Polish your Dothraki blade and down some... Game of Thrones wine (?), because it looks like the lavish Parker/Lenas fantasy wedding has hurdled California's pesky permits. A mere construction code violation will not stop the bedding ritual of a mega-rich Facebook investor.

It was looking dicey for a minute: state officials took issue with Parker's plans to literally build part of a castle in the middle of Big Sur's Ventana Inn campground (seen above), and claimed the required construction paperwork hadn't been filed. Castle paperwork. But the show will go on, says the Monterey Herald:

"We are in frank, candid conversations with the county and the Coastal Commission staff," Monterey attorney Aengus Jeffers said Monday, confirming that the plan is for the event to proceed as planned.

There's no code violation severe enough that a billionaire's lawyer can't fix it with an invisibiltiy spell. Documents pertaining to the matter are coveniently "confidential" at the moment, and the Herald notes that "the campground was reportedly already closed to the general public for sewer system repairs." What occult ceremonies are taking place there? We'll have to wait and see—but for now, we've got a few tipstery tips:

• Wedding invites are still being handed out—as rewards for being acquired by the companies of other invitees.
• The fare will be Greek, which is exotic enough to pass for medieval, I guess.
• Lenas' family is ticked off about her out of wedlock steampunk baby.

But it will be the richest steampunk baby to ever adorn itself in monocles and chainmail—does that count for nothing?

The Tumblr afterglow is starting to fade, and Yahoo is back to dumping money into oddball startups without any explanation. Why? Don't ask why.

TechCrunch reports the newest impulse buy is PlayerScale, a gaming firm that helps developers port their titles between platforms. Yahoo's reasoning on the buy is typically vague:

“The team has built an incredible gaming platform that is used by over 150 million players worldwide. We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform.”

The company's current gaming strategy consists of 90s hits like "Deep Sea Mahjong" and "Daily Crosswords." How will PlayerScale add to that? Is it not supposed to? Is Yahoo going to be a gaming company now, too? Is it going to integrate gaming with the other startups it's acquired, which deal in social networking, video chatting, news summarization, airline rewards, and public polling? Is this just going to be the Boxcar Children of technology? Are these companies being selected via some sort of Hunger Games death lottery? Will this mean Yahoo Mahjong for my iPhone?

Marissa. Marissa, are you there? Marissa...

The mega-valuable company that makes your laptop is under congressional scrutiny this week for offshore tax-dodging. It all started in 1980, when Apple's California execs moved their operation to Ireland with a fake company with the codename "Waldwill Limited."

When pressed on the Ireland debate, Tim Cook revealed himself to be quite the slippery southern gent this week. He's always been deft with press and presentations, but Cook sidestepped questions and "disagreed with characterizations" with the ease of Capitol Hill greats. Much of the railing honed in on Cook's insistence that Apple is an American company. He made the statement—verbatim—over and over again, mantra-like. The patriotism by volume was maybe Cook's only hope of countering the unflattering truth: Apple keeps billions of dollars away from the IRS by stowing cash reserves in Ireland, which levies a 2-percent tax rate (or less). One of these shell firms, Apple Operations International (AOI), retains ownership of Apple's fantastically valuable intellectually properties—the formalized ideas that've made it the most valuable company in the world.

It started here, in August 1980, with a generic memo signed off by the Irish government. These papers gave Apple an inconspicuous home away from home—only two shares in "Waldwill Limited" were issued.

Thirty years later, Waldwill Ltd. is AOI, with over 700,000 outstanding shares, shareholders that include a shadowy British Virgin Islands firm Apple taps to move money, and executive "directors" who are actually in California.

"Byzantine" plots like this are fairly standard for a company of Apple's size, says an attorney I spoke with who's familiar with similar tax strategies. "Companies like Apple use code names for acquisition vehicles and then don't bother to change the name after the acquisition, particularly if the entity is only holding assets, so the stranger the name, the more likely it's an Apple affiliate." Strange names, geographical tricks, and flattened taxes: Apple really is an American company.

To contact the author of this post, write to biddle@gawker.com

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is plowing through a media tour with her newly adopted internet son David Karp. On everyone's mind is how Tumblr will reconcile its vast collection of rape porn GIFs with tween-friendly advertising—and the duo doesn't have much of an answer.

