“Farmer's Almanac weathers the ages - The Washington Times” plus 4 more

Farmer's Almanac weathers the ages - The Washington Times
'Old Farmer's Almanac' still spots cold in Web age - Forbes
Dallas Cowboys blog: The return of Five Downs with Football Outsiders - Dallas Morning News
Stretching your golf season - Enterprise-Bulletin
On Native Ground - American Reporter

Farmer's Almanac weathers the ages - The Washington Times

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 02:48 AM PDT

By Russell Contreras ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOSTON | Doris Smith Mills often comes across past editions of the Old Farmer's Almanac at her family's 110-year-old farm in Westport, Mass. She believes previous Smiths read it for entertainment and for its yearly weather predictions in order to be ready for New England's fickle climate changes.

Today, the 78-year-old has the 24-hour Weather Channel and various weather Web sites at her fingertips, and her farm has technology to handle all sorts of extreme weather. But she still reads the Dublin, N.H.-based almanac because it's been reliable for generations, she said.

"It helps us prepare," said Miss Smith, whose family owns Noquochoke Orchards along the Westport River. "It's interesting. I like reading it."

Despite the accessibility of forecasts that rely more heavily on traditional science, the 218-year-old Old Farmer's Almanac and its longtime New England competitor, the Maine-based Farmer's Almanac, still draw droves of fans. The books, which predict weather based on sunspots, planetary positions and meteorology, still are popular at farmers markets and bookstores. Each has a circulation of 3.5 million, and their Web sites are stacked with videos, blogs and podcasts.

Old Farmer's Almanac Editor Janice Stillman said her publication, the latest edition of which was released this week, is even looking into creating an iPhone application. "We've always been state of the art since 1792," Miss Stillman said.

Based on their own calculations, both almanacs are predicting a colder-than-usual winter. That conflicts with the long-range forecast by the National Weather Service, which is calling for warmer-than-normal temperatures across much of the country because of an El Nino system in the tropical Pacific Ocean, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md.

The Old Farmer's Almanac also predicts a cooler summer and says a major hurricane will hit Florida next September. Miss Stillman said upcoming solar activity, such as sunspots, are one of the factors in the almanac's predictions.

John Nielsen-Gammon, an atmospheric science professor at Texas A&M University, said predicting long-range weather is a challenge for scientists and laymen alike. But El Nino and La Nina systems have proven to be good indicators of what to expect.

"There is no known evidence that sunspots have but a small effect on the Earth's climate," said Mr. Nielsen-Gammon. "And we're talking about a couple of tenths of a degree Celsius difference."

Still, Judson Hale, the semiretired chairman and longtime pitchman for the Old Farmer's Almanac, said there have always been almanac doubters. Mr. Hale, 76, said the almanac uses a combination of science and a "secret formula" created by founder Robert B. Thomas. That combination, Mr. Hale said, has produced what he calls an "80 percent accuracy rate" in predicting long-range weather.

The secret formula, according to the almanac's Web site, is kept in a black box that is locked away in the New Hampshire offices and can only be accessed by a small number of employees.

'Old Farmer's Almanac' still spots cold in Web age - Forbes

Posted: 10 Sep 2009 08:04 AM PDT

BOSTON --

Doris Smith Mills often comes across past editions of the "Old Farmer's Almanac" lying around her family's 110-year-old Westport, Mass., farm. She believes previous Smiths read it for entertainment and its yearly weather predictions to ready for New England's fickle climate changes.

"It helps us prepare," said Smith, whose family owns Noquochoke Orchards along the Westport River. "It's interesting. I like reading it."

Despite the accessibility of forecasts that rely more heavily on traditional science, the 218-year-old "Old Farmer's Almanac" and its longtime New England competitor, the Maine-based "Farmer's Almanac," still draw droves of fans. The books, which predict weather based on sunspots, planetary positions and meteorology, still are popular at farmers markets and bookstores. Each has a circulation of 3.5 million, and their Web sites are stacked with videos, blogs and podcasts.

"Old Farmer's Almanac" Editor Janice Stillman said her publication, the latest edition of which was released this week, is even looking into creating an iPhone application. "We've always been state of the art since 1792," Stillman said.

The "Old Farmer's Almanac" also predicts a cooler summer and says a major hurricane will hit Florida next September. Stillman said upcoming solar activity, such as sunspots, are one of the factors in the almanac's predictions.

"There is no known evidence that sunspots have but a small effect on the earth's climate," said Nielsen-Gammon. "And we're talking about a couple of tenths of a degree Celsius difference."

Still, Judson Hale, the semiretired chairman and longtime pitchman for the "Old Farmer's Almanac," said there have always been almanac doubters. Hale, 76, said the almanac uses a combination of science and a "secret formula" created by founder Robert B. Thomas. That combination, Hale said, has produced what he calls an "80 percent accuracy rate" in predicting long-range weather.

