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Old Moore's Almanac

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Did anyone buy Old Moores Almanac last year, if so perhaps you could tell us if any predictions came close to actuality. I heard a chap on the radio talking about it, I think he was the editor, and according to him it had a good success rate, what do you think?
 
There was a reference in September - I forget the actual wording - which could just about be identified with the 11 Sept, it's just a matter of interpretation. I'll have to borrow my mam's copy and have a look.

BTW, I love the ads in OMA, all those lucky charms and horoscope offers. Some of the charms are alleged to be so miraculous you'd think you were buying a piece of the True Cross, or hairs from St Peter's beard or something.

Does anyone remember Joan the Wad, a lucky charm which offered its purchasers endless luck?

Carole
 
carole said:
Does anyone remember Joan the Wad, a lucky charm which offered its purchasers endless luck?

Carole
Click to expand...

I remember the name but not what it looked like,was it a pixie or something like that?
 
That's it - and she had a male 'partner', he was like a Cornish piskie, sitting on a toadstool, but I can't remember his name - Mr Whitehead, can you help us out??

Carole
 
carole said:
That's it - and she had a male 'partner', he was like a Cornish piskie, sitting on a toadstool, but I can't remember his name - Mr Whitehead, can you help us out??

Carole
Click to expand...
Ha, I remember know, Iwas given one on a key ring and if you pushed the male partners head from side to side they performed an act I was envious of;)
or am I thinking of something else.
 
Oh, I can remember the artwork for those ads and Lucky Piskies
etc. But Joan the Wad? I must have blown her sometime. :(

The Hairs of Saint Peter, however, were entirely genuine and it
so happens I have a few remaining ones available at a special
price to FT Message Board readers. :cool:
 
hair? need more!

The Hairs of Saint Peter, however, were entirely genuine and it
so happens I have a few remaining ones available at a special
price to FT Message Board readers.
Click to expand...

50p? Been having chemotherapy recently which isn't good for the old head-theads:( so any help is welcome.

don't give me sympathy, just send the chocolates :p

J.
 
And the Moore’s Almanac thread rises from the grave.

Michael O’Leary getting nicer, snakes found in Ireland, Fungi on the missing list, and someone planning to put an advert on the moon. It’s hard to know which is the more unbelievable of Moore’s Almanac’s predictions for next year.

The Ryanair chief keeps promising to be kinder and gentler with customers but his notion of a charm offensive tends to be more offensive than charming. Even he admits that “being nice to people doesn’t come naturally to me”.

According to Moore’s Almanac, this is just one of the weird and wonderful happenings in store for us in 2015.

Others include: Record heatwaves everywhere. Waves, everywhere. “Waves will be in the news all year,” says the Almanac. Skiing in Ireland; an exciting dinosaur discovery; a cyber bank-heist, the first of its kind — are all coming our way as well.

Other events predicted are very plausible, such as: Russia’s President Putin throwing a tantrum. Does he do anything else? Zsa Zsa Gabor to ‘pass over’, as the magazine puts it. She is, after all, 97. ...

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/al ... 00113.html
Click to expand...
 
I see that Wikipedia wants us to disentangle the Almanack (English) from the Almanac (Irish) publication - a distinction I had not previously understood. I see the OP refers to the Irish one.

My memories are of the English pifflet, which could be had in the shops but was more often vended on the streets by hawkers. It shows my age but 6d. seems the proper price and I think this time of year is about right for forecasts of the next.

My mother would buy one out of habit, as many did, without much faith in its predictions. I recall that the English version was staunchly Royalist and Tory in outlook.

It was the last survivor of the race of popular publications named Almanacs but it was not really fit for anything useful. The street-vending went on into the 1970s? and I sometimes spotted it later in newsagents.

I have not seen it in recent years but the small format would make it inconspicuous on any display. :)
 
Hmmm. Big deal!

Old Moore’s Almanac is bucking the trend and it's still popular with its circulation increasing by 8% on last year.

Here are just some of the predictions that came true in 2014:

Predicted: Tourism in Ireland sees a jump in numbers.

Yes. Up again for the second year running.

Predicted: Bono to watch his health.

He had a terrible bike accident recently.

Predicted: A Dublin canal will burst its banks.

Yes, several.

Predicted: Enda Kenny will have a tough year.

Hello water charges. ...

http://www.irishcentral.com/culture/ent ... uture.html
Click to expand...
 
On the front inside cover is a colour photograph of a large perky rat, advertising a produce for pest control on farms. On the back cover, there’s an ad for baling machines. This is Old Moore’s Almanac, which has been around with its distinctive emerald-green cover for a very long time: 251 years, according to its editorial.

