Word: almanacs
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What explains the popularity of the only-yesterday school of history? Is it the reassuringly manageable look? Chaos neatly packaged with all the shapeliness of the Farmer's Almanac. Is it the pleasant mood of nostalgia? One's youth staged under soft lights to the music of Guy Lombardo. Is it the chewy, toothsome presence of facts? Dates, names and practically nothing else...
...neighbors are freezing back home WTVT in Tampa airs 70 minutes of forecasts daily. On one occasion, WTVT interrupted Walter Cronkite's Evening News to show five water spouts forming in the bay. In Boston, Don Kent styles his program as a kind of electronic Farmer's Almanac. By spot- checking a network of 60 ham-radio operators throughout New England, he keeps his WBZ viewers abreast of when and where the maple sap is running, the apple trees are blooming and the autumn foliage is turning...
Miroir soars and sparkles on occasion, but fails to sustain a high level of quality throughout. The piece's major fault is that it lacks any logic to carry the listener through. The serial composition is by the composer's own admission, a musical almanac "going from Beethoven to Schoenberg in five minutes." Harmonically it shows a startling resourcefulness, both tonal and non-tonal. Particularly amusing was the recurrence of a particularly slushy theme, either because of the humorous contrast with Pousseur's art, or perhaps due to its explicit banality in the Pousseur context...
...Hope is the Will Rogers of the age, a kind of updated, urbanized farmer's almanac of political and social currents. Rogers was the sly rustic, a humorist with a lariat; Hope is the self-caricaturing sophisticated comic with a paradiddle patter. Rogers was show business, and so is Hope, and they share the same understanding of what is unique in American humor: a healthy irreverence for pomp and position. And they both succeeded by pitching their personalities across the footlights to touch their listeners with something close to folk wisdom. Some of Hope's lines even sound...
Under Editor Luman H. Long, a staff of eight put out the nearly two- inch-thick book. About half of the Almanac is carried over from previous years; the rest consists of new facts and figures. The 1968 edition, for instance, contains the zip code for all communities of more than 2,500 population and color pictures of the flags of all nations, including those of newly independent Guyana (red, green and yellow) and Botswana (white, black and blue). Even so, fact-hungry readers are never satisfied. When the Almanac tries to drop some marginalia, such as the gestation period...