- 196th Day of 2015 169 Remaining
- Autumn Begins in 70 Days
- Sunrise:6:00
- Sunset:8:31
- 14 Hours 31 Minutes
- Moon Rise:5:50am
- Moon Set:8:09pm
- Phase:New Moon
- Full Moon July 1 @ 7:22pm and July 31 @ 3:45pm
- Full Thunder Moon / Full Hay Moon
- July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.
- Tides
- High:12:12pm/10:56pm
- Low:5:17am/5:04pm
- Holidays
- Be A Dork Day
- Gummi Worm Day
- I Love Horses Day
- National Respect Canada Day
- National Tapioca Pudding Day
- Take Your Poet To Work Day
- Pet Fire Safety Day
- O-Bon (Festival of Souls)-Japan
- St Swithin’s Day-United Kingdom (If it rains on St. Swithin's Day, it means rain for 40 days.)
- 'St. Swithin’s day, gif ye do rain,
- for forty days it will remain;
- St. Swithin’s day, an ye be fair,
- for forty days ’twill rain nae mair.'
- On This Day
- 1789 --- Only one day after the fall of the Bastille marked the beginning of a new revolutionary regime in France, the French aristocrat and hero of the American War for Independence, Marie-Joseph Paul Roch Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, becomes the colonel-general of the National Guard of Paris by acclamation. Lafayette served as a human link between America and France in what is sometimes known as The Age of Revolutions.
- 1806 --- Zebulon Pike, the U.S. Army officer who in 1805 led an exploring party in search of the source of the Mississippi River, sets off with a new expedition to explore the American Southwest. Pike was instructed to seek out headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers and to investigate Spanish settlements in New Mexico.
- 1876 --- George Washington Bradley of St. Louis pitched the first no-hitter in baseball in a 2-0 win over Hartford.
- 1964 --- Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona was nominated for president at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco. During the subsequent campaign, Goldwater said that he thought the United States should do whatever was necessary to win in Vietnam. At one point, he talked about the possibility of using low-yield atomic weapons to defoliate enemy infiltration routes, but he never actually advocated the use of nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. Although Goldwater later clarified his position, the Democrats very effectively portrayed him as a trigger-happy warmonger. This reputation, whether deserved or not, was a key factor in his crushing defeat at the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson, who won 61 percent of the vote to Goldwater’s 39 percent.
- 1965 --- The unmanned spacecraft Mariner 4 passes over Mars at an altitude of 6,000 feet and sends back to Earth the first close-up images of the red planet. Launched in November 1964, Mariner 4 carried a television camera and six other science instruments to study Mars and interplanetary space within the solar system. Reaching Mars on July 14, 1965, the spacecraft began sending back television images of the planet just after midnight on July 15. The pictures–nearly 22 in all–revealed a vast, barren wasteland of craters and rust-colored sand, dismissing 19th-century suspicions that an advanced civilization might exist on the planet. The canals that American astronomer Percival Lowell spied with his telescope in 1890 proved to be an optical illusion, but ancient natural waterways of some kind did seem to be evident in some regions of the planet. Once past Mars, Mariner 4 journeyed on to the far side of the sun before returning to the vicinity of Earth in 1967.
- 1968 --- Commercial air travel began between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., when the first plane, a Soviet Aeroflot jet, landed at Kennedy International Airport in New York.
- 1973 --- Nolan Ryan (California Angels) became the first pitcher in two decades to win two no-hitters in a season.
- 1980 --- Linda Ronstadt made her dramatic debut in "The Pirates Of Penzance" at the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.
- 2002 --- John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban,” accepts a plea-bargain deal in which he pleads guilty to one count of supplying services to the Taliban and carrying weapons. Under the terms of the deal, Walker Lindh agreed to serve 20 years in prison and cooperate with the American government in their investigation into the terrorist group al Qaeda. In return, all other charges against him were dropped, including one count of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals.
- Birthdays
- Forest Whitaker
- Clement Moore
- Dame Iris Murdoch
- Rembrandt Van Rijn
- Philly Joe Jones
- Millie Jackson
- Lolita Davidovich
- Jan Michael Vincent
- Linda Ronstadt
- Joe Satriani
- Brigettte Nielsen
KALW Almanac-July 15, 2015
