- 321st Day of 2012 / 45 Remaining
- 35 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:6:51
- Sunset:4:58
- 10 Hours 7 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:9:50am
- Moon Set:8:05pm
- Moon’s Phase: 12 %
- The Next Full Moon
- November 28 @ 6:47 am
- Full Beaver Moon
- Full Frosts Moon
For both the colonists and the Algonquin tribes, this was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. This full Moon was also called the Frost Moon.
- Tides
- High: 12:52am/11:41am
- Low: 5:43am/6:40pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:1.83
- Last Year:2.24
- Normal To Date:2.91
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Educational Support Professionals Day
- Admission Day-Oklahoma
- National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day
- Day of National Rebirth-Estonia
- UN International Day for Tolerance
- Correction Day-Syria
- On This Day In …
- 1849 --- A Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for his allegedly antigovernment activities linked to a radical intellectual group. His execution is stayed at the last minute. Dostoevsky's father was a doctor at Moscow's Hospital for the Poor, where he grew rich enough to buy land and serfs. After his father's death, Dostoevsky, who suffered from epilepsy, studied military engineering and became a civil servant while secretly writing novels. His first, Poor People, and his second, The Double, were both published in 1846-the first was a hit, the second a failure. Dostoevsky began participating in a radical intellectual discussion group called the Petrashevsky Circle. The group was suspected of subversive activites, which led to Dostoevsky's arrest in 1849, and his sentencing to death. On December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky was led before the firing squad but received a last-minute reprieve and was sent to a Siberian labor camp, where he worked for four years. He was released in 1854 and worked as a soldier on the Mongolian frontier. He married a widow and finally returned to Russia in 1859. The following year, he founded a magazine and two years after that journeyed to Europe for the first time. In 1864 and 1865, his wife and his brother died, the magazine folded, and Dostoevsky found himself deeply in debt, which he exacerbated by gambling. In 1866, he published Crime and Punishment, one of his most popular works. In 1867, he married a stenographer, and the couple fled to Europe to escape his creditors. His novel The Possessed (1872) was successful, and the couple returned to St. Petersburg. He published The Brothers Karamazov in 1880 to immediate success, but he died a year later.
- 1907 --- Oklahoma, the Sooner State, was the 46th state to enter the United States of America. The word, Oklahoma, is a combination of two Choctaw words meaning red people. Then, why Sooner? Many, many Oklahoma homesteaders thought sooner was better than later, better to stake their homesteads first, before it was legal to do so. Oil wells pop up all over the Oklahoma landscape, even in the bustling state capital, Oklahoma City. And, when that wind comes sweeping down the plain, it picks up the state bird, the scissor-tail flycatcher, and spreads the parasitic state flower, the mistletoe.
- 1915 --- Coca-Cola had its prototype for a countoured bottle patented. The bottle made its commercial debut the next year.
- 1933 --- The United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations. President Roosevelt sent a telegram to Soviet leader Maxim Litvinov, expressing hope that United States-Soviet relations would "forever remain normal and friendly.''
- 1955 --- ‘Tennessee’ Ernie Ford drove to the top spot on the record charts with “Sixteen Tons”. The song where he owed his “soul to the company store,” became the fastest-selling record in history, jumping to #1 in just 3 weeks. The tune, on Capitol Records, stayed at #1 for eight weeks.
