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Monday December 3, 2012

  • 338th Day of 2012 / 28 Remaining
  • 18 Days Until The First Day of Winter

  • Sunrise:7:08
  • Sunset:4:51
  • 9 Hours 43 Minutes of Daylight

  • Moon Rise:9:40pm
  • Moon Set:10:38am
  • Moon’s Phase: 77 %

  • The Next Full Moon
  • December 28 @ 2:22 am
  • Full Cold Moon
  • Full Long Nights Moon
  • During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest. It is also sometimes called the Moon before Yule. The term Long Night Moon is a doubly appropriate name because the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the Moon is above the horizon for a long time. The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.

  • Tides
  • High: 2:27am/12:50pm
  • Low: 7:27am/7:47pm

  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:7.44
  • Last Year:3.20
  • Normal To Date:3.20
  • Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

  • Holidays
  • Coats and Toys for Kids Day
  • Admission Day-Illinois
  • National Ice Cream Box Day

  • UN International Day of Persons With Disabilities

  • On This Day In …
  • 1818 --- Illinois (from an American Indian word meaning ‘tribe of superior men’) is the name of the 21st state to enter the United States of America. Many superior men have hailed from Illinois, the most famous being Abraham Lincoln. The ‘Illinois rail-splitter’ is buried in the city where he was married and began his legal career, Springfield, the capital of Illinois. Also known as the Prairie State, Illinois calls the tiny, but beautiful violet, the state flower, while state bird honors were bestowed on the brightly colored cardinal.

  • 1833 --- Oberlin College in Ohio started classes as the first coed institution of higher learning in the United States. Looking at the school’s registration, one would have found a total of 44 students enrolled: 29 men and 15 women.

  • 1910 --- The neon lamp was displayed for the first time at the Paris Motor Show. The lamp was developed by French physicist Georges Claude.

  • 1925 --- The first jazz concerto for piano and orchestra was presented at Carnegie Hall in NYC. Commissioned by Walter Damrosch, American composer George Gershwin presented Concerto In F, and was also the featured soloist playing a flugelhorn in a slow, bluesy style as one of his numbers.

  • 1931 --- Alka Seltzer was sold for the first time.

  • 1947 --- Marlon Brando's famous cry of "STELLA!" first booms across a Broadway stage, electrifying the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre during the first-ever performance of Tennessee Williams' play “A Streetcar Named Desire”. The 23-year-old Brando played the rough, working-class Polish-American Stanley Kowalski, whose violent clash with Blanche DuBois (played on Broadway by Jessica Tandy), a Southern belle with a dark past, is at the center of Williams' famous drama. Blanche comes to stay with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter), Stanley's wife, at their home in the French Quarter of New Orleans; she and Stanley immediately despise each other. “Streetcar”, produced by Irene Mayer Selznick and directed by Elia Kazan, shocked mid-century audiences with its frank depiction of sexuality and brutality onstage. When the curtain went down on opening night, there was a moment of stunned silence before the crowd erupted into a round of applause that lasted 30 minutes. On December 17, the cast left New York to go on the road. The show would run for more than 800 performances, turning the charismatic Brando into an overnight star. Tandy won a Tony Award for her performance, and Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

  • 1948 --- The "Pumpkin Papers" came to public light. The House Un-American Activities Committee announced that former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers had produced microfilm of secret documents hidden inside a pumpkin on his Maryland farm.

  • 1955 --- Elvis Presley’s first release on RCA Victor Records was announced. No, it wasn’t Hound Dog or Heartbreak Hotel. The first two sides were actually purchased from Sam Phillips of Sun Records: Mystery Train and I Forgot to Remember to Forget. Elvis was described by his new record company as “The most talked about personality in recorded music in the last 10 years.”

  • 1960 --- Camelot opened at the Majestic Theatre in New York City. Richard Burton and Julie Andrews played the leading roles in the musical written by Lerner and Loewe. Robert Goulet also got rave reviews. Camelot had a run of 873 performances. Broadway went Hollywood in the 1967 film version of Camelot. Its run was not quite as successful.

  • 1964 --- Police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley who had stormed the administration building the previous day and staged a massive sit-in.

  • 1965 --- In Sacramento, CA, Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) was shocked and knocked unconscious during a concert when his guitar made contact with his microphone during a performance of "The Last Time."

  • 1967 --- In Cape Town, South Africa, a team of surgeons headed by Dr. Christian Barnard, performed the first human heart transplant on Louis Washkansky. Washkansky only lived 18 days.

