“Almanac Predicts 'Very Frigid' Winter - AOL” plus 4 more

Almanac Predicts 'Very Frigid' Winter - AOL
Reflecting on a bummer summer - Buffalo News
Farmer’s Almanac: ’09/10 ski season to be totally gnarly - Aspen Daily News
Dream Team: Mickey, Spidey and the Hulk - Barron's Online
On Native Ground - American Reporter

Almanac Predicts 'Very Frigid' Winter - AOL

Posted: 05 Sep 2009 07:41 AM PDT

Sixeyess4dinner

06:53 AMSep 03 2009

It is a reflection of an education system in serious need of revampment, when there are so many that claim cold (or colder) weather 'somewhere' disproves global warming. These same people (often) cannot discern 'weather' vs climate, regional vs global or actual temp vs average temp. These same people (again, often) seem fixated on Al Gore. Whatever Al Gore is doing, whether he is a hypocrite or not, doesn't change our climate dynamics. However, since these people are willfully ignorant of the science behind our observations, they are reduced to waving their poms poms and singing chants of meaningless rhetoric about Al Gore............

Reflecting on a bummer summer - Buffalo News

Posted: 05 Sep 2009 06:30 AM PDT

A cool, rainy season dampens rituals usually spent under the sun

If you were drenched at Shakespeare in Delaware Park or raindrops diluted your barbecue sauce while trying to grill, don't feel alone.

This has been the 12th rainiest summer since 1873, according to National Weather Service records, continuing a trend that began last year when 13.04 inches fell from the sky.

"It's been the bummer summer, definitely the worst ever, without a doubt," said Rick Cohen, who has operated Transit Drive-In Theater in Lockport for 22 years. "I remember in July having to wear a sweat shirt and seeing customers bundled up in blankets. That's not how it's supposed to be."

Cohen said the summer's cool, rainy weather melted away anticipated box office revenues from "Ice Age 3" and "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince."

The 12.6 inches of rain and chillier-than-normal temperatures also washed summertime revenue down the drain for numerous Western New York businesses.

"Everybody who has produced special events in Western New York has definitely been affected this year. When you're trying to balance a not-for-profit budget like Buffalo Place, it certainly gets a little bit challenging when Mother Nature decides not to cooperate," said marketing manager Steven Joseph.

Two of the popular Thursday at the Square concerts that Buffalo Place presents were canceled due to rain, one in July when the cool weather was most pronounced.

With an average temperature of 66.9 degrees, and an average high of only 75.2, July was the sixth coolest since Ulysses S. Grant occupied the White House.

The sheer number of rain days this summer — 37 — also didn't help. Just ask Richicq Alberts, owner of Mickey Rats and Captain Kidd's in Angola-on-the-Lake. Grosses this summer were halved due to the weather, forcing a steep staff reduction.

"I've been doing this a long time, but there has never, ever been a summer — not even close — that has had this kind of consistently bad weather," Alberts said. "Between the chilliness and constant rain, it was the worst beach weather I've seen, and I've been in business 30 years."

Having said that, Alberts said it actually wasn't all bad.

"There was an eight-day stretch where the business was just fabulous. ... When we had nice weather, we were having record-breaking days because people were taking off work," he said.

Western New York was hit hard with heavy rains along the tri-county area of Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and southern Erie counties, marked by the Aug. 9 flash flood through Silver Creek and Gowanda. A tornado went through Corfu in Genesee County on July 25.

Farmers also had unwelcome weather to put up with.

"The weather posed a greater risk and more obstacles than usual, particularly for farmers who harvest field crops," said Paul Lehman, Cooperative Extension educator for Niagara County.

While beaches such as Beaver Island "had a lousy summer" because of the cool temperatures and rain, attendance at campgrounds in Evangola, Barker and Youngstown appear to have been unaffected, said parks spokeswoman Angela Berti.

"We attribute that more to the economy, because it's an affordable vacation for people to camp in state parks. Campers are also diehard, and weather doesn't get them down," Berti said.

The Buffalo Zoo also didn't suffer much because of the wet weather.

Owing to the popular attraction M&T Bank Rainforest Falls, which opened last September, attendance was up 15,000 from June to August, said zoo spokeswoman Jennifer Fields.

