The kings are at it again in the second season of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” — the hit cable show based on the famous series of books by George R.R. Martin.

Also, one queen, who has herself some dragons.

Someone’s definitely going to lose an eye. Also a limb, a head, a heart and, well, you get the idea of this fantastically gory television series.

Enjoy:

But fortunately, there are a few free tax apps that can help you with that paperwork.*

Before you get started, you might want to use a tax calculator to estimate how much you’ll get in returns … or how much you’ll owe. The TurboTax TaxCaster is scientifically unproven to either make you shout aloud with joy in the middle of the office or cause your stomach to drop faster than if you were riding this. The TaxCaster app is free on iOS and Android mobile devices as well as online.

TurboTax's iPad app

For preparing your tax paperwork, there’s now a TurboTax iPad app. Intuit actually launched the app last March, but it was too late in the season to really gain traction. The iPad app works even when you’re offline, so you can prepare your tax paperwork from almost anywhere.

This year, TurboTax, which says more than 70 percent of its customers now file online, has added some new features to the iPad app. First, it has hired 700 CPAs and tax attorneys nationwide to be on call for questions that app users might have.

Also, filers can now import data and forms from about 400,000 employers and financial institutions.

Lastly, the app’s keypad has a new user-friendly design. The large, optimized keypad is a good idea. Even when your eyes start to glaze over, you can’t miss the keys.

As with the rest of TurboTax’s mobile apps, it won’t cost users anything to download the iPad app and punch in their information, but users will be charged through iTunes when they go to actually e-file through TurboTax. At the low end, TurboTax Deluxe costs $29.99.

H&R Block has introduced a new mobile app for iPhone and Android devices that allows filers to complete a federal 1040EZ form and state return by snapping a photo of their W-2 forms (TurboTax’s SnapTax does this as well.) The service is free through February 29th.

Filers with more complex tax returns can use the H&R Block iPad app to complete those additional forms.

H&R Block’s smartphone app also aims to help users locate a nearby H&R Block office, estimate a tax refund, check the status on a refund, and decipher various tax terms with a glossary.

Like TurboTax, H&R Block is now offering free extended support for taxpayers, through a Tax Answers program. And if you’d rather have your tax returns filed for you through video conferencing, H&R does that, too, through its new Block Live service.

Keep in mind that if your gross adjusted income last year was $57,000 or less, you can qualify for free e-filing through the IRS’s Web site. And as Ina Fried pointed out a year ago at this time, the IRS has a mobile app for iPhone and Android phones that lets users track their refund status.

*This is the sentence in which I feign enthusiasm over tax season.

Being the huge fan of “Top Chef” that I am — hellllloooo, Padma! — it was even more a treat to see former Microsoft legend, controversial patent grabber and full-time fiddler Nathan Myhrvold as a guest judge this past week on the current season of the popular cable television show.

For those who usually associate him with geekery, he is also a big foodie and the author of fancy tome “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking.”

Right now, the six-volume, 2,400-page book set retails for $499 on Amazon. As described on the site: “The authors and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes.”

“Top Chef” is now set in Texas, so the topic was barbecue, an apparent fave of the techie too. But I really liked the competitor chefs’ race in the Quickfire Challenge to pull off some feat of molecular gastronomy best.

A side of patent troll pâté anyone?

Here are the videos:

I hate to use a personal story to make a professional point — but when I was in the hospital recently, after suffering from a mini-stroke, I got an important piece of health advice that, oddly enough, applies perfectly to Yahoo, the Silicon Valley Internet icon I cover very closely.

I know, I know, but listen up …

When I was close to going home, one of my doctors told me I had to make sure I paid attention to any signs that might indicate a recurrence. The issue around any possible future ischemic attack taking place, he said, is speed in getting critical care once any unusual symptoms become apparent, such as numbness, tingling, confusion and cognitive difficulty.