  • 1968 --- The rules committee of Major League Baseball (MLB) announced that in 1969 the pitcher's mound would be lowered from 15 to 10 inches. This was done in order to "get more batting action."

  • 1976 --- Seven gunman fired shots into Bob Marley's home in Kingston, Jamaica where he and the Wailers were rehearsing. Marley was slightly wounded in the attack.

  • 1979 --- The general-admission ticketing policy for rock concerts at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum in the 1970s was known as "festival seating." That term and that ticketing policy would become infamous in the wake of one of the deadliest rock-concert incidents in history. Eleven people, including three high-school students, were killed on this day in 1979, when a crowd of general-admission ticket-holders to a Cincinnati Who concert surged forward in an attempt to enter Riverfront Coliseum and secure prime unreserved seats inside. That evening's concert was scheduled to begin at 8:00 pm, but ticket-holders had begun to gather outside the Coliseum shortly after noon, and by 3:00 pm, police had been called in to maintain order as the crowd swelled into the thousands. By 7:00 pm, an estimated 8,000 ticket-holders were jostling for position in a plaza at the Coliseum's west gate, and the crowd began to press forward. When a police lieutenant on the scene tried to convince the show's promoters to open the locked glass doors at the west gate entrance, he was told that there were not enough ticket-takers on duty inside, and that union rules prevented them from recruiting ushers to perform that duty. At approximately 7:20, the crowd surged forward powerfully as one set of glass doors shattered and the others were thrown open. With Coliseum security nowhere in sight, the police on hand were aware almost immediately that the situation had the potential for disaster, yet they were physically unable to slow the stream of people flowing through the plaza for at least the next 15 minutes. At approximately 7:45 pm, they began to work their way into the crowd, where they found the first of what would eventually turn out to be 11 concert-goers lying on the ground, dead from asphyxiation. Afraid of how the crowd might react to a cancellation, Cincinnati fire officials instructed the promoters to go on with the show, and the members of the Who were not told what had happened until after completing their final encore hours later.

  • 1984 --- In the early morning hours, one of the worst industrial disasters in history begins when a pesticide plant located in the densely populated region of Bhopal in central India leaks a highly toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate into the air. Of the estimated one million people living in Bhopal at the time, 2,000 were killed immediately, at least 600,000 were injured, and at least 6,000 have died since. The leak was caused by a series of mechanical and human errors in the pesticide producing plant, operated by the Union Carbide Corporation, a U.S.-based multinational. For a full hour, the plant's personnel and safety equipment failed to detect the massive leak, and when an alarm was finally sounded most of the harm had already been done. To make matters worse, local health officials had not been educated on the toxicity of the chemicals used at the Union Carbide plant and therefore there were no emergency procedures in place to protect Bhopal's citizens in the event of a chemical leak. If the victims had simply placed a wet towel over their face, most would have escaped serious injury. The Indian government sued Union Carbide in a civil case and settled in 1989 for $470 million. Because of the great number of individuals affected by the disaster, most Bhopal victims received just $550, which could not pay for the chronic lung ailments, eye problems, psychiatric disorders, and other common illnesses they developed. The average compensation for deaths resulting from the disaster was $1,300. The Indian government, famous for its corruption, has yet to distribute roughly half of Union Carbide's original settlement. Union Carbide, which shut down its Bhopal plant after the disaster, has failed to clean up the site completely, and the rusty, deserted complex continues to leak various poisonous substances into the water and soil of Bhopal.

  • 1997 --- In Ottawa, Canada, more than 120 countries were represented to sign a treaty prohibiting the use and production of anti-personnel land mines. The United States, China and Russia did not sign the treaty.

  • 1999 --- After rowing 2,962 miles in 81 days, Tori Murden of the United States eased her 23-foot boat, American Pearl, to the dock at Fort-du-Bas on the French Carribean island of Guadeloupe. She had just rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. Astonishingly, Murden appeared relaxed, even radiant, as she stood up to toss out a rope. “Next time, the Concorde,” she quipped, as she bounded out of the boat.

  • 1999 --- The World Trade Organization (WTO) concluded a four-day meeting in Seattle, WA, without setting an agenda for a new round of trade talks. The meeting was met with fierce protests by various groups.

  • 1999 --- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) lost radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander as it entered Mars' atmosphere.

  • Birthdays
  • Katarina Witt
  • Carlos Montoya
  • Ferlin Husky
  • John Cale
  • Anna Freud
  • Cleveland Abbe
  • Charles Pillsbury
  • Julianne Moore
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • Ozzy Osbourne
  • Daryl Hannah
  • Brendan Fraser
  • Joseph Conrad
  • Mickey Thomas