“Today in History - Oct. 13 - The Guardian” plus 4 more

Today in History - Oct. 13 - The Guardian
On Native Ground - American Reporter
AUTO ALMANAC - Owen Sound Sun Times
Snow, rain mix possible through Sunday morning - Derrick
Farmers' Almanac provides a rest from bad news - Nashville Tennessean

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Today in History - Oct. 13 - The Guardian

Posted: 14 Oct 2009 06:22 PM PDT

The Associated Press= Today is Tuesday, Oct. 13, the 286th day of 2009. There are 79 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On Oct. 13, 1792, the cornerstone of the executive mansion, later known as the White House, was laid during a ceremony in the District of Columbia.

On this date:

In A.D. 54, Roman Emperor Claudius I died, poisoned apparently at the behest of his wife, Agrippina.

In 1775, the U.S. Navy had its origins as the Continental Congress ordered the construction of a naval fleet.

In 1843, the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith was founded in New York City.

In 1858, the sixth debate between senatorial candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas took place in Quicy, Ill.

In 1909, political cartoonist Herbert Block (aka "Herblock") was born in Chicago; jazz virtuoso Art Tatum was born in Toledo, Ohio.

In 1943, Italy declared war on Germany, its one-time Axis partner.

In 1944, American troops entered Aachen, Germany, during World War II.

In 1960, Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy participated in the third televised debate of their presidential campaign. (Nixon was in Los Angeles; Kennedy was in New York.)

In 1962, Edward Albee's play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opened on Broadway.

In 1974, longtime television host Ed Sullivan died in New York City at age 72.

Ten years ago: The Senate rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 48 in favor to 51 against, far short of the 67 votes needed for ratification. In Boulder, Colo., the JonBenet Ramsey grand jury was dismissed after 13 months of work with prosecutors saying there wasn't enough evidence to charge anyone in the 6-year-old's strangulation. Canadian Robert A. Mundell of Columbia University won the Nobel Prize for economic sciences.

Five years ago: President George W. Bush and Democratic rival John Kerry held their third and final debate in Tempe, Ariz., trading blows on the Iraq war, taxes, gun control, abortion and jobs.

One year ago: On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average gained a shocking 936 points after eight days of losses. American Paul Krugman won the Nobel prize in economics for his work on international trade patterns. Las Vegas gaming executive Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, who inspired the film "Casino," died in Miami Beach at age 79.

Today's Birthdays: Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is 84. Playwright Frank D. Gilroy is 84. Gospel singer Shirley Caesar is 71. Actress Melinda Dillon is 70. Singer-musician Paul Simon is 68. Actress Pamela Tiffin is 67. Musician Robert Lamm (Chicago) is 65. Country singer Lacy J. Dalton is 63. Actor Demond Wilson is 63. Singer-musician Sammy Hagar is 62. Actor John Lone is 57. Model Beverly Johnson is 57. Producer-writer Chris Carter is 53. Minnesota Timberwolves assistant Reggie Theus is 52. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., is 51. Singer Marie Osmond is 50. Rock singer Joey Belladonna is 49. Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers is 48. Actress T'Keyah Crystal Keymah is 47. Former NFL player Jerry Rice is 47. Actress Kelly Preston is 47. Country singer John Wiggins is 47. Actor Christopher Judge is 45. Actress Kate Walsh is 42. Milwaukee Brewers reliever Trevor Hoffman is 42. R&B musician Jeff Allen (Mint Condition) is 41. Actress Tisha Campbell-Martin is 41. Classical singer Carlos Marin (Il Divo) is 41. Olympic silver-medal figure skater Nancy Kerrigan is 40. Country singer Rhett Akins is 40. TV personality Billy Bush is 38. Actor Sacha Baron Cohen is 38. Rock musician Jan Van Sichem Jr. (K's Choice) is 37. Denver Broncos safety Brian Dawkins is 36. R&B singers Brandon and Brian Casey (Jagged Edge) are 34. Actress Kiele Sanchez is 33. Boston Celtics forward Paul Pierce is 32. Miami Heat center Jermaine O'Neal is 31. Singer Ashanti is 29. Christian rock singer Jon Micah Sumrall (Kutless) is 29. Olympic gold medal swimmer Ian Thorpe is 27.

Thought for Today: "Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself." â€" Anthony Trollope, English author (1815-1882).

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On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 04:38 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.

