- 86th Day of 2012 / 280 Remaining
- 86 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:7:03
- Sunset:7:28
- 12 Hr 25 Min
- Moon Rise:9:01am
- Moon Set:11:39pm
- Moon’s Phase: 15 %
- The Next Full Moon
- April 6 @ 2:20pm
- Full Pink Moon
- Full Fish Moon
- Full Sprouting Grass Moon
- Full Full Fish Moon
This name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Full Fish Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
- Tides
- High:1:11am/2:40pm
- Low:7:58am/7:48pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:11.79
- Last Year:24.50
- Normal To Date:19.95
- Annual Average: 22.28
- Holidays
- Legal Assistants Day
- Make Up Your Own Holiday Day
- National Cherry Blossom Festival
- Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanian ‘ole Day-Hawaii
- National Nougat Day
- Independence Day-Bangladesh
- Day of Democracy-Mali
- Youth Day-Vietnam
- Khordad Sal (Fasli)-Zoroastrian
- Tonight at 8:30pm local time, Earth Hour, an attempt by the World Wildlife Fund to get one billion people in 4,000 cities to switch off their lights for one hour to show that Earth's citizens care enough about climate change to take action.
- On This Day In …
- 1828 --- In Vienna, Austrian composer Franz Schubert gave his only public concert.
- 1872 --- An earthquake felt from Mexico to Oregon rocks the Owens Valley in California, killing 30 people. California, with the large San Andreas Fault running through the entire state, is a prime area for earthquakes. At 2:30 a.m. on March 26, a large quake hit Inyo County in the Owens Valley of central California. Worst-hit was Lone Pine, where 52 of the town's 59 homes were destroyed, killing 27 people as they slept. The ground moved a full seven feet horizontally in some places near Lone Pine. Major buildings in every town in Inyo were also seriously damaged. Given the reach of this quake—people hundreds of miles away in Tijuana, Mexico, felt the shaking—it is estimated that it had a magnitude of 7.8. One of most famous accounts of this earthquake came from explorer and scientist John Muir, the man who was instrumental in the establishment of Yosemite National Park. He was working as a caretaker at Black's Hotel in the area at the time and witnessed the destruction of the famed natural landmark Eagle Rock. He reported the following: The shocks were so violent and varied, and succeeded one another so closely, one had to balance in walking as if on the deck of a ship among the waves, and it seemed impossible the high cliffs should escape being shattered. In particular, I feared that the sheer-fronted Sentinel Rock, which rises to a height of three thousand feet, would be shaken down, and I took shelter back of a big Pine, hoping I might be protected from outbounding boulders, should any come so far. Then, suddenly, out of the strange silence and strange motion there came a tremendous roar. The Eagle Rock, a short distance up the valley, had given way, and I saw it falling in thousands of the great boulders I had been studying so long, pouring to the valley floor in a free curve luminous from friction, making a terribly sublime and beautiful spectacle—an arc of fire fifteen hundred feet span, as true in form and as steady as a rainbow, in the midst of the stupendous roaring rock-storm. For the next two months, there were literally a thousand aftershocks, though none were deadly.
- 1878 --- Hastings College of Law was founded.
- 1885 --- Eastman Kodak (Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co.) produced the first commercial motion picture film in Rochester, NY.
- 1937 --- Spinach growers in Crystal City, Texas, unveiled a statue of their hero, Popeye the Sailor, on the town square. It's still there.
- 1953 --- American medical researcher Dr. Jonas Salk announces on a national radio show that he has successfully tested a vaccine against poliomyelitis, the virus that causes the crippling disease of polio. In 1952--an epidemic year for polio--there were 58,000 new cases reported in the United States, and more than 3,000 died from the disease. For promising eventually to eradicate the disease, which is known as "infant paralysis" because it mainly affects children, Dr. Salk was celebrated as the great doctor-benefactor of his time. In 1954, clinical trials using the Salk vaccine and a placebo began on nearly two million American schoolchildren. In April 1955, it was announced that the vaccine was effective and safe, and a nationwide inoculation campaign began. New polio cases dropped to under 6,000 in 1957, the first year after the vaccine was widely available. In 1962, an oral vaccine developed by Polish-American researcher Albert Sabin became available, greatly facilitating distribution of the polio vaccine. Today, there are just a handful of polio cases in the United States every year, and most of these are "imported" by Americans from developing nations where polio is still a problem. Among other honors, Jonas Salk was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.
- 1964 --- Barbra Streisand debuted on Broadway in "Funny Girl."
- 1969 --- John Lennon and Yoko Ono began their "bed-in" for peace in Amsterdam.
- 1969 --- A group called Women Strike for Peace demonstrate in Washington, D.C., in the first large antiwar demonstration since President Richard Nixon's inauguration, 65 days earlier, in January. The antiwar movement had initially given Nixon a chance to make good on his campaign promises to end the war in Vietnam. However, it became increasingly clear that Nixon had no quick solution. As the fighting dragged on, antiwar sentiment against the president and his handling of the war mounted steadily during his term in office.
- 1977 --- The first single by Elvis Costello, "Less Than Zero", was released.
- 1979 --- In a ceremony at the White House, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin sign a historic peace agreement, ending three decades of hostilities between Egypt and Israel and establishing diplomatic and commercial ties. Less than two years earlier, in an unprecedented move for an Arab leader, Sadat traveled to Jerusalem, Israel, to seek a permanent peace settlement with Egypt's Jewish neighbor after decades of conflict. Sadat's visit, in which he met with Begin and spoke before Israel's parliament, was met with outrage in most of the Arab world. Despite criticism from Egypt's regional allies, Sadat continued to pursue peace with Begin, and in September 1978 the two leaders met again in the United States, where they negotiated an agreement with U.S. President Jimmy Carter at Camp David, Maryland. The Camp David Accords, the first peace agreement between the state of Israel and one of its Arab neighbors, laid the groundwork for diplomatic and commercial relations. Seven months later, a formal peace treaty was signed.
- 1997 --- The 39 bodies of Heaven's Gate members are found in a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, CA. The group had committed suicide thinking that they would be picked up by a spaceship following behind the comet Hale-Bopp.
- 1999 --- Dr. Jack Kevorkian was convicted in Pontiac, Michigan, of second-degree murder for giving a patient with Lou Gehrig's disease a lethal injection, an action videotaped and broadcast on television.
- 2000 --- Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia.
- Birthdays
- Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
- Diana Ross
- Robert Frost
- Tennessee Williams
- Rep Nancy Pelosi
- Al Jolson
- Keira Knightley
- Steven Tyler
- Pierre Boulez
- Leonard Nimoy
- Alan Arkin
- James Caan
- Erica Jong
- Bob Woodward
- Vicki Lawrence
- Martin Short
- Elaine Chao (Former Labor Secretary)
- Joseph Campbell
- Duncan Hines
- Sterling Hayden
- Strother Martin
- Bob Elliott
- Teddy Pendergrass
- Curtis Sliwa