The secret formula, according to the almanac's Web site, is kept in a black box that is locked away in the New Hampshire offices and can only be accessed by a handful of employees.

Besides its weather predictions, the "Old Farmer's Almanac" also is known for its quirky stories and advice tidbits. For example, in the 2010 edition, the almanac advises readers on how to prevent their suitcases from collecting an odor when traveling. It advises travelers to put their socks and underwear in plastic bags and place the bags inside their shoes. Then put the shoes inside old, clean socks before packing them in the suitcase.

Hale admits the "Old Farmer's Almanac" has been viewed by some as a "bit hokey." He suspects that might explain how he ended up sharing the spotlight with certain guests at some of his media appearances. Many years ago, he appeared on a Cleveland television show next to a guest who could play "America the Beautiful" with his armpit and another guest who was said to be the world's tallest woman, he said.

"I just tried to be dignified," Hale said. "But I've often thought, 'Was there a message in all these groupings?' And if so, what was the message?"

There also have been odd coincidences. In 1978, a scheduled appearance on ABC's Good Morning America was canceled when Pope Paul VI died. When the show rescheduled Hale months later, his appearance was canceled again. The new pope, John Paul I, had died.

Clarke Canfield in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.

Dallas Cowboys blog: The return of Five Downs with Football Outsiders - Dallas Morning News

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 07:34 AM PDT

Bill Barnwell, a contributing editor at footballoutsiders.com and one of the minds behind the must-read Football Outsiders Almanac 2009, will answer five Cowboys questions each week of the season using the FO data and methodologies. The Week 1 edition:

First down: You are a GM with the benefit of hindsight. Which cornerback would you pick first in the 2008 draft: Aqib Talib, Mike Jenkins or Orlando Scandrick? How would you rank their rookie seasons?

I think you'd have to say Scandrick had the best season. Certainly, our numbers say as much. Talib struggled with a hamstring injury, but he played better as the season went along. Tampa had the best pass defense in the league against No. 2 receivers, and his performance had a fair amount to do with that. (They were awful against No. 1 receivers, but from what I saw of the Buccaneers, that had more to do with Ronde Barber than anyone else.)

Jenkins would be a distant third in that mirror, but as hard as it is sometimes, you have to be patient when it comes to analyzing whether a player is a bust or not. There's plenty of players who take more than one season to really develop at this level -- consider Corey Webster, who was awful to the point of being a healthy inactive in 2007, fell into a starting job in the playoffs, put on some good performances, and then looked like one of the best corners in the league a year ago. Alternately, think about Bucs wideout Michael Clayton. He had one of the best rookie years of any wide receiver in history, and has followed it with four seasons of no more than 38 catches or 484 yards.

Although we can start looking back now, it would be foolish to place Jenkins in the "bust" camp or Scandrick into the "steal" side of the equation. A lot can change in a year or two.

Second down: Which will be the more productive tailback trio this season: Tampa Bay's Cadillac Williams, Derrick Ward and Earnest Graham or Dallas' Marion Barber, Felix Jones and Tashard Choice?

The determining factor in that equation is going to be what happens around those players, not necessarily their "true" level of performance. To be able to run the ball, you also have to be able to throw the ball; there's significant concern that Tampa won't be able to, and some mild concern that Dallas might struggle to do so (although I personally think both will be able to with some effectiveness).

If both their passing games are sound, then you have to consider the health of the offensive lines in front of them. Both these teams have very good offensive lines when they stay healthy. I'd venture to guess that the team whose starting five offensive linemen start more games than the other team's starting five will have a superior running game, making their tailbacks look more productive.

Third down: Did the Bucs upgrade at quarterback by getting rid of Jeff Garcia and bringing in Byron Leftwich?

I think it was a lateral move, although they're different sorts of players. Garcia was 18th in the league in DYAR and 16th in DVOA last year despite having a pretty good line and an ace receiver in Antonio Bryant. Leftwich hasn't been good since 2005, but he was very good that year, ranking eighth in the league in DVOA.

Again, a lot of the definition of whether Leftwich "succeeds" in Tampa will come down to the players around him. Naturally, he's supposed to make them better, but if Antonio Bryant has another brainfart and Kellen Winslow gets hurt, well, no quarterback's going to look good. There's also inherently going to be a short leash on the guy because of the presence of Josh Freeman.

Fourth down: There is a faction of Dallas media that believes Bradie James should have been a Pro Bowler last season. Tampa Bay's Barrett Ruud also didn't get an invitation to Hawaii. Which inside linebacker had the better year?

You should put that faction of the Dallas media in a room with the clip of Lorenzo Neal laying James out from the Ravens game last year playing over and over again until they change their mind.

We can't strictly compare Ruud to James statistically because their roles are different. Ruud is the middle linebacker in a 4-3, so he's going to make more plays than James would as one of the inside linebackers in a 3-4. Even so, it's hard to argue that James was on the same level as Ruud, who made 18.6% of his team's plays -- more than any other linebacker in the league. Those plays weren't very close to the line of scrimmage, which is usually thanks to poor performance up front. His charting numbers in pass coverage were also very good.

