City of Boston Presents Occupy Boston with $500 Million Tax Bill; "They Breathed Public Air," Say Officials

BOSTON/Dewey Square - Officials from the City of Boston and several men in dark suits who said they were "not from the Department of Homeland Security" presented a bill for $500 million dollars to a small child standing next to the entirely unused Dewey Square park at 9:01 a.m. this morning, saying the famously leaderless movement owed the decaying metropolis back taxes on the millions of cubic liters of air breathed by protestors during its ten week encampment last fall.

City lawyers said the little known "air tax" was passed by Puritan Archons in response to England's Glorious Revolution in 1688 to prevent "Catholicks, Iewes and Other Allies of Satan" from joining the Massachusetts Bay Colony in any capacity other than as "servants, bootblacks, and women of ill fame". The law, entitled "Being a Lawe on Inhaling Various Foule Vapours in Boston Towne", was discovered late last night under a pile of unused Writs of Mandamus at Suffolk Superior Court. Local economists were enlisted to update the original tax of "fife cowes and ye olde sowe" to several thousand dollars per second of air used.

Occupy Boston protestors could not be reached for comment, but did issue a press advisory indicating that they were attending "a Temporal Hackathon at the MIT Media Lab."

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4/2/12 UPDATE: and now we unmask this story - if wasn't already quite obvious - as our annual April Fools' Day satire ... cheers to all ...