Like its predecessor, "The Areas of My Expertise, " Hodgman's latest is an almanac-style compendium of facts ranging from the historical to the trivial.

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What we have, instead, is an almanac.

NEWYORKER: Devotions

Airline pricing is enormously complex, often confounding and angering travelers with prices that change several times a day, carry an almanac full of rules, restrictions and penalties and have huge disparities in the price of a trip in different markets or even just different days.

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Jeffrey Hirsch, editor of Stock Trader's Almanac Investor, is an unflappable propagator of market truisms, and his father, Yale Hirsch, discovered the "best six months" strategy in 1986.

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The first rankings were adapted from an ad hoc system developed for a golf almanac by Mark McCormack, founder of International Management Group.

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The Almanac of American Politics reports that at one point, Hagel had to extricate his brother from an armored personnel carrier that had run over a landmine while his own body was on fire.

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