Scuttlebutt Pipeline

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A rare find was discovered at the construction site of an upcoming Wal-Mart in Phoenix, Arizona. While digging a hole to plant a tree on the site workers discovered the remains of an 8,000 year old camel. A rare and impressive find to be sure.

PHOENIX, Arizona (AP) — Workers digging at the site of a future Wal-Mart store in suburban Mesa have unearthed the bones of a prehistoric camel that’s estimated to be about 10,000 years old.

Arizona State University geology museum curator Brad Archer hurried out to the site Friday when he got the news that the owner of a nursery was carefully excavating bones found at the bottom of a hole being dug for a new ornamental citrus tree.

“There’s no question that this is a camel; these creatures walked the land here until about 8,000 years ago, when the same event that wiped out a great deal of mammal life took place,” Archer told The Arizona Republic.

Wal-Mart officials and Greenfield Citrus Nursery owner John Babiarz have already agreed that the bones will go directly on display at ASU.

Archer said some of them may be placed on display very soon, but most will take several months “to get sorted out and stabilized.”

“In my 15 years at ASU doing this work I can think of six or seven times when finds this important have been made,” Archer said. “This is the first camel. Others have been horses, once a mammoth on Happy Valley Road. This sort of thing is extremely rare.” (source)

Am I the only one who wonders if Wal-Mart will allow the archaeologists to work peacefully? Someone I can’t help but pressure being placed to speed things up, no matter that the site itself holds the most information from which we can use to learn from.

Amazingly enough yesterday marked an eventful time for both of the Wal-Mart Supercenters in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Las Cruces PD were forced to evacuate both locations when a bomb threat was called in.

Smorty.com is another site that allows bloggers to get paid for blogging. A new cash crop in adversiting is blog advertising and many advertisers are jumping on board. So if you enjoy blogging and would like to make a little bit of money on the side this might be something you want to look into. Unless you have an exceptionally high trafficked site, not even google adsense can compare to the amount of money you can make on a regular basis in this line of marketing.

So how exactly does Smorty.com work and how do you sign up? Smorty.com requires that you have or register a paypal account for payments, once you have that though you’re in the clear. All you need is a blog and the ability to blog. Smorty shows you te advertisers and their products that they want advertised. You pick the advertising assignments you want to do this way you are blogging about something that interests you. Once you select an opportunity you are given four days to complete it and then you just submit the post via their online form. Provide the name of the post and the post’s url then click submit and it’s done. Each opportunity payout varies, but thus far I have not seen an opportunity under $6.

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Well it didn’t take Scooby Doo to solve this mystery, just the IRS. Many of my mother’s customers this year have commented on how Jackson Hewitt got them back more money. One of the main gripes they had for her was that with JH they got EIC (earned income credit) and why wasn’t she letting them take it.

EIC is only available if the parents and children are all United States citizens or residents. If they have a TIN number, which is the number issued to keep track of illegals, than they don’t qualify and she won’t give it to them. Needless to say they head back to Jackson Hewitt who will let them take it. The tax preparers, accounts, and bookkeepers of this area have known about Jackson Hewitt’s less than legal methods but to say anything about it merely makes it sound like a case of sour grapes. After all the two big businesses in this area are H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt. To hear the local businesses speak out about their methods really doesn’t look good on the locals, so they deal.

Now there is some vindication to this:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. government has sued the operators of more than 125 Jackson Hewitt Tax Service Inc. tax preparation offices, accusing them of cheating the U.S. Treasury out of more than $70 million through a “pervasive and massive series of tax-fraud schemes.” (source)

Yup, you read that right. 125 offices closed down! That makes me so happy to hear! Now maybe the IRS will be looking at all of the JH offices more closely and they’ll be forced to clean up their act. One can hope.