benzipkin.com

The New York Times Online recently launched a neat online tool – The TimesMachine – that lets you browse their issue archive stretching back to the 1850s. You can see the newspaper layouts in their original format (something Google news doesn’t offer).

I did a look-up of October 25, 1872 – one hundred years before I was born. It doesn’t seem like too much was going on outside of the Horace Greeley campaign, although it’s hard to tell because there are no real headlines! I suppose the headline is an invention of the modern newspaper…

ABC News has a neat little Flash app that matches a presidential candidate to your political views based on a series a multiple-choice questions.

Admittedly, I haven’t been following the presidential race as closely as I probably should be, but who the heck is Mike Gravel? Apparently his platform matches the most closely to my views. And if I decide that I’m not a Gravel-backer (is that Graveler?) my next choices are Kucinich and Biden…yikes!