How To Hypnotize A Chicken
The Old Farmer's Almanac, a tome which has been forecasting weather and dispensing folk wisdom since 1792, hits the newsstands Tuesday with its last edition of the millennium.
The venerable publication includes advice on how to hypnotize a chicken and other tidbits in addition to its regional weather forecasts.
Abe Weatherwise, the almanac's collective name for its weather forecasters, says:
- Northeast and Northwest: Winter will be colder than usual, with above-normal snowfall. Summer will be more typical with "a fairly active hurricane season."
- Southeast: A dry summer and wet autumn.
- South: Another blistering summer
- Midwest: A bitterly cold winter
- Southwest: A warm, dry summer
"My first job was to drive a truck filled with trash to the dump," recalls the 12th editor of the venerable almanac, the nation's oldest continuously published periodical.
During the four decades that followed - a fraction of the almanac's 207 years - Hale has dispensed a ragout of information: Everything from how to tell the temperature without a thermometer to when to plant tomatoes and how to roast a tender turkey.
His favorite is advice on three ways to hypnotize a chicken.
Hypnotize a chicken? Why would anyone want to hypnotize a chicken?
"Because you might get the chicken to do what it normally wouldn't do, maybe fetch the newspaper from the porch," Hale says.
The almanac should be "useful with a pleasant degree of humor," says Hale. He and executive editor Tim Clark say they want to set a folksy-yet-urbane tone for the almanac.
Clark says he and Hale decided to call the 1999 edition the last of the millennium "despite the right and correctness of mathematicians to point out that the millennium properly ends rather than starts with the year 2000."
The almanac is the legal document for tides, sunrises and sunsets in most states. Federal authorities confiscated all copies between 1943 and 1945 after a German spy was caught in New York using the almanac's weather and tide tables. (It comes in Canadian, western and southern editions with regional tables)
Hale likes to gently point out to editors that the proper name of the almanac is the Old Farmer's Almanac.
"Please don't forget the Old," he says, so as to not confuse it with the Farmer's Almanac, a relative baby only 181 years old that is published in neighboring Maine.
The newsstand edition sells for $3.99; a bookshop edition with 48 extra pages for $4.95.
Written by Adolphe V. Bernotas