Friday May 11, 2012

• 132^nd Day of 2012 / 234 Remaining
• 40 Days Until Summer Begins

• Sunrise:6:03
• Sunset:8:10
• 14 Hours 7 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:12:53am
• Moon Set:11:41
• Moon’s Phase: 62 %

• The Next Full Moon
• June 4 @ 4:11am
• Full Strawberry Moon
• Full Rose Moon
• Full Milk Moon

This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe. However, in Europe they called it the Rose Moon. Also because the relatively short season for harvesting strawberries comes each year during the month of June, so the full Moon that occurs during that month was christened for the strawberry!

• Tides
• High:3:05am/5:15pm
• Low:10:02am/10:51pm

• Rainfall
• This Year:15.67
• Last Year:26.17
• Normal To Date:23.20
• Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80

• Holidays
• Donate a Day's Wages to Charity Day
• Eat What You Want Day
• National Nightshift Workers Day
• National Receptionists Day
• National School Nurse Day
• National Third Shift Workers Day
• Admission Day-Minnesota
• National Mocha Torte Day
• Military Spouse Appreciation Day
• Blow Bubbles For Your Cat Day

• On This Day In …
• 1330 --- Constantinople, previously the town of Byzantium, was founded.

• 1858 --- Minnesota entered the United States of America this day as the Union’s 32nd state. Although its state bird is the common loon, there’s nothing common about Minnesota, whose Dakota-Sioux Indian name means sky-tinted water. The North Star State’s capital is St. Paul, which has a twin city, Minneapolis. The state flower is the lovely lady’s slipper.

• 1894 --- Workers at the Pullman Palace Car Co. in Illinois went on strike. (The job action spread and crippled railroad service nationwide before the federal government intervened to end the strike in July.)

• 1910 -- Glacier National Park in Montana was established.

• 1934 --- A massive storm sends millions of tons of topsoil flying from across the parched Great Plains region of the United States as far east as New York, Boston and Atlanta. At the time the Great Plains were settled in the mid-1800s, the land was covered by prairie grass, which held moisture in the earth and kept most of the soil from blowing away even during dry spells. By the early 20th century, however, farmers had plowed under much of the grass to create fields. The U.S. entry into World War I in 1917 caused a great need for wheat, and farms began to push their fields to the limit, plowing under more and more grassland with the newly invented tractor. The plowing continued after the war, when the introduction of even more powerful gasoline tractors sped up the process. During the 1920s, wheat production increased by 300 percent, causing a glut in the market by 1931. That year, a severe drought spread across the region. As crops died, wind began to carry dust from the over-plowed and over-grazed lands. The number of dust storms reported jumped from 14 in 1932 to 28 in 1933. The following year, the storms decreased in frequency but increased in intensity, culminating in the most severe storm yet in May 1934. Over a period of two days, high-level winds caught and carried some 350 million tons of silt all the way from the northern Great Plains to the eastern seaboard. According to The New York Times, dust "lodged itself in the eyes and throats of weeping and coughing New Yorkers," and even ships some 300 miles offshore saw dust collect on their decks. The dust storms forced thousands of families from Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico to uproot and migrate to California, where they were derisively known as "Okies"--no matter which state they were from. These transplants found life out West not much easier than what they had left, as work was scarce and pay meager during the worst years of the Great Depression. Another massive storm on April 15, 1935--known as "Black Sunday"--brought even more attention to the desperate situation in the Great Plains region, which reporter Robert Geiger called the "Dust Bowl." That year, as part of its New Deal program, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration began to enforce federal regulation of farming methods, including crop rotation, grass-seeding and new plowing methods. This worked to a point, reducing dust storms by up to 65 percent, but only the end of the drought in the fall of 1939 would truly bring relief.

• 1946 --- The first CARE packages for survivors of WW II in Europe arrive at Le Havre, France. (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe).

• 1947 --- B.F. Goodrich announced the development of the tubeless tire.

• 1949 --- Glacier National Park in Montana was established.

