What an odd night in Manhattan. People in groups staring up at the lunar eclipse, and hearing loud cheers from down the street for the Red Sox.

United Online, which operates NetZero and Juno, has proposed to buy Classmates.com for a hundred million dollars. After all, it's been some time since they found a good waste of money. They had a great deal going with "NetZero at the Half" on the NBA on NBC, before the NBA moved to ABC.

$100 million for a service that merely allows people to stay in touch? (I think I registered once and have not been back to the site since.) Even United Online seems to be having second thoughts. The announcement of the proposed acquisition was buried in its earnings press release, and tacked on as a headline afterthought. That's hardly an endorsement of a dubious way to spend free cash.

Although I usually dread Gretchen Morgenson's columns each week, this week we happen to be in agreement. She criticizes Marsh for apparently forcing employees to invest a lot of their retirement savings in Marsh stock. This is a valid criticism, although we come at it from completely different directions. Gretchen thinks anything corporate executives do is bad. I think Marsh is wrong for other reasons.

First, forced investments contaminate the signal stock ownership should send to the market as confidence in a business. It pumps up the price for artificial reasons.

Also, it's just not right to take advantage of rank-and-file workers who might not be well-versed in diversification and other investment basics. Your job should not depend on trusting your retirement savings to one company.

What to do about this? Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Companies should have to disclose mandatory investment plans. Then the market should punish them for pumping up their stock price and being bad employers.

One of the only bright spots in the Yankees postseason: Miguel Cairo. This guy is fun to watch. That slide home on Derek Jeter's base-clearing double was absolutely fantastic. Cairo finished the year with a solid average above .290 and played second base reliably.

On a team that seemed to have a few too many underachieving superstars, Cairo is refreshing. I hope, even with all the changes sure to come, he sticks around for next year.

Looking for new ideas this holiday season? Try this, the Canadian Weather Trivia Calendar for 2005.

Environment Canada (their version of our National Weather Service) is great. Having been to Canada a fair amount over the last year, I saw that their forecasts are generally the most accurate among other weather services. Their Web site is spectacular, packed with explanations, searchable climate data, and cool graphics (such as the close-up of the coastal storm, posted last week).

The US National Weather Service has also improved its Web site over the last few years. Forecasts are now available in graphical as well as text form (although I prefer the descriptive, narrative version). They've managed to link multiple entities in a logical way--once on the NWS home page, you can surf to the National Hurricane Center or the Climate Prediction Center rather easily.

The very best product the NWS offers, though, is its technical forecast discussion. (See the latest one for New York City.) You have to decipher the abbreviations, but this product provides a glimpse of the decisions and debates in arriving at a prediction. It shows you what the computer models are predicting, which models the forecast is based on, and where the forecast may go wrong. Even when the NWS forecast turns out to be wrong, these forecast discussions are invaluable day after day.

How bad is AT&T Wireless in downtown Fort Lauderdale? The AT&T Wireless coverage map shows the city well within its supposed home calling area. However, on my recent visit there, my phone had to roam onto Cingular to get a signal. This was not in a remote location--it was on Las Olas and N.E. 15th Avenue, right in the middle of the city. There are no tall buildings nearby, so this lack of reception can only be about poor execution. In Victoria Park, the nice residential section just to the northeast of downtown, approximately 2/3 of call attempts failed. Part of this could be NIMBY with respect to cell sites, but that wouldn't explain why other people on competing providers could place calls without a problem.

I suppose that AT&T Wireless, while pouring money into upgrading its network in New York City, has not done the same in Fort Lauderdale. This could be because Cingular has its own sites in Fort Lauderdale also. In New York City, Cingular uses T-Mobile, so when the deal closes they will push everyone onto the improved AT&T Wireless network. In Fort Lauderdale, AT&T Wireless probably figures they will just lame-duck it out until everyone is migrated over to the superior Cingular network next year.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a great article on the debate between efficient market theorists and those who believe in more of a behavioral explanation for stock prices. Supposedly, Eugene Fama has slightly backed off his conclusion that markets are always efficient--he now says that sometimes they may not be completely efficient.

Fine. But the story didn't get to what really matters from this debate, what that means for investors. Even if markets aren't always 100% efficient, it does not logically follow that an individual investor can determine, at a given point in time, exactly how a market is not efficient. Money managers, who make a living on the fiction that they can consistently beat the market, will surely herald this shift in thought as good news for market timers and technical strategists.

