November 13, 2014

• Actor’s Day
• National Indian Pudding Day
• National Mom’s and Dad’s Day
• Sadie Hawkins Day
• Start A Rumor Day

• World Kindness Day

• On This Day
• 1775 --- Continental Army Brigadier General Richard Montgomery takes Montreal, Canada, without opposition. Montgomery's victory owed its success in part to Ethan Allen's disorganized defeat at the hand of British General and Canadian Royal Governor Guy Carleton 

  

  at Montreal on September 24, 1775. Allen's misguided and undermanned attack on Montreal led to his capture by the British and imprisonment in Pendennis Castle in Cornwall, England. Although a failure in the short term, Allen's attack had long-term benefits for the Patriots. Carleton had focused his attention on suppressing Allen's attack, while refusing reinforcements to Fort St. Jean, to which Montgomery's expedition laid siege from August 21 to November 3, 1775. Fort St. Jean's commander, Major Charles Preston, surrendered on November 3, fearful of the hardship the 

  

  town's civilians would face during a winter under siege. With the final fortification between Montgomery and Montreal in Patriot hands and Carleton's defenses depleted by the conflict with Allen, Montgomery's forces entered Montreal with ease on November 13.

• 1789 --- Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to a friend in which he said, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." 

• 1927 --- After seven years of construction and over $48 million, the Holland Tunnel, New York City’s connection to Jersey City, NJ, opened to traffic. It was named after the chief engineer of construction, Clifford Milburn Holland, who died before the tunnel was completed.

  

• 1945 --- President Harry Truman announces the establishment of a panel of inquiry to look into the settlement of Jews in Palestine. In the last weeks of World War II, the Allies liberated one death camp after another in which the German Nazi regime had held and slaughtered millions of Jews. Surviving Jews in the formerly Nazi-occupied territories were left without family, homes, jobs or savings. In August 1945, Truman received the Harrison report, which detailed the plight of Jews in post-war Germany, and it became clear to him that something had to be done to speed up the process of finding Jewish refugees a safe place to live. In late August, Truman contacted British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to propose that Jewish refugees be allowed to immigrate to Palestine, which at the time was occupied by Britain. Attlee responded that he would look into the matter and asked for a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to examine the complicated issue of integrating Jewish settlers into territory that was home to an Arab majority. Meanwhile, two U.S. senators introduced a resolution in Congress demanding the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine

• 1946 --- The first artificial snow was produced -- by Vincent J. Schaefer over Mt. Greylock, Massachusetts.

  

• 1953 --- In an example of the absurd lengths to which the "Red Scare" in America is going, Mrs. Thomas J. White of the Indiana Textbook Commission, calls for the removal of references to the book Robin Hood from textbooks used by the state's schools. Mrs. Young claimed that there was "a Communist directive in education now to stress the story of Robin Hood because he robbed the rich and gave it to the poor. That's the Communist line. It's just a smearing of law and order and anything that disrupts law and order is their meat." She went on to attack Quakers because they "don't believe in fighting wars." This philosophy, she argued, played into communist hands.

• 1956 --- The Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses.

• 1961 --- The Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was released. 

  

• 1968 --- The Beatles' animated movie "Yellow Submarine" premiered in the U.S.

  

• 1969 --- In Washington, as a prelude to the second moratorium against the war scheduled for the following weekend, protesters stage a symbolic "March Against Death." The march began at

  

   6 p.m. and drew over 45,000 participants, each with a placard bearing the name of a soldier who had died in Vietnam. The marchers began at Arlington National Cemetery and continued past the White House, where they called out the names of the dead. The march lasted for two days and nights. This demonstration and the moratorium that followed did not produce a change in official policy--although President Nixon was deeply angered by the protests, he publicly feigned indifference and they had no impact on his prosecution of the war.

  

• 1971 --- The U.S. spacecraft Mariner 9 became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, Mars. 

