The Smarmy Carny

Spot these leaves!

A coin defect in the Wisconsin 2004-D coins could make your 25¢ piece worth $100 and upward.

Normal Wisconsin quarters do not have any extra little leaves, but two variations (called "extra leaf down" and "extra leaf up," as seen in the picture to the right) are causing quite a stir. You can read up on further details at coinworld.com.

Of course, if you don't believe me, feel free to send any Wisconsin 2004-D coins my way for inspection. $100 bills are also accepted.

Rhymes with "Tax Laud"

Remember: when you win a million dollars in front of 59 million people on the most popular reality show of all time, you might not try to keep that money a secret. If anyone is paying attention, it's the IRS.

The Smoking Gun released this document, in which the IRS claims that Richard Hatch not only failed to claim his Survivor million in 2000, but also did not report $321,000 in 2001. Whoops.

Any time someone wins a large sum from a game show, lottery, etc., I immediately figure out roughly what they have won after taxes. With a million dollars, can't you afford a decent accountant?

This all makes me curious about how often winners of large sums of money fail to report their large winnings on their taxes. I can't imagine how it wouldn't cross your mind during tax time. I remember biting my nails one year over $2 that I won on a free Bingo website. You'd hope that Jeopardy winners and the like would be intelligent enough to claim the winnings, but the lottery is the complete opposite. Not only do you need zero intelligence to win, I think that it's more likely that people playing the lottery regularly are more likely to lack that certain je ne sais quoi regarding financial intelligence. Lotto winners are the neanderthals of winners. I don't expect them to last a year with a million dollars, and many of them don't.

The odd thing is that reality show winners, for the most part, are neither of these two categories per se. Reality shows get a bad rap from the general public, and so do reality show contestants, for the most part. Most of these generalizations are formed by some of these half-baked reality shows that crop up. Still, even though Survivor has its fair share of losers, one has to be at least half-sane and half-brained in order to win. (Note: Of course, I could be wrong. I don't actually watch Survivor. *cough*) I did see enough of Richard Hatch to believe him to be someone with a properly functioning brain.

Crunch!"

I just wonder what the problem is. Lack of foresight? Awful accounting? Greed? The world may never know how many dollars it takes to get to the tax fraud center of a Survivor Pop.