Monday January 27, 2014

• 27^th Day of 2013 / 338 Remaining
• 52 Days Until The First Day of Spring

• Sunrise:7:16
• Sunset:5:28
• 10 Hours 12 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:4:02am
• Moon Set:2:20pm
• Moon’s Phase: 14 %

• The Next Full Moon
• February 14 @ 3:54 pm
• Full Snow Moon
• Full Hunger Moon

Since the heaviest snow usually falls during this month, native tribes of the north and east most often called February’s full Moon the Full Snow Moon. Some tribes also referred to this Moon as the Full Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions in their areas made hunting very difficult.

• Tides
• High:7:01am/9:06pm
• Low:12:49am/2:09pm

• Rainfall
• This Year:2.12
• Last Year:13.50
• Average Year to Date:13.02

• Holidays
• Mozart Day
• Thomas Crapper Day
• Activity Professionals Day
• National Chocolate Cake Day

• UN International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust
• Day of Remembrance for Victims of Nazism (Germany)
• Holocaust Memorial Day-United Kingdom
• Vietnam Day-Vietnam

• On This Day In …
• 1302 --- Poet and politician Dante Alighieri is exiled from Florence, where he served as one of six priors governing the city. Dante's political activities, including the banishing of several rivals, led to his

  

  own banishment, and he wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town.

• 1606 --- The trial of Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators began. They were executed on January 31.

• 1870 --- Kappa Alpha Theta, the first women’s Greek letter society, or sorority, was founded at Indiana Asbury University -- now DePauw University -- in Greencastle, Indiana.

• 1880 --- Thomas Edison was granted patent for electric lamps giving light by incandescence.
  

  

• 1888 --- The National Geographic Society is founded in Washington, D.C., for "the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge." The

  

  33 men who originally met and formed the National Geographic Society were a diverse group of geographers, explorers, teachers, lawyers, cartographers, military officers and financiers. All shared an interest in scientific and geographical knowledge, as well as an opinion that in a time of discovery, invention, change and mass communication, Americans were becoming more curious about the

  

  world around them. With this in mind, the men drafted a constitution and elected as the Society's president a lawyer and philanthropist named Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Neither a scientist nor a geographer, Hubbard represented the Society's desire to reach out to the layman. Nine months after its inception, the Society published its first issue of National Geographic magazine.

• 1927 --- United Independent Broadcasters Inc. started a radio network with contracts with 16 stations. The company later became Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

• 1944 --- Soviet forces permanently break the Leningrad siege line, ending the almost 900-day German-enforced containment of the city, which cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives.The siege began officially on September 8, 1941. The people of Leningrad began building antitank fortifications and succeeded in creating a stable defense of the city, but as a result were cut off from all access to vital resources in the Soviet interior, Moscow specifically. In 1942, an estimated 650,000 Leningrad citizens perished from starvation, disease, exposure, and injuries suffered from continual German artillery bombardment. Barges offered occasional relief in the summer and ice-borne sleds did the same in the winter. Slowly but surely a million of Leningrad's young, sick, and elderly residents were evacuated, leaving about 2 million to ration available food and use all open ground to plant vegetables. On January 12, Soviet defenses punctured the siege, ruptured the German encirclement, and allowed more supplies to come in along Lake Ladoga. The siege officially ended after 872 days (though it is often called the 900-day siege), after a Soviet counteroffensive pushed the Germans westward.

• 1945 --- Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.
  

  

• 1948 --- Wire Recording Corporation of America announced the first magnetic tape recorder. The ‘Wireway’ machine with a built-in oscillator sold for $149.50.
  

  

• 1950 --- 'Science' magazine announce the discovery of the new antibiotic, terramyacin. What made it unusual is that Pfizer & Co. had discovered the antibiotic in a soil sample from Indiana. Pfizer had been searching soil samples from around the world for new bacteria fighting organisms.

• 1956 --- Elvis Presley released "Heartbreak Hotel."

• 1961 --- Leontyne Price made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
  

  

• 1964 --- The Rolling Stones appeared as judges on the British TV show "Juke Box Jury."
  

  

• 1967 --- A launch pad fire during Apollo program tests at Cape Canaveral, Florida, kills astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chafee. An investigation indicated that a faulty electrical wire inside the Apollo 1 command module was the probable cause of the fire. The astronauts, the first Americans to die in a spacecraft, had been participating in a simulation of the Apollo 1 launch scheduled for the next month. The Apollo program was

  

  initiated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) following President John F. Kennedy's 1961 declaration of the goal of landing men on the moon and bringing them safely back to Earth by the end of the decade. The so-called "moon shot" was the largest scientific and technological undertaking in history. In December 1968, Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to travel to the moon, and on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. walked on the lunar surface. In all, there were 17 Apollo missions and six lunar landings.

• 1967 --- More than 60 nations signed the Outer Space Treaty which banned the orbiting of nuclear weapons and placing weapons on celestial bodies or space stations.

• 1968 --- Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay was released on this day, seven weeks after the singer’s death. It became #1 on March 16, 1968 and remained at the top spot for a

  

  month. Redding began his recording career in 1960 with Johnny Jenkins and The Pinetoppers (on Confederate Records). He sang duet with Carla Thomas and had 11 chart hits. Redding of Dawson, GA was killed in a plane crash at Lake Monona near Madison, WI. Four members of the Bar-Kays were also killed in the crash. The Dock of the Bay, his only number one song, was recorded just three days before his death.

• 1973 --- The Vietnam peace accords were signed in Paris. The United States, South Vietnam, Viet Cong, and North Vietnam

  

  formally sign "An Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam" in Paris. Due to South Vietnam's unwillingness to recognize the Viet Cong's Provisional Revolutionary Government, all references to it were confined to a two-party version of the document signed by North Vietnam and the United States—the South Vietnamese were presented with a separate document that did not

  

  make reference to the Viet Cong government. This was part of Saigon's long-time refusal to recognize the Viet Cong as a legitimate participant in the discussions to end the war.

• 1975 --- A bipartisan Senate investigation of activities by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is launched by a special congressional committee headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. On November 20, the committee released its report, charging both U.S. government agencies with illegal activities. The committee reported that the FBI and the CIA

  

  had conducted illegal surveillance of several hundred thousand U.S. citizens. The CIA was also charged with illegally plotting to assassinate foreign leaders, such as Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile. In 1973, Allende was killed in a coup that the CIA secretly helped organize. The Senate committee also reported that the CIA had maintained a secret stockpile of poisons despite a specific presidential order to destroy the substances.

• 1984 --- Carl Lewis bettered his own two-year-old record by 9-1/4 inches when he set a new, world indoor record with a long-jump mark of 28 feet, 10-1/4 inches. The track event was held in New York City.
  

  

• 1996 --- Mahamane Ousmane, the first democratically elected president of Niger, was overthrown by a military coup. Colonel Ibrahim Bare Mainassara declared himself head of state.

• 1997 --- It was revealed that French national museums were holding nearly 2,000 works of art stolen from Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

• 2006 --- The last Western Union Telegrams are sent.

• Birthdays
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodson)
• Jerome Kern
• Chief Justice John Roberts
• James Cromwell
• Mikhail Baryshnikov
• Bridget Fonda
• Mimi Rogers
• Keith Olbermann
• William Randolph Hearst Jr
• Skitch Henderson
• Bobby Blue Bland