  

• 1974 --- 28-year-old Karen Silkwood is killed in a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma City. Silkwood worked as a technician at a plutonium plant operated by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and she had been critical of the plant's health and safety procedures. In September, she had complained to the Atomic Energy Commission about unsafe conditions at the plant (a week before her death, plant monitors had found that she was contaminated with radioactivity herself), and the night she died, she was on her way to a meeting with a union representative and a reporter for The New York Times, reportedly with a folder full of documents that proved that Kerr-McGee was acting negligently when it came to worker safety at the plant. However, no such folder

  

   was found in the wreckage of her car, lending credence to the theory that someone had forced her off the road to prevent her from telling what she knew. Silkwood went to a union meeting before heading home in her white Honda. Soon, police were summoned to the scene of an accident along Oklahoma's State Highway 74: Silkwood had somehow crashed into a concrete culvert. She was dead by the time help arrived. An autopsy revealed that she had taken a large dose of Quaaludes before she died, which would likely have made her doze off at the wheel; however, an accident investigator found skid marks and a suspicious dent in the Honda's rear bumper, indicating that a second car had forced Silkwood off the road.

• 1977 --- The comic strip "Li'l Abner" by Al Capp appeared in newspapers for the last time.

  

• 1979 --- In the middle of a game at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City, Philadelphia 76ers center Darryl Dawkins leaps over Kansas City Kings forward Bill Robinzine and slam-dunks the basketball, shattering the fiberglass backboard. The result, according to people who were at the game, was a sound like a

  

   bomb going off in the middle of the court. Shards of glass were everywhere: They nicked Robinzine all over his legs and arms and gotten stuck in Dr. J’s Afro. "It wasn’t really a safe thing to do," Dawkins chuckled later, "but it was a Darryl Dawkins thing to do."

• 1982 --- Near the end of a weeklong national salute to Americans who served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated in Washington after a march to its site by thousands of veterans of the conflict. The long-awaited memorial was a simple V-shaped black-granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939 Americans who died in the conflict, arranged in order of death, not rank, as was common in other memorials.

  

• 1982 --- “Business as Usual”, the smash album by Men at Work, started a fifteen-week run at number one in the U.S.

  

• 1985 --- Nevado del Ruiz, the highest active volcano in the Andes Mountains of Colombia, suffers a mild eruption that generates a series of lava flows and surges over the volcano's broad ice-covered summit. Flowing mixtures of water, ice, pumice, and other rock debris poured off the summit and sides of the volcano, forming

  

   "lahars" that flooded into the river valleys surrounding Ruiz. The lahars joined normal river channels, and massive flooding and mudslides was exacerbated by heavy rain. Within four hours of the eruption, the lahars traveled over 60 miles, killing more than 23,000 people, injuring over 5,000, and destroying more than 5,000 homes. Hardest hit was the town of Armero, where three quarters of the 28,700 inhabitants died.

• 1986 --- U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly acknowledged that the U.S. had sent "defensive weapons and spare parts" to Iran. He denied that the shipments were sent to free hostages, but that they had been sent to improve relations. 

• 1999 --- The host of Saturday Night Live was the country-music giant Garth Brooks, but the musical guest that night was a rocker by the name of Chris Gaines—a musician few but Garth Brooks himself had ever even heard of. According to his official biography, Chris Gaines was a former Grammy-winner and seasoned rock

  

   veteran staging a mid-career comeback nearly 10 years after a string of hits in the 1980s with songs that included collaborations with Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan, among others. In fact, "Chris Gaines" was Garth Brooks in a black wig and a glued-on soul patch—the biggest country-music star in the world pursuing his dreams of being a rock star in the guise of a highly developed alter-ego.

• 2001 --- U.S. President George W. Bush signed an executive order that would allow for military tribunals to try any foreigners captured with connections to the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. It was the first time since World War II that a president had taken such action. 

• Birthdays
• Whoopi Goldberg
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Justice Louis Brandeis
• Jean Seberg
• Jack Elam
• Clyde McPhatter
• Garry Marshall
• Jimmy Kimmel

• 317^th Day of 2014 / 48 Remaining
• Winter Begins in 38 Days

• Sunrise:6:48
• Sunset:4:59
• 10 Hours 11 Minutes

• Moon Rise:10:24pm
• Moon Set:12:13pm
• Moon Phase:58%
• Next Full Moon December 6 @ 4:27am
• Full Cold Moon
• Full Long Nights Moon

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 Tide:4:17am/2:48pm
• Low Tide:9:51am/9:48pm