- 321st Day of 2015 44 Remaining
- Winter Begins in 34 Days
- Sunrise:6:52
- Sunset:4:56
- 10 Hours 4 Minutes
- Moon Rise:1:44am
- Moon Set:10:36pm
- Phase:33% 6 Days
- Next Full Moon November 25 @ 2:44pm
- This was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. Another interpretation suggests that the name Full Beaver Moon comes from the fact that the beavers are now actively preparing for winter. It is sometimes also referred to as the Frosty Moon.
- Tides
- High:3:20am/2:01pm
- Low:8:26am/8:55pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:1.39
- Last Year:1.45
- Avg. YTD:3.02
- Seasonal Normal (July 1-June 31) :23.80
- Holidays
- National Baklava Day
- Homemade Bread Day
- National Farm Joke Day
- National Take A Hike Day
- National Unfriend Day
- Electronic Greeting Card Day
- Entrepreneurs Day
- World Peace Day
- World Prematurity Day
- International Student’s Day
- National Revival Day-Azerbaijan
- President’s Day-Marshall Islands
- Student Youth Day-Turkmenistan
- On This Day
- 1558 --- Queen Mary I, the monarch of England and Ireland since 1553, dies and is succeeded by her 25-year-old half-sister, Elizabeth. The two half-sisters, both daughters of King Henry VIII, had a stormy relationship during Mary’s five-year reign. Mary, who was brought up as a Catholic, enacted pro-Catholic legislation and made efforts to restore the pope to supremacy in England. A Protestant rebellion ensued, and Queen Mary imprisoned Elizabeth, a Protestant, in the Tower of London on suspicion of complicity. After Mary’s death, Elizabeth survived several Catholic plots against her; though her ascension was greeted with approval by most of England’s lords, who were largely Protestant and hoped for greater religious tolerance under a Protestant queen. Under the early guidance of Secretary of State Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth repealed Mary’s pro-Catholic legislation, established a permanent Protestant Church of England, and encouraged the Calvinist reformers in Scotland.
- 1800 --- Congress held its first session in Washington, D.C., in the partially completed Capitol building.
- 1839 --- Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, conte di San Bonifacio, debuts in Milan. The premiere was held at La Scala, Italy’s most prestigious theater. Oberto was received favorably, and the next day the composer was commissioned by Bartolomeo Merelli, the impresario at La Scala, to write three more operas. In 1842, after some personal and professional setbacks, the opera Nabucco made Verdi an overnight celebrity. He would go on to compose such classic operas as Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Aída, and Otello.
- 1857 --- H.N. Wadsworth of Washington D.C. received the first American toothbrush patent (U.S. patent No. 18,653). "...separating the bunches of bristles more than the common brush, so as to give more elasticity and enable them to enter between the interstices of the teeth-having the brush wide that it may be imperative on the part of the patient to brush the gums thoroughly..."
- 1869 --- The Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean and the Red seas, is inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony attended by French Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. In 1854, Ferdinand de Lesseps, the former French consul to Cairo, secured an agreement with the Ottoman governor of Egypt to build a canal 100 miles across the Isthmus of Suez. An international team of engineers drew up a construction plan, and in 1856 the Suez Canal Company was formed and granted the right to operate the canal for 99 years after completion of the work. Construction began in April 1859, and at first digging was done by hand with picks and shovels wielded by forced laborers. Later, European workers with dredgers and steam shovels arrived. Labor disputes and a cholera epidemic slowed construction, and the Suez Canal was not completed until 1869–four years behind schedule. On November 17, 1869, the Suez Canal was opened to navigation.
