© 2024 KALW 91.7 FM Bay Area
KALW Public Media / 91.7 FM Bay Area
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Friday April 13, 2012

1970 - Apollo 13 (highlighted story below)
1970 - Apollo 13 (highlighted story below)
  • 104th Day of 2012 / 162 Remaining
  • 68 Days Until Summer Begins
  • Sunrise:6:37
  • Sunset:7:45
  • 13 Hr 8 Min
  • Moon Rise:2:17am
  • Moon Set:12:48pm
  • Moon’s Phase: Last Quarter
  • The Next Full Moon
  • May 5 @ 8:36pm
  • Full Flower Moon
  • Full Corn Planting Moon
  • Full Milk Moon

In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name of this Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.

  • Tides
  • High:4:37am/6:53pm
  • Low:11:41am
  • Rainfall
  • This Year:14.21
  • Last Year:24.74
  • Normal To Date:22.23
  • Annual Average: 22.28
  • Holidays
  • Scrabble Day
  • Friday The 13th
  • National Peach Cobbler Day
  • Environmental Protection Day
  • International Plant Appreciation Day
  • International Special Librarian's Day
  • Cambodian New Year
  • National Day-Chad
  • Songkran Days (Thai New Year)-Thailand
  • Pi Mai (Laos New Year)-Laos
  • Baisakhi/Vaisakhi-Sikhism
  • On This Day In …
  • 1742 --- Nowadays, the performance of George Friedrich Handel's Messiah oratorio at Christmas time is a tradition almost as deeply entrenched as decorating trees and hanging stockings. In churches and concert halls around the world, the most famous piece of sacred music in the English language is performed both full and abridged, both with and without audience participation, but almost always and exclusively during the weeks leading up to the celebration of Christmas. It would surprise many, then, to learn that Messiah was not originally intended as a piece of Christmas music. Messiah received its world premiere on this day in 1742, during the Christian season of Lent, and in the decidedly secular context of a concert hall in Dublin, Ireland. The inspiration for Messiah came from a scholar and editor named Charles Jennens, a devout and evangelical Christian deeply concerned with the rising influence of deism and other strains of Enlightenment thought that he and others regarded as irreligious. Drawing on source material in the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, Jennens compiled and edited a concise distillation of Christian doctrine, from Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah's coming through the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ and then to the promised Second Coming and Day of Judgment. Jennens took his libretto to his friend George Friedrich Handel and proposed that it form the basis of an oratorio expressly intended for performance in a secular setting during the week immediately preceding Easter. "Messiah would be directed at people who had come to a theater rather than a church during Passion Week," according to the Cambridge Handel scholar Ruth Smith, "to remind them of their supposed faith and their possible fate." This didactic mission may have inspired Jennens to write Messiah, but it is fair to say that George Friedrich Handel's transcendent music is what made the work so timeless and inspirational. Messiah gained widespread popularity only during the final years of Handel's life, in the late 1750s, but it remains one of the best-known musical works of the Baroque period more than two centuries later. When you consider that Handel composed the score for Messiah in just 24 days, you begin to understand the incredible esteem in which some of his followers held him. As Ludwig van Beethoven said of Handel: "He is the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb."
  • 1954 --- Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron made his major league debut with the Milwaukee Braves.
  • 1959 --- A Vatican edict prohibited Roman Catholics from voting for Communists.
  • 1962 --- In the U.S., major steel companies rescinded announced price increases. The John F. Kennedy administration had been applying pressure against the price increases.
  • 1964 --- Sydney Poitier becomes the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role as a construction worker who helps build a chapel in Lilies of the Field (1963).When presenting Poitier with his Oscar statuette, the actress Ann Bancroft congratulated him with a kiss on the cheek, a gesture that caused a mild scandal among the show’s most conservative audiences. Poitier took part in a more momentous kiss three years later, when he and Katherine Houghton shared the first interracial on-screen kiss in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967).
  • 1965 --- King of the Road Roger Miller won five Grammies, a record that stood until 1984 when Michael Jackson took eight. In 1999 Carlos Santana also won eight.
  • 1970 --- Disaster strikes 200,000 miles from Earth when oxygen tank No. 2 blows up on Apollo 13, the third manned lunar landing mission. Astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise had left Earth two days before for the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon but were forced to turn their attention to simply making it home alive. Mission commander Lovell reported to mission control on Earth: "Houston, we've had a problem here," and it was discovered that the normal supply of oxygen, electricity, light, and water had been disrupted. The landing mission was aborted, and the astronauts and controllers on Earth scrambled to come up with emergency procedures. The crippled spacecraft continued to the moon, circled it, and began a long, cold journey back to Earth. The astronauts and mission control were faced with enormous logistical problems in stabilizing the spacecraft and its air supply, and providing enough energy to the damaged fuel cells to allow successful reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Navigation was another problem, and Apollo 13's course was repeatedly corrected with dramatic and untested maneuvers. On April 17, with the world anxiously watching, tragedy turned to triumph as the Apollo 13 astronauts touched down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
  • 1981 --- Janet Cook won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Things took a strange turn when she later said that her prize-winning story in The Washington Post was a fake. She made up the story and passed it off as truth. Her award was taken away and given instead to Teresa Carpenter of New York’s Village Voice.
  • 1990 --- The Soviet Union accepted responsibility for the World War II murders of thousands of imprisoned Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. The Soviets had previously blamed the massacre on the Nazis.
  • 1997 --- Tiger Woods became the youngest person to win the Masters Tournament at the age of 21. He also set a record when he finished at 18 under par.
  • 1999 --- Jack Kervorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, Mich., to 10 to 25 years in prison for the second-degree murder of a man whose assisted suicide was videotaped and shown on "60 Minutes."
  • 2011 --- A federal jury in San Francisco convicted Barry Bonds of obstruction of justice, but failed to reach a verdict on allegations that he'd used steroids and lied to a grand jury about it.
  • Birthdays
  • Thomas Jefferson
  • Garry Kasparov
  • Samuel Beckett
  • Al Green
  • Peabo Bryson
  • Tony Dow
  • Jack Casady
  • Butch Cassidy
  • Ben Nighthorse Campbell
  • Max Weinberg
  • Frank W. Woolworth
  • Eudora Welty
  • Don Adams
  • Lowell George
  • Alfred Butts