- 1959 --- Did the young Austrian nun named Maria really take to the hills surrounding Salzburg to sing spontaneously of her love of music? Did she comfort herself with thoughts of copper kettles, and did she swoon to her future husband's song about an alpine flower while the creeping menace of Nazism spread across central Europe? No, the real-life Maria von Trapp did none of those things. She was indeed a former nun, and she did indeed marry Count Georg von Trapp and become stepmother to his large brood of children, but nearly all of the particulars she related in her 1949 book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, were ignored by the creators of the Broadway musical her memoir inspired. And while the liberties taken by the show's writers, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, and by its composer and lyricist, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, caused some consternation to the real Maria von Trapp and to her stepchildren, according to many later reports, those liberties made The Sound of Music a smash success from the very night of its Broadway opening on this day in 1959. With a creative team made up of Broadway legends and a star as enormously popular and bankable as Mary Martin, it was no surprise that The Sound of Music drew enormous advance sales. But audiences continued to flock to The Sound of Music despite sometimes tepid reviews, like the one in The New York Times that said the show "lack[ed] the final exultation that marks the difference between a masterpiece and a well-produced musical entertainment." Reviewer Brooks Atkinson did, however, single out the "affecting beauty" of the music from The Sound of Music as saving it from a story verging on "sticky." Sticky or no, The Sound of Music was an instant success, and numerous songs from its score— including "Do Re Mi," "My Favorite Things" and "Climb Every Mountain"—quickly entered the popular canon. Indeed, the original cast recording of The Sound of Music was nearly as big a phenomenon as the show itself. Recorded just a week after the show's premiere on this day in 1959 and released by Columbia Records, the album shot to the top of the Billboard album charts on its way to selling upwards of 3 million copies worldwide
- 1969 --- The U.S. Army announced that several had been charged with massacre and the subsequent cover-up in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968.
- 1970 --- Anne Murray received a gold record for Snowbird. She was the first Canadian recording artist to receive a gold record.
- 1973 --- President Richard Nixon declares that America's energy requirements have outpaced its production capacity and urges Congress to pass Senate Bill 1081, which would authorize the construction of a pipeline to access oil from the North Slope of Alaska. Nixon claimed the nation's "dangerous reliance" on foreign oil, controlled mainly by the increasingly powerful, but politically unstable oil-rich nations of the Middle East, posed a threat to America's economy. America had once relied on cheap domestic oil, but by the 1970s, dwindling supplies forced the nation to buy more expensive oil on the international market. An Arab oil embargo in 1973 exacerbated the problem. Saying that the conservation of existing domestic supplies was not enough, Nixon declared that America had to find and tap more oil resources closer to home. In his announcement on this day, Nixon projected that the pipeline would be completed in 1977, and would eventually carry 2 million barrels of oil per day into the port at Valdez, Alaska, where tankers would then carry the precious cargo into the continental United States. Nixon sought to assure an increasingly vocal environmental movement that the planned pipeline—which he called the "single largest endeavor ever undertaken by private enterprise"--would be constructed and operated "under the most rigid environmental safeguards ever devised." Meanwhile, though, he asked Congress not to attach amendments to the bill that would have given federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Fish and Game regulatory power over the pipeline's construction.
- 1978 --- The movie version of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" opens. The Bee Gees, Peter Frampton and Billy Preston made their acting debuts in the movie.
- 1988 --- In Pakistan, citizens vote in their first open election in more than a decade, choosing as prime minister the populist candidate Benazir Bhutto, daughter of former Pakistani leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. She was the first woman leader of a Muslim country in modern history. After General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq seized power in Pakistan in a military coup in 1977, Zulfikar Bhutto was tried and executed on the charge of having ordered an assassination in 1974. Benazir Bhutto endured frequent house arrests during the next seven years. In 1984, she fled to England, where she became head of her father's former party, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). In 1988, President Zia died along with the American ambassador to Pakistan in a mysterious plane crash, leaving a power vacuum. Bhutto returned to Pakistan and launched a nationwide campaign for open elections. In elections on November 16, Bhutto's PPP won a majority in the National Assembly, and on December 1 Bhutto took office as prime minister of Pakistan. Her government fell in 1990, but from 1993 to 1996 she again served as Pakistani leader
- 1998 --- The U.S. Supreme Court said that union members could file discrimination lawsuits against employers even when labor contracts require arbitration.
- 2004 --- President George W. Bush picked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state, succeeding Colin Powell.
- 2004 --- A NASA unmanned "scramjet" (X-43A) reached a speed of nearly 10 times the speed of sound above the Pacific Ocean.
- Birthdays
- W C Handy
- Diana Krall
- Lisa Bonet
- Burgess Meredith
- Daws Butler
- Dwoght Gooden
- Martha Plimpton
- Oksana Baiul