In a sitdown with George Stephanopoulos, Karp—who earlier bristled at G-Step's insistence on labeling him a "hipster" for daring to wear a hoodie and be 26—got hit with the porn question. Of course.

"Are you worried that that is going to turn off advertisers?" (The answer is yes, they are worried)

So what will they do about it? As you can see, there's no real plan. The two have jargon on their side, but not specifics. Mayer suggests tagging NSFW posts as such could be a solution. But lots of the porn on Tumblr is already tagged with porny terms—tits, blowjob, etc. Mayer's quasi-answer sounds like it could segregate Tumblr into two sites—one with porn and one without—which users could toggle between. That sounds like a headache for anyone who enjoys porn! There are also plenty of Tumblr sites that punctuate generally SFW fare with NSFW media. What do you do with those?

"Uhh, community flagging, uhh, machine learning..." says Karp. Two surefire ways to not get rid of porn are hoping the porn-loving internet self-regulates, or that some sort of porn-sniffing algorithm can just handle it automatically. "Drawing a circle" around Tumblr's rape GIFs will be harder than just simply drawing a circle.

A staple of the Gilded Age 2.0 startup party, beyond custom stickers and a GIF photo booth, is the novelty cocktail. At last night's "Shin Digg" (get it?) in New York, the chic aggregator was serving gin-based middle fingers to one of its vocal critics.

Dave Winer—best known for early, pioneering work in bloggin' software—has some pointed thoughts about Digg's impending Google Reader replacement: he doesn't think it exists or deserves our attention.

I've never seen vaporware from a tiny dev team get as much attention as Digg's Google Reader replacement.

— Dave Winer ☮ (@davewiner) April 30, 2013

Vaporware! You might as well accuse a startup of cannibalism. But why sulk about the accusation when you can gloat via alcohol? (I've seen the Digg Reader, for what it's worth, and it is both real and very nice looking!) No word whether Winer ever showed up to see the drink named in his honor.

Tim Cook's grand scheme to avoid American corporate tax rates was just revealed as a little more absurd, with a new report by the New York Times. The (Californian) company is using (Irish) dummy companies to funnel cash to (Manhattan) bank accounts.

Recent congressional scrutiny is focused on Apple Sales International and Apple Operations International—two holding companies created in Ireland to help Apple escape US taxes. But the whole "Irish" thing is overstated:

Apple’s $102 billion in offshore profits is actually managed by one of its wholly owned subsidiaries in Reno, Nev., according to the Senate report on the company’s tax avoidance. The money is tracked by Apple company bookkeepers in Austin, Tex. What’s more, the funds are held in bank accounts in New York.

That's right: billions upon billions of Apple dollars are deemed "offshore" and untouchable, despite sitting in Manhattan accounts. The system works! For Apple.

Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty

Crain's reports a series of whopping windfalls for firms like Union Square Ventures, which pulled a 5,000% return of $253 million—that's more than David Karp himself (with around $250 million).

The others?

Sequoia Capital - $176 million (700% return)

Spark Capital - $77 million (4,000% return)

Don't forget the people who sat at desks:

The company's first 10 employees will receive an average of $6.2 million in cash; the first 30 will receive an average of $3.3 million in cash, and the rest of the 178 employees will each receive $371,000.

These are probably just rough estimates, but still, enjoy your day job.

Update: According to PrivCo, which compiled these estimates, the employee data is based on "median" numbers.

Update 2: PrivCo emailed in an explanation of its tally:

Update 3: Fred Wilson calls these numbers "total garbage." Given PrivCo's previous financial fuckups, it's certainly possible.

Today's congressional hearing on Apple's Irish tax-dodging has included a lot of impressive browbeating—it's nice to see Tim Cook taken to task. What doesn't help the issue is Senator John McCain chuckling with Cook about how his gosh darn iPhone updates apps all the durn time.

You can't grill and guffaw in the same breath, Mr. Senator. It was a strange turn for McCain, who'd otherwise been riding Cook through the entirety of his questioning—spoiled somewhat by the Quirky Grandpa routine that capped it off. [video via TPM]

Bill Allison, the editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, looks at the lobbying and campaign finance records relating to Apple as its CEO, Tim Cook, appears before a Senate Committee.