AUTO ALMANAC - Owen Sound Sun Times

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 04:59 AM PDT

Posted By WHEELBASE COMMUNICATIONS

Posted 3 hours ago

DRAWING BOARD

2010 Honda Accord Crosstour: With last year's launch of the Toyota Camry-based Venza wagon, Honda must have felt the need to respond with a similar offering. The resulting Crosstour hatchback, scheduled for release in fall 2009, is built on a Honda Accord platform and will likely use that model's four-cylinder and optional V6 powerplants, plus offer all-wheel-drive as an option.

IT'S HISTORY

* Jochen Rindt is the only racing driver to have been posthumously awarded the Formula One championship. Rindt's 1970 points total following his fatal crash practising for the Italian Grand Prix that year was never equalled.

* From 1925-27, the Hertz rent-a-car company actually manufactured its own open-and closed-top automobiles specifically for hire.

EBAY WATCH

1957 MGA coupe, 13 bids, sold for $13,800 US: The MGA series, which was sold from 1955-62, was a popular roadster, but the "fixed head" coupe didn't sell nearly as well. That was a shame, since its owners didn't have to fight to install the roadster's awkwardly fitting soft-top during bouts of inclement weather.

Both models used the same 80-hp 1.6-litre four-cylinder engine attached to a stout four-speed manual transmission. Given this MGA's recent refurbishment, the winner of this auction scored a great deal. Visit www.ebaymotors.com.

PARTS BIN

Michelin driving shoes, $80, www.michelinfootwear.com: The Michelin name is well-known for its tires and now the company also markets a couple limited-edition driving shoes.

The Belair is a (black or brown) leather shoe with plenty of cushioning and support where you need it most, while the Cobra (pictured) is constructed with a leather and breathable mesh upper and can be ordered in black or tan and brown.

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Snow, rain mix possible through Sunday morning - Derrick

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 01:17 AM PDT

Snow, rain mix possible through Sunday morning

It's only mid-October, but area residents might wake up to a surprise the next few days as forecasters say the first snow of the year is in the air.

A mixture of snow and rain is in the forecast through Sunday morning as the region is expected to be affected by a low-pressure system. A meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh said there will be little or no accumulation because the ground isn't cold enough.

The early snow, if it arrives, will add to the up-anddown weather patterns the area has seen the past few weeks ranging from a few pleasant days to other days that have brought high winds and other adverse conditions.

Even if the snow flies the next couple of days, it will quickly melt because a warmup is expected next week. A high pressure system will move into the area by Monday, bringing high temperatures in the 50s Monday and Tuesday and the low 60s under sunny skies on Wednesday.

So there is a chance the region could still see an Indian summer before the first significant snowfalls arrive down the road. Almanacs have predicted that the area could see another long, cold and snowy winter.

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Farmers' Almanac provides a rest from bad news - Nashville Tennessean

Posted: 15 Oct 2009 12:06 AM PDT

It's amazing what can suddenly grab your attention, and even keep it for a while.

And that's with all the "important'' things going on in life, things such as the national debate on health-care reform, the debate over whether the U.S. should put more troops in Afghanistan, trying to find ways to reduce teen violence and even trying to get a colleague or two to understand that the Bordeaux area here is not in North Nashville.

But here I was, sitting at my desk late Tuesday afternoon reading through a Farmers' Almanac for 2010. I bet Jerry Thompson is getting a kick out of this, I thought to myself as I turned page after page of the publication that gives "a measure of good humor, amusing anecdotes, wise-old weather predictions, helpful hints and good reading for every member of the family done on a high moral plane.''

Jerry Thompson, for those of you who, unfortunately, didn't get a chance to meet him, was an award-winning Tennessean reporter, city editor and columnist who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan for 16 months in 1979 and 1980 to write about the hatemongering of that racist group. Now and then in his columns, Thompson, who died in late January 2000 following a 12-year battle with cancer, would make his fearless weather forecast for the coming winter.

The last forecast he made, in October 1999, talked of how the signs he depended on the year before were much more complicated in 1999.

"When the woolly worms started to show themselves last year, some were brownish orange,'' he wrote. "Others had wide bands of orange around their bodies and only a few were solid black.

"The more orange on a woolly worm usually means the warmer the weather. On the other hand, a solid black one portends a cold, harsh winter. All the woolly worms I've seen this year, as well as those seen by my neighbors, have been solid black. I get the shivers just thinking about it.''

Now, I am not going to go out on a limb and make a forecast for what the weather will be like this winter but with all the rain and cool temperatures we've had recently, something tells me we could be in for a rough winter. And I might add that I haven't seen any woolly worms so far this fall.

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Almanacs

Thursday, October 15, 2009