Saturday, December 5, 2009

Almanacs “Will It Be A Bad One? 2009-2010 Winter Forecast - WCPO” plus 4 more

Almanacs “Will It Be A Bad One? 2009-2010 Winter Forecast - WCPO” plus 4 more

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

Posted: 05 Dec 2009 06:05 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: 05 Dec 2009 02:52 AM PST

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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 ...

The Almanac - OfficialWire

Posted: 05 Dec 2009 01:04 AM PST

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

Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States, in 1782; U.S. Army Gen. George Custer in 1839; film director Fritz Lang in 1890; Walt Disney in 1901; U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., in 1902; film director Otto Preminger in 1906; singer Little Richard (Richard Penniman) in 1932 (age 77); author Joan Didion in 1934 (age 75); opera tenor Jose Carreras in 1946 (age 63); rock singer Jim Messina in 1947 (age 62); comedian Margaret Cho in 1968 (age 41); and actor Frankie Muniz ("Malcolm In The Middle") in 1985 (age 24).

On this date in history:

In 1776, the first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at William and Mary College in Virginia.

In 1848, U.S. President James Polk confirmed the discovery of gold in California, leading to the "gold rush" of 1848 and '49.

In 1933, prohibition of liquor in the United States was repealed when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 1945, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers disappeared on a routine flight in the area of the Atlantic known as the Bermuda Triangle.

In 1955, in one of the early civil rights actions in the South, blacks declared a boycott of city buses in Montgomery, Ala., demanding seating on an equal basis with whites. The boycott, prompted by the arrest of Rosa Parks, a black woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, lasted until Dec. 20, 1956, when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling integrated the city's public transit system.

Also in 1955, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organization merged after 20 years of rivalry to form the AFL-CIO.

In 1990, the U.S. State Department said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had accepted the idea of direct high-level U.S.-Iraqi talks to resolve the Gulf crisis.

In 1991, British media magnate Robert Maxwell disappeared while on his yacht off the Canary Islands.

Also in 1991, convicted mass murderer Richard Speck died, one day short of his 50th birthday and 25 years after killing eight student nurses in Chicago.

In 1993, Rafael Caldera Rodriguez was elected president of Venezuela.

In 2001, factions in war-shaken Afghanistan agreed on an interim government, naming Hamid Karzai as their new leader.

In 2002, U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., celebrated his 100th birthday on Capitol Hill. Thurmond, who retired the following year, had served the Senate since 1954, making him both the longest-serving and oldest member of Congress. He died June 27, 2003.

In 2004, the U.S. Congress said it was considering a proposal to withhold millions of dollars in foreign aid unless countries agree to shield Americans from prosecution of war crimes.

In 2006, Fiji's prime minister was placed under house arrest as the Pacific island nation's military announced it had taken control of the government.

In 2007, a man opened fire in a popular Omaha mall, killing eight and wounding five others before apparently turning the gun on himself.

In 2008, about 533,000 non-farm U.S. jobs were lost in November, the highest number since 1974, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rate increased 0.2 of a point to 6.7 percent.

 

A thought for the day: Archibald MacLeish said of Americans, "They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world."

 

Government almanac - The Spokesman-Review

Posted: 05 Dec 2009 12:14 AM PST

December 5, 2009 in Washington Voices

Government almanac

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Monday

Millwood City Council – 7 p.m. at City Hall, 9103 E. Frederick.

Spokane Valley Fire – 4 p.m. at Station 8, 2110 N. Wilbur.

Tuesday

Fire District 8 – 7 p.m. at Station 82, 12100 E. Palouse Highway.

Fire District 11 (Rockford) – 7 p.m. at Fire Station 1, 116 W. Emma.

Spokane Valley City Council – 6 p.m. at City Hall, 11707 E. Sprague.

Wednesday

Edgecliff SCOPE – 6:30 p.m. at the Edgecliff Senior Center, 6903 E. Fourth.

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Club moss spores act as a fiery ingredient - Akron Beacon Journal

Posted: 04 Dec 2009 11:10 PM PST

Here are a few recent Almanac questions.

Q: What is club moss?

A: Club mosses (Lycopodium) are a not-so-common denizen of Ohio woodlands. Species are also called ground pine or ground cedar and have attractive scalelike leaves and, unlike true mosses, do have a vascular system with specialized cells for fluid transport.

Club mosses are not seed plants and do not produce flowers or fruits, but rather reproduce by spores. These pale yellow spores have been used for everything from ingredients in fireworks to powders for photographic flashes and are often used by herbalists and homeopaths.

