- 322nd Day of 2015 43 Remaining
- Winter Begins in 33 Days
- Sunrise:6:53
- Sunset:4:56
- 10 Hours 3 Minutes
- Moon Rise:12:25pm
- Moon Set:11:40pm
- Phase:44% 7 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:4:14am/3:11pm
- Low:9:45am/9:54pm
- Holidays
- National Vichyssoise Day
- Geographic Information Systems Day
- Married To A Scorpio Day
- National Educational Support Professionals Day
- Occult Day
- Push Button Phone Day
- William Tell Day
- Flag Day-Uzbekistan
- Independence Day-Morocco
- Vertieres Day-Haiti
- On This Day
- 1307 --- As popular legend has it, in the early 14th century the Swiss hero William Tell–known for his skill with a crossbow–defied the authority of an Austrian tyrant named Hermann Gessler. Gessler forced Tell’s young son to stand against a tree with an apple balanced on his head. If Tell did not shoot the apple with one of his arrows, he ordered, the boy would be killed. Tell took aim with his crossbow and shot the arrow in its center without hurting the boy; he was later said to have killed Gessler and inspired the Swiss people to rise up against Austrian rule.
- 1863 --- President Abraham Lincoln boards a train for Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to deliver a short speech at the dedication of a cemetery of soldiers killed during the battle there on July 1 to July 3, 1863. The address Lincoln gave in Gettysburg became one of the most famous speeches in American history.
- 1865 --- Samuel L. Clemens published "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" under the pen name "Mark Twain" in the New York "Saturday Press."
- 1883 --- North American railroads switched to a new Standard Railway Time (SRT), resulting in the creation of four standard time zones adopted were Eastern Standard Time, Central Daylight Time, Mountain Standard Time, and Pacific Daylight Time.
- 1928 --- Walt Disney's 'Steamboat Willie' animated cartoon (in black-and-white) premiered at the Colony Theatre in New York City. The first cartoon with synchronized sound and the debut of Mickey Mouse (originally named Mortimer).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NQyzcDnMdE
- 1956 --- Fats Domino appeared on the Ed Sullivan show and performed his hit "Blueberry Hill." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKQZy2PJtq8
- 1966 --- U.S. Roman Catholic bishops did away with the rule against eating meat on Fridays.
- 1969 --- Apollo 12 astronauts Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. and Alan L. Bean landed on the lunar surface during the second manned mission to the moon.
- 1970 --- President Nixon asks Congress for supplemental appropriations for the Cambodian government of Premier Lon Nol. Nixon requested $155 million in new funds for Cambodia—$85 million of which would be for military assistance, mainly in the form of ammunition. He also asked for an additional $100 million to restore funds taken from other foreign appropriations during the year by “presidential determination” and given to Cambodia. Nixon wanted the funds to provide aid and assistance to Lon Nol to preclude the fall of Cambodia to the communist Khmer Rouge and their North Vietnamese allies.
- 1978 --- Peoples Temple founder Jim Jones leads hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide at their agricultural commune in a remote part of the South American nation of Guyana. Many of Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison-laced punch while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. The final death toll at Jonestown that day was 909; a third of those who perished were children. In 1978, a group of former Temple members and concerned relatives of current members convinced U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, a Democrat of California, to travel to Jonestown and investigate the settlement. On November 17, 1978, Ryan arrived in Jonestown with a group of journalists and other observers. At first the visit went well, but the next day, as Ryan’s delegation was about to leave, several Jonestown residents approached the group and asked them for passage out of Guyana. Jones became distressed at the defection of his followers, and one of Jones’ lieutenants attacked Ryan with a knife. The congressman escaped from the incident unharmed, but Jones then ordered Ryan and his companions ambushed and killed at the airstrip as they attempted to leave. The congressman and four others were murdered as they boarded their charter planes. Back in Jonestown, Jones commanded everyone to gather in the main pavilion and commit what he termed a “revolutionary act.” The youngest members of the Peoples Temple were the first to die, as parents and nurses used syringes to drop a potent mix of cyanide, sedatives and powdered fruit juice into children’s throats. Adults then lined up to drink the poison-laced concoction while armed guards surrounded the pavilion.
- 1987 --- After nearly a year of hearings into the Iran-Contra scandal, the joint Congressional investigating committee issues its final report. It concluded that the scandal, involving a complicated plan whereby some of the funds from secret weapons sales to Iran were used to finance the Contra war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, was one in which the administration of Ronald Reagan exhibited “secrecy, deception, and disdain for the law.” Naming several members of the Reagan administration as having been directly involved in the scheme (including National Security Advisor John Poindexter and deceased CIA Director William Casey), the report stated that Reagan must bear “ultimate responsibility.”
- 1987 --- A fire in a London subway station kills 30 commuters and injures scores of others. It is the worst fire in the history of the city’s underground rail system. The King’s Cross station in London is one of the city’s busiest; it contains two terminals and is at the intersection of several subway lines. Late on a Wednesday afternoon, people began to smell smoke coming from beneath one of the station’s escalators. Even though several people reported the smell to station employees, no action was taken. At 7:50 p.m., flames were spotted beneath the escalator. By that time, it was too late. Smoke filled the station as the fire quickly spread, leaving no clear path of escape. The London Fire Brigade arrived to find general chaos and panic; they were also faced with what one witness described as a “shock wave of fire.” The heat level rose rapidly since the fire was trapped far below street level.
- 1991 --- Shiite Muslim kidnappers in Lebanon free Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite after more than four years of captivity. Waite, looking thinner and his hair grayer, was freed along with American educator Thomas M. Sutherland after intense negotiations by the United Nations.
- 1996 --- A revolutionary new Volkswagen factory opens in Resende, Brazil. The million-square-meter Resende factory did not have an ordinary assembly line staffed by Volkswagen workers: In fact, the only people on Volkswagen’s payroll were the quality-control supervisors. Independent subcontractors were responsible for putting together every part of the trucks and buses that the factory produced. This process, which Volkswagen called the “modular consortium,” reduced the company’s labor costs considerably by making them someone else’s problem: The company simply purchased its labor from the lowest bidder. Eventually, Volkswagen hoped to export this new system to all of its factories in developing countries.
- 1996 --- Tony Silva, a world-renowned expert and outspoken protector of exotic birds, is sentenced to seven years in prison without parole for leading an illegal parrot smuggling operation. Silva was only one of many to be arrested during “Operation Renegade,” a three-year international probe into bird smuggling by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Division of Law Enforcement, although his case was by far the best known.
- 1998 --- Alice McDermott beats out front-runner Tom Wolfe for the National Book Award with her novel “Charming Billy”, losing a bet with her children. McDermott felt she was so unlikely to win the award that she told her three children she’d give them whatever they wanted if she won: She ended up owing them a portable TV, an inflatable armchair, and a ski trip.
- Birthdays
- Alan Shepard
- Louis Daguerre
- Imogene Coca
- Hank Ballard
- Brenda Vacarro
- Linda Evans
- Graham Parker
- Chloe Sevigny
- George Gallup
- Kim Wilde
- Elizabeth Perkins
- Johnny Mercer
- Mickey Mouse
National Vichyssoise Day-KALW Almanac-11/18/2015
