Yes, New York is coming after it's beloved yogis, and all the supposedly blissed-out folks who practice the ancient leg-bendy ritual fitness of choice.

Last year, after New York State's Education Department attempted to subject Yoga Studios to licensing regulations—in which fees are pulled from making yoga instructors become "teachers," thus generating revenue for the state—the "Yoga Bill" was passed exempting yoga and martial arts studios from state educational certification.

Now, the state's trying a new tactic to tax Yoga studios: auditing them under the claim that they should be subject to the same kinds of tax (4.5%) and regulations as a fitness studio, as opposed to a dance or movement studio, which yoga studios lay claim to being more akin to. They're also gunning to get yoga studios to treat their teachers—currently independent contractors—as employees. Finally, they're trying to subject them to the idea that they are indeed fitness studios, which would require licensing fees for the spaces they are housed in.

The nonprofit that lobbied to get the original Yoga Bill passed last year—Yoga for NY—fights off these claims:

Yoga classes are not specifically listed among the services and classes that are taxable. The matter is therefore open to interpretation. But this could mean adding close to $1.00 to a $20 class, a cost that gets passed on to the student...One studio is being sued for three years of back taxes...While every yoga studio should look out for the welfare of its teachers, almost no studio but the very largest could easily survive when burdened with the thousands of dollars in extra cost that [turning independent contractors into employees and certifications] would represent.

To be fair, this is all true: Yoga could theoretically become—like cigarettes, and soda—much more expensive to this city. That said, Yoga looks like a pretty exceptional way to make a living avoiding some of the more foreboding taxes of New York City businesses even remotely like it have to face. Or it did. Until now.

What will New York's Yogis do? With any luck: Let slip the downward dogs of war with the tax man! For more information, the fight lives "om" here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

In_____ble.

Three things in this life are, it would seem, inevitable: death, taxes, and New York's Vulture blog (which covers pop culture) misusing the term "inevitable." Yesterday, the blog asked who would star in the "inevitable News of the World movie"--you know, because media scandals are always turned around, right away, into docudramas which lend themselves easily to SEO-enriched comment threads listing red-haired Hollywood actresses.

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defines "inevitable" as "incapable of being avoided or evaded." Given the general breakdown of language--specifically online language--into a string of "infamous"es, "random"s, and "pretty much amazing"s, we can call it, well, inevitable that a word which colloquially means the end result of a grinding chain of events (and which originated in Middle English!) now means "a funny confluence of cultural phenomena that, individually, get traffic."

Ranked from most inevitable to least inevitable (from inevitable to avoidable, that is), these are the things that Vulture headlines have called "inevitable" in 2011.

--The "backlash" (a word likely deserving its own listicle) against James O'Keefe's video "sting" against NPR. [This is actually a Daily Intel article, perhaps explaining why "inevitable" is used correctly!]

--A reality TV series about the rapper Ice-T and his wife, the glamour model Coco.

--A parody of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" by a group of people who evidently make a lot of music video parodies.

--A movie about the News of the World scandal.

--A YouTube video of Hitler (from the movie Downfall) reacting to Lars von Trier's Nazi jokes at Cannes.

--A parody of the Harry Potter series set to Rebecca Black's "Friday," or vice versa.

--A Snoop Dogg song about Charlie Sheen.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_