Sports adversity this summer, however, has meant dealing with unwelcome weather.

The Porter Cup was interrupted by weeklong rains in late July, shortening the event to 54 holes and requiring the field to be cut on an emergency basis for the first time in its 51-year history.

And the Bisons were down an average of 785 people a game for their home season, which ended Thursday.

"The three things we were fighting this year were the economy, weather and the play of the team," said Mike Buczkowski, the Bisons' general manager. The Bisons, as a first-time Mets franchise, have the worst record in the International League. "I would say the weather had the biggest effect on our attendance of those three."

That was most pronounced during June and July, when some rain fell on 19 of 26 games at Coca-Cola Field, accounting for some of the seven rainouts this season, Buczkowski said.

Things may not be a whole lot better weather-wise next year. The Old Farmer's Almanac predicts that in 2010 summers in the Northeast will be "cooler than normal," though with "slightly below normal rainfall."

Less-than-normal rainfall would be welcomed by Shakespeare in Delaware Park, hit by seven full rainouts and four cancellations immediately before a play began or by intermission. On other nights, performers operated under the constant threat of rain.

However, Lisa Ludwig, Shakespeare in Delaware Park's managing director, said drama buffs compensated by coming out in droves when the weather turned nice. "On the nights that were beautiful and wonderful, you couldn't find a spot on the hill."

With summer fading, dry weather is sticking around, with no rain predicted at least through Thursday.

e-mail: msommer@buffnews.com

Farmer’s Almanac: ’09/10 ski season to be totally gnarly - Aspen Daily News

Posted: 05 Sep 2009 05:11 AM PDT

According to 2010 Old Farmer's Almanac, there will be above average snowfall this winter in the Intermountain Region that includes Aspen. Snow will be especially heavy right about the time ski season kicks off, the guide's weather forecast claims, with more of the white stuff coming down around Christmas.

ìThe snowiest periods will occur in early and mid-November, mid- and late December, and mid- and late January,î says the whimsical almanac, which comes out Tuesday for the 218th consecutive year.

The guide's precipitation forecast, which comes from ìa secret formula that was devised by the founder of this Almanac, Robert B. Thomas, in 1792î was 88 percent accurate last year, according to the almanac.

Pitkin County Commissioner George Newman referenced the Old Farmer's Almanac's snow prediction last week during a board discussion of this winter's economic outlook.

In addition to its much-anticipated weather predictions, the 256-page almanac includes helpful hints for all things earthy and outdoorsy (and not). There's a list of the best dates to go camping, based on the phase of the moon. And there's a 10-page ìEssential Manure Manual,î along with edifying quotes from the likes of Desiderius Erasmus, and recipes for goulash and meatloaf with buttermilk.

A guide to snow-shoveling suggests drinking and shirking: ìAfter 25 swipes, sip a toddy, take a breath then do another 25. After 100 swipes, go inside and call your son to come over for dinner. While he's there, hand him a shovel.î

The good folks of Dublin, N.H., who put out the guide also give readers ads for a panoply of goods (ìASIAN BRIDES!î and a ìLucky Mojo Bagî) and services (ìThink you have been hexed? Removes all evil spells,î offers a spiritualist from Alabama) and advice (ìRead Romans, Chapter 10, verses 9-10. Next, read entire Bible repeatedly.î).

In addition to good snow, the almanac calls for a delightful year of stargazing. Jupiter will be the closest it's been to Earth since 1963. The best day for viewing will be Sept. 20. ìFinding Jupiter should be easy,î the guide says. ìBeginning in mid-August, look halfway up the southern sky for the night's brightest star. This is Jupiter!î

andrew@aspendailynews.com

Dream Team: Mickey, Spidey and the Hulk - Barron's Online

Posted: 05 Sep 2009 03:31 AM PDT

AMONG WALT DISNEY'S STRENGTHS IS A KNACK for creating, nurturing, selling and reselling characters with double lives, secret identities, alter egos. Sleeping Beauty is both a princess and a peasant girl. Hannah Montana pivots from pop star to normal teenager (to the extent that having a famous country singer Dad and living in a Malibu beachfront mansion is "normal").

