Like H1N1, the notion of taxing text messages and other new electronic forms of communication has taken root and is threatening to go pandemic.

The city of Vallejo, Calif. is voting today on expanding utility taxes to include text messages, pager messages and VOIP calls. The measure would lump these together with gas, electricity, water and other utilities, while lowering the overall utility tax rate from 7.5% to 7.3%.

This follows the example set by Sacramento and 40 other towns in California which have added electronic communications to their taxable utilities, both to reduce the burden on those clinging to land-lines and to increase city revenue.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Vallejo's general fund has lost $18 million in the past two years. It declared bankruptcy in 2008.

While officials contend that the change will have only a minimal impact on a typical resident's utility bill, some locals are concerned that the measure opens up the door for taxes on other forms of communication not presently taxed. I'm wondering about passenger pigeons.

As more and more people abandon land-lines, many communities will be looking to replace lost tax revenue by charging for text messages, voice-over-Internet calls, e-mails, and IM conversations. If they could, some would probably charge by the syllable for face-to-face coffee house conversations. If so, we'd probably learn to abbrev wht we sed 2 sv $.

What's in a name? The pork industry is discovering the wrong name can become a multi-billion dollar calamity.

Since April, when many of us first heard the name "Swine Flu" used for the H1N1 virus, the pork market has been in a tailspin.

According to the National Pork Producers Council, this is the second body blow absorbed by hog farmers in the last two years, resulting to date in $5.3 billion of lost revenue.

The first was the sudden dramatic increase in the price of corn, which almost doubled within the six months following September 2007. The second blow was the Sw*** flu, a misleading moniker for a virus that you cannot, cannot, cannot contract by eating pork.

In 1999 the American Association for Retired People officially changed its name to AARP to avoid the misconception that it was only for retired persons. Since that time, it has vigorously pursued baby boomers as they enter their golden years.

Now, the association seems to be reaching even further down the ages, all the way to young people interested in gaining financial wisdom, by unveiling a new Web site, LifeTuner.

LifeTuner is "an online personal finance community site born out of a growing recognition that young adults need to take a much more active role than previous generations in planning and preparing for their own financial security."

The site contains the usual personal finance background information, calculators and other tools, expert Q&A and a community section where users can engage with one another. Like most AARP products, it seems well thought out and professional, and will probably be as good a resource as any for young people who want to start down the road of financial independence.

I had the opportunity recently to speak with WhiteFence.com's CEO Franc Arbride about home utilities and how we might trim these expenses. He describes his site as "a comparison shopping engine for utilities and other home services," which allows the user to input his address and receive detailed comparisons of terms offered by competing utilities.

I called Arbride after reading a WhiteFence report that showed the huge difference in utility bills from city to city.

Who pays the most? This is one crown that I doubt that those of you in Baltimore, Maryland will enjoy wearing, but the average bill, according to WhiteFence.com, in the summer quarter of 2009 was $390.44.

The same report should put a smile on the faces of those of you in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Denver and San Francisco. L.A. was the least expensive at $192.97, less than half of those in Baltimore. Fortunately for the East Coaster, the cost of housing is skewed in the opposite direction.

There's something about cleavage that moves simple men to accept the most preposterous notions. Witness the witless people who were scammed last week by a perp who offered them jobs as security guards at the Playboy Mansion Halloween bash.

According to KTLA News, several people showed to meet their boss at the appointed time and place (a Denny's), after paying the cons who posed as organizers an upfront fee of $225 each for uniforms and security passes.

After hanging out at the restaurant waiting until 1 a.m. it finally occurred to them that they had been scammed. No job, no booty, nothing but another lesson on the benefits of thinking with your brain rather than your libido.

After all, for a job working security at the Playboy Mansion, you'd have to pay a lot more than $225, right? At auction, I bet the positions would sell for thousands.

Halloween trick or treat night night came early this year at our house, and thanks no doubt to the H1N1 flu scare, we were visited by very few ghosts and goblins. We were despairing (drooling) over the amount of candy left over to tempt us, until I discovered Halloween Candy Buy Back, a program by dentists to buy candy from kids and their parents and send it to soldiers overseas.

