C.J.: KSTP's Rebekah Wood heads south

KSTP-TV is losing potent bench strength with the departure of anchor Rebekah Wood.

Wood is following her husband, Corey Miller, to Tampa, where he is being transferred by GE Healthcare IT, for which he does PR. They'll be moving there -- her last day with KSTP is Nov. 25 -- with their daughters, Hathaway, 7, and Delaney, 6.

"We're going down there, and I'm looking for a job," said Wood, who has been at KSTP four years.

That shouldn't be any problem for Joe Mauer's biggest married fan. Wood is great behind the anchor desk and hysterical on the radio after she finishes news cuts for FM107.1 and 1500 ESPN. She just lets it fly.

"I think I might be done with TV," she said. "We'll see. I love radio. I found that out," said Wood, who has been Staci's permanent fill-in on KS95's "Moon & Staci" show.

"Since I'm going down there and have never lived outside of the Midwest, I'm starting something new. I might just try something new."

Having lived only in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Wood is concerned about how long it will take for Florida to feel like home.

I've always been intrigued by Wood's wicked humor and the names of her daughters.

"You want spunk," she said. "People live up to their names, so you want girls to be not too girly, I think."

Hathaway's abundantly spunky. "The other day, Delaney said, 'Hathaway, you have a crush on everyone.' And Hathaway goes, 'Yeah, I dig a lot of people.'"

Delaney's name comes from the Jimmy Buffett song "Delaney Talks to Statues," and Hathaway "is just a name I heard a long, long time ago, and I told my husband, way before we were even married, 'We're naming our daughter Hathaway,' and he said, No we're not, and I said, 'Yes we are.' Now he loves it."

Miller has to be a little surprised Wood is following him anywhere.

"I think he is," she laughed. "He told me he wanted to marry someone like his grandmother, who was a tough cookie, and he's recently rethought that."

Wood and Miller met in Duluth, where he was a TV news anchor. "KSTP has been great to me," she said, "and they told me if I came back they would find a place for me. That would be wonderful."

Making waves on TwitterThe #ThingsLongerThanKimsMarriage hashtag on Twitter was created by Minnesota-born comedic genius Lizz Winstead.

Didn't realize this when acknowledging this tweet from @lizzwinstead: "Bet Kris Humphries wishes he hadn't joined the #OccupyKimKardashian movement." Winstead was clearly inspired by Kim Kardashian's rather uninspired allegiance to marriage vows just 72 days after marrying Kris Humphries.

"It went international!" said Winstead of #OccupyKim. Now Lizz is busy sharpening her drumsticks for her annual New Year's Eve year-in-review show at the Parkway. "This year I'm calling it 'Bang the Dumb Slowly.'"

An audit in Kim's future?Readers hope the IRS will pay close attention to Kim Kardashian's 2011 tax return.

With Kris Humphries' 72-Day Wife announcing that she's making a $200,000 donation to the Dream Foundation in lieu of returning wedding gifts, some readers are seeing red.

"So, Kim gets to keep [hundreds of] thousands of dollars of gifts SHE got to pick out that were on her registry AND she gets a tax deduction for them?" e-mailed Barb Dahl. "Again, evil genius."

Since Kardashian is not inclined to do the most obvious right thing (which would be staying married) or the second most straightforward act (the laborious chore of having her people return the gifts with notes handwritten by Kim), a donation is the easy way out.

"That would be the simplest way," confirmed Paul Quast, an attorney and CPA for the law firm of Bernick Lifson. "If you started donating $200,000 worth of wedding gifts, [that] would be a ton of paperwork you would have to attach to the return. If you are contributing anything of value, I believe it's above $5,000, you actually have to have a formal appraisal that complies with the IRS requirements. The IRS is sick and tired of looking at people's receipts and taking their word for it. They want you to get independent certified appraisals. It's very involved. She's probably doing this just to keep it simple.

"This [size] deduction would flag her tax form, make it more likely she would be audited," said Quast. "A $200,000 donation very likely would be reviewed to make sure you had the appropriate documentation."

Quast's legal colleague, Jessica Roe, managing partner at Bernick Lifson, who was also on our call, said: "If you are an IRS agent, wouldn't you WANT to flag it? Come on, it's that the most exciting thing you could do in a year!"

Very quietly, Quast added, "That didn't come from me."

By early Wednesday evening, the "No More Kardashians" petition at www.gopetition.com had drawn more than 89,000 signatures.

C.J. is at 612.332.TIPS or cj@startribune.com. More of this attitude can be heard Thursday mornings on Fox 9.