Almanacs “The Almanac - Nov. 9 - Post Chronicle” plus 4 more

The Almanac - Nov. 9 - Post Chronicle
Will It Be A Bad One? 2009-2010 Winter Forecast - WCPO
On Native Ground - American Reporter
Snowmobiling Economic Indicators Are Positive for 2009-2010 Season - PR-USA.net
Daily almanac - Columbus Dispatch

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Posted: 09 Nov 2009 04:34 AM PST

Today is Monday, Nov. 9, the 313th day of 2009 with 52 to follow.

The moon is waning. The morning stars are Venus, Mars and Saturn. The evening stars are Mercury, Neptune, Jupiter and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Scorpio. They include astronomer Benjamin Banneker in 1731; Russian author Ivan Turgenev in 1818; architect Stanford White in 1853; actor-comedian Ed Wynn in 1886; actresses Marie Dressler in 1868 and Hedy Lamarr in 1914; Sargent Shriver, first director of the Peace Corps, in 1915 (age 94); former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew in 1918; actress Dorothy Dandridge in 1923; astronomer Carl Sagan in 1934; baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson in 1935 (age 74), and bodybuilder/actor Lou Ferrigno (TV's "Incredible Hulk") in 1951 (age 58).

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On this date in history:

In 1918, German Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated as World War I drew to a close.

In 1933, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt set up the Civil Works Administration as an emergency depression agency to provide jobs for the unemployed.

In 1938, mobs of Germans attacked Jewish businesses and homes throughout Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, or Crystal Night.

In 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled major league baseball isn't within the scope of federal anti-trust laws.

In 1965, a massive power failure left more than 30 million people in the dark in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada.

In 1984, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was completed by the addition of the Frederick Hart statue called "Three Servicemen."

In 1985, Gary Kasparov, 22, became the youngest world chess champion, ending the 10-year reign of Anatoly Karpov in Moscow.

In 1989, East Germany announced free passage for its citizens through border checkpoints. The announcement rendered the Berlin Wall, the most reviled symbol of the Cold War, virtually irrelevant 28 years after its construction.

Also in 1989, aging Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping resigned from his last official position as chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission.

In 1991, Hong Kong reinitiated its controversial program of forced repatriation when it deported 59 Vietnamese refugees.

In 1992, violence escalated along the Israeli-Lebanese border one day before the resumption of Middle East peace talks in Washington.

In 1995, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat visited Israel for the first time to offer personal condolences to the wife of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In 2002, the death toll from West Nile virus on this date was at least 148 in 2,796 cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

In 2003, Iran's foreign minister said his country wanted closer relations with the European Union and was stopping uranium enrichment.

In 2005, a series of explosions rocked three major hotels in Amman, Jordan, killing 57 people and injuring hundreds. Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia claimed responsibility.

In 2006, losses by incumbent Republicans in Virginia and Montana gave the Democratic Party a majority in the U.S. Senate in 2006 midterm elections.

In 2007, Michael Mukasey was sworn in as U.S. attorney general in a private ceremony at the Justice Department, He succeeded Alberto Gonzales, who resigned under fire.

In 2008, three men were executed by firing squad for the 2002 bombings in Bali that killed 202 people, mostly tourists.

Also in 2008, China announced plans for a stimulus package worth more than $500 billion over two years for infrastructure projects, including new airports, subways, low-income housing and rail systems.

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A thought for the day: Edgar Watson Howe wrote, "What people say behind your back is your standing in the community." (c) UPI

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Will It Be A Bad One? 2009-2010 Winter Forecast - WCPO

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:47 AM PST

The news is grim from the Farmer's Almanac, "Old Man Winter doesn't want to give up his frigid hold just yet, but his hold will mostly be in the middle of the country." Not a very comforting forecast for those of us in the Tri-State.

The forecast from the Farmer's Almanac places the Tri-State in Very Cold & Snowy during January-March 2010, while eastern Ohio will see Average Temps and Precipitation.

Long range seasonal models from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center for January, February and March 2010 have a different take on the forecast. Their model is showing slightly above normal temps with below normal precipitation. Their long range model for December '09 - February '10 depicts near normal temps with below normal precipitation.

