This correction brought to you by the inimitable NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, which has kept all of my dumb pet projects up and running throughout the Tumblr debacle.

Wait, what?

[via Boing Boing]

Well, of course I want to opt out of placement of cookies by advertisers. That sounds great! So I visited the Network Advertising Initiative site linked to try to do just that. And—sigh—of course there's a catch. It turns out that in order to opt out of placement of Facebook advertising cookies by more than two of the sites listed, I have to enable placement of cookies by third parties in Firefox across the board.

Um, no. I'm guessing there are many reasons why they chose to set up an opt-out system this way—and I don't purport to know any of them for sure. But this strikes me as a rather clumsy solution.

The best part? When I went back to the Facebook Site Governance note to comment on the issue, I found that despite the note supposedly being open for comment until November 5, I could read others' comments, but not leave any of my own. Awesome.

P.S. Facebook, "opt-out" is not a verb. "Opt out" would be the correct spelling; the hyphenated form finds more proper use as either an adjective or adverb.

After calling around to a few numbers in the Missouri capitol Friday, Mary Cottom of the Missouri Women's Council (who administers the state's Breast Cancer Awareness Fund, an entity completely separate from the Cervical Cancer Prevention Fund) was able to connect me with one Joel Allison at the Department of Revenue. After calling around a bit himself, Allison explained to me just what had happened.

It seems that a glitch occurred when I e-filed through TurboTax, and the $4 value entered on line 45 was lost or discarded. Thus when the return was processed, the system deduced that I had overpaid and summarily (er, four months later) cut me a check for the overage.

To remedy the situation, all I have to do is return my check to Allison (with a Post-it reminding him of where I would like the money to go) at the following address:

So if anyone else out there on the Internet happens to have this problem, that's the solution, and I'd suggest calling Allison at 573-757-5855 to give him a heads up—he said I was the first person he'd heard of this happening to, but if this is a genuine glitch in the system, I fear I may not be the only one. If so, it could be a major problem for this (and perhaps other) state trust funds.

To wrap things up, Allison checked with the website folks at the DoR about the trust fund listing. In his words: "I couldn't find any reason why it wouldn't be there." A day later, the Cervical Cancer Prevention Fund was listed.

The site still claims "There is a total of seventeen trust funds eligible for contributions on Missouri’s income tax returns," which is too low by three; in addition, the entire DHSS subdomain, including the Show Me Healthy Women site, seems to be down at the moment—but hey, we're making progress, neh?

Doing that was supposed to ensure two things:

1. That the total amount I paid in both federal and state taxes this year wouldn't end in three sixes, a.k.a. the Devil's number

2. That my additional $4 would end up in the hands of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services' Show Me Healthy Women Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention Program

Apparently neither of those things happened, and I now have a completely unwanted check for $4 sitting on my desk.

When I called the number listed for the program in the MO-1040 instructions, I found that it had been disconnected. A call to the new number listed on the website went unanswered, though admittedly, I did call after-hours. More to the point, though, the trust fund is no longer listed on the Department of Revenue site.

I'm calling again tomorrow. I mean, seriously, WTF, Missouri? Did some wires get crossed? Was there a reorganization of some sort? Did the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention program lose its funding within the last three months?

I want some answers! I don't want this money.

Alas, when I clicked on the survey link, I found that they basically only wanted to know two things: my age range and my income bracket. That was it; end of survey. Could it simply have been a screening questionnaire?

If it turns out that it wasn't, and that that's all they want to know about me for all time, that would be unfortunate, as I'd appreciate the opportunity to tell them a thing or two about their publication. I figure they might want to know, for instance, that

1. They sent me the wrong selection of articles in Issue No. 1, which unfortunately included pieces from Travel + Leisure and GOLF in place of the requested ones from Food & Wine and Money. (Thankfully, this has since been corrected.)

2. My coworkers and I have been creeped out by the tone-deaf wording of some of the Lexus ads, including the back-cover ad on Issue No. 1 that stated, "The all-new 2010 RX. Now with more [your name]," as well as the advertising band around Issue No. 2 that claimed the issue to be "Inspired by someone we're both familiar with. You."

Um, clearly you're not that familiar with me, guys.