- 331st Day of 2012 / 35 Remaining
- 25 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:7:02
- Sunset:4:53
- 9 Hours 49 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise3:46pm:
- Moon Set:5:18am
- Moon’s Phase: 97 %
- The Next Full Moon
- November 28 @ 6:47 am
- Full Beaver Moon
- Full Frosts Moon
For both the colonists and the Algonquin tribes, this was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. This full Moon was also called the Frost Moon.
- Tides
- High: 8:37am/10:32pm
- Low: 2:37am/3:42pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:4.08
- Last Year:3.20
- Normal To Date:4.04
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Cake Day
- International Aura Awareness Day
- Muharram 1-Islamic New Year
- Republic Day-Mongolia
- Day of the Covenant-Baha’i
- On This Day In …
- 1860 --- A newspaper print of newly elected President Abraham Lincoln clearly showed the beginnings of a beard. The idea for the beard had come from a letter sent by 11-year-old Grace Bedell, who had suggested that Mr. Lincoln would look better with a beard.
- 1862 --- Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson sends a handwritten manuscript called Alice's Adventures Under Ground to 10-year-old Alice Liddell. The 30-year-old Dodgson, better known by his nom de plume Lewis Carroll, made up the story one day on a picnic with young Alice and her two sisters, the children of one of Dodgson's colleagues. Dodgson, the son of a country parson, had been brilliant at both mathematics and wordplay since childhood, when he enjoyed making up games. However, he suffered from a severe stammer, except when he spoke with children. He had many young friends who enjoyed his fantastic stories: The Liddell children thought his tale of a girl who falls down a rabbit hole was one of his best efforts, and Alice insisted he write it down. During a visit to the Liddells, English novelist Henry Kingsley happened to notice the manuscript. After reading it, he suggested to Mrs. Liddell that it be published. Dodgson published the book at his own expense, under the name Lewis Carroll, in 1865. The story is one of the earliest children's books written simply to amuse children, not to teach them. The book's sequel, Through the Looking Glass, was published in 1871. Dodgson's other works, including a poetry collection called Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, and another children's book, Sylvia and Bruno, did not gain the same enduring popularity as the Alice books. Dodgson died in 1898.
- 1867 --- J.B. Sutherland patented the refrigerated railroad car.
- 1872 --- The Great Diamond Hoax, one of the most notorious mining swindles of the time, is exposed with an article in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. Fraudulent gold and silver mines were common in the years following the California Gold Rush of 1849. Swindlers fooled many eager greenhorns by "salting" worthless mines with particles of gold dust to make them appear mineral-rich. However, few con men were as daring as Kentucky cousins Philip Arnold and John Slack, who convinced San Francisco capitalists to invest in a worthless mine in the northwestern corner of Colorado. Arnold and Slack played their con perfectly. They arrived in San Francisco in 1872 and tried to deposit a bag of uncut diamonds at a bank. When questioned, the two men quickly disappeared, acting as if they were reluctant to talk about their discovery. Intrigued, a bank director named William Ralston tracked down the men. Assuming he was dealing with unsophisticated country bumpkins, he set out to take control of the diamond mine. The two cousins agreed to take a blindfolded mining expert to the site; the expert returned to report that the mine was indeed rich with diamonds and rubies. Joining forces with a number of other prominent San Francisco financiers, Ralston formed the New York Mining and Commercial Company, capitalized at $10 million, and began selling stock to eager investors. As a show of good faith, Arnold and Slack received about $600,000-small change in comparison to the supposed value of the diamond mine. Convinced that the American West must have many other major deposits of diamonds, at least 25 other diamond exploration companies formed in the subsequent months. Clarence King, the then-little-known young leader of a geographical survey of the 40th parallel, finally exposed the cousins' diamond mine as a hoax. A brilliant geologist and mining engineer, King was suspicious of the mine from the start. He correctly deduced the location of the supposed mine, raced off to investigate, and soon realized that the swindlers had salted the mine--some of the gems he found even showed jewelers-cut marks. Back in San Francisco, King exposed the fraud in the newspapers and the Great Diamond Hoax collapsed. Ralston returned $80,000 to each of his investors, but he was never able to recover the $600,000 given to the two cousins. Arnold lived out the few remaining years of his life in luxury in Kentucky before dying of pneumonia in 1878. Slack apparently squandered his share of the money, for he was last reported working as a coffin maker in New Mexico. King's role in exposing the fraud brought him national recognition--he became the first director of the United States Geological Survey.
