazed to find it on the site. So here's Franklin Pangborn introducing Jack Paar on his first Tonight, which was on July 29, 1957...
If you like this stuff, go over to the Tonight Show Experience to experience more of it. But don't believe everything you read. The "Timeline" feature there says that Downs introduced Paar on the first show, even though the site has this clip of someone else doing that. And then it says, of Paar's last show, that "various guest hosts try to fill his shoes as speculation over who will replace him continues." That's all wrong. Carson was signed before Paar left. But the site's full of enough fun stuff that it's worth a long visit.
April 3, 2009