This is among the less-discussed nodes of resonance in Disney 's (ticker: DIS) surprise deal last week to acquire Marvel Entertainment (MVL) -- creator of the average teenage boy who's also a web-squirting vigilante and the scientist who grows huge and green when perturbed.

The union of these two companies will make Marvel's male-skewing, often dark characters alter egos to Disney's girl-pleasing, sunnier personalities. The opportunity, and it's an attractive one, is to plug the characters from Marvel -- a pure content creator -- into Disney's global web of cable networks, product-licensing platforms and theme parks.

The potential for unleashing Spider Man, the Hulk and Iron Man -- not to mention some 5,000 total characters, many unknown and unexploited, and plenty of them no doubt forgettable -- on the Disney empire should justify well the stout price Disney agreed to pay.

The market expressed some mild alarm over the $4 billion tab, which amounts to $50 per Marvel share in cash and Disney stock. This values Marvel -- subject of a bullish item in The Trader column last October when the stock was near 30 -- at more than 22 times 2010 expected earnings and more than 13 times projected cash flow.

For certain, this represents a full price, but they're just not making 70-year-old iconic character portfolios that enjoy a slavish, multi-generational following and the capacity to drive nine-figure box-office hauls anymore.

Disney said the deal would dilute fiscal 2010 per-share earnings-now forecast at $1.87-by a mid-single-digit percentage. Disney shares sold off for four days, losing more than $2 billion in market value, before rising a bit Friday after analysts who had been briefed on deal details Thursday began commenting more favorably. The stock closed at 24.90, off 3.5% for the week.

This little shakeout creates a better entry point for investors in an already modestly valued stock -- probably the best-positioned media player even before picking up Marvel's stable of unique characters. Barron's has made this case going back to a positive cover story a year and a half ago ("The Magic's Back," Feb. 25, 2008). Since then, Disney shares have outperformed both the general media sector and the S&P 500.

There are signs that Disney is keeping financial expectations muted with its guidance on the acquisition's likely impact. Barton Crockett, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets who follows Marvel, vetted Disney's dilution estimate and figures that the denizens of the Magic Kingdom are either planning to use very conservative accounting for intangibles or simply low-balling.

Much has been said about how rival studios, such as Sony (SNE); Fox, a unit of News Corp. (NWSA), Barron's parent; and Paramount, owned by Viacom (VIA), have distribution deals for future Marvel films, which means that Disney won't take full control of all movie economics for some time.

In an interview Thursday, Disney CEO Robert Iger said: "We factored in all encumbrances with the agreements -- and then some." He went on to note that the guidance doesn't include returns that might be generated from obscure Marvel characters or from cost savings; Iger noted that Marvel is already a rather lean operation. There are some rather bankable sources of incremental revenue, however. Outside the U.S., licenses for products bearing Marvel characters are negotiated through third parties, who take a big slice of the proceeds. Disney can pocket 100% of sales by simply plugging Marvel's characters into its vast global licensing infrastructure.

A recent meet-and-greet at Disneyland tied to its Fairies franchise drew large crowds to visit the park and pay to have photos taken with the characters, says Iger. Tapping Marvel fans for such events would be a layup. And Marvel has been seeking a television outlet in India, where Disney has one of the more popular youth channels.

Iger figures that Disney could decide to use a couple of Marvel's planned film releases in any given year to replace Disney-produced features. Iger has long advocated capital discipline in the movie studio, and this would serve that objective.

These benefits would be in addition to the widely noted opportunity to pump Marvel programming through Disney XD, the cable channel aimed at boys. To sum up, the price for Marvel will take some work to justify, but it's likely Disney will do just that.

THEY CALL IT THE PAPER ANNIVERSARY, the one that marks the completion of a first year. And boy, can we sure count on plenty of paper being stained -- and breath being expended and airtime burned -- about the first anniversary of the Lehman Brothers failure, approaching in a week.

Count on this: We'll soon be treated, or subjected, to how-it-all-happened articles and melodramatic cable specials, strategists' reminiscences and first-person laments from former staffers. This will generate some, but not all, of the noise in the market in coming weeks. We're also approaching the end, or the potential end, of some government financial-support programs rushed into place in the capital-markets chaos that followed Lehman's demise.

