Friday May 17, 2013

• 137^th Day of 2013 / 228 Remaining
• 35 Days Until The First Day of Summer

• Sunrise:5:57
• Sunset:8:14
• 14 Hours 17 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:12:32pm
• Moon Set:1:12am
• Moon’s Phase: First Quarter

• The Next Full Moon
• May 24 @ 9:27pm
• 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:3:55am/6:03pm
• Low:10:47am

• Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
• This Year:16.32
• Last Year:15.64
• Normal To Date:23.34
• Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

• Holidays
• National Cherry Cobbler Day

• Constitution Day-Norway
• World Telecommunication and Information Society Day
• Constitution Day-Nauru

• On This Day In …
• 1733 --- England passes the Molasses Act, putting high tariffs on rum and molasses imported to the colonies from anyplace other than Britain and its possessions.

• 1769 --- George Washington launches a legislative salvo at Great Britain's fiscal and judicial attempts to maintain its control over the American colonies. With his sights set on protesting the British policy of "taxation without representation," Washington brought a package of non-importation resolutions before the Virginia House of Burgesses.

• 1792 --- The New York Stock Exchange was founded by brokers meeting under a tree on what is now Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is located in the financial district, an area in lower Manhattan, on a street named after a defensive wall built around 1650. Wall Street became interchangeable with the Stock Exchange. The original brokers’ meeting place was quite different from today’s noisy, crowded, high-energy floor. In bad weather, they met at a coffee house and when the day was sunny, the brokers sat under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street to conduct their business. There are now over 51 million individual investors and 10,000 institutional investors who are represented on the floor of the NYSE by 480 member-trader firms. The NYSE is respected throughout the world and attracts investors from many countries.

• 1875 --- Oliver Lewis rode Aristides winning a purse of $2,850 in the first running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, KY. Aristides won the one and a half mile Run for the Roses in a time of 2 minutes, 37-3/4 seconds.

• 1881 --- Frederick Douglass was appointed recorder of deeds for Washington, DC.

• 1885 --- For the second time in two years, the Apache chief Geronimo breaks out of an Arizona reservation, sparking panic among Arizona settlers. A famous medicine man and the leader of the Chiricahua Apache, Geronimo achieved national fame by being the last American Indian to surrender formally to the United States. For nearly 30 years, Geronimo and his followers resisted the attempts of Americans to take away their southwestern homeland and confine them to a reservation. He was a fearless warrior and a master of desert survival. The best officers of the U.S. Army found it nearly impossible to find Geronimo, much less decisively defeat him. In 1877, Geronimo was forced to move to the San Carlos, Arizona, reservation for the first time, but he was scarcely beaten. Instead, Geronimo treated the reservation as just one small part of the vast territory he still considered to belong to the Apache. Fed up with the strictures and corruption of the reservation, he and many other Apache broke out for the first time in 1881. For nearly two years, the Apache band raided the southwestern countryside despite the best efforts of the army to stop them. Finally, Geronimo wearied of the continual harassment of the U.S. Army and agreed to return to the reservation in 1884, much on his own terms. He did not stay long. Among the many rules imposed upon the Apache on the reservation was the prohibition of any liquor, including a weak beer they had traditionally brewed from corn. In early May 1885, Geronimo and a dozen other leaders deliberately staged a corn beer festival. Reasoning that the authorities would be unlikely to try to punish such a large group, they openly admitted the deed, expecting that it would lead to negotiations. Because of a communication mix-up, however, the army failed to respond. Geronimo and the others assumed the delay indicated the army was preparing some drastic punishment for their crime. Rather than remain exposed and vulnerable on the reservation, Geronimo fled with 42 men and 92 women and children. Quickly moving south, Geronimo raided settlements along the way for supplies. In one instance, he attacked a ranch owned by a man named Phillips, killing him, his wife, and his two children. Frightened settlers demanded swift military action, and General George Crook coordinated a combined Mexican and American manhunt for the Apache. Thousands of soldiers tracked the fugitives but Geronimo and his band split into small groups and remained elusive. Crook's failure to apprehend the Indians led to his eventual resignation. General Nelson Miles replaced him. Miles committed 5,000 troops to the campaign and even established 30 heliograph stations to improve communications. Still, Miles was also unable to find the elusive warrior. Informed that many of the reservation Apache, including his own family, had been taken to Florida, Geronimo apparently lost the will to fight. After a year and a half of running, Geronimo and his 38 remaining followers surrendered unconditionally to Miles on September 3, 1886. Relocated to Florida, Geronimo was imprisoned and kept from his family for two years. Finally, he was freed and moved with this family to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. He died of pneumonia at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909.

• 1932 --- The U.S. Congress changed the name "Porto Rico" to "Puerto Rico."

• 1954 --- The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled for school integration in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. The ruling declared that racially segregated schools were inherently unequal.

• 1963 --- Joan Baez headlined the first Monterey Folk Festival in California.

• 1967 --- Tennessee repealed its 1925 law making it illegal to teach evolution in public schools.

• 1970 --- Norwegian ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl and a multinational crew set out from Morocco across the Atlantic Ocean in Ra II, a papyrus sailing craft modeled after ancient Egyptian sailing vessels. Heyerdahl was attempting to prove his theory that Mediterranean civilizations sailed to America in ancient times and exchanged cultures with the people of Central and South America. The Ra II crossed the 4,000 miles of ocean to Barbados in 57 days.

• 1971 --- The musical, Godspell, opened this night at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City. Godspell featured the song Day by Day (a top-15 hit in 1972). The rock musical that featured Robin Lamont played for 2,651 performances and was the third longest-running off-Broadway production at the time.

• 1973 --- In Washington, D.C., the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, headed by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, begins televised hearings on the escalating Watergate affair. One week later, Harvard law professor Archibald Cox was sworn in as special Watergate prosecutor.

• 1980 --- Rioting erupted in Miami's Liberty City neighborhood after an all-white jury in Tampa acquitted four former Miami police officers of fatally beating black insurance executive Arthur McDuffie. Eight people were killed in the rioting.

• 1984 --- Mario Soto of the Cincinnati Reds threw four strikeouts in one inning. Soto was only pitcher number 15 since 1900 to do so. How? The hit catcher dropped the ball on the third strikeout of a game against the Chicago Cubs. The runner took off to first base and was safe. The rules state that the catcher must hold on to the ball for a third strike call to take effect. This was the first four-strikeout inning since 1978. Soto joined the company of Mike Paxton, Phil Niekro, Bill Bonham and Mike Cuellar -- all pitchers in the 1970s -- who had the same thing happen to them.

• 1996 --- U.S. President Clinton signed a measure requiring neighborhood notification when sex offenders move in. Megan's Law was named for 7-year-old Megan Kanka, who was abducted, raped and killed in 1994.

• 2000 --- Two former Ku Klux Klansmen were arrested on murder charges in the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls.

• 2001 --- The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp based on Charles M. Schulz's "Peanuts" comic strip.

• 2005 --- Toyota Motor Company announces its plans to produce a gasoline-electric hybrid version of its bestselling Camry sedan. Built at the company's Georgetown, Kentucky, plant, the Camry became Toyota's first hybrid model to be manufactured in the United States.

• Birthdays
• Dorothy Richardson
• Maureen O’Sullivan
• Sugar Ray Leonard
• Taj Mahal
• Bill Paxton
• Jim Nantz
• Enya
• Craig Ferguson
• Trent Reznor
• Page McConnell
• Horace Dodge
• Sandro Boticelli
• Ayatollah Khomeini
• Archibald Cox
• Brigit Nilsson
• Dennis Hopper
• Jesse Winchester