That’s because every second of delay translates to increased damage to cerebral cells that could badly impact speech, movement and worse.

“Remember,” the doctor intoned with great and very appropriate gravity. “Time is brain.”

Yes, indeed it is — for me, and also very much so for Yahoo these days.

Leaving aside my own mortality, one of the most important issues going forward for Yahoo’s long-hoped-for revival will be how quickly the company moves in the next month, in what has so far been a lugubrious and rumor-heavy process to figure out its strategic plan in the wake of the firing of CEO Carol Bartz in early September.

That means — going into a major holiday season — Yahoo has about 30 working days to make what has to be a complex and multiparty deal. It is likely to include private equity firms, big companies, Asian partners, investment bankers, major shareholders and scrutiny from the media, in an effort that is approximately akin to herding cats.

This from a board that has often moved with snail-like reflexes in the midst of much more minors crises, and has shown a talent for disaster.

So, while speed is sometimes the enemy of reason, in this case, it is now more necessary than ever before.

There are three key reasons why Yahoo’s leaders have to perform quickly now, each of which could spell even more turmoil for the long-troubled company, if botched.

The first is the possibility — actually, the probability — of a proxy fight that might begin informally just after the new year.

That’s when you could start hearing from someone like activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point — who has been vocal about ousting Yahoo board members, including co-founder Jerry Yang. Yahoo directors are fully aware that he is eyeing this ugly option, which will include readying an alternate slate of directors.

According to a Yahoo spokeswoman, the earliest nominations for directors can be submitted is February 24 for those “shareholder proposals not intended for inclusion in proxy materials and for nomination of director candidates.”

But while there is a formal process, you will hear it coming long before that, unless Yahoo gives Loeb board seats to quiet him down — which is unlikely but possible.

Such a noisy fight is not one Yahoo can afford to have, and it has already shown some cloddish sensibilities in its response to a recent letter by Loeb — who has many more shares than Yang, and should still be accorded a certain amount of respect, no matter what he says.

Given how badly the last Yahoo shareholder tussle with Carl Icahn went, another proxy battle could be deadly, and might drag on through the first half of 2012. In his Yahoo tussle, Icahn ultimately got three seats on the Yahoo board, but eventually went away with everyone the poorer.

Second, Yahoo will report its fourth-quarter earnings in late January, which will likely continue to show weakness in key sectors of its business. While interim CEO Tim Morse is doing a laudable job given the shaky circumstances, drops in advertising revenue growth, engagement and search are not anything Yahoo can keep making excuses for.

While it is likely the company’s beleaguered operating execs will pull out the stops to make the numbers look better — a new game I like to play is “how many homepage ads can they jam in there at the quarter’s end?” — it’s no panacea for the kinds of dramatic and even drastic changes that new ownership will have to make, sooner than later.

And, speaking of beleaguered, perhaps the most important reason that Yahoo has to get the lead out and clarify its situation is due to one consistent thing about the company: Talent attrition and employee fatigue.

Speaking to one exec after another in recent weeks, it is dead clear that Yahoo is increasingly hard-pressed to hold on to the best of its current employees, or to attract any terrific new ones.

The impact on product innovation, morale and more is obvious.

One exec who has long been one of the more cheerleader types for Yahoo — often calling me out in the past for being too negative on the company’s prospects — has recently turned weary, cynical and even depressed about the future — so much so that I now find myself bucking up the worker.

“You can’t hire anyone, since you can’t tell them honestly who their bosses might be in three months,” said the staffer. “And you can’t look anyone who works for you now in the eye and tell them it will turn out right in the end, either, given the track record so far.”

Indeed. And, more than any other factor that could hurt Yahoo in the competitive tech sector, brain drain is what will always get you in the end.

