Wednesday July 25, 2012

• 207^th Day of 2012 / 159 Remaining
• 59 Days Until Autumn Begins

• Sunrise:6:08
• Sunset:8:25
• 14  Hours 17 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:1:09pm
• Moon Set:12:02am(Thu)
• Moon’s Phase: 43 %

• The Next Full Moon
• August 1 @ 8:27pm
• Full Sturgeon Moon
• Full Red Moon
• Full Green Corn Moon
• Full Grain Moon

The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.

• Tides
• High:3:54am/4:24pm
• Low:9:37am/1:11pm

• Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
• This Year:0.02
• Last Year:0.08
• Normal To Date:0.00
• Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80

• Holidays
• Be Adamant About Something Day
• National Hot Fudge Sundae Day
• Feed the Country Ducks Day (A day to drive into the country and find a pond with ducks you can feed.)
• Louise Brown Day (Marking her birth on this day in 1978 in Oldham, England. She was history’s first "test-tube baby.")

• Constitution Day-Puerto Rico
• Santiago Day-Spain
• Republic Day-Tunisia
• Guanacaste DayCosta Rica
• Yalong Cultural Festival-Tibet

• On This Day In …
• 1805 --- Aaron Burr visited New Orleans with plans to establish a new country, with New Orleans as the capital city.

• 1909 --- Louis Bleriot of France crossed the English Channel in a 28-hp monoplane with a wingspan of just 23 feet. It was the first time that trick had been accomplished. Actually, it was the world’s first international, overseas flight. Today, one may also travel between France and England by way of the ‘chunnel’ that runs beneath the English Channel. A train will take you over, or rather, under and back.

• 1941 --- Henry Ford sits down at his desk in Dearborn, Michigan and writes a letter to the Indian nationalist leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The letter effusively praises Gandhi and his campaign of civil disobedience aimed at forcing the British colonial government out of India. By July of 1941, Ford's pacifist views led him to despair at the current global situation: Nazi Germany had invaded Poland, causing Britain and France to declare war against it. The United States, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was firmly on the side of the Allies, but Ford was convinced that the country should remain neutral, despite mounting pressure from the government for his company to start mass-producing airplanes to help defeat the Nazis. The previous May, Ford had reluctantly bowed to this pressure, opening a massive production facility for airplane production at Willow Run, near Dearborn, to manufacture B-24E Liberator bombers for the Allied war effort. As Douglas Brinkley writes in "Wheels for the World," his history of Ford Motor Company, the automaker disliked imperialism and was hopeful that Gandhi's campaign would succeed in pushing the British out of India and establishing Indian home rule. In addition, Ford Motor Company had long enjoyed healthy sales in the cities of Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta. Ford's letter to Gandhi, now included in the Henry Ford Museum and Library, read: "I want to take this opportunity of sending you a message...to tell you how deeply I admire your life and message. You are one of the greatest men the world has ever known."

• 1943 --- Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was overthrown in a coup.

• 1946 --- Crooner Dean Martin and comedian Jerry Lewis staged their first show as a team at Club 500 in Atlantic City, NJ. Actually, the two had met while performing -- separately -- at the Glass Hat in New York City and decided to try an ad-lib act together. The rest is entertainment history. The duo went from earning $350 a week to $5,000 a week in under eight months, with Martin playing the romantic straight man opposite Lewis as his goofy, unpredictable partner.
•  
• 1952 --- Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

• 1956 --- 52 of the 1,662 passengers and crew on board the Andrea Doria died in a collision with the Swedish-American liner Stockholm near Cape Cod. Launched on June 16, 1951 and named after a famous Italian admiral, the Andrea Doria was Italy’s most luxurious liner. For three years the Andrea Doria reigned supreme on the Atlantic cruise routes while gaining the moniker ‘Grand Dame of the Sea’. At 11:10 p.m., sixty miles from Nantucket Island, the heavily reinforced bow of the Stockholm tore through the starboard side of the Andrea Doria. Thanks to the ship’s S.O.S. signals, a group of ships soon arrived and provided much-needed lifeboats to complete the abandonment of the Andrea Doria. Newsmen and cameras caught her eventual fate and the entire world listened on the radio as she slid beneath the waves to settle in 225 feet of water at 10:09 a.m. All of the 52 who were lost died as a direct result of the initial collision.