- 1958 --- The Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” hits #1 on the Billboard pop chart. The song “Tom Dooley” was probably first sung sometime after May 1, 1868, when a North Carolina man named Tom Dula was hanged to death for the murder of his fiancée, Laura Foster. Thanks to extensive coverage in major newspapers like The New York Times, the trial of Mr. Dula made him something of a national cause celebre, and he proclaimed his innocence of the murder even as he stood on the gallows. It is not clear when or by whom the mournful murder ballad based on his story was written, but it was resurrected by the Kingston Trio in the late 1950s after hearing a fellow folk singer perform it in an audition at San Francisco’s Purple Onion club. The Kingston Trio’s version of “Tom Dooley” focused more on moody Appalachian atmospherics than on the graphic details of the love quadrangle found in the original, but that trade-off, combined with the Trio’s banjo-backed harmonies, made “Tom Dooley” into the mammoth hit that launched their massively successful career. And the Kingston Trio’s success, in turn, made it possible for a more political brand of folk music to move into the popular mainstream—and into the DNA of rock and roll—in the years that followed.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZYjc57V55U
- 1968 --- The Oakland Raiders score two touchdowns in nine seconds to beat the New York Jets–and no one sees it, because they’re watching the movie Heidi instead. With just 65 seconds left to play, NBC switched off the game in favor of its previously scheduled programming, a made-for-TV version of the children’s story about a young girl and her grandfather in the Alps. Viewers were outraged, and they complained so vociferously that network execs learned a lesson they’ll never forget: “Whatever you do,” one said, “you better not leave an NFL football game.” With a little more than a minute left to play, the Jets kicked a 26-yard field goal that gave them a 32-29 lead. After the New York kickoff, the Raiders returned the ball to their own 23-yard line. What happened after that will go down in football history: Raiders quarterback Daryle Lamonica threw a 20-yard pass to halfback Charlie Smith; a facemask penalty moved the ball to the Jets’ 43; and on the next play, Lamonica passed again to Smith, who ran it all the way for a touchdown. The Raiders took the lead, 32-36. Then the Jets fumbled the kickoff, and Oakland’s Preston Ridlehuber managed to grab the ball and run it two yards for another touchdown. Oakland had scored twice in nine seconds, and the game was over: They’d won 43-32.
- 1970 --- The Soviet Union landed an unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle on the moon, the Lunokhod 1. The vehicle was released by Luna 17.
- 1970 --- The court-martial of 1st Lt. William Calley begins. Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade (Light) of the 23rd (Americal) Division, had led his men in a massacre of Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai 4 on March 16, 1968. My Lai 4 was one of a cluster of hamlets that made up Son My village in the northern area of South Vietnam.
- 1973 --- In the midst of the Watergate scandal that eventually ended his presidency, President Richard Nixon tells a group of newspaper editors gathered at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, that he is “not a crook.” Nixon made the now-famous declaration during a televised question-and-answer session with Associated Press editors. Nixon, who appeared “tense” to a New York Times reporter, was questioned about his role in the Watergate burglary scandal and efforts to cover up the fact that members of his re-election committee had funded the break-in. Nixon replied “people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” He did, however, admit that he was at fault for failing to supervise his campaign’s fund-raising activities. At one point during the discussion, Nixon gave a morbid response to an unrelated question about why he chose not to fly with back-up to Air Force One when traveling, the usual security protocol for presidential flights. He told the crowd that by taking just one aircraft he was saving energy, money and possibly time spent in the impeachment process: “if this one [plane] goes down,” he said, “they don’t have to impeach [me].”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh163n1lJ4M
- 1980 --- John Lennon's last album, before he was killed three weeks later, "Double Fantasy" was released. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nGsgYzj2-0
- 1993 --- Annie Proulx wins the National Book Award for her novel “The Shipping News”. Proulx lived in various towns in New England and in North Carolina during her childhood and wrote her first short story at age 10 when she was home sick with the chicken pox. In college, she majored in history and later worked toward a doctorate. However, she abandoned academia to make her living writing magazine articles and how-to books for nearly 20 years. She married and divorced three times, raised three sons as a single mother, and still found time to write and publish a few short stories every year. Her first collection of short stories, “Heart Songs and Other Stories”, was published in 1988. Her first novel, Postcards (1992), won the PEN/Faulkner award. Her second novel, “The Shipping News”, about an out-of-luck journalist and father who rebuilds his life after moving to Newfoundland, won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award. Her short story collection Close Range was published in 1999.
- 1997 --- Six militants opened fire at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt, killing 62 people, most of them foreign tourists. The attackers were killed by police.
- 2003 --- Ex-soldier John Muhammad is found guilty of one of a series of sniper shootings that terrorized the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area and dominated national headlines in October 2002. Police charged that Muhammad and his 17-year-old accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, killed 10 people and wounded three others during a three-week killing spree. After just over six hours of deliberation, a jury convicted Muhammad of the October 9, 2002, shooting of Dean Meyers while he pumped gas at a Sunoco station in Manassas, Virginia.
- 2003 --- Actor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger is sworn in as the 38th governor of California at the State Capitol in Sacramento. Schwarzenegger, who became a major Hollywood star in the 1980s with such action movies as Conan the Barbarianand The Terminator, defeated Governor Gray Davis in a special recall election on October 7, 2003.
- 2010 --- A hand-count of votes affirmed the re-election of U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, the first Senate candidate in over 50 years to win a write-in campaign.
- Birthdays
- Lee Strasberg
- Louis the XVIII
- Rock Hudson
- Gordon Lightfoot
- Martin Scorsese
- Danny DeVito
- Lauren Hutton
- Lorne Michaels
- Elvin Hayes
- Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
- RuPaul
- Daisy Fuentes
National Baklava Day-KALW Almanac-11/17/15