The virtues of index investing are independent of whether the market is somewhat, mostly or completely efficient. Lots of irrational things drive stock prices, but detecting those is impossible. The best approach is still to assume you're not any smarter than the market and to ensure you come out with at least the same results as the market generally.

This infrared-enhanced photo, courtesy of Environment Canada, shows what happens when a tropical storm merges with a cutoff low. Predicted well in advance by the GFS computer model, this cutoff low has formed just east of New England over the last couple of days. When Tropical Storm Nicole moved north, it merged with this upper-level cutoff to create a "stacked," stalled system. Rain bands are backing west through Boston but the system should eventually move east later today.

We've seen dramatic home runs, leaping grabs, precision pitching...but there was something so fresh about A-Rod's third base steal last night. I don't remember being so excited about a play that seemed so unusual.

A wild pitch later, here we go again with the Red Sox...

It must be great to be a company that's about to be acquired subject to a long regulatory approval process. You can assume you will be bought out, but you have lots of time to waste someone else's money. That's what seems to be happening at AT&T Wireless.

With the Cingular deal apparently now imminent, AT&T Wireless has managed to kick off not one, but two major new product offerings requiring extensive marketing, advertising, and support. Last week, the company introduced "Ogo," a mobile messaging device geared towards teens. Today, AT&T Wireless announced it was launching a music service.

Should we feel bad for Cingular? No. Nobody forced them to pay $41 billion for a company with a long track record of waste and incompetence. Instead, the headaches ahead in this merger integration are all too appropriate.

As noted here before, The Weather Channel's Web site, weather.com, is taking its lifestyle forecasting strategy to the extreme. You can enter golf courses and airports in its city-search box, just in case you don't know what city the golf course is in. Or you can check the "heating and cooling forecast," which tells you to put on the heat if it's cold outside, and put on the air conditioning if it's hot.

Now there's something new: the fitness forecast. It's yet another way of expressing the very same forecast information, with an added piece of obvious information: what to wear. For example, today the forecast is for a high of 70. That means wear shorts, says weather.com.

Are people so dumb that they can't make these very small logical connections from just the basic forecast? I guess in The Weather Channel's opinion, yes. So here are some other suggestions for new weather.com forecasts:

• The umbrella forecast--telling you whether to bring an umbrella, because telling you whether it will rain is not enough.

• The bus stop jacket forecast--will you need to wear a jacket while waiting for the bus? Just in case you couldn't figure that out from the predicted temperature and wind, they could offer specific guidance.

• The sunglasses forecast. A forecast of "mostly sunny" may not quite get the point across clearly. A sunglasses forecast could tell you, in no uncertain terms, whether you might need to wear sunglasses.

Tonight I caught a recap of the Kirk Gibson home run in the 1988 World Series. The home run is obviously a great moment, but even better is sportscaster Vin Scully's narrative. Scully is the best baseball voice I have ever heard. I used to watch the NBC "Game of the Week," no matter who was playing, just to hear Scully's play-by-play. His delivery is eerily even, such that a merely subtle emphasis signals an important moment. His enunciation is nearly perfect, and of course his descriptive vocabulary is second to none. "Be-hiiind the bag!" (1986) perfectly captured the shock of that moment as only Scully could do it; "...and the Mets win!" featured a complex mixture of raspiness and clarity that you just can't teach or calculate. I know Scully's career extends far before when I first started watching baseball in the early 1980s, and I'm sure there are hundreds of other perfectly delivered narratives.

What about play-by-play narrators other sports?

For football, my vote goes to Dick Stockton, a blue chip voice of the NFL for as long as I can remember. You can trust his experience, and his delivery, like Scully's, is even--so when he elevates his tone a level, you know the moment deserves it. Stockton does other sports also; somehow he seems to match best with football.

For hockey, Mike Emrick is a vocal magician. As a puck races around the ice, Emrick somehow keeps his narrative stream at a perfectly calibrated pace. When the stakes rise, the overall level of Emrick's tone does also, but it never ventures beyond sustainability until a goal is scored (or a game is won).

For basketball, Marv Albert stands above everyone else in his ability to combine analysis, humor, and sarcasm with nearly perfect control of tone. Unfortunately, thanks to Cablevision, Knicks fans will have to do without Marv this year.