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National Apple Pie Day-KALW Almanac-12/03/2015

  • 337th Day of 2015 28 Remaining
  • Winter Begins in 18 Days
  • Sunrise: 7:08
  • Sunset: 4:50
  • 9 Hours 42 Minutes
  • Moon Rise: 12:46am (Friday)
  • Moon Set: 12:54pm
  • Phase: Last Quarter
  • Next Full Moon December 25 @ 3:11am
  • The Full Cold Moon; or the Full Long Nights Moon – December During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest. It is also sometimes called the Moon before Yule. The term Long Night Moon is a doubly appropriate name because the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the Moon is above the horizon for a long time. The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.
  • Tides
  • High: 5:09am/4:33pm
  • Low: 11:23am/10:05pm
  • Holidays
  • National Apple Pie Day
  • Make A Gift Day
  • National Green Bean Casserole Day
  • Let’s Hug Day
  • National Roof Over Your Head Day
  •  
  • International Day Of Persons With Disabilities
  • On This Day
  • 1818 --- Illinois was admitted to the union as the 21st state.
  • 1901 --- King Camp Gillette applied for a patent on his disposable razor. (Patent No. 775,134 issued Nov 15, 1904).
  • 1917 --- The Quebec Bridge opened for traffic after almost 20 years of planning and construction. The bridge suffered partial collapses in 1907 (August 29) and 1916 (September 11). 
  • 1925 --- "Concerto in F," by George Gershwin, had its world premiere at New York's Carnegie Hall. Gershwin himself played the piano. 
  • 1931 --- Alka Seltzer was sold for the first time. 
  • 1944 --- Civil war breaks out in Athens as communist guerillas battle democratic forces for control of a liberated Greece. Germany had occupied Greece to bail out Italy after Italy’s failed invasion threatened to leave Greece open to Allied occupation. When Germany arrived, various Greek resistance forces gave battle, but two stood out as particularly important: a communist-backed resistance movement called the National Liberation Front, and a liberal, democratic movement called the Greek Democratic National Army. While both of these factions operated from different ideological frameworks, they nevertheless occasionally cooperated in fighting the common German enemy. By early 1944 though, the communist-backed National Liberation Front had taken to the hills to create a provisional government, rejecting the legitimacy of both the Greek king and his government-in-exile. It also disregarded the one remaining rival for ultimate political supremacy in Greece—the Democratic National Army.
  • 1947 --- Marlon Brando’s famous cry of “STELLA!” first booms across a Broadway stage, electrifying the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre during the first-ever performance of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire. The 23-year-old Brando played the rough, working-class Polish-American Stanley Kowalski, whose violent clash with Blanche DuBois (played on Broadway by Jessica Tandy), a Southern belle with a dark past, is at the center of Williams’ famous drama.
  • 1948 --- The House Un-American Activities Committee announced that former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers had produced microfilm of secret documents hidden inside a pumpkin on his Maryland farm.
  • 1950 --- Tom Fears (Los Angeles Rams) caught an NFL-record 18 passes against the Green Bay Packers. Terrell Owens (San Francisco 49ers) broke the record with 20 catches for 283 yards and a touchdown against the Chicago Bears on December 17, 2000. 
  • 1960 --- The Lerner and Loewe musical "Camelot" opened on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre.
  • 1964 --- Police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley who had stormed the administration building the previous day and staged a massive sit-in.
  • 1965 --- The album "Rubber Soul" by the Beatles was released.
  • 1967 --- 53-year-old Lewis Washkansky receives the first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. Washkansky, a South African grocer dying from chronic heart disease, received the transplant from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old woman who was fatally injured in a car accident. Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, who trained at the University of Cape Town and in the United States, performed the revolutionary medical operation. The technique Barnard employed had been initially developed by a group of American researchers in the 1950s.
  • 1968 --- The rules committee of Major League Baseball (MLB) announced that in 1969 the pitcher's mound would be lowered from 15 to 10 inches. This was done in order to "get more batting action." 
  • 1973 --- Pioneer 10 sent back the first close-up images of Jupiter. The first outer-planetary probe had been launched from Cape Canaveral, FL, on March 2, 1972. 
  • 1979 --- The general-admission ticketing policy for rock concerts at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum in the 1970's was known as “festival seating.” That term and that ticketing policy would become infamous in the wake of one of the deadliest rock-concert incidents in history. Eleven people, including three high-school students, were killed when a crowd of general-admission ticket-holders to a concert, featuring The Who, surged forward in an attempt to enter Riverfront Coliseum and secure prime unreserved seats inside.
  • 1979 --- The last Pacer rolls off the assembly line at the American Motors Corporation (AMC) factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin. When the car first came on the market in 1975, it was a sensation, hailed as the car of the future. “When you buy any other car,” ads said, “all you end up with is today’s car. When you get a Pacer, you get a piece of tomorrow.” By 1979, however, sales had faded considerably. Today, polls and experts agree: the Pacer was one of the worst cars of all time.
  • 1984 --- In the early morning hours, one of the worst industrial disasters in history begins when a pesticide plant located in the densely populated region of Bhopal in central India leaks a highly toxic cloud of methyl isocyanate into the air. Of the estimated one million people living in Bhopal at the time, 2,000 were killed immediately, at least 600,000 were injured, and at least 6,000 have died since. The leak was caused by a series of mechanical and human errors in the pesticide producing plant, operated by the Union Carbide Corporation, a U.S.-based multinational. For a full hour, the plant’s personnel and safety equipment failed to detect the massive leak, and when an alarm was finally sounded most of the harm had already been done. To make matters worse, local health officials had not been educated on the toxicity of the chemicals used at the Union Carbide plant and therefore there were no emergency procedures in place to protect Bhopal’s citizens in the event of a chemical leak. If the victims had simply placed a wet towel over their face, most would have escaped serious injury.
  • 1989 --- President George Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev issue statements strongly suggesting that the long-standing animosities at the core of the Cold War might be coming to an end. Commentators in both the United States and Russia went farther and declared that the Cold War was over.
  • 1992 --- The Greek tanker "Aegean Sea" ran aground at La Coruna, Spain and spilled 21.5 million gallons of crude oil.
  • 1999 --- Tori Murden became the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean alone. It took her 81 days to reach the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe from the Canary Islands. 
  • Birthdays
  • Carlos Montoya
  • Octavia Hill
  • Anna Freud
  • Ellen Swallow Richards
  • Charles Pislbury
  • Cleveland Abbe
  • Joseph Conrad
  • Andy Williams
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • Jaye P Morgan
  • John Cale
  • Ozzie Osbourne
  • Daryl Hannah
  • Katarina Witt
  • Brendan Fraser