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Thursday August 14, 2014

  • 226th Day of the Year / 139 Remaining
  • Autumn Begins in 39 Days

  • Sunrise:6:25
  • Sunset:8:03
  • 13 Hours 38 Minutes

  • Moon Rise:10:37pm
  • Moon Set:11:03am
  • Moon’s Phase 78%
  • Full Moon August 10 @ 11:10am
  • Full Sturgeon Moon

The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.

  • Tides
  • High Tide:1:55am/2:33pm
  • Low Tide:8:01am/8:49pm

  • Holidays
  • Navajo Code Talkers Day
  • National Creamsicle Day

  • Festival of Hungry Ghosts-China
  • Independence Day-Pakistan
  • Honey Spas-Russia
  • National Flag Day-Paraguay
  • International Lizard Day

  • On This Day
  • 1765 --- A crowd in Boston gathered under a large elm tree to protest the Stamp Act. The 'Liberty Tree' became a rallying point for resistance to British rule over the American Colonies.

  • 1784 --- On Kodiak Island, Grigory Shelikhov, a Russian fur trader, founds Three Saints Bay, the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska. The European discovery of Alaska came in 1741, when a Russian expedition led by Danish navigator Vitus Bering sighted the Alaskan mainland. Russian hunters were soon making incursions into Alaska, and the native Aleut population suffered greatly after 
    being exposed to foreign diseases. The Three Saints Bay colony was founded on Kodiak Island in 1784, and Shelikhov lived there for two years with his wife and 200 men. From Three Saints Bay, the Alaskan mainland was explored, and other fur-trade centers were established. In 1786, Shelikhov returned to Russia and in 1790 dispatched Aleksandr Baranov to manage his affairs in Alaska.

  • 1848 --- The Oregon Territory was established by the U.S. Congress. The area included the future states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana.

  • 1896 --- Gold was discovered in Canada's Yukon Territory. Within the next year more than 30,000 people rushed to the area to look for gold. 

  • 1880 --- Exactly 632 years after rebuilding began, the Cologne Cathedral, Cologne, Germany, was completed ... only to be damaged again during WWII. The largest Gothic style cathedral in Northern Europe was first built on the same site in 873 A.D., but was destroyed by fire in 1248. Rebuilding began on this day in 1248.

  • 1900 --- During the Boxer Rebellion, an international force featuring British, Russian, American, Japanese, French, and German troops relieves the Chinese capital of Peking after fighting its way 80 miles 
    from the port of Tientsin. The Chinese nationalists besieging Peking's diplomatic quarter were crushed, and the Boxer Rebellion effectively came to an end.

  • 1919 --- About 1 million tons of ice and rock broke off of a glacier near Mont Blanc, France. Nine people were killed in the incident. 

  • 1933 --- A devastating forest fire is sparked in the Coast Range Mountains, located in northern Oregon, 50 miles west of Portland. Raging for 11 days over some 267,000 acres, the blaze began a series of fires that struck the region at six-year intervals until 1951 that became known collectively as the Tillamook Burn. The first Tillamook Burn fire—which began around noon on August 14, 1933—was sparked in a logging operation located on the slopes above the North Fork of Gales Creek, west of the town of Forest Grove. An official investigation of the fire found that it stemmed from friction produced when loggers dragged a large Douglas-fir log across a 
    downed tree, igniting a large amount of logging debris in the area. Weather conditions—including an unusually high temperature of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, with only 20 percent humidity—helped ignite and spread the blaze, and within an hour, the fire had destroyed 60 acres of the surrounding land. Present-day roads and highways in the region had not yet been built, and the remote location of the logging operation meant that the loggers were forced to fight the fire largely by themselves. Some 3,000 men, including loggers, local 
    farmers and volunteers and several hundred members of the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, battled with the fire over 10 days as it burned through some 40,000 acres. On the night of August 24, strong east winds spread the blaze over 240,000 more acres in only 20 hours, making it one of the fastest-growing forest fires of the 20th century.

  • 1935 --- U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. The act created unemployment insurance and pension plans for the elderly. Social security was a campaign promise in the 1932 presidential election. Democrats pledged: “We advocate unemployment and old-age insurance under state laws.” 
    FDR proposed the bill in June of 1934. Conservatives fought it, some believing it would “threaten the integrity of our institutions.” Most supported it, hoping that it would address the long-range problem of economic security for the aged through a system in which workers contributed to their own future retirement.

