What could be more American than a fresh start? Fresh starts are the American tradition.

Europeans got a fresh start five hundred years ago when they came west across the Atlantic. The people the Europeans kicked aside to get that fresh start got their own fresh start, tens of thousands of years earlier, when they came east across the Bering land bridge.

Well, today the Gazette gets not just one, but two fresh starts.

Yesterday, about sundown, we switched our DNS settings. According to our lamentably limited understanding of these things, little-bitty patches of iron oxide around the world have been having their magnetic orientation reversed. As a result, when they visit our URL, instead of finding our former website, they’ll find this one. We’ve hankered for some time for a website simple enough for us to understand. Thanks to the combined efforts of the WordPress community, we think we may have found it. We are grateful.

As we switch over, we also want to express our undying gratitude to Cheri Haley, of Primal Media, who, four years ago, so generously gave us the site we now leave behind. If we were more competent and energetic, we could certainly have done more with it. Despite our sloth and ineptitude, the old site did wonderful things for the Gazette. It probably brought us three-quarters of our subscription base.

Our other fresh start today will be on Vol. 251., No. 13; our March 23 issue. Every fortnight it’s something, this fortnight our primary distraction has been tinkering with this new site. But now it’s time we got back to the paper side of things. The image of sixteen empty clipboards just above represents the state of the paper this morning. We’ve got until the 22nd to fill those clipboards up. Wish us luck.