The National Weather Service is basing their forecast on a weak El Nino which causes the central and eastern tropical Pacific waters to warm. It usually lasts about 12 months.

Global temperature data from NASA satellites launched in 1979 have shown a decline in temperatures over the past decade. The National Climatic Data Center shows that temperatures in 2008 were below normal for most of the country when looking at the 115 year average.

There was only a slight increase in global temperatures for July and August this year due to a weak El Nino, yet Cincinnati in July recorded its coldest July since records started being kept in 1869.

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On Native Ground - American Reporter

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:35 AM PST

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.

Snowmobiling Economic Indicators Are Positive for 2009-2010 Season - PR-USA.net

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:42 AM PST

Every year, 3 million people bundle up, get outdoors and participate in an activity that generates $28 billion worth of economic activity in North America -- snowmobiling. Snowmobiling is a favorite winter pastime, and it continues to grow each year. Snowmobile registrations in North America increased in 2009 compared to 2008. In Canada, there was an 8 percent increase in registered snowmobiles, and in the United States, registered snowmobiles increased by 1 percent. There are over 2.5 million registered snowmobiles in North America.

Snowmobilers' level of activity is also rising. There are 230,000 miles of groomed and marked snowmobile trails that wind through beautiful scenery throughout the U.S. and Canada, amounting to more miles of snowmobile trails than in the entire U.S. interstate highway system. Snowmobilers averaged over 1,300 miles of riding -- a 20 percent increase from the previous year.

Major universities across North America have conducted Economic Impact Studies, highlighting how snowmobile related winter tourism is a major part of winter's economic engine. Studies show over 90,000-full time jobs exist to support snowmobile tourism. Many areas report that snowmobiling is the largest part of their tourism sector.

The 2009-2010 season is gearing up to be just as promising. Climatologists across North America have reported a 7 degree below average temperature for parts of North America. In some regions, this summer has been the coldest in over 100 years. Initial reports show that global cooling will continue for ideal snowmobiling temperatures this winter. The Farmer's Almanac also predicts a frigid winter with abundant snowfall.

For those interested in learning more about snowmobiling, www.gosnowmobiling.org is an essential tool for guidance. The site provides information on getting started in snowmobiling, dealers and renters who can supply you with a snowmobile, locations to snowmobile, and more.

ISMA is an organization representing the four manufacturers of snowmobiles. ISMA's main function is to provide and encourage policies, programs and activities to improve the lifestyle activity of snowmobiling throughout the world. It maintains strong partnerships with the Canadian Council of Snowmobile Organizations (CCSO/CCOM) and the American Council of Snowmobile Associations (ACSA). For more information, visit www.snowmobile.org. International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association, 1640 Haslett Road, Suite 170, Haslett, MI 48840.

Daily almanac - Columbus Dispatch

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 12:24 AM PST

Today is Monday, Nov. 9, the 313th day of 2009. There are 52 days left in the year.

Highlights in History

• On Nov. 9, 1989, communist East Germany threw open its borders, allowing citizens to travel freely to the West.

• In 1872, fire destroyed almost 800 buildings in Boston.

• In 1918, it was announced that Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II would abdicate. He then fled to the Netherlands.

• In 1938, Nazis looted and burned synagogues as well as Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria in what became known as "Kristallnacht."

• In 1965, the great Northeast blackout occurred as a series of power failures lasting up to 13 1/2 hours left 30 million people in seven states and part of Canada without electricity.

• In 1976, the U.N. General Assembly approved resolutions condemning apartheid in South Africa, including one characterizing the white-ruled government as "illegitimate."

• Ten years ago: With fireworks, concerts and a huge party at the landmark Brandenburg Gate, Germany celebrated the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

• Five years ago: Attorney General John Ashcroft and Commerce Secretary Don Evans resigned; they were the first members of the cabinet to leave as President George W. Bush headed into his second term.

• One year ago: Barack Obama's transition chief, John Podesta, told Fox News Sunday the president-elect planned to review Bush's executive orders on issues such as stem-cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.

Thought for Today

"I think charm is the ability to be truly interested in other people." -- Richard Avedon, American fashion photographer (1923-2004)

Source: Associated Press

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Almanacs

Monday, November 9, 2009