I'd vehemently differ, other than perhaps as a piece of abstract art: the black bar is attention-grabbing to negative effect, and the opening animation is self-indulgent, as is the massive whitespace atop. Also, the width of the page seems rather strange: why so wide, with no content?

The text column is narrow because it's easier for humans to read text in narrow columns. Also, negative space isn't necessarily bad -- it can be used to draw attention to important items.

Now that I think about it, if the black bar was lighter, then the page wouldn't balance visually. To be honest, I didn't actually notice what was on the black bar when I first read the article, and when you scroll down it collapses into something less visually imposing. The open animation could do with being a bit faster or vanishing altogether though. I feel like having a smooth close animation is important because the eye is attracted to sudden movement.

I have no problem with the narrow text column, what bugs me is the fact that the web page has horizontal scroll bars on my 1440-pixel wide display. Nothing on the page requires that much width.

You're right, it does. Didn't notice that. That is rather silly.

I cannot read beyond the first few lines on my Droid. Very disappointing.

Well, meh. It doesn't scroll when pressing the spacebar, so this is quite bad from a usability point of view.