It has survived for so long because there really isn’t any other magazine in Ireland like it. Old Moore’s Almanac provides lists of tide tables as well as the fairs, marts and racing fixtures around the country. Google could give you the same, but that’s not the point. Can Google give you Old Moore’s predictions for 2015, for what will be happening in Ireland and the wider world? And where else would you find articles on subjects as esoteric as the holy wells of Ireland, healers, the paranormal, wedding traditions and “past-life regressions”?

Nicole Buckler is editor of the almanac, which has a modest staff of three and costs €4.50. She has been there since 2009, when the almanac was relaunched and colour was introduced. “We sold 46,000 copies of the 2015 edition,” she says. “Circulation is actually going up again.” ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-...n-the-future-according-to-old-moore-1.2063034
 
So how has its predictions fared to date in 2015?

Old Moore’s Almanac: how many of its January predictions came to pass?
On the first Friday of each month, we look back at the predictions in Old Moore’s Almanac to see which, if any, came true. Gay Byrne will be in the news? Bingo

CORRECT: Gay Byrne was in the news because of Stephen Fry’s views on God in The Meaning of Life

It’s February. Time to look at Old Moore’s predictions for January, as published in Old Moore’s Almanac 2015 and see if any of them came even mildly true.

Not having looked at January’s predictions for weeks, I had forgotten what was in them. I was sure they included “Joan Burton has a headache”, but in fact that is predicted to happen this month. In any case, the Tánaiste probably has headaches of a political kind on a regular basis.

So it was spooky to read, for January, “Gay Byrne in the news”. Byrne, despite being a broadcasting legend, doesn’t tend to make hard news much any more. He did regularly when he was the chairman of the Road Safety Authority, but he retired from that role last year. Well, Old Moore, you told it like it was (or would be).

Byrne’s interview with Stephen Fry about God on The Meaning of Life has so far received almost 4½ million views on YouTube. ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-...ts-january-predictions-came-to-pass-1.2089778
 
'Kim and Kanye will announce news of another baby. But Kanye West’s mental health will decline. He will be ill for several years. Kim will divorce him and marry again quickly’

I’m not sure what Old Moore has against the Kardashian clan, but he’s hell-bent on waving the bad fairy wand over them. A baby, an illness, a divorce and a marriage? Blimey, that’s a lot of action for one month.

What actually happened in Kardashian-Land this month is more surreal than anything Old Moore came up with. Kim Kardashian’s stepfather, Bruce Jenner, a former Olympic decathlon gold medallist, announced via a two-hour interview on American television that he was in the process of gender transition. Jenner is 65, and his decision to go public about being transgender was widely praised.

Kanye West, far from being in a state of mental decline, was, according to his wife, Kim Kardashian, so understanding and supportive of Jenner’s announcement that he helped her to be similarly accepting.

‘A cyber bank-heist, the first of its kind’

Well, we’re still not sure how thieves planned their startlingly audacious raid on the safety box depository in London’s Hatton Garden, but it was certainly the heist of the century ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-...an-obsession-is-getting-out-of-hand-1.2197187
 
A very mixed month for Old Moore’s predictions
Old Moore’s Almanac had a less than stellar August, as anyone eagerly awaiting a heatwave in Ireland can attest

‘Rats in the news!’
This was the excitable promise of one of Old Moore’s Irish predictions for August. What is it with Irish bands using “rats” in their name? We had the Boomtown Rats a long time ago (pity nobody thought of reusing that name to describe our post-boom bankers). Now we have a band called the Bionic Rats, a ska and reggae band, who performed “an exclusive acoustic track” on The Imelda May Show this month. I guess this was news if you are a Bionic Rats fan.

‘Sinéad O’Connor’s life in the news again’
O’Connor’s life and times have been in the news a lot this summer; in July, she pulled out of all her remaining concerts for the year due to an unspecified illness of her son. Then in late August, she posted on her Facebook page that she was due to have a hysterectomy. “Hysterectomy Wednesday thank f***. Ovaries and uterus. My daughter says my vagina will be like a famine road,” she wrote. She added, “(PS can everyone considering bitching about what I post on my page kindly f*** off and get their own page).” ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/a-very-mixed-month-for-old-moore-s-predictions-1.2335114
 
Doom, gloom, wombs and tombs: Old Moore’s 2015
After a year of analysing the predictions of Old Moore’s Almanac, there are some things we can confidently say the deathless soothsayer enjoys
Mon, Dec 28, 2015, 06:00

Old Moore, aka Theophilus Moore, is an ancient, apparently deathless soothsayer who has, since 1764, predicted the news headlines in Old Moore’s Almanac. This annual publication is filled with articles about pet psychics, holy wells, haunted Irish buildings and agriculture on Mars (frankly, this newspaper could learn a thing or two). Every year Old Moore makes dozens of prediction, and he gets some of them sort of right, proving there is more to life than “facts” and “logic”.

