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Monday July 16, 2012

  • 198th Day of 2012 / 168 Remaining
  • 68 Days Until Autumn Begins
  • Sunrise:6:01
  • Sunset:8:31
  • 14 Hours 30 Minutes of Daylight
  • Moon Rise:3:50am
  • Moon Set:6:41pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 6 %
  • The Next Full Moon
  • August 1 @ 8:27pm
  • Full Sturgeon Moon
  • Full Red Moon
  • Full Green Corn Moon
  • Full Grain Moon

The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.

  • Tides
  • High:11:12am/9:29pm
  • Low:4:12am/3:42pm
  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:0.00
  • Last Year:0.07
  • Normal To Date:0.00
  • Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
  • Holidays
  • National Woodie Wagon Day
  • Toss Away the "Could Haves" and "Should Haves" Day
  • National Corn Fritters Day
  • Fresh Spinach Day
  • National Closet Space Appreciation Day
  • Atomic Bomb Day
  • La Paz Day-Bolivia
  • Lunes del Cerro-Mexico
  • World Snake Day
  • On This Day In …
  • 1439 --- Kissing was outlawed in England to stop the spread of a killer plague.
  • 1790 --- The District of Columbia was established as the seat of the U.S. government.
  • 1918 --- In Yekaterinburg, Russia, Czar Nicholas II and his family are executed by the Bolsheviks, bringing an end to the three-century-old Romanov dynasty. Crowned in 1896, Nicholas was neither trained nor inclined to rule, which did not help the autocracy he sought to preserve among a people desperate for change. The disastrous outcome of the Russo-Japanese War led to the Russian Revolution of 1905, which ended only after Nicholas approved a representative assembly--the Duma--and promised constitutional reforms. The czar soon retracted these concessions and repeatedly dissolved the Duma when it opposed him, contributing to the growing public support for the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary groups. In 1914, Nicholas led his country into another costly war--World War I--that Russia was ill-prepared to win. Discontent grew as food became scarce, soldiers became war weary and devastating defeats at the hands of Germany demonstrated the ineffectiveness of Russia under Nicholas. In March 1917, revolution broke out on the streets of Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and Nicholas was forced to abdicate his throne later that month. That November, the radical socialist Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in Russia from the provisional government, sued for peace with the Central Powers and set about establishing the world's first communist state. Civil war broke out in Russia in June 1918, and in July the anti-Bolshevik "White" Russian forces advanced on Yekaterinburg, where Nicholas and his family were located, during a campaign against the Bolshevik forces. Local authorities were ordered to prevent a rescue of the Romanovs, and after a secret meeting of the Yekaterinburg Soviet, a death sentence was passed on the imperial family. Late on the night of July 16, Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children and four servants were ordered to dress quickly and go down to the cellar of the house in which they were being held. There, the family and servants were arranged in two rows for a photograph they were told was being taken to quell rumors that they had escaped. Suddenly, a dozen armed men burst into the room and gunned down the imperial family in a hail of gunfire. Those who were still breathing when the smoked cleared were stabbed to death.
  • 1926 --- The first underwater color photographs appeared in "National Geographic" magazine. The pictures had been taken near the Florida Keys.
  • 1935 --- The world's first parking meter, known as Park-O-Meter No. 1, is installed on the southeast corner of what was then First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on this day in 1935. The parking meter was the brainchild of a man named Carl C. Magee, who moved to Oklahoma City from New Mexico in 1927. Magee had a colorful past: As a reporter for an Albuquerque newspaper, he had played a pivotal role in uncovering the so-called Teapot Dome Scandal (named for the Teapot Dome oil field in Wyoming), in which Albert B. Fall, then-secretary of the interior, was convicted of renting government lands to oil companies in return for personal loans and gifts. He also wrote a series of articles exposing corruption in the New Mexico court system, and was tried and acquitted of manslaughter after he shot at one of the judges targeted in the series during an altercation at