We wanted to tell you about the Newspaper Association of America’s International Newspaper Carrier Day, which is supposed to be celebrated on October 10, but as you’ll learn if you click that link, the “Full text of this content is available to subscribers only“. I’m personally not going to fuss about it, because as is more often becoming the case, my town doesn’t even have a newspaper. What I will fuss about though, is this character Christopher Columbus. I’m on a personal mission to have his holiday replaced with Leif Erikson Day for two simple reasons: 1.) Leif was here first, by 500 years, and 2.) He went home without making a big mess like Columbus did. As we all now know, the whitewashing of Columbus’ life we received as kids in America was bunk; he was brutal when in power, and messianically delusional later in life. I’m kind of joking (at least in terms of my personal activism on the issue) but this is a serious topic; as the people of the Transform Columbus Day Alliance point out, “Columbus Day is an inherently racist statement of cultural domination“, and Columbus was a “slave trader whose legacy is steeped in blood, violence, and death“. I’d like to add that his movie bombed at the box office too. In a week or so we’ll touch on another October horror: Halloween. Last year the scariest spooks were Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke; what will be the hot theme this year?