• 1965 --- Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival, performing a rock-and-roll set publicly for the very first time while a chorus of shouts and boos rained down on him from a dismayed audience. Six weeks earlier, Bob Dylan had recorded the single that marked his move out of acoustic folk and into the idiom of electrified rock and roll. "Like A Rolling Stone" had only been released five days before his appearance at Newport, however, so most in the audience had no idea what lay in store for them. Neither did festival organizers, who were as surprised to see Dylan's crew setting up heavy sound equipment during sound check as that evening's audience would be to hear what came out of it. With guitarist Al Kooper and The Paul Butterfield Blues Band backing him, Dylan took to the stage with his Fender Stratocaster on the evening of July 25 and launched into an electrified version of "Maggie's Farm." Almost immediately, the jeering and yelling from the audience grew loud enough nearly to drown out the sound of Dylan and his band. It has been stated by some who witnessed the historic performance that some of the yelling from the audience that night was about the terrible sound quality of the performance—overloud in general and mixed so poorly that Dylan's vocals were unintelligible. But what prompted the outright booing—even over Dylan's next number, the now-classic "Like A Rolling Stone"—was a sense of dismay and betrayal on the part of an audience unprepared for the singer's new artistic direction.

• 1967 --- The Beatles and other U.K. rock groups urged the British government to legalize marijuana. Their comments were made in a London Times advertisement signed by all four of the Beatles.

• 1969 --- Neil Young made his first appearance with Crosby, Stills and Nash.

• 1978 --- Louise Joy Brown, the world's first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) is born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents Lesley and Peter Brown. The healthy baby was delivered shortly before midnight by caesarean section and weighed in at five pounds, 12 ounces.

• 1979 --- President Jimmy Carter absolved Dr. Samuel Mudd, the physician who had treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg, of any responsibility in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Mudd’s name was no longer mud.

• 1984 --- Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space.

• 1990 --- Roseanne Barr sang "The National Anthem" before a major-league baseball game in San Diego. When she spit and scratched herself, the fans booed.

• 2000 --- An Air France Concorde jet crashes upon takeoff in Paris on this day in 2000, killing everyone onboard as well as four people on the ground. The Concorde, the world's fastest commercial jet, had enjoyed an exemplary safety record up to that point, with no crashes in the plane's 31-year history. Air France Flight 4590 left DeGaulle Airport for New York carrying nine crew members and 96 German tourists who were planning to take a cruise to Ecuador. Almost immediately after takeoff, however, the plane plunged to the ground near a hotel in Gonesse, France. A huge fireball erupted and all 105 people on the plane were killed immediately. The Concorde fleet was grounded in the wake of this disaster while the cause was investigated. The investigation revealed that the plane that took off just prior to Flight 4590 had dropped a piece of metal onto the runway. When the Concorde jet ran over it, its tire was shredded and thrown into one of the engines and fuel tanks, causing a disabling fire. Concorde jets went back into service in November 2001, but a series of minor problems prompted both Air France and British Airways to end Concorde service permanently in October 2003.

• 2008 --- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation that will ban trans fats in restaurants and retail food establishments. The ban goes into effect on January 1, 2010. California is the first state to ban trans fats in restaurants.  There are several cities that have banned them, and California and Oregon have previously banned trans fats in school meals.

• 2010 --- WikiLeaks leaked to the public more than 90,000 internal reports involving the U.S.-led War in Afghanistan from 2004-2010.

• Birthdays
• Nate Thurmond
• Louise Joy Brown
• Walter Brennan
• Estelle Getty
• Walter Payton
• Iman