Ahead of a hearing at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations [today] at which its CEO, Tim Cook, is the star witness, computer, tablet and smartphone manufacturer Apple has preemptively released his prepared remarks defending the company's tax practices, which include pooling $100 billion overseas, away from the grasping hand of the Internal Revenue Service.

The prepared testimony does not mention the more than$14.5 million Apple has spent on lobbying the federal government since 1998, nor that taxes top the list of issues the company has raised, according to data in Influence Explorer. One of the bills appearing most frequently in its lobbying reports is the Freedom to Invest Act, introduced by Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, that would allow U.S. companies to bring home some of the cash they hold overseas without facing tax on it.

The biggest recipient of contributions from Apple employees and their family members is President Barack Obama, whose campaign committess have gotten more than $514,000, a total that eclipses the second biggest recipient, Hillary Clinton, who got $46,800. Among sitting members of Congress, the top recipient is Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., whose gotten $22,625. Boxer is not a member of the committee looking into Apple, but Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, the ranking member, is; Apple employees and their family members have contributed $10,100 to his campaigns.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report of its own on Apple's practices, claiming that the company exploits differences between tax law in the United States and Ireland, where the company maintains a subsidiary, to avoid taxes.

It's not the only tech company in the hot seat—a whistleblower in the United Kingdom alleges that Google's tax avoidance there is "immoral," and claims he has 100,000 emails to prove it. Like his counterpart at Apple, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has defended the company's tax practices.

For information on a possible correlation between the taxes corporations pay and the amount they spend on lobbying, click here.

The Sunlight Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that strives to make government more transparent and accountable. Learn more about Sunlight's work by checking out Influence Explorer, Scout, Open States and Political Party Time.

Insecure code-slinger Marco Arment was an original employee at Tumblr, when it was just two dudes in a room. He wrote a nostalgic little post yesterday about the company's rise to Yahoo's pocketbook, with one important conclusion: he's rich too. OK? Very rich. Not yacht rich, but rich. OK?

Arment—who also created (and recently sold) Instapaper—takes us on a dull trot through coding memory lane:

David always had a vision for where he wanted to go next. I was never the “idea guy” — in addition to my coding and back-end duties, I often served as an idea editor. David would come in with a grand new feature idea, and I’d tell him which parts were infeasible or impossible, which tricky conditions and edge cases we’d need to consider, and which other little niceties and implementation details we should add.

Woof. This is why they needed Aaron Sorkin to make The Social Network interesting. If you skip all the David Karp slobbering, you'll get to the reason Arment bothered with this in the first place: answering the question no one asked. Are you rich now, too? Are you?

As for me, while I wasn’t a “founder” financially, David was generous with my employee stock options back in the day. I won’t make yacht-and-helicopter money from the acquisition, and I won’t be switching to dedicated day and night iPhones. But as long as I manage investments properly and don’t spend recklessly, Tumblr has given my family a strong safety net and given me the freedom to work on whatever I want. And that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Good to know, Marco—and we're glad you went with something slightly more subtle than a selfie with liquid gold spilling out of your mouth. You know, since running a Twitter account from the perspective of your BMW wasn't enough.

Your ship has come in @marcoarment

— Marco's M5 (@M5arment) May 8, 2013

The world's most popular room-renting service is now illegal in the largest city in the United States, CNET reports. This could be a setback.

The sublease startup, which is largely enjoyed but occasionally disastrous, is now out of New York—pending appeal—for violating the city's "hotel law."(Read the full court decision below) You see, you can't run a hotel out of your apartment (even a very shabby one in a cramped studio apartment) for the same reason you can't pretend your car is a taxi and let people pay you for rides, sans license. Obviously the Silicon Valley disruption set doesn't care much for either of these notions, and Airbnb hasn't paid that law any attention. Now it'll have to—and it should, given how useful the service is (so long as it doesn't result in your apartment being destroyed without recourse) in a city where it can be a colossal nightmare to find an affordable bed.

The company—recently valued at $2.5 billion—is of course, not going to just lie down and take this. Without access to New York, that valuation might lose a few zeros.

Airbnb provided us with the following statement:

Decision and Order for NOV 35006622J