U.S. TV networks marked the official end of the TV season on Wednesday with a flurry of widely viewed send-offs, including the last episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and the season finale of “American Idol.” But those big programs are closing out a TV season in which few new shows became hits, and ratings for the four most-watched networks fell.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Here is a very funny ad for a baseball cap company with actors Alec Baldwin (he of the New York Yankees persuasion) and John Krasinski (a Boston Red Sox fanatic), getting us ready for the 2011 season.

By the way, Walt Mossberg loves the Sox, although BoomTown loves me some World Series-winning San Francisco Giants.

The beard is still very feared.

Enjoy:

Nickelodeon has ordered up another season of its popular animated television series “SpongeBob SquarePants” for a ninth season.

Yay!

No, really–it is the only kids’ show I have been able to endure so far.

Krabby Patties for all!

Here is the good video of its theme song:

One particular highly accessible kind of flash mob, in which local singing groups perform Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus at shopping malls, has been replicated all over the U.S. and Canada in the last month or so.

Quickly: Flash mobs are traditionally secretly orchestrated performances that play out in public places while bringing a little bit of magic to unsuspecting people in the right place at the right time. If you’ve ever seen those videos of a person breaking into song or dance in a public place, then being joined by hordes of interlopers who somehow know the full routine, you’ve seen a flash mob. (There are also less choreographed variations, like public pillow fights.)

Since flash mobs seem so fun, organic and full of life, they’ve of course been co-opted by marketers who mimic the style right down to camera shots of the surprised and confused onlookers capturing videos of the moment with their own camera phones. But they’ve also recently been adopted by wholesome community groups wanting to spread a little holiday joy. And in many cases, both the performers and the audience know about the event in advance (element of surprise be damned).

One flash mob performance of “Hallelujah” in a Canadian shopping mall, posted on YouTube on Nov. 17, has been seen more than 25 million times. YouTube’s Trends blog recently called it “by far, the most popular video of the season.”

YouTube’s Kevin Allocca also highlighted some 20 other flash mob performances, also of “Hallelujah” and mostly in shopping malls, from Orlando, Cleveland, Chattanooga, Juneau and Winnipeg. Allocca says the meme may actually have been kicked off by the Opera Company of Philadelphia performing “Hallelujah” in a Macy’s as part of the Knight Foundation’s Random Acts of Culture. That video was posted Nov. 1 and has more than six million views.

It’s gotten so bad that on Monday night a mall near Sacramento had to be evacuated after crowds overwhelmed it and the fire department feared for its structural integrity. A planned flash mob by the Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra and other local congregations had been endorsed by the mall and promoted for weeks, drawing thousands to watch and sing along with their printed-out sheet music.

Would-be flash mobbers broke into impromptu singalongs as they were escorted out of the building and into the parking lot (with their video cameras recording all the while, of course). So apparently spontaneity isn’t dead yet.

ComScore said in the past week alone, four days exceeded $800 million in spending, including Cyber Monday, which became the heaviest online spending day on record at $1.028 billion.

On Tuesday, spending hit $911 million, making it the third-heaviest day on record, and Wednesday and Thursday came in at $868 million and $850 million, respectively. These figures include both physical merchandise, and relatively new categories, like virtual goods.

The big winners in the past week have been the Amazon.coms of the world and other large retailers, comScore noted.

The top 25 online retailers generated 20 percent more sales for the month of November, compared to last year, and their share increased to nearly 68 percent of the market. Meanwhile, the marketshare of small-to-mid-size retailers shrunk to 32.2 percent.

These increases aren’t expected to last as some retailers became less aggressive with promotions and discounts toward the end of the week, when year-over-year growth rates fell to single digits. “We may see another week of this effect before late season discounts and buying by procrastinators gives the season a final spending surge,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

Not a huge number, but together with the 2.5 million units Foxconn’s main production site at Shenzhen can produce each month, it’s presumably enough to offset the inevitable spike in holiday demand. And once Chengdu’s 50 iPad production lines are up and running in 2011, Foxconn will be able to produce about 40 million iPads per year–according to Digitimes, anyway.

