It's an attractive design. Here are my nitpicks. Feel free to disregard as many as you wish ;)
I personally prefer pages that do not require higher than 800x600. Horizontal scrolling bothers me.
It was not immediately obvious to me that a lot of your links actually were links since they are all different colors and do not have underlines. I would suggest either giving them an underline or making them the same color (a different color from other text). They do change when you hover over them, but might still confuse less computer-literature users.
Have you considered putting the poll or the top bar (between the date and the "Headlines") on the sidebar to the left?
What is the difference between "Fresh Droppings" and "Older Headlines"? They both look like older stories to me, though one looks a little older. If so, I would condense these into a single section.
Your FAQ link points to http://chron.edgecity.net/special/ which is blank. When I manually added "faq" onto the end of that I got the default scoop FAQ page.
4Literature - Read, write, and discuss your favorite books.
