- 338th Day of 2015 27 Remaining
- Winter Begins in 17 Days
- Sunrise: 7:09
- Sunset: 4:50
- 9 Hours 41 Minutes
- Moon Rise: 12:46am
- Moon Set: 1:15pm
- Phase: 37% 23 Days
- 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: 5:51am/5:53pm
- Low: 12:33pm/11:48pm
- Rainfall
- This Year: 1.73
- Last Year: 6.94
- YTD Avg.: 5.06
- Annual Avg.: 23.80
- Holidays
- National Cookie Day
- Extraordinary Work team Recognition Day
- Faux Fur Day
- National Dice Day
- National Kitten Day
- Santa’s List Day
- Wear Brown Shoes Day
- Bartender Appreciation Day
- World Wildlife Conservation Day
- International Sweater Vestival
- On This Day
- 1619 --- Thirty-eight colonists arrived from England and ventured ashore to settle the land grant along the James River that became known as the Berkeley Hundred (Berkeley Plantation). They observed a prayer of Thanksgiving for their safe passage to the New World. December 4 became a day of Thanksgiving at Berkeley,"yearly and perpetually kept holy" as the plantation charter directed.
- 1783 --- Future President George Washington, then commanding general of the Continental Army, summons his military officers to Fraunces Tavern in New York City to inform them that he will be resigning his commission and returning to civilian life. Washington had led the army through six long years of war against the British before the American forces finally prevailed at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. There, Washington received the formal surrender of British General Lord Charles Cornwallis, effectively ending the Revolutionary War, although it took almost two more years to conclude a peace treaty and slightly longer for all British troops to leave New York.
- 1875 --- William Marcy Tweed, the "Boss" of New York City's Tammany Hall political organization, escaped from jail and fled from the U.S.
- 1952 --- Heavy smog begins to hover over London, England. It persists for four days, leading to the deaths of at least 4,000 people. It was a Thursday afternoon when a high-pressure air mass stalled over the Thames River Valley. When cold air arrived suddenly from the west, the air over London became trapped in place. The problem was exacerbated by low temperatures, which caused residents to burn extra coal in their furnaces. The smoke, soot and sulfur dioxide from the area’s industries along with that from cars and consumer energy usage caused extraordinarily heavy smog to smother the city. By the morning of December 5, there was a visible pall cast over hundreds of square miles. The smog became so thick and dense that by December 7 there was virtually no sunlight and visibility was reduced to five yards in many places. Eventually, all transportation in the region was halted, but not before the smog caused several rail accidents, including a collision between two trains near London Bridge. The worst effect of the smog, however, was the respiratory distress it caused in humans and animals, including difficulty breathing and the vomiting of phlegm. One of the first noted victims was a prize cow that suffocated on December 5. An unusually high number of people in the area, numbering in the thousands, died in their sleep that weekend.
- 1956 --- Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash recorded together (the Million Dollar Quartet). While recording engineer Jack Clement ran a tape that would not be discovered for more than 20 years, Sam Phillips—ever the promoter—had the presence of mind to summon a photographer from the local paper to capture images of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins gathered around a piano singing the kind of music they’d all grown up on: gospel. The caption under the photo that ran in the next day’s Memphis Press-Scimitar was “Million Dollar Quartet.” The label quickly caught on among rock-and-roll fans who would not actually get the chance to hear the recording made on this day in 1956 until 1981, when the first portions of the lost tapes were discovered and released.
- 1969 --- Black Panthers Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22, are gunned down by 14 police officers as they lie sleeping in their Chicago, Illinois, apartment. About a hundred bullets had been fired in what police described as a fierce gun battle with members of the Black Panther Party. However, ballistics experts later determined that only one of those bullets came from the Panthers’ side. In addition, the “bullet holes” in the front door of the apartment, which police pointed to as evidence that the Panthers had been shooting from within the apartment, were actually nail holes created by police in an attempt to cover up the attack. Four other Black Panthers were wounded in the raid, as well as two police officers.
- 1970 --- Cesar Chavez was jailed in California for refusing to cancel a United Farm Workers lettuce boycott.
- 1978 --- Dianne Feinstein became San Francisco's first woman mayor when she was named to replace George Moscone, who had been assassinated.
- 1980 --- The bodies of four American nuns slain in El Salvador two days earlier were unearthed. Five national guardsmen were later convicted of the murders.
- 1981 --- Reds, a movie about an American Communist and the Russian Revolution written by, directed and starring Warren Beatty–an actor who became a prominent Hollywood leading man in the 1960s with such movies as Bonnie and Clyde–premieres in U.S. theaters.Reds, based on a true story, received 12 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Beatty) and Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor for Beatty’s co-stars Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson. Beatty took home an Oscar for Best Director, his inaugural win in that category. He had received his first Best Director Oscar nomination several years earlier for his directorial debut, 1978’s Heaven Can Wait.
- 1991 --- Islamic militants in Lebanon release kidnapped American journalist Terry Anderson after 2,454 days in captivity. As chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, Anderson covered the long-running civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). On March 16, 1985, he was kidnapped on a west Beirut street while leaving a tennis court. His captors took him to the southern suburbs of the city, where he was held prisoner in an underground dungeon for the next six-and-a-half years.
- 1997 --- The National Basketball Association (NBA) suspends Latrell Sprewell, three-time All Star point guard for the Golden State Warriors, for one year after he attacked Warriors’ coach P.J. Carlesimo. During practice on December 1, Sprewell had a verbal confrontation with Carlesimo when the coach told him to “put a little mustard” on a pass. When Carlesimo approached him, Sprewell grabbed the other man around the neck and began choking him, until he was pulled away by several other players and team officials. Told to leave practice, Sprewell returned within 20 minutes and threw a punch at Carlesimo before he was again pulled away. Carlesimo, who was known for his aggressive and often confrontational coaching style, had a history of problems with Sprewell, having previously benched the guard–his team’s leading scorer–after he was late to practice. The Warriors initially terminated Sprewell’s contract, and his year-long suspension was the longest ever handed out by the NBA. After Sprewell pushed for arbitration, the sentence was later reduced to 68 games, a gap that still cost Sprewell some $6 million in wages. After Sprewell was reinstated, Golden State traded him to the New York Knicks, where he resumed his career in 1999.
- 2009 --- 22-year-old American exchange student Amanda Knox is convicted of murdering her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, in 2007 in Perugia, Italy. Knox received a 26-year prison sentence, while her 25-year-old Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaelle Sollecito, who also was convicted in the slaying, was sentenced to 25 years behind bars. The sensational, high-profile case raised questions in the United Statesabout whether Knox, who always maintained her innocence, received a fair trial. Then, in October 2011, in a decision that made international headlines, an Italian court reversed the murder convictions of both Knox and Sollecito and they were freed from prison.
- Birthdays
- Crazy Horse
- Lillian Russell
- Max Baer Jr
- John Cale
- Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon
- Dennis Wilson
- Jeff Bridges
- Cassandra Wilson
- Marisa tomei
- Tyra Banks
- Jay Z (Shawn Corey Carter)
- Francisco Franco
National Cookies Day-KALW Almanac-12/04/2015
