September 6, 1991

With this issue, the Ninnescah Valley News takes its first toddling steps into the computer age. Using a personal computer and a laser printer, we perform the publishing functions which in earlier times required C.W. Claybaugh to fill a large room with rumbling, whirling, cast iron equipment.
But space-saving and noise-reduction are not the essence of what computers offer. Computers, simply stated, give us time.
It is possible to do all the things a computer does—putting images on paper, calculating large numbers, combining information from a variety of sources—with pen and paper and time. The computer doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before, it simply does it faster; giving us time to move on to other things.
(In parentheses we note that no time was saved by our computer system this week. But, we do recognize that once we become more computer-friendly our time spent on-task, as they say in computer manuals, will be significantly reduced, thus giving us time to take advantage of the games package included in the PageMaker program.)
And so, with all this extra time in the final days of the twentieth century, we are able to sit back on the front porch and peruse the 200th anniversary issue of The Old Farmer’s Almanac which arrived this week. The edition, as usual, brims with quirky good news. However, ominously lurking in the back pages is the weather forecast for the Central Great Plains.
First, the quirky good news. According to the Alamanac, if you are an American chatting with a friend in a coffee shop, you will touch each other twice an hour. Two English people would not touch at all, while two French people would touch each other 110 times an hour. Puerto Ricans are handiest of all, touching 180 times an hour.
The Almana reports that the Industrial Revolution prompted the planting of grass lawns, but it was an American who raised the consciousness, and noise-level, of the landed gentry. “In 1919, an American army colonel named Edwin George fell prey to the 20th century predilection for adding motors to machines that had previously been thought to work well without them. Removing the gasoline engine from his wife’s washing machine, he managed to install it on a push mower of the type developed by Budding almost 90 years before. To his satisfaction, he discovered that he could cut grass more loudly than ever before. Mrs. George, presumable, went back to pounding the family’s laundry on a flat stone in the river.”
Good fun prevails in the first half of the Almanac. But then comes the weather report, which is the primary reason people have been buying almanacs for two centuries. Grab your snow boots, folks. The winter we’ve been dreading for the past decade is headed our way.
According to the Almanac, “snowfall will be well above normal…cold spells predominate…colder than normal…”
With the snow drifted in great mounds and the chill factor unbearable, we’ll have plenty of opportunities this winter to sit at the keyboards and save time… ~T.Stucky