Oddly enough, despite his obsession with things that are “in the news”, Old Moore did not predict The Irish Times’ Old Moore series, which was started off by my colleague Rosita Boland in January, which each month subjected his premonitions to forensic analysis. Nor did he predict that I would take over the column from Rosita in October. If he had, it would have helped me a lot with my forward planning for the year, to be honest. This said, I forgive Old Moore his oversight and am fully confident that he read this article with his “mind powers” some time last year.

Anyway, after a year of analysis, here are some things we can confidently say that Old Moore enjoys:

Vague apocalyptic statements
Each month Old Moore includes a few obscure, hard-to-disprove predictions. In November, for example, he mentioned in passing that at some point there would be something called “the Dark Pope”. He’s a bit vague on the details. We’ve been arguing here at The Irish Times about whether it’s a reference to Conor Pope.

In July he throws in a reference to a “trinity” of events. “Fukushima is the first. There will be a second in 2015 and a third in 2016.” This sounds pretty ominous but it basically boils down to a prediction that between now and the end of 2016 some things will happen. When some things happen he will be proved right. Spooky.

My favourite example of Old Moore’s vagueness is his unspecific, theoretically positive but oddly threatening November prediction: “There will be lots of very old people as medicine improves.” This terrifying geriatric horde will, no doubt, need a strong leader, presumably with the word “old” already affixed to his moniker.

New-fangled contraptions
Old Moore might be an oldster but he likes to talk about fancy futuristic things. He’s quite confident about humans’ technological capabilities. This year he has predicted flying cars, lots of robots, mining on the moon, space tourism, space emigration, space hotels and even “a reality show about the moon”. A colleague thinks Old Moore’s technology-themed visions are “just reruns of The Jetsons”, but as my robo- chauffeur said as we floated towards an orbiting space hotel, “that sounds like something the Dark Pope might say”.

The health of celebrities
He doesn’t have a great track record predicting celebrity deaths. Betty White, George Bush snr and Zsa Zsa Gabor are all still with us despite Old Moore’s grisly musings. Perhaps he just means that Bush, White and Gabor are dead to him? ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-...om-wombs-and-tombs-old-moore-s-2015-1.2468366


ACCURATE MOORE HIS BEST PREDICTIONS FOR 2015

JANUARY

‘Gay Byrne in the news’ In January Byrne’s interview with Stephen Fry about God went viral and racked up 4.5 million views on Youtube. “Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?” cried Stephen. Old Moore had heard it all before.

FEBRUARY

‘Very famous artwork in the news’ Paul Gauguin’s Nafea Faa Ipoipo (orWhen Will You Marry?) became the most expensive piece of art ever when a museum in Qatar bought it for €265 million. Old Moore probably also knows the answer to the question in the title.

‘Politician has a twitter event’ Gerry Adams said during an interview that he was fond of trampolining naked with his dog, and Twitter (which was invented by the Dark Pope as a harbinger of end times) went mad about it.

MARCH

‘Sacha Baron Cohen in the news’ This gets in on a technicality. Cinecitta Sacha Baron Cohen was the name of the winner of the Best Toy Dog group at Crufts which is, as Rosita said, “the canine equivalent of the Oscars”. ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-...om-wombs-and-tombs-old-moore-s-2015-1.2468366
 
We're all doomed.

What’s in store for Ireland in 2022?

Well, we’ll have a landslide, a giant wave, an earthquake, a heatwave, a drought and a huge dump of snow. Oh, and Dublin will win the football and Limerick will win the hurling.

That’s all according to Old Moore’s Almanac, which is now 258 years old and still gazing into its crystal ball and trying to predict the future.
Founded by Theophilus Moore, a teacher of Latin and Greek who ran a classical academy in Milltown in Dublin, the annual magazine is a popular stocking filler around Christmas time, and includes plenty of predictions for Ireland and the rest of the world going forward.

Quite worryingly, it says that there will be a second pandemic unrelated to the first.

Also worryingly, our bodies will become merged with technology to the point that it becomes part of our biology. Right, so. Virtual sex, meanwhile, will become astoundingly realistic with new equipment, “making long-distance relationships a thing”. ...

https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40755174.html
 
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