Then we've got the approaching profit-warning season -- the typical autumn reality check for next year's earnings forecasts -- the anniversary of 9/11 and the arrival of the date 09/09/09 on Wednesday -- which some flag as a potential terror-event magnet -- and the welling up of swine-flu fears. And that's to say nothing of a stock market that's up by half in six months.

In other words, there's plenty to worry about. And, helpfully, people are plenty worried, or at least cautious.

As noted here a couple of weeks ago, the prospect of a tougher, much more volatile market in September may have been over-anticipated by traders. This is visible in derivatives markets, where protection against a volatility spike has been bid up in price beyond what current conditions seem to warrant. (Much of this is hedging, but it's still noteworthy.)

In some respects, the outsized attention being paid to the historical record showing September to be the poorest month for stocks echoes the "sell in May" chatter of a few months ago. The historical pattern in both cases is clear, yet the almanac isn't always an oracle in any given year.

This doesn't mean -- as the most loudly snorting bulls will tell you -- that "everyone's bearish, and that's bullish." No, professional traders have chased the upward trend enough and gotten more comfortable with the S&P around 1000 than they've been in weeks, at least. The market for several days until Friday declined to seize on decent economic data as an excuse to tack on more upside. So far, the pullbacks have been mere hiccups, rather than dry heaves. At some point, that will change.

STILL, THE MAIN STREET INVESTOR REMAINS disengaged and skeptical of the market, as Ned Davis Research noted last week, citing fund-flow, investor-survey and consumer-confidence trends. This doesn't help much in fashioning a tactical view about the direction of the next short-term move. But it does have relevance for longer-dated trends.

Undoubtedly, the moment when retail investors were most confident about stocks as wealth-building perpetual-motion machines for buy-and-hold devotees was around the top of the tech bubble in early 2000, when the annualized trailing 10-year S&P 500 return exceeded 15%. Bad call.

Today, the trailing 10-year return is a negative 2% or so, excluding dividends. It turned negative last fall and is likely to stay weak as we lap the melt-up market of late 1999 and early 2000.

Yet if stupendous historical results were a siren's song that was best left unheeded in 2000, do the quite-lousy trailing 10-year numbers of today imply that -- as stated here in January -- "the direction of mean reversion for asset classes will favor stocks again before long"?

Noting the widespread disillusionment with the buy-and-hold philosophy that had so enchanted the public a decade ago, Bernie Schaeffer of Schaeffer's Investment Research says that "subsequent to the previous 21 negative decades ...the market was higher 70% of the time over the following one, three and five years, and was higher 100% of the time over the following decade. And market returns over these periods were, on balance, better than average."

There are no guarantees. And it's tough to argue against the idea that the market for some years might stay in a wide trading range. But those little folks with the luxury to sit tight for a while could be in a better position now than the professional investors who will be paid good money to try and eke out excess returns over the next four months to justify their employment.

E-mail: michael.santoli@barrons.com

On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 05 Sep 2009 02:55 AM PDT

On Native Ground
MY BACK PAGES: WATCHING MY CRAFT CHANGE OVER 30 YEARS
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.

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Printable version of this story

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass.

News came over an Associated Press teletype machine at 65 words a minute. Changing the heavily inked ribbons was always a chore, not to mention making sure the paper didn't run out.

Stories were typed on battered old manual typewriters that dated back to the 1940s.

Computers? Still a new-fangled technology that hadn't yet seeped down to this level of the business.

The Internet? There were only a few hundred people using it. If you needed to look up an address, you got a phone book or a city directory. If you needed to confirm a stray fact, you pulled out The World Almanac.

They were still using reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a razor blade and Scotch tape were your tools for editing audio. It was still an analog world, with dials and meters and black telephones with dials.

In the fall of 1985, when I started working in newspapers, video display terminals were cutting edge technology. Two years later, I went out and got my first computer - a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. With its built-in 300 baud modem, I could file a story anyplace I could find a pay phone.

Cellphones? That was as futuristic as the communicators they used on "Star Trek."

There were still a few smokers in the first city room I worked in. The barroom downstairs was still a place where you could find reporters between shifts. The building also shuddered just a little from the giant presses when they fired up, and the stairwells were coated with a thin film of ink.