It’s the third time this fall the company has talked up a Web-only service. And each time it does so it excites some of you who… really like the idea of not using DVDs.

The rest of you? You may be underwhelmed.

The big caveat here is we don’t know what Netflix plans to offer. But my hunch is the company won’t be able to offer a streaming-only option at a significant discount to its most popular $8.99-a-month plan, which also lets you stream unlimited video–and allows you to check out any DVD you want.

Note that:

• The streaming-only service the company launched in Canada this year costs $7.99 a month.
• Netflix has been testing the same service, at the same price, in the U.S. this fall.
• Even though the Netflix streaming-only option only offers about 20 percent of the catalog available on its traditional DVD rental service, the company is paying big money for that catalog. Netflix has already racked up a $1.2 billion digital content bill, which could grow to $2 billion next year.

Netflix has also been testing out a price increase for its $8.99  streaming + disc plan, to $9.99 a month. Perhaps that’s to make the $7.99 option appear that much more attractive ($7.99 also happens to be the new price for Netflix competitor Hulu Plus).

And perhaps $7.99 will be just fine for people who don’t want to deal with discs and envelopes and mailboxes, and want instant video whenever they want it. Even if they can’t get everything they want.

In any case, this could all be moot. While I haven’t seen any reports of a streaming-only option priced below $7.99, Netflix has said it has run “many” tests. So perhaps it has a trick up its sleeve.

For giggles, I asked Netflix PR guy Steve Swasey what he could tell me. His response: “Stay tuned!”

Fair enough. I assume that “shortly” means “in time for the Christmas shopping season, when people start buying shiny new TVs and gadgets that work well with Netflix streaming.” And that kicks off on Black Friday–just eight days away.

BoomTown is a big fan of Lisa Kudrow’s Internet-only series, “Web Therapy.”

In the all-improv three-minute episodes, the former “Friends” star channels a prickly and decidedly odd therapist named Fiona Wallice, who does her sessions via online video chat.

It is destined to be a cable television show, but, so far, Kudrow has managed to attract a spate of celebrities to “Web Therapy.”

And she scored big tonight in the third-season premiere, with a guest appearance by Meryl Streep.

She plays Camilla Bowner, a sexual-orientation therapist.

The pair are, needless to say, a match made in Web heaven.

Here is a preview of the show, which posts in its entirety later today:

The national broadcast television networks aren’t the only ones debuting a fall series season.

CollegeHumor Media, the online comedy video site, is also trying out three longer-term, weekly series rather than the more typical “viral one-offs,” it said.

“The whole idea is to get people to start thinking of CollegeHumor less as a comedy show, and more as a comedy network.” said CollegeHumor’s President of Original Content, Sam Reich, in a statement.

Thus, the New York-based unit of IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) is offering:

“Full Benefits”–What happens when your friend with benefits is also a co-worker? Well, presumably, hilarity ensues!

“Hello My Name Is”–A professional make-up artist is hired to apply prosthetics to cast member Josh Ruben. When the process is complete, does hilarity ensue?

“Very Mary Kate”–Life can be tough for a former child star with only a few billion dollars, a 26-bedroom apartment and a trusty bodyguard to her name. Hilarity or something like it, I think.

As you will see from these three videos, they are all still a little not-ready-for-prime-time, but it’s a nice effort, especially from the adorkable couple in “Full Benefits.”

Enjoy:

Okay, it’s admittedly a very funny mock skit from this weekend’s season premiere of “Saturday Night Live,” featuring singer Katy Perry and her problems related to a canceled appearance on “Sesame Street.”

But must poor Elmo suffer? You’ll figure out why right away.

One big plus: The genius of former SNL cast members Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler, who was also host of the NBC television comedy show. Perry was the musical guest too.

Here’s the video:

Perhaps both.

