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National Espresso Day-KALW Almanac-11/23/2015

  • 327th Day of 2015 38 Remaining
  • Winter Begins in 28 Days
  • Sunrise:6:59
  • Sunset:4:53
  • 9 Hours 54 Minutes
  • Moon Rise:3:40pm
  • Moon Set:4:12am
  • Phase:93% 12 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:8:03am/9:16pm
  • Low:1:40am/2:45pm
  • Holidays
  • National Espresso Day
  • National Cashew Day
  • Dr Who Day
  • Eat A Cranberry Day
  • Fibonacci Day (a pattern of counting where each number is the sum of the previous two)
  • Cutty Sark Day
  • On This Day
  • 1499 --- Perkin Warbeck, who invaded England in 1497 claiming to be the lost son of King Edward IV, is hanged for allegedly trying to escape from the Tower of London. Believed to be a native of Tournai in Belgium, Warbeck went to Ireland in 1491 and claimed he was Richard, duke of York, the second son of Edward IV. Richard and his elder brother were presumed murdered in the Tower of London by their uncle, King Richard III, in 1483. Warbeck found support from the enemies of King Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England, and in 1497 landed at Cornwall and raised an army of 6,000 men. Faced with King Henry’s larger army, he fled but was captured and imprisoned. In November 1499, he was executed. Warbeck’s story was written by the Tudors–history’s victors–and it might never be known whether he was actually Richard of York or just a Flemish impostor.
  • 1835 --- Henry Burden was granted the first U.S. patent for a horseshoe manufacturing machine.
  • 1869 --- The 3 masted clipper ship 'Cutty Sark' was launched at Dunbarton, Scotland. It was one of the last to be built and is the only one surviving today. It is 212 feet long and 36 feet wide. It was initially used in the English/Chinese tea trade. Fully restored in 1957, it is in dry berth in Greenwich, London as a sailing museum.
  • 1874 --- Thomas Hardy’s novel “Far from the Madding Crowd” is published. In the novel, farm owner Bathsheba Everdene is courted by three suitors, each showing a different face of love and human nature. Although the book ends happily, it contains many of the tragic elements, grim view of human nature, and pessimistic outlook that characterize Hardy’s later masterworks, including Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895).
  • 1876 --- William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, leader of New York City’s corrupt Tammany Hall political organization during the 1860s and early 1870s, is delivered to authorities in New York City after his capture in Spain. Tweed became a powerful figure in Tammany Hall–New York City’s Democratic political machine–in the late 1850s. By the mid 1860s, he had risen to the top position in the organization and formed the “Tweed Ring,” which openly bought votes, encouraged judicial corruption, extracted millions from city contracts, and dominated New York City politics. The Tweed Ring reached its peak of fraudulence in 1871 with the remodeling of the City Court House, a blatant embezzlement of city funds that was exposed by The New York Times. Tweed and his flunkies hoped the criticism would blow over, but thanks to the efforts of opponents such as Harper’s Weekly political cartoonist Thomas Nast, who conducted a crusade against Tweed, virtually every Tammany Hall member was swept from power in the elections of November 1871. All the Tweed Ring were subsequently tried and sentenced to prison. Boss Tweed served time for forgery and larceny and other charges but in 1875 escaped from prison and traveled to Cuba and Spain. In 1876, he was arrested by Spanish police, who reportedly recognized him from a famous Nash cartoon depiction.
  • 1889 --- Louis Glass installed the first jukebox, actually called 'nickel-in-the-slot-phonograph' at the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco, California.
  • 1903 --- Singer Enrico Caruso made his American debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, appearing in "Rigoletto."
  • 1936 --- The first issue of the pictorial magazine Life is published, featuring a cover photo of the Fort Peck Dam by Margaret Bourke-White. Life actually had its start earlier in the 20th century as a different kind of magazine: a weekly humor publication, not unlike today’s The New Yorker in its use of tart cartoons, humorous pieces and cultural reporting. When the original “Life” folded during the Great Depression, the influential American publisher Henry Luce bought the name and re-launched the magazine as a picture-based periodical. By this time, Luce had already enjoyed great success as the publisher of Time, a weekly news magazine.
  • 1936 --- Bluesman Robert Johnson is recorded for the very first time in a San Antonio recording studio. In his short but hugely influential life, Robert Johnson spent only five days in the recording studio, recording only 41 total takes of 29 different songs. Thirteen of those takes and eight of those songs—including “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Terraplane Blues”—were captured during his first-ever session, on this day in 1936, in a makeshift studio set up in adjoining rooms of the Gunter Hotel in downtown San Antonio. Johnson returned to the Gunter Hotel twice more later in that same week, and then recorded once more over the course of two days in 1937 in Dallas. The results of those sessions were 12 78-rpm records issued on the Vocalion label in 1937 and 1938, the last of them after Johnson’s death by poisoning at the hands of a jealous husband on August 16, 1938.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dloPrGI0EuY
  • 1959 --- Robert Stroud, the famous “Birdman of Alcatraz,” is released from solitary confinement for the first time since 1916. Stroud gained widespread fame and attention when author Thomas Gaddis wrote a biography that trumpeted Stroud’s ornithological expertise.
  • 1970 --- George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" was released in the U.S.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kNGnIKUdMI
  • 1972 --- Secret peace talks resume in Paris between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese representative, but almost immediately reach an impasse. The sticking points were the implementation of the international supervisory force and Saigon’s insistence on the withdrawal of all North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. When the talks became hopelessly deadlocked, President Nixon ordered what became known as the “Christmas bombing” to force the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table.
  • 1976 --- Police arrested Jerry Lee Lewis outside the gates of Graceland after he showed up for the second time that night and made a scene by shouting, waving a pistol and demanding to see Elvis Presley. 
  • 1979 --- Thomas McMahon, a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), is sentenced to life imprisonment for preparing and planting the bomb that killed Lord Louis Mountbatten and three others three months before.
  • 1980 --- An earthquake strikes Southern Italy, killing more than 3,000 people. The casualty toll was so high in part because the tremor struck during Sunday night mass, as many residents sat in churches that crumbled in the quake. The 7.2-magnitude quake struck at 7:34 p.m. on a Sunday night and was centered in Eboli, south of Naples. In nearby Balvano, children were preparing for their first communion at the 1,000-year-old Conza Della Compagna church. The violent shaking demolished the church and killed scores of people, including 26 children.
  • 1981 --- President Ronald Reagan signs off on a top secret document, National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), which gives the Central Intelligence Agency the power to recruit and support a 500-man force of Nicaraguan rebels to conduct covert actions against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. A budget of $19 million was established for that purpose. NSDD-17 marked the beginning of official U.S. support for the so-called Contras in their struggle against the Sandinistas.
  • 1984 --- Boston College’s diminutive quarterback Doug Flutie throws a last-second 64-yard pass to beat the University of Miami 47-45. The 30,235 fans in the Orange Bowl had already begun to celebrate the victory they were sure their Hurricanes had won, and they were stunned when Flutie’s pass found his teammate (and roommate) Gerard Phelan in the end zone. The receiver, for his part, was just as stunned: “He threw it a long, long way,” Phelan said after the game. “I didn’t think he could throw the ball that far.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-_uYyVlxrk
  • Birthdays
  • Harpo Marx
  • Billy the Kid (William H Bonney)
  • Boris Karloff
  • Ellen Drew
  • Susan Anspach
  • Steve Landesberg
  • Robin Roberts
  • Bruce Hornsby
  • Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi
  • Bruce Vilanich
  • Jose Napoleon Duarte
  • Miley Cyrus
  • Franklin Pierce (15th President)