In order to stop hemorrhaging money Johnny Depp, once the world’s highest paid actor, has been selling off his assets as quickly as possible. The man who once portrayed Edward Scissorhands is having to deal with cutting losses instead of hedges. Now, Captain Jack Sparrow is having to plug holes on the sinking ship that is his bank account, which led to Depp unsuccessfully attempting to put his horse farm on Versailles road up for auction.

“Here’s the thing, if you’re trying to stop losing money the last thing you’d wanna sell is a horse farm,” said champion horse breeder Raoul Duke. “I guess I can see how he lost it all if can’t make money growin’ horses here in Kentucky.”

Depp’s personal financial manager Glen Lantz disagrees, “Look my client has come up against some hard times, and we’re not sure how many more times we can make a Pirates of The Caribbean movie. I think his character has hit all the islands down there at this point.”

“More like Johnny Debt,” snickered Tom Hanson, a nearby auction-watcher who would never be able to afford a horse farm of any sort but still enjoyed watching the sale of the farm fail. “Disney prints their own money basically, so if you’re the star of a Disney movie based on my favorite ride from Disneyworld and you’re still having to sell off assets, well, that’s the only type of person I could see struggling to make money off a horse farm in the horse capitol of the world.”

Before Hanson left, he looked over each shoulder and said in a hushed tone, “I’ll be honest, when I showed up here I wasn’t even expecting it to be a horse farm. From looking at all pictures of this Depp fellow in US Weekly , I assumed this guy had figured out how to grow scarves and leather bracelets, this whole horse thing is kind of a let down to be honest.”

Thanks to a recent state tax rebate of $1.8 million, Williamstown’s much-maligned Ark Encounter has officially become the first religious vessel to successfully circumnavigate Kentucky’s tax laws.

Ark Encounter captain Ken Ham may not consider he and his crew to be gruff, seasoned seamen, but the speed and consistency with which he was able to maneuver around the state’s complicated tax laws has nautical historians and H&R Block accountants alike at a loss for words.

“I’m at a loss for words,” said H&R Block accountant and coincidentally nautical historian Andy Douglas. “In just one year’s time the Ark Encounter has been able to go from an embarrassing eye sore for the state of Kentucky to an embarrassing eye sore for the state of Kentucky with a $1.8 million rebate.”

Despite the high praise from Andy Douglas and literally no one else, Ham remains humble.

“Circumnavigation is a touchy subject for a lot of people, but it’s in the Old Testament,” said Ham, thinking instead about circumcision. “God even told Abraham to circumnavigate himself.”

“When it rains it pours, and when God tells you it’s gonna flood you grab an umbrella,” Ham paused a moment before finishing his thought by loudly coughing out the word, “corporation.”

“We knew these waters weren’t going to easy,” Ham said, referring to the tax codes as water for some reason. “So we rigged her up with a $10 sail and we set a course. It was hard to resist the siren’s song of being a decent member of the community and realizing all the breaks we’d already gotten and not trying to push our luck but we resisted that call and pushed forward.”

As Lexington residents’ holiday attention turns from Labor Day celebrations to Halloween, enthusiastic costume shoppers gather outside a building beneath what appears to be a newly hung banner that reads “Halloween Express.” As the shoppers prepare to go buy unimaginative male costumes or female costumes made with the minimum amount of material one question permeates through the crowd; ‘what was in this building yesterday?’

“Was it a Kohls? Was it a Platinum Plus? I have no idea and I know I’ll forget to look come November,” said shopper Mike Meijer. “Tuesday morning!” Meijer then shouted as if Archimedes had just discovered a solution. After a moment of pause Meijer realized that Tuesday Morning was next door, and also a store he really shouldn’t even know about.

“So if the Jo Ann Fabric next door is still open, then what was this? Is it possible it’s a Halloween Express year round and we just don’t notice it until we are looking for it like that Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? I don’t know, I just came here to pick up this Rocket Scientist costume for my daughter,” said shopper Fredrick Kroger as he held up a hanger with little more than a spaceship adorned bikini and a pair of glasses.

“I mean if you think about it, this whole Halloween Express store is a pretty good costume, because I have no idea what normal store is wearing it,” Kroger said. “Pretty meta man. I mean if you go into an old McDonalds, you know it’s an old McDonalds right? But this place, it’s the perfect disguise. Crazy to think about.”

As Meijer and Kroger looked at the store, searching their brains for what used to be, Meijer looked over and said, “They took down the statues, I mean mannequins, of the old store here and we forgot our history, sad.”

In an age where more Morgans seem to be added to the Morgan and Morgan establishment every week, some law watchers have started asking an uncomfortable question that no one has quite been able to answer yet: what did Kevin Renfro do with the Becker family? Renfro seems to have established himself as the face of a law firm, but he has become the face of a law firm which bears another family’s name.

Some in our office, Jeff mainly, think that Kevin Renfro has kidnapped the Becker Law Office and is masquerading as the new lead council in some sort of fully clothed ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ situation. “I dunno about y’all but my eyes are wide open,” concluded Jeff who’s always here but doesn’t really work here per se.

An even more woke law watcher we spoke to believes that Renfro has stashed the Becker family away in the same place the other Isaacs from Isaacs & Isaacs is. “While it’s not based on any facts it’s still a very real possibility,” our source, Clint, who wished to remain anonymous told us.

“I’m just wondering why no one is asking questions about all these lawyers that serve Kentucky and keep disappearing. It’s like once Eric C. Conn hit that New Mexico border everyone stopped looking,” said one man that called our office, and assured us he was not Eric C. Conn, even though we kept asking if he was.

“I don’t know for sure what happened to any of them,” the man that wasn’t Eric C. Conn conceded. “But if the lost Isaacs, Gary Becker and the Hughes that seems to have gotten cut off by Kaughman and Stigger can all team up, Insurance companies in this state would be shaking in their boots.”