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Nat'l Animal Crackers Day-KALW Almanac-4/18/2016

  • 109th Day of 2016 256 Remaining
  • Summer Begins in 63 Days
  • Sunrise: 6:28
  • Sunset: 7:49
  • 13 Hours 21 Minutes
  • Moon Rise: 4:51pm
  • Moon Set: 4:52am
  • Phase: 89% 11 Days
  • Next Full Moon April 21 @ 10:25pm
  • Full Pink Moon, this name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
  • Tides
  • High: 9:28am/10:04pm
  • Low: 3:33am/3:34pm
  • Holidays
  • Animal Crackers Day
  • Adult Autism Awareness Day
  • Boston Marathon Day
  • Patriots Day
  • National Lineman Appreciation Day
  • National Velociraptor Awareness Day
  • Newspaper Columnists Day
  • Pet Owners Independence Day
  • Paul Revere Day
  • Tax Day
  •  
  • World Heritage Day
  • Health Day-Kiribati
  • Independence Day-Zimbabwe
  • Flag Day-Denmark
  • On This Day
  • 1521 --- Martin Luther, the chief catalyst of Protestantism, defies the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V by refusing to recant his writings. He had been called to Worms, Germany, to appear before the Diet (assembly) of the Holy Roman Empire and answer charges of heresy. Martin Luther was a professor of biblical interpretation at the University of Wittenberg in Germany. In 1517, he drew up his 95 theses condemning the Catholic Church for its corrupt practice of selling “indulgences,” or forgiveness of sins. Luther followed up the revolutionary work with equally controversial and groundbreaking theological works, and his fiery words set off religious reformers across Europe. In 1521, the pope excommunicated him, and he was called to appear before the emperor at the Diet of Worms to defend his beliefs. Refusing to recant or rescind his positions, Luther was declared an outlaw and a heretic. Powerful German princes protected him, however, and by his death in 1546 his ideas had significantly altered the course of Western thought.
  • 1775 --- British troops march out of Boston on a mission to confiscate the American arsenal at Concord and to capture Patriot leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, known to be hiding at Lexington. As the British departed, Boston Patriots Paul Revere and William Dawes set out on horseback from the city to warn Adams and Hancock and rouse the Minutemen. The Boston Patriots had been preparing for such a British military action for some time, and, upon learning of the British plan, Revere and Dawes set off across the Massachusetts countryside. They took separate routes in case one of them was captured: Dawes left the city via the Boston Neck peninsula and Revere crossed the Charles River to Charlestown by boat. As the two couriers made their way, Patriots in Charlestown waited for a signal from Boston informing them of the British troop movement. As previously agreed, one lantern would be hung in the steeple of Boston’s Old North Church, the highest point in the city, if the British were marching out of the city by Boston Neck, and two lanterns would be hung if they were crossing the Charles River to Cambridge. Two lanterns were hung, and the armed Patriots set out for Lexington and Concord accordingly. Along the way, Revere and Dawes roused hundreds of Minutemen, who armed themselves and set out to oppose the British.
  • 1906 --- A devastating earthquake begins to shake the city of San Francisco. The first of two vicious tremors shook San Francisco at 5:13 a.m., and a second followed not long after. The quake was powerful enough to be recorded thousands of miles away in Cape Town, South Africa, and its effect on San Francisco was cataclysmic. Thousands of structures collapsed as a result of the quake itself. However, the greatest devastation resulted from the fires that followed the quake. The initial tremors destroyed the city’s water mains, leaving overwhelmed firefighters with no means of combating the growing inferno. The blaze burned for four days and engulfed the vast majority of the city. By the time a heavy rainfall tamed the massive fire, the once proud city of San Francisco was in shambles. More than 28,000 buildings burned to the ground and the city suffered more than $500 million in damages. The human toll was equally disastrous: authorities estimated that the quake and fires killed 700 people, and left a quarter of a million people homeless. The famous writer and San Francisco resident Jack London noted, “Surrender was complete.” Despite the utter devastation, San Francisco quickly recovered from the great earthquake of 1906. During the next four years, the city arose from its ashes. Ironically, the destruction actually allowed city planners to create a new and better San Francisco. A classic western boomtown, San Francisco had grown in a haphazard manner since the Gold Rush of 1849. Working from a nearly clean slate, San Franciscans could rebuild the city with a more logical and elegant structure. The destruction of the urban center at San Francisco also encouraged the growth of new towns around the bay, making room for a new population boom arriving from the U.S. and abroad. Within a decade, San Francisco had resumed its status as the crown jewel of the American West.