We all want to see breast cancer cured, so it's no surprise that people respond to an email that tells them that sending a single text message or email to a friend would cause a large national company to donate a buck to cancer research. Unfortunately, it's not true.

The email, according to Snopes.com, encourages the recipient to email or text this message to a friend: "What if it was ur grandmother, ur mother, daughter, sister, niece, aunt, cousin or ur best friend that had breast cancer? How would u feel?"

It promises that, for each email or text message sent, Verizon, Sprint/Nextel, T-Mobile, AT&T and MetroPCS would donate a dollar to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. The Komen Foundation is the largest fund raising organization for cancer research, having raised over a billion dollars since 1982. It does not deserve to be besmirched by this hoax. If you want to donate to this organization via a text message, it has a link for that.

I haven't found any reports that this message contains a virus or other malware; it appears to be simply a stupid stunt.

The hoax is a new iteration of an old theme. In the 1950s, cigarette companies included coupons with each pack of smokes that were redeemable for "gifts." At that time, an oft-repeated rumor claimed that these could be donated to one charity or another which would redeem them for iron lungs. Another version substituted seeing-eye dogs. Yet another claimed that pull tabs on cans (back when they pulled entirely free of the can) could be used to buy time on a dialysis machine.

I fail to see the humor in a hoax that takes advantage of our concern about such a killer as breast cancer.

If you want to be popular on Halloween night, give out chocolate. That's among the many fun Halloweeen facts I found on the spooky night.

• The Census Bureau estimates that 36 million kids between the ages of 5 and 13 will trick-or-treat this year on Halloween. (Many of the ghosts and ghoulies that visit my house are under five, while some are old enough to drive from house to house, so the total number of TOTers is certainly higher.)
• There are 111.4 million occupied housing units in the country, also known as targets to this ravenous horde.
• 41% of givers scarf down some of the candy they bought for the night, and 90% of parents admit to stealing some of their childrens' plunder.
• Chocolate is the most common handout (52%). Thirty percent of households give out hard candy or lollipops. One in four spring for full-sized candies. The rest hand out the misnamed "fun" size.
• The most popular candy gifts as ranked by children:

1. Chocolate, 68%
2. Lollipops, 9%
3. Gummy candy, 7%
4. Gum, 7%

I wonder if I'm making a mistake by handing out dental floss this year?

• Happily, 93% of people residing in households consider their neighborhoods safe. I wonder how many nations in the world can match that?
• The U.S. grew 1.1 billion pounds of pumpkins last year, equivalent to over 1,100 B-747s. The most gourd-friendly state? Illinois, which produced almost half of the Jack-o-lantern blanks.
• The average American consumed 23.8 pounds of candy last year. Yes, I did my share of the work.
• We will spend around $2.23 billion on candy during the seven days leading up to Halloween, according to a spokesperson for the National Confectioners Association.
• The Jack-o-lantern is a tradition brought to the U.S. by Irish immigrants, who back home had carved them out of rutabagas and other root vegetables.
• The pumpkin originated in Mexico around 7,000 B.C.
• The winning pumpkin in the Circleville Ohio Pumpkin festival this year weighed 1,635.5 lbs., more than the combined weight of the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup plus their coach.

You might wonder what could be done with such a pumpkin? How about this?

In an announcement that should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the woes of Detroit's Big Three, Chrysler Group LLC is dumping product lines while making room on its showroom floors for products from Fiat. There was no reason that Fiat SpA would have partnered up with the dinosaur if not to gain a foothold in the American market.

According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), the auto maker will announce in early November plans to begin building upscale Alfa Romeos, a Fiat-owned brand, in North America to distribute through the Chrysler network by 2012. The MiTo compact is scheduled to be the first off the assembly line.

On the import slate for 2011 is the 500, a minicar in the class of the VW Beetle and BMW Mini, built by Fiat in Poland.

My jaw hit the floor when I read the "what could they be thinking?" announcement that Microsoft had commissioned an entire half-hour special by the maker and cast of the adult cartoon hit "Family Guy". The show was to include plugs embedded in the narrative extolling the virtues of its new Windows 7 operating system.

Had they ever watched his show, I asked myself? Apparently they have now, as the company announced it is dropping the idea.

Gee, I wonder what part of Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane's oeuvre offended their Microsensibilities?