a Las Vegas hotel. By the time Magee came to Oklahoma City to start a newspaper, the Oklahoma News, his new hometown shared a common problem with many of America's urban areas--a lack of sufficient parking space for the rapidly increasingly number of automobiles crowding into the downtown business district each day. Asked to find a solution to the problem, Magee came up with the Park-o-Meter. The first working model went on public display in early May 1935, inspiring immediate debate over the pros and cons of coin-regulated parking. Indignant opponents of the meters considered paying for parking un-American, as it forced drivers to pay what amounted to a tax on their cars, depriving them of their money without due process of law. Despite such opposition, the first meters were installed by the Dual Parking Meter Company beginning in July 1935; they cost a nickel an hour, and were placed at 20-foot intervals along the curb that corresponded to spaces painted on the pavement. Magee's invention caught on quickly: Retailers loved the meters, as they encouraged a quick turnover of cars--and potential customers--and drivers were forced to accept them as a practical necessity for regulating parking. By the early 1940s, there were more than 140,000 parking meters operating in the United States. Today, Park-O-Meter No. 1 is on display in the Statehood Gallery of the Oklahoma Historical Society.
  • 1945 --- Fat Boy, the experimental, plutonium bomb, exploded at 5:30 a.m. in the first U.S. test of an atomic bomb. The mushroom-shaped cloud rose to a height of 41,000 feet above the New Mexico desert at Alamogordo Air Base. All life in a one-mile radius ceased to exist.
  • 1963 --- The U.S. Postal Service began using ZIP codes. ZIP means zone improvement plan. There are 43,000 5-digit zip codes.
  • 1951 --- J.D. Salinger's only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is published by Little, Brown on this day in 1951. The book, about a confused teenager disillusioned by the adult world, is an instant hit and will be taught in high schools for half a century. The 31-year-old Salinger had worked on the novel for a decade. His stories had already started appearing in the 1940s, many in the New Yorker. The book took the country by storm, selling out and becoming a Book of the Month Club selection. Fame did not agree with Salinger, who retreated to a hilltop cabin in Cornish, New York, but he continued to publish stories in the New Yorker periodically.
  • 1964 --- In accepting the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, Barry M. Goldwater said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
  • 1967 --- Arlo Guthrie performs a new song, the 20 minute 'Alice's Restaurant', at the Newport Folk Festival.
  • 1969 --- Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy, FL, and began the first manned mission to land on the moon.
  • 1973 --- Former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly revealed the existence of President Richard Nixon's secret taping system during the Senate Watergate hearings.
  • 1980 --- The California Supreme Court rules that Ted Giannoulas can appear in public in his San Diego Chicken suit as long as it does not have the call letters of the radio station (KGB) that first used it as a promotional gambit.
  • 1981 --- Singer Harry Chapin died in a car crash in New York. Chapin, a folk-rock balladeer, was 38. His hit songs included Taxi, W-O-L-D and the million seller, Cat’s in the Cradle. He was a champion of the hungry and homeless and organized a massive effort to provide food for the needy. This was his legacy to the world; his work continues by other performers.
  • 1990 --- An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale devastated the Philippines, killing over 1,600 people. A thousand more were missing. Damage was reported in Manila, Cabanatuan, Baguio and Luzon. It was the worst earthquake in that part of the world since 1976
  • 1994 The Three Tenors, singers Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras performed for 56-thousand in L.A.’s Dodger Stadium and an estimated worldwide TV audience of 1.3-billion.
  • 2004 --- Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement by a federal judge for lying about a stock sale.
  • Birthdays
  • Ginger Rogers
  • Barbara Stanwyck
  • Orville Redenbacher
  • Reuben Blades
  • Will Ferrell
  • Michael Flatley
  • Margaret Smith Court
  • Stewart Copeland
  • Phoebe Cates
  • Roald Amundsen
  • Barnard Hughes
  • Cal Tjader
  • Desmond Dekker
  • Pinchas Zuckerman
  • Ida Bell Wells