Based on a suggestion by (of all people) my weightlifting trainer, I'm trying a new tack for promoting Off the Top of My Head, plain word-of-mouth having, er, rather failed to set the world ablaze. Since I have for many years harbored a fairly deeply ingrained distaste for people who hawk stuff on the Internet (though I know, intellectually, it's been an irrational relic of an earlier time for... uh, quite a while now), I have mixed feelings about having done ( this, ) but it doesn't appear to be against the YouTube TOS, and, well, what the hell, it's worth a shot.

For all that I complain about life in Maine having lost a lot of the luster it held for me in, oh, say 1988, there are still a few great things about living here.

Here's one: Voting? Once the ballots are finalized and printed, it's on anytime the town office is open. "Screw it, I can't be arsed to go to the high school gym on the first Tuesday in November" is just as valid a reason for filing an absentee ballot as "I'm going to be in Guam that day." In fact, they don't care what your reason is. You want to vote on Thursday, October 9 because you think the feng shui is better? Fine! No skin off the town office's nose. I brought mine home to ponder it over dinner and then mailed it back this year, but in past years I've filled it out right there at the "car registration and other administrative functions" counter and handed it back across. Easy-peasy.

'Course, in my town the simplicity of this process is helped by the fact that the absentee ballots are exactly the same as the normal ones - there's no levers or electrical widgets or mysterious ATM-like machinery on Election Day, the people who go to the high school have to fill out precisely the same form, taken from the same stack of blank ones. They're all tallied by a machine like the ones that score the SATs, so they just put the absentee ones in a pile and then run them through the machine with everyone else's on Election Day evening after the polls close.