balloon levy
n.— «A balloon levy is a term used to describe the practice of requesting more money than we reasonably expect to receive.…This is done because the equalized assessed value of the district is unknown, but the levy needs to be filed by the last Tuesday in December.» —“District sets levy high in effort to capitalize on unknown EAV ” by Heidi Terry-Litchfield Morris Daily Herald (Illinois) Nov. 29, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...