That first newspaper company I worked for - the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram and Evening Gazette - had four morning and six afternoon editions and a dozen bureaus in the county it published in. There were two separate news staffs, and even though they worked for the same company, the competition was still fierce.

One of my several jobs was working in the morgue - the newspaper's library - where we still clipped stories out of each day's edition and filed them away in envelopes. When a reporter or editor needed background on a subject, my job was to retrieve the right folders with the right clippings in a room filled with hundreds of cabinets with files that went back decades.

Pneumatic tubes brought pictures up to the composing room, and page proofs came down to the copy desk the same way. The darkroom was just that, a dark room filled with a dozen photo enlargers and photographers rushing make prints on deadline. I eventually learned how to do darkroom work and how to go from taking the film out of the camera to producing a finished print in under 30 minutes. The photos from the AP came one at a time from a LaserPhoto printer, in 8 minute intervals. Waiting for photos was a constant hassle.

The old photographers I encountered then were old enough to have used Speed Graphics - the bulky, hard-to-focus 4 x 5 inch cameras that were the newspaper standard from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The old compositors I encountered then were old enough to remember linotypes and the smell of melting lead.

The old editors I encountered then were old enough to remember pastepots and black pencils and making and remaking a newspaper on the fly with a few written instructions and a lot of teamwork in the mechanical departments.

Pagination - making a pages on a computer - was just starting to creep into use. I remember the first such unit - a Mac Plus - which was used to make graphic. Within 10 years of seeing that Mac for the first time, I would be making pages on a computer. The compositors - the wizards with Exacto knifes that could do just about anything you asked, just don't touch the type, please - were out of a job.

Automation changed lots of things. I was replaced by a computer terminal in the paper's morgue. Indexing was now done with a few keystrokes, not with a heavy steel straight edge tearing pages. Digital photography made the darkroom obsolete. The teletype printers disappeared, and wire service news came flying into the mainframe computers at thousands of words a minute.

And now I feel as ancient as the people I met when I started out, the tribe that started out in the 1940s and 1950s, when newspapers were king and the work that reporters did was the stuff of movies.

Twenty years ago this month, I went through my first buyout. The T & G had been sold two years before, and changes were in the works. Being a junior member of the staff who lashed three part-time jobs into something of a living, I was thrown overboard immediately. But I was struck by how many people, the elders of the paper that I looked up to and learned from, chose to take a buyout and leave than stick around and face an uncertain future. Most of that generation left, and I got my first education on the harshness of the newspaper business.

The morning and evening papers merged the following year. The T & G's bureaus started to disappear. The presses moved out of the hulking old building on Franklin Street and went to a remote site a few miles away. The papers were sold again, this time to The New York Times Co. They eliminated zoned editions this year and the paper is struggling to survive.

Since that bleak Yuletide two decades ago, I've been through three more newspaper sales. I've become an elder, talking about the old days of afternoon papers, pasting-up pages, teletypes and darkrooms to a generation that Googles phone numbers and needs MapQuest to find an address. And I've watched my profession go from fat and sassy to threadbare and dying in one generation.

I'm still young enough to be a bridge between the analog and digital eras, and still looking forward to the shape of journalism to come. The tools we have now to tell stories were barely dreamed of when I started out, but I recognize how important they are and working to master them. We just have to remember that the need to tell stories is primal, and that storytellers will always be needed.

What will the young reporters I work with now be saying when they look back at their careers 20 years from now? Will they be talking about that gruff and crabby gray-bearded editor they had as their first mentor? The rickety first-generation iMacs that they have to use to write their stories on? The lack of reliable Internet and cellphone service? Or will they talk about working in newspapers at a time when they became quaint relics of a bygone age?

My love for the printed page is still abiding, but it's hard to remember what it was like before the Internet, before desktop computers, before digital cameras and voice recorders, before the avalanche of data that pours from the Web each day, before the 24-hour news cycle, before all the changes that I have seen in nearly three decades of broadcast, print and online journalism. The past is a nice place to visit, but the future is still the place I hope to see.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.

Almanacs

Saturday, September 5, 2009