  • 1945 --- U.S. President Harry S Truman announced that Japan had surrendered to the Allies [WWII]. Thousands thronged into the 
    streets throughout the United States to celebrate V-J Day. The official ratification of the surrender didn’t take place until September 2, in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri.

  • 1953 --- David N. Mullany and his 13-year-old son, David A. Mullany, 
    while trying to come up with a ball that would curve every time it was thrown, wound up inventing the Wiffle Ball. The ball had oblong holes on the top half, and a solid bottom. The original Wiffle bat was wood, 
    but for many years it has been a skinny yellow fungo-shaped plastic bat. You can still buy the bat-and-ball set for a few dollars.

  • 1956 --- The trademark "Chock Full O' Nuts-The Heavenly Coffee" was registered.

  • 1969 --- The New York Mets were 9-1/2 games behind the league-leading Chicago Cubs. The Amazing Mets began a comeback that launched the phrase, “You Gotta Believe,” as they began a drive that 
    took them to the National League pennant and the World Series Championship (over the Baltimore Orioles). It was the first championship for the Mets franchise which began in 1962.

  • 1971 --- St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson throws the first no-hitter of his storied career. Gibson’s heroics helped his team sail to an 11-0 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates.

  • 1980 --- Workers in Gdansk, Poland, seize the Lenin Shipyard and demand pay raises and the right to form a union free from communist control. The massive strike also saw the rise to prominence of labor leader Lech Walesa, who would be a key figure in bringing an end to communist rule in Poland. Gdansk had been a 
    center of labor agitation in Poland since the 1960s. When the Polish government announced new economic austerity policies and higher food prices in 1980, workers at the Lenin Shipyard exploded in anger. Lech Walesa, a veteran of Poland's labor disputes, joined the workers and on August 14, 1980, they took over the shipyard.

  • 1980 --- People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was incorporated. 
  • 1984 --- IBM released PC-DOS v3.0 for PC/AT (with network support). Remember those AT machines? A 286 processor, 20-30meg hard drive and 256k/512k RAM for somewhere between $6000 and $9000

  • 1985 --- Michael Jackson outbid Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono for the ATV music-publishing catalog. Jackson paid $47.5 million for the rights to more than 250 songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In the years afterward, that catalog—now estimated to be worth in excess of $1 billion—allowed Jackson to remain solvent by serving as collateral for several enormous personal loans that funded his extravagant lifestyle through years of low earnings and legal difficulties. In 2008, however, Jackson gave up his remaining interest in the catalog to Sony, one of his primary creditors.

  • 1987 --- Mark McGwire set the record for major league home runs by a rookie when he connected for his 39th home run of the season. he eventually ended the season with 49 hr's.
  • 2000 --- Police in Los Angeles, fired pepper spray and rubber bullets to clear a crowd of 9,000 people when a free concert by Rage Against the Machine turned violent. 
  • 2003 --- A major outage knocked out power across the eastern United States and parts of Canada. Beginning at 4:10 p.m. ET, 21 power plants shut down in just three minutes. Fifty million people were affected, including residents of New York, Cleveland and Detroit, as well as Toronto and Ottawa, Canada. Although power companies were able to resume some service in as little as two hours, power remained off in other places for more than a day. 
    The outage stopped trains and elevators, and disrupted everything from cellular telephone service to operations at hospitals to traffic at airports. In New York City, it took more than two hours for passengers to be evacuated from stalled subway trains. Small business owners were affected when they lost expensive refrigerated stock. The loss of use of electric water pumps interrupted water service in many areas. There were even some reports of people being stranded mid-ride on amusement park roller coasters. At the 
    New York Stock Exchange and bond market, though, trading was able to continue thanks to backup generators. Despite concerns, there were very few reports of looting or other blackout-inspired crime. In New York City, the police department, out in full force, actually recorded about 100 fewer arrests than average. In some places, citizens even took it upon themselves to mitigate the effects of the outage, by assisting elderly neighbors or helping to direct traffic in the absence of working traffic lights.

  • 2009 --- Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a Charles Manson follower who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, was released from a Texas prison hospital after more than three decades behind bars.

  • Birthdays
  • John Brodie
  • Halle Berry
  • David Crosby
  • Steve Martin
  • Earvin “Magic” Johnson
  • Marcia Gay Harden
  • Sarah Brightman
  • Gary Larson
  • Russell Baker
  • Mia Kunis
  • Tim Tebow
  • Ernest Thayer
  • Buddy Greco
  • Susan St James
  • Danielle Steele