- 237th Day of 2015 128 Remaining
- Autumn Begins in 29 Days
- Sunrise:6:34
- Sunset:7:48
- 13 Hours 14 Minutes
- Moon Rise:4:38pm
- Moon Set:2:08am
- Phase:79%
- Full Moon August 29 @ 11:37am
- Full Sturgeon Moon / Full Green Corn Moon
- Full Grain Moon/Full Red Moon
- The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.
- Tides
- High:8:58am/7:45pm
- Low:1:58am/1:46pm
- Holidays
- National Banana Split Day
- National Secondhand Wardrobe Day
- National Whiskey Sour Day
- Touch-A-Heart Tuesday
- Kiss And Make Up Day
- Constitution Day-Paraguay
- Independence Day-Uruguay
- Liberation Day-Hong Kong
- Dia Do Soldado-Brazil
- On This Day
- 0325 --- The Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical debate held by the early Christian church, concludes with the establishment of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Convened by Roman Emperor Constantine I in May, the council also deemed the Arian belief of Christ as inferior to God as heretical, thus resolving an early church crisis.
- 1718 --- New Orleans was founded by French colonists. The city was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time.
- 1835 --- The first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper. Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day. The New York Sun, founded in 1833, was one of the new “penny press” papers that appealed to a wider audience with a cheaper price and a more narrative style of journalism. From the day the first moon hoax article was released, sales of the paper shot up considerably. It was exciting stuff, and readers lapped it up. The only problem was that none of it was true. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped publication years earlier, and Grant was a fictional character. The articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter educated at Cambridge University. Intended as satire, they were designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.
- 1875 --- Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old merchant navy captain, becomes the first known person to successfully swim the English Channel. Captain Webb accomplished the grueling 21-mile crossing, which really entailed 39 miles of swimming because of tidal currents, in 21 hours and 45 minutes. During the overnight crossing from Dover, England, to Calais, France, Captain Webb drank brandy, coffee, and beef tea to keep his strength and heat up. He was hailed as a national hero upon his return to England, and a triumphal arch was erected in his honor in his hometown in Shropshire. The Daily Telegraph proclaimed, “At this moment the Captain is probably the best-known and most popular man in the world.”
- 1916 --- The National Park Service was established within the Department of the Interior.
- 1920 --- The first airplane to fly from New York to Alaska arrived in Nome.
- 1939 --- “The Wizard of Oz”, which will become one of the best-loved movies in history, opens in theaters around the United States. Based on the 1900 children’s novel”The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, by L. Frank Baum (1856-1919), the film starred Judy Garland as the young Kansas farm girl Dorothy, who, after being knocked unconscious in a tornado, dreams about following a yellow brick road, alongside her dog Toto, to the Emerald City to meet the Wizard of Oz. Along the way, Dorothy encounters a cast of characters, including the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Wicked Witch of the West. Though the scenes in Kansas were shot in traditional black and white, Oz appears in vivid Technicolor, a relatively new film process at the time. Nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Picture category, The Wizard of Oz lost to the Civil War-era epic “Gone With the Wind.””The Wizard of Oz” won a Best Song Oscar for “Over the Rainbow,” which became one of Garland’s signature hits. Garland won a special award at that year’s Oscar ceremony, for Best Juvenile Performer. Filmed at MGM Studios in Culver City, California, “The Wizard of Oz” was a modest box-office success when it was first released, but its popularity continued to grow after it was televised for the first time in 1956. An estimated 45 million people watched that inaugural broadcast, and since then ”The Wizard of Oz” has aired on TV countless times. Today, some of the film’s famous lines, including “There’s no place like home” and “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” are well-known to several generations of moviegoers.
- 1944 --- After more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris is liberated by the French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. German resistance was light, and General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German garrison, defied an order by Adolf Hitler to blow up Paris’ landmarks and burn the city to the ground before its liberation. Choltitz signed a formal surrender that afternoon, and on August 26, Free French General Charles de Gaulle led a joyous liberation march down the Champs d’Elysees.
- 1950 --- In anticipation of a crippling strike by railroad workers, President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order putting America’s railroads under the control of the U.S. Army, as of August 27, at 4:00 pm.
- 1975 --- The album "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen was released.
- 1978 --- The Turin shroud believed to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ went on display for the first time in 45 years.
- 1979 --- The storm that will become Hurricane David forms near Cape Verde off the African coast in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. It would go on to devastate the island of Dominica, and then the Dominican Republic, killing 1,500 people.
- 1985 --- New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden becomes the youngest 20-game winner in Major League Baseball history. Gooden was 20 years, nine months and nine days old when he led his Mets over the San Diego Padres 9-3–a month younger than “Bullet” Bob Feller was when he racked up his 20th win in 1939.
- 1994 --- Robert Plant and Jimmy Page reunited in a London studio to record their MTV "Unplugged" show. The show was called "Unledded."
- Birthdays
- Clara Bow
- Leonard Bernstein
- Ruby Keeler
- Elvis Costello
- Walt Kelly
- Althea Gibson
- Regis Philbin
- Wayne Shorter
- Anne Archer
- George Wallace
- Sean O’Kelly
- Bill Nye
- Ivan (“the Terrible”) IV
- Allan Pinkerton
- Martin Amis
- Arnold Neustadter
National Banana Split Day-KALW Almanac-8/25/2015