• 1960 --- Israeli soldiers captured Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires.

• 1972 --- John Lennon appeared on the "Dick Cavett" TV show and said that the FBI had tapped his phone.

• 1972 --- The San Francisco Giants announced that they were trading Willie Mays to the New York Mets.

• 1973 --- Charges against Daniel Ellsberg for his role in the Pentagon Papers case were dismissed by Judge William M. Byrne, who cited government misconduct.

• 1981 --- In what would prove to be the next to the last concert of his tragically short life, Bob Marley shared the bill at Madison Square Garden with the hugely popular American funk band The Commodores. With no costumes, no choreography and no set design to speak of, "The reggae star had the majority of his listeners on their feet and in the palm of his hand," according to New York Times critic Robert Palmer. "After this show of strength, and Mr. Marley's intense singing and electric stage presence, the Commodores were a letdown." Only days after his triumphant shows in New York City, Bob Marley collapsed while jogging in Central Park and later received a grim diagnosis: a cancerous growth on an old soccer injury on his big toe had metastasized and spread to Marley's brain, liver and lungs. Less than eight months later, on May 11, 1981, Bob Marley, the soul and international face of reggae music, died in a Miami, Florida, hospital. He was only 36 years old. Nesta Robert Marley was born on February 6, 1945, in rural St. Ann Parish, Jamaica, the son of a middle-aged white Jamaican Marine officer and an 18-year-old black Jamaican girl. At the age of nine, Marley moved to Trench Town, a tough West Kingston ghetto where he would meet and befriend Neville "Bunny" Livingston (later Bunny Wailer) and Peter McIntosh (later Peter Tosh) and drop out of school at age 14 to make music. Jamaica at the time was entering a period of incredible musical creativity. As transistor radios became available on an island then served only by a staid, BBC-style national radio station, the music of America suddenly became accessible via stateside radio stations. From a mix of New Orleans-style rhythm and blues and indigenous, African-influenced musical traditions arose first ska, then rock steady—precursor styles to reggae, which did not take shape as a recognizable style of its own until the late 1960s. Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer performed together as The Wailers throughout this period, coming into their own as a group just as reggae became the dominant sound in Jamaica. Thanks to the international reach of Island Records, the Wailers came to the world's attention in the early 1970s via their albums Catch a Fire (1972) and Burnin' (1973). Eric Clapton spread the group's name even wider by recording a pop-friendly version of "I Shot The Sheriff" from the latter album. With the departure of Tosh and Wailer in 1974, Marley took center stage in the group, and by the late 70s he had turned out a string of albums— Exodus (1977), featuring "Jamming," "Waiting In Vain" and "One Love/People Get Ready;" Kaya (1978), featuring "Is This Love" and "Sun Is Shining"; and Uprising (1980), featuring "Could You Be Loved" and "Redemption Song."  While none of the aforementioned songs was anything approaching a hit in the United States during Bob Marley's lifetime, they constitute a legacy that has only increased his fame in the years since his death on this day in 1981.

• 1997 --- Garry Kasparov resigns after 19 moves in a game against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by scientists at IBM. This was the sixth and final game of their match, which Kasparov lost two games to one, with three draws.The last game of the 1997 Kasparov v. Deep Blue match lasted only an hour. Deep Blue traded its bishop and rook for Kasparov’s queen, after sacrificing a knight to gain position on the board. The position left Kasparov defensive, but not helpless, and though he still had a playable position, Kasparov resigned--the first time in his career that he had conceded defeat. Grandmaster John Fedorowicz later gave voice to the chess community’s shock at Kasparov’s loss: "Everybody was surprised that he resigned because it didn't seem lost. We've all played this position before. It's a known position." Kasparov said of his decision, "I lost my fighting spirit."

• Birthdays
• Irving Berlin
• Salvador Dali
• Martha Quinn
• Martha Graham
• Mort Sahl
• Eric Burdon
• Dame Margaret Rutherford
• Phil Silvers