Posted: 11 Sep 2009 12:06 PM 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.

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 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.

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. 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, he said.

"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.

On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 10:43 PM 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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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.

Almanac clings to formulaic success - Evansville Courier-Press

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 10:00 PM PDT

It happens every fall, as sure as TV reporters shoot footage of woolly worms crossing a rural road or bees buzz syrupy soft drinks at college football stadiums.

The folks at New Hampshire's Old Farmer's Almanac release yet another edition filled with weather forecasts — chilly and wetter than normal for us this winter — and weird or whimsical bits of info.

You know the kind: How to use a "mad" stone (found in the gut of a cud-chewing animal) as a home remedy; the return of the push mower; the best way to make a cheese sandwich; the best day for cutting hair or quitting smoking; and news of an extraterrestrial visitor in 2010.

Don't be scared, it's only Jupiter, which will be the closest it's been to Earth (367 million miles) in almost 50 years.

The $5.99, 250-page almanac, out on newsstands this week, reaches 9 million readers and follows the motto set by founder Robert B. Thomas in 1792: To be "useful, with a pleasant degree of humor."

But it's the weather predictions that spark conversation as leaves turn and frost returns.

So let's go straight to the forecast for Region 7, a narrow band of Ohio Valley stretching from Evansville to Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.

The almanac states that although December will be four degrees warmer than normal (39 degree average), overall winter temperatures will be slightly below normal (especially in January and March) while precipitation will be above normal, with near-normal snowfall.

Best chance of snow is late January, mid-February and early March.

April and May 2010 will be much warmer and dryer than normal, according to the almanac.

Summer 2010 will be cooler than normal and rainfall below normal, especially in the east.

The publication, whose scientists look to the future by looking into the past, bases its forecasts on technology, the solar cycle and what it calls a secret formula.

While past claims of an 80 percent accuracy rate were tongue-in-cheek, a study by the University of Illinois found the almanac's degree of accuracy couldn't be explained by random chance.

Looking at the bigger picture, the almanac's staff says its study of the current solar cycle reinforces its belief that over the coming years a gradual cooling of the atmosphere will occur, offset by any warming caused by increased greenhouse gases.

The almanac also has an Old Farmer's Almanac for Kids, Volume 3, which is aimed at children ages 8 and up and filled with facts, stories and projects. Go to www.almanac4kids.com.

Gardener's almanac - Wichita Eagle

Posted: 11 Sep 2009 10:08 PM PDT

Rain, rain, go away — Not for good... just come again some other day. The crazy wet, cool weather continues. Trees are starting to change colors. I'm trying to enjoy it, but it just doesn't seem natural.

Asparagus and rhubarb — Ward Upham of K-State says that asparagus and rhubarb plants are building up reserves for next year now. They need plenty of water (check), and should be kept free of weeds. You can either remove foliage once all the green is gone or leave it to help collect snow to moisturize the plants this winter, Upham says.

Plant — Lettuce, radishes, spinach, turnips.

Roll out the rain barrels — There are a couple of opportunities to get in on the rain-collecting craze this month:

* Botanica will offer its second rain barrel workshop on Sunday, from 1 to 4 p.m. Twenty walk-ins will be accepted. Participants will take home a 55-gallon completed rain barrel (be sure to bring a vehicle that can transport it). The cost is $55, or $50 for Botanica members.

* A $10 rain barrel can be had at an event from 2 to 6 p.m. Sept. 30 at the Coca-Cola plant at 3001 E. Harry. The plant is closing Oct. 10, and the employees will be recycling 55-gallon drums into rain barrels for the public. To register, call Cindy at Coca-Cola at 316-612-6411. Mail a $10 check payable to the Ellsworth County Conservation District to Coca-Cola, 3001 E. Harry, Wichita, 67211. During the event you can pick up your barrel, adding an overflow valve if you desire and watching how they're made. You can also pick up other conservation information.

Pruning workshop — Botanica will have a workshop from 8 to 10 a.m. Sept. 24 on basic pruning guidelines to promote plant health and maintain a natural shape. The fee is $12, or $8 for Botanica members. Bring pruners. To register, call 316-264-0448.

"Shrink Your Lawn" talk — Author Evelyn Hadden will be at Botanica on Sept. 27 to give a presentation based on her book "Shrink Your Lawn: Design Ideas for Any Landscape." The talk will be at 3 p.m. The cost will be $10, or $6 for Botanica members.

Daylily meeting — The Wichita Daylily Club will meet at 7 p.m. Monday at Botanica. The public is invited. A video of this year's national meeting in Lake Mary, Fla., will be shown.

Project Beauty tea — Project Beauty will start its 2009-2010 membership drive with a Tree Coins in a Fountain tea at 1 p.m. Thursday at Botanica. It will include a style show with selections by Pearl from Dillard's Towne West. There is no charge. The theme of the tea will be a celebration of Project Beauty's donation of the new fountain in Botanica's Shakespearean Garden. Project Beauty is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the beautification of Wichita.

FloraKansas plant sale — The FloraKansas native plant sale at Dyck Arboretum of the Plains in Hesston continues today and Sunday. Hours are from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. today and from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Scott Vogt, arboretum horticulturist, will be on hand to help people choose the right plant for the right place.

Plant a Row for the Hungry — Here's where you can donate fruits and vegetables from the garden to the needy, during business hours:

* Kansas Food Bank, 1919 E. Douglas

* Augusta Ace Hardware, 316 W. Seventh Ave. in Augusta

* Brady Nursery, 11200 W. Kellogg

* Hillside Nursery, 2200 S. Hillside

* Hillside Feed & Seed, 1805 S. Hillside

* Johnson's Garden Centers, 802 N. Ridge Road, 21st and Woodlawn, 2707 W. 13th St.

* Valley Feed & Seed, 1903 S. Meridian.

Tuesdays on the Terrace — Wildflowers & Whiskey Sours is the theme of this week's Tuesdays on the Terrace at Botanica. From 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday there will be a cash bar and live music by on the terrace and the gardens to visit. The event is included in Botanica admission or membership.

_ Annie Calovich

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Almanacs

Saturday, September 12, 2009

“Some cling to 'Old Farmer's Almanac' in Web age - Houston Chronicle” plus 3 more

“Some cling to 'Old Farmer's Almanac' in Web age - Houston Chronicle” plus 3 more

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