- 81st Day of 2013 / 284 Remaining
- 91 Days Until The First Day of Summer
- Sunrise:7:08
- Sunset:7:24
- 12 Hours 16 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:3:01pm
- Moon Set:4:10am
- Moon’s Phase:78 %
- The Next Full Moon
- March 27 @ 2:30am
- Full Worm Moon
- Full Crust Moon
- Full Lenten Moon
- Full Crow Moon
- Full Sap Moon
As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.
- Tides
- High:7:38am/9:25pm
- Low:2:10am/2:37pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:14.73
- Last Year:10.34
- Normal To Date:20.67
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Bavarian Crepes Day
- American Diabetes Association Alert Day
- As Young As You Feel Day
- International Day of the Seal
- International Goof Off Day
- UN World Day for Water
- Emancipation Day-Puerto Rico
- New Years Day-India
- Arab League Day-Syria
- People’s Party Day-Laos
- On This Day In …
- 1457 --- Gutenberg Bible became the first printed book.
- 1765 --- Britain enacted the Stamp Act to raise money from the American colonies.
- 1841 --- Englishman Orlando Jones patented a method for making cornstarch in 1841.
- 1873 --- Slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico.
- 1882 --- Congress outlawed polygamy.
- 1894 --- Play-off competition for the coveted hockey award known as Lord Stanley’s Cup began. Montreal and Ottawa played for the first championship honors on this day. Montreal took home the trophy. The original trophy cost $48.67 and was purchased the previous year by Sir Frederick Arthur Stanley, Lord Stanley of Preston. He then donated it to the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association. The inaugural champion was the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association. From 1894 on, the winner of the Stanley Cup has had to win a series of playoff games first. Since 1926, the Stanley Cup has been awarded solely by the National Hockey League every year except 2005, when the NHL was on strike. The original trophy that Lord Stanley donated was retired in 1962. Since then, only one trophy has served in its place, making the Stanley Cup the only trophy in major sports that is not reproduced each year. When a team wins the Cup, they are allowed to hold on to the trophy for one year, and the name of every player, coach and front-office employee is inscribed onto it. (In 1954, Detroit Red Wings owner Marguerite Norris, a former goaltender, became the first woman to have her name engraved on the cup.)
- 1895 --- In what is generally regarded as the first public display of a movie projected onto a screen, Auguste and Louis Lumiere showed their first movie – the one-minute "Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory" – to an invited audience in Paris.
- 1903 --- Niagara Falls ran out of water due to an ice formation ahead of the falls. The unusual conditions made it possible to walk across the rapids bed.
- 1933 --- President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Beer and Wine Revenue Act. This law levies a federal tax on all alcoholic beverages to raise revenue for the federal government and gives individual states the option to further regulate the sale and distribution of beer and wine. With the passage of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act in 1919, temperance advocates in the U.S. finally achieved their long sought-after goal of prohibiting the sale of alcohol or "spirits." Together, the new laws prohibited the manufacture, sale or transportation of liquor and ushered in the era known as "Prohibition," defining an alcoholic beverage as anything containing over 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. President Woodrow Wilson had unsuccessfully tried to veto the Volstead Act, which set harsh punishments for violating the 18th Amendment and endowed the Internal Revenue Service with unprecedented regulatory and enforcement powers. In the end, Prohibition proved difficult and expensive to enforce and actually increased illegal trafficking without cutting down on consumption. In one of his first addresses to Congress as president, FDR announced his intention to modify the Volstead Act with the Beer and Wine Revenue Act. No fan of temperance himself, FDR had developed a taste for alcohol when he attended New York cocktail parties as a budding politician. (While president, FDR refused to fire his favorite personal valet for repeated drunkenness on the job.) FDR considered the new law "of the highest importance" for its potential to generate much-needed federal funds and included it in a sweeping set of New Deal policies designed to vault the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. The Beer and Wine Revenue act was followed, in December 1933, by the passage of the 21st Amendment, which officially ended Prohibition.
- 1935 --- Persia was renamed Iran.
- 1941 --- The Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state went into operation.
- 1945 --- Representatives from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Yemen meet in Cairo to establish the Arab League, a regional organization of Arab states. Formed to foster economic growth in the region, resolve disputes between its members, and coordinate political aims, members of the Arab League formed a council, with each state receiving one vote. When the State of Israel was created in 1948, the league countries jointly attacked but were repulsed by the Israelis. Two years later, Arab League nations signed a mutual defense treaty. Fifteen more Arab nations eventually joined the organization, which established a common market in 1965.
- 1947 --- In response to public fears and Congressional investigations into communism in the United States, President Harry S. Truman issues an executive decree establishing a sweeping loyalty investigation of federal employees.
- 1948 --- "The Voice of Firestone" became the first commercial radio program to be carried simultaneously on both AM and FM radio stations.
- 1960 --- A.L. Schawlow & C.H. Townes obtained a patent for the laser. It was the first patent for any laser.
- 1972 --- The Equal Rights Amendment is passed by the U.S. Senate and sent to the states for ratification. First proposed by the National Woman's political party in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was to provide for the legal equality of the sexes and prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. More than four decades later, the revival of feminism in the late 1960s spurred its introduction into Congress. Under the leadership of U.S. Representative Bella Abzug of New York and feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, it won the requisite two-thirds vote from the U.S. House of Representatives in October 1971. In March 1972, it was approved by the U.S. Senate and sent to the states. Hawaii was the first state to ratify what would have been the 27th Amendment, followed by some 30 other states within a year. However, during the mid-1970s, a conservative backlash against feminism eroded support for the Equal Rights Amendment, which ultimately failed to achieve ratification by the a requisite 38, or three-fourths, of the states.
- 1978 --- Karl Wallenda, of the Flying Wallendas, fell to his death while walking a cable strung between to hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
- 1981 --- RCA put its Selectravision laser disc players on the market. Soon, the product was called “the Edsel of the entertainment field.” The units cost $500 and the videodisks about $15 each. The combination failed to catch the consumer’s fancy.
- 1990 --- A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, found former tanker captain Joseph Hazelwood innocent of three major charges in connection with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but convicted him of a minor charge of negligent discharge of oil.
- Birthdays
- Chico Marx
- Virginia Gray
- Werner Klemperer
- Marcel Marceau
- Glen Campbell
- James Patterson
- Stephen Sondheim
- Robert Millikan
- Ruth Page
- William Shatner
- Reese Witherspoon
- Sen Orrin Hatch
- George Benson
- Wolf Blitzer
- Andrew Lloyd Webber
- Lena Olin
- Bob Costas
- Stephanie Mills
- Louis L'Amour