Today, club mosses are ground-hugging, creeping plants with a worldwide distribution, some growing as epiphytes on trees. But in ages past in the Carboniferous period (354 to 290 million years ago), their relatives were tree-size and contributed to coal deposits. Enjoy their graceful miniature forestlike appearance.

Q: I see that I can buy soil stimulants and various microbes that can be added to my garden soil. Are they worth it?

A: While there are unusual cases when adding specific microbes (certain fungi, bacteria, beneficial nematodes) to soil can be helpful, it is not easily done without detailed knowledge of the whys and wherefores of these applications. In reality, typical soil contains an almost unimaginable number and diversity of microscopic organisms.

Of course, sometimes soil in your garden may not be ''typical'' and it may not contain much organic matter and not a typical range of microbes. Thus the lure of adding some superorganisms, but do not assume you can just add some magic potion that will dramatically change the equation. These are mostly just ''chicken soup for the soil'' products.


The more important long-term solution is to build your soil environment so that it supports more microbial activity. The best approach: adding decomposed, composted organic matter over time, say for decades. That sustained stewardship is what gardening is all about.

By the way, when I say the numbers of soil microorganisms are ''almost unimaginable,'' I kid you not. Serita Fry, a former soil ecologist at Ohio State University, indicates a cup of healthy forest soil has more than 50,000 arthropods (mostly microscopic and a few macroscopic insects and their relatives), 100,000 nematodes of various types, 20 million protozoa, 200 billion single-celled bacteria and 60 miles of fungal hyphae.

I am currently reading a fun and informative book titled The Invisible Kingdom by Idan Ben-Barak that estimates even larger numbers of microbes, including a trillion (a thousand billion) total microbes in a teaspoon of soil, with more than 10,000 species of microbes making up that teaspoon-size total.

These two estimates are rather drastically different, but the point is, there are lots of the little invisible-to-the-naked-eye buggers.

Q: What is the biggest mushroom?

A: That is a tricky question, so here is a tricky answer.

First some background. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies, the reproductive structures of certain fungi. Purists might say that mushrooms are only the fruiting bodies of certain club fungi (so named for oblong, club-shaped, spore-bearing structures) but most mushroom lovers would include both club fungi and cup fungi, such as morels as mushrooms.

These mushroom fruiting bodies, complete with their microscopic spores, make up the most obvious parts of these fungi. But when the conditions of moisture are right for fruiting, the greatest part of the fungus is the threadlike mass of fungal mycelia.

If you do not believe me, check out a mushroom that is growing on organic matter in soil or on mulch: All that white stuff connected to the mushroom is countless strands of microscopic fungal strands, which when taken together, you see as threadlike mycelia with your naked eye.

The largest fungus in the world, indeed the largest organism in the world, is one of those club fungi with a mushroom for its fruiting body. It is a species of Armillaria known as the honey mushroom.

How big is this fungus? How about one specimen of Armillaria ostoyae in the forests of Oregon that covers 2,200 acres. However, this size refers to the spreading strandlike mycelium of the fungus in the ground. The fruiting body of this fungus, what we call the mushroom, is a much more modest 1 to 4 inches by 2 to 6 inches in size.

The largest fruiting body is a giant puffball (Calvatia gigantea), which we can typically see in Ohio as a football-size or watermelon-size mushroom that can grow to 4 feet across and weigh up to 45 pounds or so.

Now one final nuance, thanks to Diana the Baker at Akron's West Point Market.

On Thursday, our Fleshy Woodland Fungi class held a party in Columbus for Dr. Landon Rhodes, my graduate school adviser three decades ago, who is retiring this month. Dr. Rhodes (I still cannot bring myself to call him Lanny) taught the class lo these many years until my tenure for the class began this fall.

But back to Diana.

I gave her a book with pictures of mushrooms and asked her to unleash her creativity, and she came up with a chocolate cake in the shape of Dr. Rhodes' favorite mushroom — a morel. Diana's cake may not be a Guinness Book of World Records-size mushroom cake, but it was certainly the biggest mushroom cake any of us had ever seen. It must have weighed 8-10 pounds. And the taste — all our lives, we have looked for a cake such as this.

Jim Chatfield is a horticultural educator with Ohio State University Extension. If you have questions about caring for your garden, write: Jim Chatfield, Plant Lovers' Almanac, Ohio State University Extension, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691. Send e-mail to chatfield.1@cfaes.osu.edu or call 330-466-0270. Please include your phone number if you write.

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