  • 1907 --- The Fairmont hotel reopened in San Francisco, one year after being severely damaged by the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
  • 1923 --- The first baseball game was played at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, with New York beating the Boston Red Sox 4-1. John Phillip Sousa's band played the National Anthem.
  • 1939 --- Gene Autry recorded "Back in the Saddle Again."
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5F-O_19lSI
  • 1956 --- Grace Kelly marries Prince Rainier of Monaco in a spectacular ceremony on this day in 1956. Kelly, the daughter of a former model and a wealthy industrialist, began acting as a child. After high school, she attended the American Academy for Dramatic Arts in New York. While she auditioned for Broadway plays, she supported herself by modeling and appearing in TV commercials. In 1949, Kelly debuted on Broadway in The Father by August Strindberg. Two years later, she landed her first Hollywood bit part, in Fourteen Hours. Her big break came in 1952, when she starred as Gary Cooper’s wife in High Noon. Her performance in The Country Girl, as the long-suffering wife of an alcoholic songwriter played by Bing Crosby, won her an Oscar in 1954. The same year, she played opposite Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. While filming another Hitchcock movie, To Catch a Thief (1955), in the French Riviera, Kelly met Prince Rainier of Monaco. It wasn’t love at first sight for Kelly, but the prince initiated a long correspondence, which led to their marriage in 1956. Afterward, she became Princess Grace of Monaco and retired from acting. She had three children and occasionally narrated documentaries.
  • 1968 --- London Bridge, originally constructed in 1831, was sold to Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for $2.46 million. The granite bridge was taken apart and reconstructed in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
  • 1974 --- Italian prosecutor Mario Sossi is kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It was the first time that the left-wing terrorist group had directly struck the Italian government, marking the beginning of tensions that lasted for 10 years. The Red Brigades were founded by college student Renato Curcio in 1969 to battle “against the imperialist state of the multinationals.” At first, the fledgling organization restricted its activities to small acts of vandalism and arson. However, in 1972, they abducted business executive Idalgo Macchiarini, releasing him a short time later with a sign that said, “Hit one to educate 100. Power to the armed populace.” The Red Brigades kidnapped several other executives in the years following.
  • 1983 --- Joan Benoit wins her second Boston Marathon in the women’s division with a time of 2:22:43. The following year, she went on to win the first-ever women’s marathon at the Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles and became the first person to win Boston as well as Olympic gold.
  • 1989 --- Thousands of Chinese students continue to take to the streets in Beijing to protest government policies and issue a call for greater democracy in the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC). The protests grew until the Chinese government ruthlessly suppressed them in June during what came to be known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
  • 2014 --- Nepali mountaineering guides, most of them ethnic Sherpas, are killed by an avalanche on Mt. Everest, the Earth’s highest mountain. It was the single deadliest accident in the history of the Himalayan peak, which rises more than 29,000 feet above sea level and lies across the border between Nepal and China. The avalanche, which occurred around 6:30 a.m., swept over the Sherpas in a notoriously treacherous area of Everest known as the Khumbu Icefall, at approximately 19,000 feet. At the time, the Sherpas had been hauling loads of gear for commercial expedition groups. The disaster, in which no foreigners were killed, reopened debates about the dangerous risks undertaken by Sherpas for their typically affluent clients (in addition to lugging most of the supplies for an expedition, Sherpas are responsible for such tasks as setting lines of fixed ropes and ladders for climbers), as well as the over-commercialization of Everest, where human traffic jams during the spring mountaineering season and massive amounts of litter have become common.
  • Birthdays
  • Clarence Darrow
  • Lucretia Borgia
  • Leopold Stokowski
  • Sylvia Fischer
  • Barbara Hale
  • Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown
  • Hayley Mills
  • James Woods
  • Nate Archibald
  • Rick Moranis
  • Conan O’Brien