- 88th Day of 2013 / 277 Remaining
- 84 Days Until The First Day of Summer
- Sunrise:6:57
- Sunset:7:30
- 12 Hours 33 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:10:32pm
- Moon Set:8:16am
- Moon’s Phase:93 %
- The Next Full Moon
- April 25 @ 12:59pm
- Full Pink Moon
- Full Sprouting Grass Moon
- Full Egg Moon
- Full Fish Moon
This moon’s name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
- Tides
- High:12:28am/1:29pm
- Low:6:56am/6:53pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:14.73
- Last Year:12.31
- Normal To Date:21.25
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Knights Of Columbus Founders Day
- National Mom and Pop Business Owners Day
- Texas Love the Children's Day (Tx)
- National Lemon Chiffon Cake Day
- Commemoration Day-Madagascar
- Youth Day-Taiwan
- Boganda Day-Central African Republic
- International Earth Hour @ 8pm
- On This Day In …
- 1848 --- A huge upstream ice jam stopped almost all water flow over Niagara Falls (both American Falls and the Canadian Horseshoe Falls) for several hours. You could actually walk out into the riverbed below the falls.
- 1867 --- The British Parliament passed the North America Act to create the Dominion of Canada.
- 1882 --- The Knights of Columbus organization was granted a charter by the state of Connecticut. The Knights of Columbus is a Catholic, fraternal service, family organization of almost 6 million members.
- 1946 --- Fiorella LaGuardia became the director general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Organization.
- 1951 --- In one of the most sensational trials in American history, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. The husband and wife were later sentenced to death and were executed in 1953. The Rosenberg case garnered worldwide attention. Their supporters claimed they were being made scapegoats to the Cold War hysteria that was sweeping America. The French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called their execution a "legal lynching." Others pointed out that even if the Rosenbergs did pass secrets along to the Soviets during World War II, Russia had been an ally, not an enemy, of the United States at the time. Those who supported the verdict insisted that the couple got what they deserved for endangering national security by giving top-secret information on a devastating weapon to communists.
- 1951 --- The wonderful Rodgers and Hammerstein musical based on Margaret Langdon’s novel, Anna and the King of Siam, opened on Broadway. The King and I starred Yul Brynner in the role of the King of Siam. The king who, along with his subjects, valued tradition above all else. From this day forward, the role of the King of Siam belonged to Yul Brynner and no other. Brynner appeared in this part in more than 4,000 performances on both stage and screen (the Broadway show was adapted for Hollywood in 1956). Anna, the English governess hired to teach the King’s dozens of children, was portrayed by Gertrude Lawrence. Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Brynner acted, danced and sang their way into our hearts with such memorable tunes as Getting to Know You, Shall We Dance, Hello, Young Lovers, I Whistle a Happy Tune, We Kiss in a Shadow, I Have Dreamed, Something Wonderful, A Puzzlement and March of the Siamese Children. The King and I ran for a total of 1,246 outstanding performances at New York’s St. James Theatre.
- 1961 --- The 23rd amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The amendment allowed residents of Washington, DC, to vote for president.
- 1962 --- Jack Paar left his highly successful late night TV talk show after five years. He left behind a salary of $250,000 and an estimated audience of eight-million people. Fill-in hosts were used, including one who would ultimately win the coveted position of host of The Tonight Show. He was Johnny Carson.
- 1971 --- Lt. William L. Calley is found guilty of premeditated murder at My Lai by a U.S. Army court-martial at Fort Benning, Georgia. Calley, a platoon leader, had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai 4, a cluster of hamlets in Quang Ngai Province on March 16, 1968. The unit had been conducting a search-and-destroy mission to locate the 48th Viet Cong (VC) Local Force Battalion. The unit entered Son My village but found only women, children, and old men. Frustrated by unanswered losses due to snipers and mines, the soldiers took out their anger on the villagers, indiscriminately shooting people as they ran from their huts. The soldiers rounded up the survivors and led them to a nearby ditch where they were shot. Calley was found guilty of personally murdering 22 civilians and sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced to 20 years by the Court of Military Appeals and further reduced later to 10 years by the Secretary of the Army. Proclaimed by much of the public as a "scapegoat," Calley was paroled in 1974 after having served about a third of his 10-year sentence.
- 1971 --- A jury in Los Angeles recommended the death penalty for Charles Manson and three female followers for the 1969 Tate-La Bianca murders. (The sentences were later commuted.)
- 1971 --- In Memphis, Bruce Springsteen jumped a fence at Graceland in an attempt to see his idol, Elvis Presley.
- 1974 --- Eight Ohio National Guardsmen were indicted on charges stemming from the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. All the guardsmen were later acquitted.
- 1974 --- The unmanned U.S. space probe Mariner 10, launched by NASA in November 1973, becomes the first spacecraft to visit the planet Mercury, sending back close-up images of a celestial body usually obscured because of its proximity to the sun. Mariner 10 had visited the planet Venus eight weeks before but only for the purpose of using Venus' gravity to whip it toward the closest planet to the sun. In three flybys of Mercury between 1974 and 1975, the NASA spacecraft took detailed images of the planet and succeeded in mapping about 35 percent of its heavily cratered, moonlike surface.
- 1979 --- The Committee on Assassinations Report issued by U.S. House of Representatives stated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the result of a conspiracy.
- 1995 --- The U.S. House of Representatives rejected a constitutional amendment that would have limited terms to 12 years in the U.S. House and Senate.
- 2006 --- Tom Jones can apparently count among his many fans one Elizabeth Windsor of London, England—known professionally as Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen. A 38-year-old mother of four when the alluring Mr. Jones made his first great splash in March 1965, Her Majesty bestowed upon him four decades later one of the highest honors to which a British subject can aspire. On March 29, 2006, Queen Elizabeth II made the Welsh sensation Tom Jones—now Sir Tom Jones—a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
- 2009 --- Rick Wagoner, the chairman and chief executive of troubled auto giant General Motors (GM), resigns at the request of the Obama administration. During Wagoner's more than 8 years in the top job at GM, the company lost billions of dollars and in 2008 was surpassed by Japan-based Toyota as the world's top-selling maker of cars and trucks, a title the American automaker had held since the early 1930s. On March 30, 2009, the day after the White House announced Wagoner had been asked to step aside, President Barack Obama stated that GM would have to undergo a fundamental restructuring in the next 60 days in order for the government to consider loaning it any more money. On June 1, 2009, GM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Bankruptcy was a move once considered unthinkable for the company that was founded in 1908 and became a giant of the U.S. economy in the 20th century. GM pursued a strategy of selling a vehicle "for every purse and purpose," in the words of Alfred Sloan, who became president of the company in 1923 and resigned as chairman in 1956. By its peak in 1962, GM produced 51 percent of all the cars in the U.S. However, according to The New York Times, during the 1960s the automaker "began a long and slow process of undermining itself" as it failed to innovate fast enough in the face of competition from foreign car manufacturers.
- Birthdays
- John Tyler (10th President)
- Cy Young
- Perry Farrell
- Judith Guest
- Eric Idle
- John McLaughlin
- John Major
- Walt Frazier
- Amy Sedaris
- John Popper
- Pearl Bailey
- Samuel Walton
- Eugene McCarthy
- Bud Cort