We spent most of Thursday cooking yams, turkey, stuffing etc and an apple and pumpkin pie… and consumed it all in 45 minutes. The next day, we made turkey sandwiches and hiked with friends for an hour in the snow-crusted woods north of town.

More blog disintermediation of traditional media, but this time the medium in question is the singles bar. Megan MacArdle reports that “two of the blogosphere’s finest are tying the knot. They met and fell in love entirely through their blogs, and now they’re making it official.”

Always early to the story, Matt Welch writes in Glenn Reynolds as Media Person of the Year on a poll run by Patrick Phillips. One scribe nominates another on a third scribe’s site. Beneath mighty castles, the sands are shifting. (Or we’re all a bunch of bums shouting at each other in a blind alley.)

We’ve got eight inches of snow. Looks fantastic. Guess that, this being MA, they won’t cancel classes. Update: school was cancelled. “It is winter at last,” says my six-year-old.

Here’s a sad story about Tony Vena, 72-year-old “former Philadelphia parking lot operator” who spent $40,000 to invent, patent, build and market a pet doorbell. So far he’s sold 12. The really sad part: although the article says Vena has paid someone to design a web site, the site doesn’t show up in Google.

Matt Welch writes: “did you know I once lost the keys to the Prague castle? They literally had to change the locks of the place, because I was such a no-home, keys-losing jackass'”

Seeking to reach new audiences, eBay is paying 25% of an eBay seller’s ad in a print newspaper, magazine, catalog or newsletter. (Via Auctionbytes.com)

The Perfect Store, a recently published history of eBay, suggests that print marketing flops for online auctioneers. Times Mirror launched Auction Universe against eBay in 1997 with full-page ads in the LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant and Long Island Newsday. “The company’s internal projection was that the ads would generate at least 35,000 new registered users. In fact, they produced just 200.”

“Dow Jones’s Consumer Electronic Publishing unit, or CEP, which includes the Online Journal and other Web properties, was cash-flow positive in the third quarter.” (WSJ)

Today’s NYTimes offers an overview of the health insurance horror many self-employed people face. With insurance running at $10,000+ for a family of four, many families can’t afford to eat and insure. “According to recently released Census Bureau figures, 1.4 million Americans lost their health insurance last year, an increase largely attributed to the economic slowdown and resulting rise in unemployment.”

Woke up still jangling with adrenaline and ideas after yesterday’s intense afternoon in Room 127 of the Yale Law School. I’ve spent an hour this morning cleaning up yesterday’s notes and adding a few links.

Denise Howell, paraphrasing Glenn Reynolds from room 127, puts it this way: “Blogs, done right, provide the reader with a unique opportunity to get to *know* the writer, without and/or before ever meeting him or her.” Not surprising, I guess, since reading a blog is close as we get to “mind reading.”

In his recap, Tim Schnabel also enjoyed the confluence of mind and body in Room 127: “So for one day, the blogosphere actually had a physical center, a nexus of sorts, a town hall… call it what you will, it was interesting.”

Was it worth taking notes and postin real time? Who knows. As traffic logs show, most newspaper articles interest only 1 in 100 readers. Here’s the reaction of off-site event-watcher Renee Hopkins: “Somebody emailed the Kitchen Cabinet bloggers with the question, “does anyone care about this minute-by-minute reporting?!’ The answer is YES! I do!! I bet I’m not the only one, either. This attendance-by-blog is almost as good as being there.”

My favorite lines from yesterday:

Glenn Reyonds: “We will see the growth of weblogs and other thin media that are partially competive and partially symbiotic with big media.”

Jenny Levine: “Reading RSS on PDA with wireless is the ultimate in shifted information.”

Donna Wentworth: Art & blogs “are like people who are possessed of a driving will to please us.”

Mickie Kaus: “Many of the givens of journalism turn out to be artifacts of print technology.”

Me: “We need more Minutemen journalists.”

Rorry Perry: “The public can use Google as a de facto search engine of West Virginia legal information and decisions.”

Great job Yale Law team. Let’s do another in March!