The Beauty Part

Year after year, if you're like me, you buy a Farmer's Almanac. You do it because the local weather report is always wrong, and the Farmer's Almanac, you've heard, has a much higher percentage of correct predictions.

What I overlook (and you may too)--I'm not a farmer. I live in a city. I am, in Woody Allen's phrase, "two with nature." I don't even have a window box. So what do I care about the best time to plant corn?

Eric Utne--the long-ago founder of a great, self-named magazine--shrewdly saw the need for a new kind of almanac. Its readers would be urban/suburban, not rural. They would care more about the environment, fitness and spiritual development than about agriculture. And they might like tart proverbs, poems and alternative wisdom along with the weather.

Thus was born a 288-page paperback filled with the sort of reading you don't expect from a fact-based book. And speaking of facts: its weather forecaster--"Doc Weather"--claims to be more accurate (71%) than the Farmer's Almanac (51%). But the facts, as we used to know them, are regularly upended here. Indeed, the book's first quotation is "Start slow and taper off." Yeah, this isn't your father's Almanac. It's Cosmo Doogood's Urban Almanac.