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Friday the 13th-KALW Almanac-11/13/2015

  • 317th Day of 2015 48 Remaining
  • Winter Begins in 38 Days
  • Sunrise:6:48
  • Sunset:4:59
  • 10 Hours 11 Minutes
  • Moon Rise:8:26am
  • Moon Set:6:52pm
  • Phase:4% 2 Days
  • Next Full Moon November 25 @ 2:44pm
  • This was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. Another interpretation suggests that the name Full Beaver Moon comes from the fact that the beavers are now actively preparing for winter. It is sometimes also referred to as the Frosty Moon.
  • Tides
  • High:12:03am/1-:56am
  • Low:5:00am/5:47pm
  • Holidays
  • Friday The 13th
  • Actor’s Day
  • National Indian Pudding Day
  • National Mom’s & Dad’s Day
  • Sadie Hawkins Day
  • Start A Rumor Day
  •  
  • World Kindness Day
  • Harvest Festival-Virgin Islands
  • On This Day
  • 1789 --- George Washington, inaugurated as the first president of the United States in April, returns to Washington at the end of his first presidential tour. For four weeks, Washington traveled by stagecoach through New England, visiting all the northern states that had ratified the U.S. Constitution. Washington, the great Revolutionary War hero and first leader of the new republic, was greeted by enthusiastic crowds wherever he went. Major William Jackson, who was Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War, accompanied the president, along with a private secretary and nine servants, including several slaves. The group traveled as far north as Kittery, Maine, which was still a part of Massachusetts at the time.
  • 1805 --- Supposedly, Johann George Lehner, a German butcher from Frankfurt living in Vienna, Austria, created a beef and pork sausage. Called 'Frankfurter' in Austria and elsewhere 'Wiener' (also known as 'Wiener-Frankfurter' and Wienerwurst).  In America it's usually called a 'Hot Dog.'
  • 1927 --- The Holland Tunnel opened - the first Hudson River automobile tunnel from New York City to New Jersey. 
  • 1940 --- The Walt Disney movie "Fantasia" had its world premiere at New York's Broadway Theater. 
  • 1953 --- Mrs. Thomas J. White of the Indiana Textbook Commission, calls for the removal of references to the book Robin Hood from textbooks used by the state’s schools. Mrs. Young claimed that there was “a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That’s the Communist line. It’s just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat.” She went on to attack Quakers because they “don’t believe in fighting wars.” This philosophy, she argued, played into communist hands. Though she later stated that she never argued for the removal of texts mentioning the story from school textbooks, she continued to claim that the “take from the rich and give to the poor” theme was the “Communist’s favorite policy.” Reacting to criticisms of her stance, she countered that, “Because I’m trying to get Communist writers out of textbooks, my name is mud. Evidently I’m drawing blood or they wouldn’t make such an issue out of it.”
  • 1967 --- President Lyndon Johnson is briefed on the situation in Vietnam by Gen. William Westmoreland, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and Robert W. Komer, the head of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program. They painted an optimistic picture that led Johnson to state on television on November 17 that, while much remained to be done, “We are inflicting greater losses than we’re taking…We are making progress.” Such pronouncements haunted President Johnson and his advisers only two months later, when the communists launched a massive offensive during the Tet New Year holiday in January 1968.
  • 1968 --- The Beatles' animated movie "Yellow Submarine" premiered in the U.S.
  • 1969 --- In Washington, as a prelude to the second moratorium against the war scheduled for the following weekend, protesters stage a symbolic “March Against Death.” The march began at 6 p.m. and drew over 45,000 participants, each with a placard bearing the name of a soldier who had died in Vietnam. The marchers began at Arlington National Cemetery and continued past the White House, where they called out the names of the dead.
  • 1970 --- An immense tidal wave and storm surge caused by a powerful cyclone kills over 200,000 people in East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh, on this day in 1970. The delta area where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers flow into the Bay of Bengal is particularly vulnerable to this type of storm. In fact, this was at least the third disaster in the region to kill 200,000 people. The storm began on November 10, 1,000 miles south of East Pakistan in the Indian Ocean. As the storm approached land late on the night of November 12, wind speeds varied from 75 to 100 miles per hour. These speeds are significantly slower than hurricane winds, but the river delta area in Bangladesh is shaped in such a way that the waves produced by cyclones are funneled toward land and significantly concentrated.
  • 1974 --- 28-year-old Karen Silkwood is killed in a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma City. Silkwood worked as a technician at a plutonium plant operated by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and she had been critical of the plant’s health and safety procedures. In September, she had complained to the Atomic Energy Commission about unsafe conditions at the plant (a week before her death, plant monitors had found that she was contaminated with radioactivity herself), and the night she died, she was on her way to a meeting with a union representative and a reporter for The New York Times, reportedly with a folder full of documents that proved that Kerr-McGee was acting negligently when it came to worker safety at the plant. However, no such folder was found in the wreckage of her car, lending credence to the theory that someone had forced her off the road to prevent her from telling what she knew.
  • 1977 --- The comic strip "Li'l Abner" by Al Capp appeared in newspapers for the last time.
  • 1979 --- In the middle of a game at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Philadelphia 76ers center Darryl Dawkins leaps over Kansas City Kings forward Bill Robinzine and slam-dunks the basketball, shattering the fiberglass backboard. The result, according to people who were at the game, was a sound like a bomb going off in the middle of the court. Shards of glass were everywhere: They nicked Robinzine all over his legs and arms and gotten stuck in Dr. J’s Afro. “It wasn’t really a safe thing to do,” Dawkins chuckled later, “but it was a Darryl Dawkins thing to do.”
  • 1982 --- Near the end of a weeklong national salute to Americans who served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington after a march to its site by thousands of veterans of the conflict. The long-awaited memorial was a simple V-shaped black-granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died in the conflict, arranged in order of death, not rank, as was common in other memorials.
  • 1985 --- Nevado del Ruiz, the highest active volcano in the Andes Mountains of Colombia, suffers a mild eruption that generates a series of lava flows and surges over the volcano’s broad ice-covered summit. Flowing mixtures of water, ice, pumice, and other rock debris poured off the summit and sides of the volcano, forming “lahars” that flooded into the river valleys surrounding Ruiz. The lahars joined normal river channels, and massive flooding and mudslides was exacerbated by heavy rain. Within four hours of the eruption, the lahars traveled over 60 miles, killing more than 23,000 people, injuring over 5,000, and destroying more than 5,000 homes. Hardest hit was the town of Armero, where three quarters of the 28,700 inhabitants died.
  • 1986 --- U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly acknowledged that the U.S. had sent "defensive weapons and spare parts" to Iran. He denied that the shipments were sent to free hostages, but that they had been sent to improve relations. 
  • 1987 --- Sonny and Cher sang "I Got You Babe" on the David Letterman show.
  • 1995 --- Greg Maddox (Atlanta Braves) became the first major league pitcher to win four consecutive Cy Young Awards.
  • Birthdays
  • Whoopi Goldberg
  • Robert L:ouis Stevenson
  • Justice Louis Brandeis
  • Jean Seberg
  • Jack Elam
  • Richard Mulligan
  • Garry Marshall
  • Jimmy Kimmel
  • Caroline Goodall