- 142nd Day of 2012 / 224 Remaining
- 30 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:5:55
- Sunset:8:19
- 14 Hours 24 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:6:22am
- Moon Set:9:13pm
- Moon’s Phase: 1 %
- The Next Full Moon
- June 4 @ 4:11am
- Full Strawberry Moon
- Full Rose Moon
- Full Milk Moon
This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe. However, in Europe they called it the Rose Moon. Also because the relatively short season for harvesting strawberries comes each year during the month of June, so the full Moon that occurs during that month was christened for the strawberry!
- Tides
- High:1:05pm/11:28pm
- Low:6:01am/5:45pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:15.67
- Last Year:26.86
- Normal To Date:23.44
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- International Jazz Day
- Julia Pierpont Day (decoration day/ memorial day)
- Slugs Return from Capistrano Day
- National Waiter/Waitress Day
- National Strawberries & Cream Day
- Hummel Day (marking the birth in 1909 of Sister Maria Hummel, the German kindergarten art teacher whose watercolor drawings were transformed into the world’s finest figurines.)
- National Backyard Games Week
- International Jazz Day
- Day of the Republic-Azerbaijan
- National Day-Ethiopia
- Independence Day-Montenegro
- Naval Glories Day (Battle of Iquique)-Chile
- World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development
- Sheep Festival-Cameroon
- Victoria Day-Canada
- On This Day In …
- 1819 --- The first bicycles, imported from England, appeared on the streets of New York City. They were originally known as "swift walkers." Within a month, the city banned the new-fangled machines as being hazardous to public safety.
- 1881 --- In Washington, D.C., humanitarians Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons found the American National Red Cross, an organization established to provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters in congruence with the International Red Cross. Barton, born in Massachusetts in 1821, worked with the sick and wounded during the American Civil War and became known as the "Angel of the Battlefield" for her tireless dedication. In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln commissioned her to search for lost prisoners of war, and with the extensive records she had compiled during the war she succeeded in identifying thousands of the Union dead at the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. She was in Europe in 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and she went behind the German lines to work for the International Red Cross. In 1873, she returned to the United States, and four years later she organized an American branch of the International Red Cross. The American Red Cross received its first U.S. federal charter in 1900. Barton headed the organization into her 80s and died in 1912.
- 1891 --- From the You Won’t Believe Your Eyes department: Peter Jackson and Jim Corbett fought to a draw in San Francisco, CA. Nothing wrong with that except the boxing match went an unprecedented 61 rounds! No wonder it was a draw. The boxers couldn’t raise their arms anymore! What did they do, holler at each other? And was there a dinner break? How about other necessities of nature? Was the crowd enthusiastic the entire time? How many times did the fighters just stand around and stare at each other for an entire round? Inquiring sports minds want to know!
- 1892 --- The opera "I Pagliacci" by Ruggiero Leoncavallo was first performed, in Milan, Italy.
- 1927 --- Charles A. Lindbergh arrived to a hero’s welcome in Paris, in his spindly monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis (the famous plane is now displayed in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC). Lindbergh’s flight marked the first time that a person had flown across the Atlantic Ocean. The event got more press coverage than any other single even in history to that time. In American newspapers alone, it was estimated that some 27,000 columns of words were used to describe Lindbergh’s epic journey. A depiction of that famous flight was portrayed by one of America’s great motion picture actors, Jimmy Stewart, in the film, The Spirit of St. Louis. Upon his return to American soil, Lucky Lindy was given another hero’s welcome.
- 1932 --- Five years to the day that American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the first pilot to accomplish a solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, female aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first pilot to repeat the feat, landing her plane in Ireland after flying across the North Atlantic. Earhart traveled over 2,000 miles from Newfoundland in just under 15 hours. Unlike Charles Lindbergh, Earhart was well known to the public before her solo transatlantic flight. In 1928, as a member of a three-person crew, she had become the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an aircraft. Although her only function during the crossing was to keep the plane's log, the event won her national fame, and Americans were enamored with the daring and modest young pilot. For her solo transatlantic crossing in 1932, she was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross by the U.S. Congress.
- 1956 --- The United States exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb, over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.
- 1959 --- The musical "Gypsy" starring Ethel Merman opened on Broadway.
- 1969 --- John Lennon and Yoko Ono began a ten-day "bed-in" in Montreal's Queen Elizabeth Hotel.
- 1988 --- In an attempt to consolidate his own power and ease political and ethnic tensions in the Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev dismisses the Communist Party leaders in those two republics. Since coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev had faced numerous problems with his efforts to bring about domestic reform in the Soviet Union. First and foremost was the opposition by more conservative Russian officials, who believed that Gorbachev's economic and political reforms might threaten the position of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Both Karen S. Demirchyan and Kyamran I. Bagirov, heads of the Communist Party in Armenia and Azerbaijan respectively, fell into this group—Gorbachev had publicly complained about his frustrations in bringing about economic reform in the two republics. The second major problem faced by the Soviet leader was the rising tide of ethnic unrest in several Russian republics. In the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the unrest spilled across their borders, with Azerbaijanis and Armenians trading charges about mistreatment at the hands of the other. Neither Demirchyan nor Bagirov seemed capable of dealing with the situation. Gorbachev thus decided to kill two birds with one stone, and on May 21, announced that both men were being removed from their positions for "reasons of health." They were quickly replaced with men handpicked by Gorbachev.
- 1990 --- In a classic final episode of the Newhart TV series, Bob Newhart woke up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, his wife on a previous series, The Bob Newhart Show. He had been dreaming since 1978.
- 1991 --- The prime minister of India from 1984 until 1989, Rajiv Gandhi was in the midst of a campaign rally for reelection when a bomb exploded in his hand. Like his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. The bomb was hidden in a bouquet of flowers handed to Rajiv by a so-called admirer.
- 2009 --- After months of numerous mechanical failures, a new recycling system was activated on the international space station. The new system recycles astronauts urine and sweat into drinking water.
- Birthdays
- Plato
- Andrei Sakharov
- Elizabeth Fry
- Henri Rousseau
- Fats Waller
- Josh Hamilton
- Sen. Al Franken
- Judge Reinhold
- Mr. T.
- Dennis Day
- Raymond Burr
- Ara Parseghian
- Leo Sayer
- Bill Champlin
- Notiorious B.I.G./Christopher Wallace