- 363rd Day of 2015 2 Remaining
- Spring Begins in 81 Days
- Sunrise: 7:24
- Sunset: 4:59
- 9 Hours 35 Minutes
- Moon Rise: 9:38pm
- Moon Set: 10:12am
- Phase: 81% 18 Days
- Next Full Moon January 23 @ 5:46pm
- Full Wolf Moon Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule. Some called it the Full Snow Moon, but most tribes applied that name to the next Moon.
- Tides
- High: 1:58am/12:46pm
- Low: 7:20am/7:35pm
- Rainfall (July 1 – June 30)
- This Year: 6.78
- Last Year: 15.14
- YTD Avg.: 8.80
- Annual Avg.: 23.80
- Holidays
- National Pepper Pot Day
- Still Need To Do Day
- Tick Tock Day
- Kwanzaa (Dec 26 thru Jan 1)
- On This Day
- 1170 --- Archbishop Thomas Becket is brutally murdered in Canterbury Cathedral by four knights of King Henry II of England, apparently on orders of the king. In 1155, Henry II appointed Becket as chancellor, a high post in the English government. Becket proved a skilled diplomat and won the trust of Henry, who nominated him as archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. The king hoped his friend would help in his efforts to curb the growing power of the church. However, soon after his consecration, the new archbishop emerged a zealous defender of the jurisdiction of the church over its own affairs. In 1164, Becket was forced to flee to France under fear of retaliation by the king. He was later reconciled with Henry and in 1170 returned to Canterbury amid great public rejoicing. Soon afterward, against the objections of the pope, Henry had his son crowned co-king by the archbishop of York, and tensions again came to a head between Becket and Henry. At this time, perhaps merely in a moment of frustration, the king issued to his court the following public plea: “What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house, and not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk.” A group of Henry’s knights took the statement very seriously, and on December 29, Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral.
- 1778 --- British Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell and his force of between 2500 and 3600 troops, which included the 71st Highland regiment, New York Loyalists, and Hessian mercenaries, launch a surprise attack on American forces defending Savannah, Georgia. American Major General Robert Howe and his paltry force of between 650 and 900 men were severely outnumbered. Campbell also outflanked the Continental forces by locating a path through the swamp to the right of the American position. Howe ordered the city to be evacuated and the army to withdraw from combat. During the process, the Georgia Brigade took heavy losses when it was cut off from Howe’s other forces. The Patriots lost 83 men and another 483 were captured, while the British lost only 3 men and another 10 were wounded. Savannah remained in British control until the Redcoats left of their own accord on July 11, 1782.
- 1845 --- Texas was admitted to the union as the 28th state.
- 1890 --- In the final chapter of America’s long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 400 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. Many Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians. On December 15, 1890, reservation police tried to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief, who they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, and killed him in the process, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge. On December 29, the U.S. Army’s 7th cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it’s unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it’s estimated 400 Indians were killed, nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men. The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre. Surrounded by heavily armed troops, it’s unlikely that Big Foot’s band would have intentionally started a fight. Some historians speculate that the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were deliberately taking revenge for the regiment’s defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876.
- 1916 --- Gregory Rasputin, the monk who had wielded powerful influence over the Russian court, was murdered by a group of noblemen.
- 1916 --- James Joyce’s book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published in New York. The book had been previously serialized in Ezra Pound’s review The Egoist.
- 1940 --- London suffers its most devastating air raid when Germans firebomb the city. Hundreds of fires caused by the exploding bombs engulfed areas of London, but firefighters showed a valiant indifference to the bombs falling around them and saved much of the city from destruction. The next day, a newspaper photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral standing undamaged amid the smoke and flames seemed to symbolize the capital’s unconquerable spirit during the Battle of Britain.
- 1963 --- The Weavers gave their farewell concert at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, IL.
- 1972 --- Following 36 years of publication, the last weekly issue of "LIFE" magazine hit the newsstands. The magazine later became a monthly publication.
- 1982 --- Jamaica issued a Bob Marley commemorative stamp.
- 1989 --- Vaclav Havel was elected president of Czechoslovakia by the country's Federal Assembly. He was the first non-Communist to hold the position in more than four decades.
- 1994 --- Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes pled guilty to arson charges for setting fire to and destroyed boyfriend Andre Rison's $1 million Atlanta mansion.
- 1998 --- Khmer Rouge leaders apologized for the 1970s genocide in Cambodia that claimed 1 million lives.
- Birthdays
- Paula Poundstone
- Charles Goodyear
- Ted Danson
- Andrew Johnson (17th President)
- Klaus Fuchs
- Pablo Casals
- Inga Swenson
- Ray Nitschke
- Jon Voight
- Marianne Faithful
- Yvonne Elliman
- Jude Law
National Pepper Pot Day-KALW Almanac-12/29/2015