- 1922 --- In Egypt's Valley of the Kings, British archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first souls to enter King Tutankhamen's tomb in more than 3,000 years. Tutankhamen's sealed burial chambers were miraculously intact, and inside was a collection of several thousand priceless objects, including a gold coffin containing the mummy of the teenage king. When Carter first arrived in Egypt, in 1891, most of the ancient Egyptian tombs had been discovered, and the majority of these had been hopelessly plundered by tomb raiders over the millennia. However, Carter was a brilliant excavator, and in the first years of the 20th century he discovered the tombs of Queen Hatshepsut and King Thutmose IV. Around 1907, he became associated with the Earl of Carnarvon, a collector of antiquities who commissioned Carter to supervise excavations in the Valley of the Kings. By 1913, most experts felt there was nothing in the Valley left to be uncovered. Carter, however, persisted in his efforts, convinced that the tomb of the little-known King Tutankhamen might still be found. King Tutankhamen was enthroned in 1333 B.C. when he was still a child. He died a decade later at the age of 18 and thus made only a faint impression on the history of ancient Egypt. In the 13th century B.C., Tutankhamen and the other "Amarna" kings were publicly condemned, and most records of them were destroyed--including the location of Tutankhamen's tomb. A century later, in the 12th century B.C., workers building a tomb for Ramses VI inadvertently covered Tutankhamen's tomb with a deep layer of chips, further protecting it from future discovery. After World War I, Carter began an intensive search for Tutankhamen's tomb and on November 4, 1922, discovered a step leading to its entrance. Lord Carnarvon rushed to Egypt, and on November 23 they broke through a mud-brick door, revealing the passageway that led to Tutankhamen's tomb. There was evidence that robbers had entered the structure at some point, and the archaeologists feared they had discovered yet another pillaged tomb. However, on November 26 they broke through another door, and Carter leaned in with a candle to take a look. Behind him, Lord Carnarvon asked, "Can you see anything?" Carter replied, "Yes, wonderful things." It was the antechamber of Tutankhamen's tomb, and it was gloriously untouched. The dusty floor still showed the footprints of the tomb builders who left the room more than 3,000 years before. Apparently, the robbers who had broken into Tutankhamen's tomb had done so soon after it was completed and were caught before moving into the interior chambers and causing serious damage. Thus began a monumental excavation process in which Carter carefully explored the four-room tomb over several years, uncovering an incredible collection of several thousand objects. In addition to numerous pieces of jewelry and gold, there was statuary, furniture, clothes, a chariot, weapons, and numerous other objects that shed a brilliant light on the culture and history of ancient Egypt. The most splendid find was a stone sarcophagus containing three coffins nested within each other. Inside the final coffin, made out of solid gold, was the mummified body of the boy-king Tutankhamen, preserved for 3,200 years.
- 1940 --- The half million Jews of Warsaw, Poland, were forced by the Nazis to live within a walled ghetto.
- 1941 --- U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill establishing the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. In 1939 Roosevelt had signed a bill that changed the celebration of Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November.
- 1942 --- President Roosevelt ordered nationwide gasoline rationing, beginning December 1.
- 1942 --- "Casablanca," starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, had its world premiere at the Hollywood Theater in New York.
- 1968 --- Cream gave its last concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. It was recorded and released as "Goodbye Cream" February 20, 1969.
- 1973 --- Rose Mary Woods, U.S. President Richard Nixon’s personal secretary, told a federal court she had accidentally erased over eighteen minutes of a ‘Watergate tape’ made June 20, 1972. The recording was of a crucial conversation at an Oval-Office meeting between Nixon and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman just three days after the Watergate break-in.
- 1983 --- A Brinks Mat Ltd. vault at London's Heathrow Airport was robbed by gunmen. The men made off with 6,800 gold bars worth nearly $40 million. Only a fraction of the gold has ever been recovered and only two men were convicted in the heist.
- 1992 --- Britain announced that Queen Elizabeth II had volunteered to start paying taxes on her personal income, and would take her children off the public payroll.
- Birthdays
- Charles Schulz
- Tina Turner
- Rich Little
- John McVie
- Art Shell
- William Cowper
- Sarah Grmike
- Bruno Hauptman
- Eric Sevareid
- Robert Goulet