A wasted vote?

I've spent a lot of time over the past few months trying to figure out which of the two presidential candidates would be least bad.

Yesterday I submitted my ballot (I voted by mail - everybody going to a polling place on one day is a ridiculous process for managing an election in the twenty-first century).

I voted for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson.

A number of people have told me I wasted my vote (including one libertarian!). I strongly disagree. Voting for either of the other two would have been a waste of my vote. Worse,  it would have been seen as tacit approval of a man, regardless of whether it was Obama or Romney, with little regard for personal or economic freedom and no willingness to take the hard decisions necessary to fix America's fundamental problems.

I don't blame the politicians despite my lack of regard for them. They are simply the best two men in the country at giving the electorate what it wants no matter how irrational those desires might be, 2012's masters of pandering. Right now what the people want is to moan and cry about how terrible everything is and how they want something better, but not to have anything actually change. That is to say, the majority of American voters want to keep doing the same things but get a different result. Last time I looked, that was the definition of madness. Well I refuse to be a part of it.

New author blog

If you are more interested in following my journey as an author than my exploits as a skier you may prefer to follow my new author blog at http://www.dahillauthor.com

For those of you more interested in skiing, don't worry, the 2012-13 ski season is only 43 days away and I shall soon be providing my normal blow by blow account of what I hope is a better season than last year!

When is a holiday not a holiday?

When you live in the US. Of the many places I have lived (or spent extended periods of time working) the US is the least universal in its observance of public holidays. Sure everybody takes Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas but there are a whole lot of other "holidays" where only a small proportion of people are actually off work (which is kind of inconsistent with the whole concept of holiday if you ask me.)

Columbus Day (today) is one of them. It's one of those holidays that is largely unobserved unless you work in a government office or the Post Office. I know this because Marie just asked me if the Post Office was closed today. So I typed Post Office Columbus Day into Google and had the answer seconds later. Which leads me to the real point of this post, to ask "how did people live before the Internet?"