Monday March 31, 2014

• 90^th Day of 2014 / 275 Remaining
• 82 Days Until The First Day of Summer

• Sunrise:6:54
• Sunset:7:32
• 12 Hours 38 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:7:25am
• Moon Set:8:55pm
• Moon’s Phase: 1 %

• The Next Full Moon
• April 15 @ 12:45 am
• Full Pink Moon
• Full Sprouting Moon
• Full Egg Moon
• Full Grass Moon
• 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 Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.

• Tides
• High:12:20pm
• Low:5:57am/6:02

• Rainfall
• This Year:9.40
• Last Year:15.17
• Average Year to Date:21.40

• Holidays
• Cesar Chavez Day
• Bunsen Burner Day
• Mule Day
• National "She's Funny That Way" Day
• National Clams on the Half Shell Day
• Tater Day
• Oranges and Lemons Day

• Culture Day-Micronesia
• National Day-Malta
• Transfer Day-US Virgin Islands

• On This Day In …
• 1776 --- Abigail Adams writes to her husband, John Adams, urging him and the other members of the Continental Congress not to forget about the nation's women when fighting for America's independence from Great Britain. The future First Lady wrote in part, "I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."

• 1836 --- The first monthly installment of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, by 24-year-old writer Charles Dickens, is published under the pseudonym Boz. The short sketches were originally commissioned as captions for humorous drawings by caricaturist Robert Seymour, but Dickens' whimsical stories about

  

  the kindly Samuel Pickwick and his fellow club members soon became popular in their own right. Only 400 copies were printed of the first installment, but by the 15th episode, 40,000 copies were printed. When the stories were published in book form in 1837, Dickens quickly became the most popular author of the day.

• 1870 --- In Perth Amboy, NJ, Thomas Mundy Peterson became the first black to vote in the U.S.
  

  

• 1889 --- French engineer Alexandre Gustave Eiffel unfurled the French tricolor from atop the Eiffel Tower to mark its completion. A beautiful sight, no? Well, not so to writers, Guy deMaupassant and Alexandre Dumas, who condemned the Eiffel Tower as a “horrid nightmare.” The Eiffel Tower is 984 feet tall and consists of an iron

  

  framework supported on four masonry piers, from which rise four columns that unite to form a single vertical tower. Platforms, each with an observation deck, are at three levels. Elevators ascend the piers on a curve, and Eiffel contracted the Otis Elevator Company of the United States to design the tower's famous glass-cage elevators. The elevators were not completed by March 31, 1889, however, so Gustave Eiffel ascended the tower's stairs with a few hardy companions and raised an enormous French tricolor on the structure's flagpole. Fireworks were then set off from the second platform.
  

  

• 1900 --- The W.E. Roach Company was the first automobile company to put an advertisement in a national magazine. The magazine was the "Saturday Evening Post".

• 1906 --- The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States was founded to set rules in amateur sports. The organization became the National Collegiate Athletic Association in 1910.

• 1918 --- Daylight saving time went into effect throughout the United States for the first time. Folks would spring ahead an hour allowing for longer early evenings. The time change left enough light for many activities, especially in farming areas. Planting and such could best be done with the sun up an extra hour. And, of course, folks would fall back an hour to standard time in the fall.

• 1940 --- La Guardia airport in New York officially opened to the public.
  

  

• 1943 --- The show, Away We Go, was renamed. Never heard of it? We think you may have. The show opened at the St. James Theatre in New York City and, thanks to the talents of stars like Alfred Drake, Joan Roberts and Howard DeSilva, it became an instant hit.

  

  The show ran for 2,212 performances -- until 1948. The musical, which has grossed millions of dollars on stage and as a blockbuster movie was initially produced for the sum of $75,000. It is still legendary among musical productions -- especially after it was retitled Oklahoma!

• 1945 --- "The Glass Menagerie" by Tennessee Williams opened on Broadway.
  

  

• 1947 --- John L. Lewis called a strike in sympathy for the miners killed in an explosion in Centralia, IL, on March 25, 1947.
  

  

• 1959 --- The Dalai Lama (Lhama Dhondrub, Tenzin Gyatso) began exile by crossing the border into India where he was granted political asylum. Gyatso was the 14th Daila Lama.
  

  

• 1966 --- The Soviet Union launched Luna 10, which became the first spacecraft to enter a lunar orbit.

• 1967 --- Jimi Hendrix began his first British tour with Cat Stevens.
  

  

• 1968 --- In a televised speech to the nation, President Lyndon B. Johnson announces a partial halt of bombing missions over North Vietnam and proposes peace talks. He said he had ordered "unilaterally" a halt to air and naval bombardments of North Vietnam "except in the area north of the Demilitarized Zone, where the continuing enemy build-up directly threatens Allied forward positions." He also stated that he was sending 13,500 more troops to Vietnam and would request further defense expenditures--$2.5 billion in fiscal year 1968 and $2.6 billion in fiscal year 1969--to finance recent troop build-ups, re-equip the South Vietnamese Army, and meet "responsibilities in Korea." In closing, Johnson shocked the nation with an announcement that all but conceded that his own presidency had become another wartime casualty: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."

• 1976 --- The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that coma patient Karen Anne Quinlan could be disconnected from her respirator. (Quinlan remained comatose and died in 1985.)

• 1989 --- Chefs from Japanese restaurants in New York persuaded the FDA to allow them to import and serve fugu.  When the first shipment

  

  of Japanese blowfish (tora fugu) arrived, chefs had to attend special classes to protect their customers from poisoning.

• 1994 --- "Nature" magazine announced that a complete skull of Australppithecus afarensis had been found in Ethiopia. The finding is of humankind's earliest ancestor.
  

  

• 1995 --- Singer Selena, 23, was shot to death in Corpus Christi, Texas, by the founder of her fan club.

• 1995 --- Major League Baseball players are sent back to work after the longest strike in baseball history ends on this day in 1995. Because of the strike, the 1994 World Series was cancelled; it was the first time baseball did not crown a champion in 89 years.

• 1999 --- Four New York City police officers were charged with murder for killing Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant, in a hail of bullets. (They were acquited in 2000.)
  

  

• 2000 --- In Uganda, officials set the number of deaths linked to a doomsday religious cult, the Movement for the Restoration of the

  

  Ten Commandments, at more than 900. In Kanungu, a March 17 fire at the cult's church killed more than 530 and authorities subsequently found mass graves at various sites linked to the cult.

• 2004 --- Four American civilian contractors were killed in Fallujah, Iraq; frenzied crowds dragged their burned, mutilated bodies and strung two of them from a bridge.

• 2005 --- Terri Schiavo died at a hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., 13 days after her feeding tube was removed in a wrenching right-to-die dispute.

• Birthdays
• Cesar Chavez
• Mary Chestnut
• Sen Pat Leahy
• Rhea Perlman
• Richard Chamberlain
• Shirley Jones
• Herb Alpert
• Angus Young
• Al Gore
• Christopher Walken
• Rene Dewscartes
• Franz Joseph Haydn
• Octavio Paz
• Gabe Kaplan
• Lefty Frizzell