The Web video site is getting ready to roll out its much discussed subscription offering of $9.95 a month, the Los Angeles Times reports. That jibes with chatter I heard earlier this week, though I’m not yet convinced this is a done deal.

But for argument’s sake, let’s say the report is correct, and the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC, Disney’s (DIS) ABC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox is about to test a premium plan. If they are doing so at $9.95 a month, it’s possible they’ve ended up with a price that will make both consumers and network TV guys unhappy.

How’s that?

$9.95 a month–$120 a year–is an awful lot to pay for free TV. Industry sources expect the initial plans for “Hulu Plus” to focus on access to a deep catalog from its broadcast TV owners. So instead of just getting the most recent five episodes of, say, “Family Guy”–those will still be available for free on regular Hulu–you’ll get an entire season or more.

If you’re really, really into a couple shows that run on ABC, NBC or Fox, then perhaps a Hulu subscription makes more sense than buying the shows on DVD or downloading them from iTunes.

But if you’re really into “Mad Men” on AMC or “Justified” on FX (which is great), or anything else on cable, Hulu Plus may not do much for you. And at the same time…

$9.95 a month doesn’t go that far once Hulu pays the bills. TV executives expect that Hulu will need to hand over something like $1 to $1.50 per subscriber to each of its network owners. Because that’s the same price the broadcast networks are trying to extract from cable TV operators in “retransmission” fights (see: ABC vs. Cablevision). And that money is worth a whole lot more to them than Hulu subscriptions. Which means the TV guys can’t undercut themselves on the Web.

So Hulu will need to pay out something like $3 to $5.50 off the top for every $10 it brings in. And then it has to shoulder the streaming costs, billing costs, customer service costs, etc.–figure a couple bucks a month more for that stuff. That gets you something like a 30 percent gross margin, which is nothing to brag about.

And what happens if Hulu wants to expand the service and add shows from other providers? It will either have to cut into its thin margin to pay for the programming or raise its rate above $10 a month. Which is already a lot to pay for free TV.

There are a few things Hulu and its owners can do to make Hulu Plus more attractive. Offer the service on more platforms, for one, like Apple’s iPad. And tinker with “windows,” so that Hulu subscribers get to see stuff before the freeloaders.

But moving windows is a good way to confuse/piss off most users, who don’t have any interest in digital/analog TV economics and just want to watch shows.

Also, access to Hulu on the iPad seems a bit less valuable given that Disney’s ABC, one of Hulu’s owners, is already giving away free access to its shows via a very popular app. Industry sources says Hulu CEO Jason Kilar tried desperately to get ABC not to introduce its free app for this very reason.

But while Disney is a minority owner in Hulu, Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs is the largest individual shareholder in Disney. If you want to connect the dots on that one, you’ll be doing the same thing everyone else in TV Land is doing.

One of the most popular shows online, too, after 14 seasons, the Comedy Central television series will air the 200th episode tonight, in which all the celebrities ever mocked on it join in a class-action lawsuit.

Tom Cruise, beware!

Here’s the short video:

Nielsen says 13.3 percent of Americans who watched the Oscars also used the Web during this month’s telecast and that 14.5 percent of those watching last month’s Super Bowl did the same thing (see table below; click to enlarge).

These numbers are both up from last year, and the only surprise here is that they’re so low. But remember: Not everyone spends as much time on the Web as you do–a third of the country still doesn’t have broadband.

Nielsen says that online/offline viewers spent the majority of their Web time at Facebook, Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), which isn’t surprising. It’s a little bit interesting that Twitter.com doesn’t crack Nielsen’s list of Top 10 domains for simultaneous viewing. But perhaps most people who Twitter during TV time are doing so from their phones.

Speaking of which, many thanks to all of you who have refrained from Twittering during and immediately after “Lost” this season–my stream has been nice and quiet so far. Or perhaps no one’s watching “Lost” anymore. I wouldn’t blame them; this season has been frustrating even by the show’s frustrating standards.