'04

For 2004, you can peruse a collection of adult, amusing, creepy, cute, dynamic, friendly, geeky, guilty, helpful, hopeless, interactive, international, mean, often-imitated, philosophical, sexy, shocking, silly, strange, swanky or unexpected 404 pages at Area 404.

Search for "2004" on Google, and the first pages offered are "Athens 2004," "2004 International CES" (the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas), and "The Official Re-election Site for President George W. Bush." I'm sure many of us will be thoroughly sick of those topics by by the end of the year, if we aren't already . . . especially that last one . . .

Check out the New Year Applet Countdown to see exactly how far we are into the year, then reset your watch. Shouldn't they call it a "count up" now?

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My exciting New Year's Eve: We drank sparkling cider from champagne glasses -- my son calls it "grog" (he's a fan of pirate stories) -- and watched "Dick's ball drop" on TV, as one of the revelers in Times Square described it during a live interview on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. Then we went outside to see the fireworks and fighter jets over Manhattan.

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"Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go."
--Brooks Atkinson

"Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true."
--Lord Tennyson