Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

It’s nineteen hours into the new year, and I’ve received our first present from the far right fringe hate groups. In a plastic bag, tied with a white twist-tie and weighted with a piece of slightly red-tinged granite, a flier greeted me when I took the dogs out tonight:

Don’t Have Sex With Blacks
Avoid AIDS!

The flier [...]

Dan Gillmor’s new post-Mercury News blog has been launched at DanGillmor.typepad.com, and takes a moment to do a welcome expectations reset for what his experiment in participatory journalism will become. I’m still looking forward to seeing what happens.

inessential.com: NetNewsWire 2.0b10: podcasting, Atom, bug fixes, more. Nice work integrating RSS enclosures support into a “regular” RSS aggregator. Lots of Atom feed improvements too. I’d say “bravo” if it weren’t so redundant.

I updated the genealogy section of the site; this long overdue update added in all my living Brackbill second and third cousins. I had never had a chance to transcribe the Brackbill Book, the 1989 compilation of our family tree from Great-Grandfather Harry on down, and so I was in the embarrassing position of having [...]

We had Charlie and Carie over last night for a traditional New Year’s meal of cotechino and lentils—we upped the ante by serving them over homemade pappardelle in a sauce that also featured fresh sage, onions, and pancetta. (Skip’s Italian Food Blog: Felice Capo d’Anno talks a little more about the tradition).
Interestingly, Lisa had trouble [...]

All things considered, 2004, as years go, was no 2001, but I’m still glad to see it go. Here’s to 2005, and its possibilities. Will it be: “Under a blood red sky/A crowd has gathered, black and white/Arms entwined, a chosen few/The newspapers say it’s true”? or “Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any [...]