James ranked 18th in the league in plays, which isn't bad at all, but he also made his plays way off the line of scrimmage (3.9 yards away, tied for 74th in the league, and right around Ruud's level) and had poor numbers in pass coverage. Having an ambulatory linebacker next to him would have helped, but he might have to wait until 2010 for that.

So, by our statistics, Ruud was way better in coverage and made more plays. James ... talks more. Good player, that Bradie James, but just because everyone else on the Cowboys' roster made the Pro Bowl in 2007 doesn't mean James should get to go, too.

Fifth down: The Bucs finished sixth last season in the FO defensive efficiency ratings. What are your expectations for that unit after losing longtime defensive coordinator Monte Kiffin and legendary OLB Derrick Brooks among other pieces?

We're projecting a slight decline from their performance of a year ago, when they were sixth in the league in defensive DVOA, at -7.3%.

Our projection system looks favorably on teams that promote their defensive coordinators from within as opposed to those which bring in a new guy from outside, because we've seen way more positive improvements from the former than we have from the latter. (It also might be subject to some bias; teams might only promote from inside if they have an effective defense, or if they have supreme confidence in the new guy.) Although Jim Bates is coming in from outside the organization, he'll be answering to Raheem Morris, who was already in the organization. So we might be overestimating the impact of the switch there.

As for those old guys, well, they might not have been playing all that well. Even if losing them is a detriment, there should be a positive impact from the improvements made by players like DE Gaines Adams, Ruud, and CB Aqib Talib. So we're not expecting much of a slip-up or an improvement, one way or another.

Stretching your golf season - Enterprise-Bulletin

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 04:28 AM PDT

Posted By CAMERON BURCHAILS

Posted 3 hours ago

The start to the 2009 golf season can be summed up in five words. Rain, rain and more rain!

The Farmer's Almanac has long been a source for many to help predict the weather.

The 2009 fall prediction indicates that September will be average in terms of temperatures with above average rainfall. The first 10 days of the month have shown us that sometimes predictions can be wrong.

We have had the best weather of the entire summer with sunshine, blue skies and temperatures well into

the upper 70s and low 80s.

If you are a golfer or simply enjoy the outdoors, this has been an outstanding start to the month of September.

The prediction for Ontario in October is to expect above average temperatures, combined with below average precipitation. This can mean only one thing; don't put your golf clubs away too soon!

Last fall I set a personal record playing 72 holes of golf, on four consecutives days, on four different courses in November. The streak started on Nov. 5 at the Atoka Golf Club at Cranberry, followed by Nov. 6 at Batteaux Creek, Nov. 7 again at Atoka Golf Club, and finally the last round of the season at Grey Silo in Waterloo. I know that this personal best will be hard to beat.

The fall is my favorite time of the year to play golf. The colours of the trees, combined with the warm breezes and the rustling of the leaves make it a great time to play golf. I also enjoy the beautiful sunrises and sunsets that is characterized by the fall and even enjoy the calls of the blue jays, even though our ball team will not be making it to the playoffs again this fall.

The following are a few dates that you may wish to make a note of.

The first is Sept. 22, which marks the "official" end of summer and the first day of autumn. Thanksgiving weekend is on the weekend of Oct. 10, 11 and 12. Daylight savings time ends on Sunday, Nov. 1, and Thanksgiving in the states is on Thursday, Nov. 26.

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What do these dates mean in the grand scheme of things? Well probably not much, unless you are a golfer. To me, Sept. 22 marks the beginning of what I believe is the best time of the year to play golf.

Traffic and rates are down, while the temperatures are still up.

Thanksgiving weekend is usually busy for most families planning on getting together for turkey dinner. It also means the last opportunity for many to get in a round of golf or two.

So, plan ahead and book your tee off times well in advance, so that you are not disappointed.

Nov. 1 means that you now have one hour less to play golf. It also means that you will have to finish your round before 7:30 p. m., unless you like playing in the dark.

Last year's Indian summer was outstanding and one that will be hard "to beat."

I, however, being the eternal optimist believe that anything is possible and with a little luck, the golf season may be able to be stretched into the second or even third week in November.

perfect end to the season would be a quick round of 18 on a warm, sunny autumn day, followed by football on the American Thanksgiving weekend. I might even cap it off with one more turkey dinner, just to celebrate.

If my calculations are correct, that means that this year's golf season will have lasted seven-and-a-half months-- which means that there will only be four-and-a-half months left to rest and get ready for the 2010 season.

Enjoy the fine weather this fall and remember to call around for some of the best rates and specials of the season. For a complete list of golf course numbers and websites emailme at

Next Week: The Tour Championship Preview

Cameron Burechails (Teaching Professional), The Georgian

Bay Golf Academy, 705-441-0865,

On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 03:09 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

Friday, September 11, 2009