Resource link - styleguide check, weather in your inbox

A new site by Mary Beth Protomastro, www.onlinestylebooks.com, searches style guides across the Web.

Interesting idea and somewhat useful, but basically seems to be a Google search tailored to various style locations. It still won't get you into AP or Chicago, both of which are subscription. It does get you to the AP ask-the-editor section, but as you quickly find out that is of limited use because if you don't have an AP subscription, you can see only the most recent entries - even though the one you want has disappeared into the paywall.

(Here's a search I did on "workforce," one of those AP directives for two words when much of the world has gone to one.)

Still, if you want to get a sense of what's going on in that big, scary style world out there, it's good to have in the bookmarks.

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I've mentioned here before the usefulness of Emergencyemail.org to get weather and other alerts in your inbox. Now, the free service mails you once a day with links to your daily weather as well as tropical storm updates, Gulf oil updates, etc.

Earl Finckle - Mr. Weather - dies

When I worked at WOWO, Earl Finckle, who died this past Friday, was the voice of weather. His slightly raspy, down-home voice fit right in at the station, which pumped his forecasts out across the Midwest and near South with its 50,000 watts.

Listeners didn't seem to care that Earl wasn't in Fort Wayne -- or most of the other cities where he was the voice of "the weather." Or that sometimes the telephone line noise almost drowned him out. More often than not, when people in Fort Wayne talked about the weather, I remember hearing back, "What does Earl say?"

His Central Weather Service was in Chicago, and there's something right with the karma there -- the city of broad shoulders was home to the man on whose intellectual shoulders rested many the fortunes of farmers, pilots, and just plain folk wanting to know if it was OK to go to the lake.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Finckle died Friday in Highland Park Hospital. He was 81.

You'll find several snippets from his forecasts on the airchecks on the WOWO history site.

It's a reminder that no matter how many computers, databases, interconnected networks and flashy green-screen graphics, one of the most powerful forces has always been a person's judgment to make sense of it all and personality to make us listen, read or watch.

Thank you, Earl, for reminding us of that day after day, even though we didn't know it at the time.

Folliowing tropical storms, etc.

For several years I have subscribed to an e-mail alert site, emergencyemail.org. If you are a reporter on crime, courts or anything similar, you should too.

And editors, your paper, which should have a central, unlisted e-mail account to aggregate these kinds of feeds, should have a subscription (free) as well and a plan to monitor it.

But today from Emergencyemail came a link to another neat site for tracking weather, especially tropical weather:
http://www.vuetoo.com/vue1/Situationpagenews.asp (links on the left rail take you to the latest tropical stuff).

File this under Very Cool.

It may be old hat to some of you, but I suspect many more may not know about it. Get a link into your browser right now. The image below is of the overall national weather situation page.



By the way, another useful tool, if you did not know it, is that the FBI now provides its news releases and other alerts by RSS or e-mail feed. Go to www.fbi.gov, and you will see the links on the left rail.

Also, several services out there will turn an RSS feed into an e-mail for you. Sometimes that can be the more convenient way to get the info, especially if you are using a mobile device. I use Feedblitz, but there are others (and, yes, I have been slothful about setting up a Feedblitz feed for this blog. I promise to do so soon.)