Monday December 9, 2013

• 343^rd Day of 2013 / 22 Remaining
• 12 Days Until The First Day of Winter

• Sunrise:7:14
• Sunset:4:50
• 9 Hours 36 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:12:15pm
• Moon Set:12:44am(Tuesday)
• Moon’s Phase: First Quarter

• The Next Full Moon
• December 17 @ 1:29amam
• 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:4:18am/4:08pm
• Low:10:35am/10:16pm

• Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
• This Year:2.09
• Last Year:8.89
• Normal To Date:5.77
• Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

• Holidays
• National Pastry Day
• National Salesperson's Day
   
• International Anti-Corruption Day
• Independence Day-Tanzania
• Constitution Day-Northern Marianas

• On This Day In …
• 1788 --- George Washington sold his race horse, Magnolia, to Colonel Henry Lee. Washington reportedly got 5,000 acres of Kentucky farmland in the trade.

• 1793 --- The first daily newspaper in New York City was founded by Noah Webster. The American Minerva was published for the first time this day.
  

  

• 1803 --- The 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by the U.S. Congress. With the amendment Electors were directed to vote for a President and for a Vice-President rather than for two choices for President.

• 1854 --- On this day, The Examiner prints Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which commemorates the

  

  courage of 600 British soldiers charging a heavily defended position during the Battle of Balaklava, in the Crimea, just six weeks earlier. Tennyson had been named poet laureate in 1850 by Queen Victoria.

• 1907 --- The U.S. Post Office in Wilmington, Delaware offered Christmas Seals for sale for the very first time. Contributions for the

  

  original seals, designed by Emily P. Bissell, helped in the fight against tuberculosis. (A hospital in Wilmington is named in honor of Bissell.)

• 1926 --- The U.S. Golf Association legalized steel-shaft golf clubs. Many of the new clubs are still wrapped around tree trunks, put there by angry golfers who couldn’t make them work any better than the clubs made with hickory sticks.

• 1934 --- Because of ground conditions, the New York Giants football team preferred to wear basketball sneakers, as they defeated the Chicago Bears, 30-13, for the NFL championship.
  

  

• 1950 --- Harry Gold--who had confessed to serving as a courier between Klaus Fuchs, a British scientist who stole top-secret information on the atomic bomb, and Soviet agents--is sentenced to 30 years in jail for his crime. Gold's arrest and confession led to the arrest of David Greenglass, who then implicated his brother-in-law and sister, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

• 1955 --- Sugar Ray Robinson knocked out Carl Olson and regained his world middleweight boxing title.

• 1958 --- In Indianapolis, retired Boston candy manufacturer Robert H.W. Welch, Jr., establishes the John Birch Society, a right-wing organization dedicated to fighting what it perceives to be the extensive infiltration of communism into American society. Welch named the society in honor of John Birch, considered by many to be the first American casualty in the struggle against communism. In 1945, Birch, a Baptist missionary and U.S. Army intelligence specialist, was killed by Chinese communists in the northern province of Anhwei.

• 1963 --- The first Supremes album, "Meet the Supremes," was released.
  

  

• 1964 --- The John Coltrane Quartet recorded "Love Supreme."

• 1965 --- 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' premiered on CBS TV.
  

  

• 1965 --- Cincinnati Reds trade outfielder Frank Robinson to the Baltimore Orioles, in exchange for the pitchers Milt Pappas and Jack Baldschun and the outfielder Dick Simpson. The trade is widely regarded as one of the worst in major league baseball history.

• 1967 --- The Cunard lines 1,000 ft, 81,000 ton passenger ship the Queen Mary, launched in 1936, arrived in Long Beach, California to begin its new roll as a museum, hotel and conference center.
  

  

• 1967 --- Jim Morrison was arrested onstage in New Haven, CT, and charged with breach of peace and resisting arrest.
  

  

• 1972 --- Nothing in her professional credentials suggested the Australian pop singer Helen Reddy as a feminist icon prior to 1972. She'd made her way to the United States from her native Australia on her own to pursue stardom, and she'd paid her dues working on the periphery of the music business for a number of years before making a breakthrough. Yet when that breakthrough came, it was in the form of a 1971 cover version of "I Don't Know How To Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar—hardly a song about women's

  

  liberation. But a feminist icon is exactly what Helen Reddy would become the very next year, when the anthem-to-be "I Am Woman" charged up the pop charts, reaching the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 on this day 41 years ago.

• 1990 --- Lech Walesa, founder of the Solidarity trade union, wins a landslide election victory, becoming the first directly elected Polish leader.

• 1990 --- Slobodan Milosovic was elected president in Serbia's first free elections in 50 years.

• 1992 --- Bill Wyman left the Rolling Stones after over 30 years with the group.

• 1992 --- Clair George, former CIA spy chief, was convicted of lying to the U.S. Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. U.S. President George H.W. Bush later pardoned George.

• 1994 --- U.S. President Clinton fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders after learning that she had told a conference that masturbation should be discussed in school as a part of human sexuality.

• 1995 --- The Beatles’ Anthology 1 was #1 in the U.S. The double CD contained 60 Beatles songs and was the their sixteenth number-one album. It also set a record for the longest time span for a run of number-one albums: 31 years and 10 months between Meet the Beatles and Anthology 1.

• 2003 --- In Australia, thieves broke into a home and stole two 300-year-old etchings by Rembrandt. The 4-by-4-inch etchings, a self-portait and a depiction of the artist's mother, were valued around $518,000.
  

  

• Birthdays
• Joan Armatrading
• Redd Foxx
• Clarence Birdseye
• House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill
• Kirk Douglas
• Sen Kirsten Gillibrand
• Dick Van Patten
• Buck Henry
• Deacon Jones
• Beau Bridges
• Sen Tom Daschle
• John Malkovich
• Mario Cantone
• Tre Cool
• John Milton
• Emmett Kelly
• Dalton Trumbo
• Adm. Grace Murray Hopper
• John Cassavetes
• Margaret Hamilton
• Douglas Fairbanks Jr.
• Judi Dench
• Donny Osmond