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Thursday December 11, 2014

  • Admission Day-Indiana
  • National Noodle Ring Day

  • International Mountain Day
  • National Day-Burkina Faso

  • On This Day
  • 1769 --- Edward Beran of London patented venetian blinds.

  • 1792 --- France's King Louis XVI went before the Convention, which had replaced the National Assembly, to face charges of treason. He was convicted and condemned and was sent to the guillotine the following January.

  • 1816 --- The Hoosier state, Indiana, entered the United States of America as the 19th state. The nickname, meaning rustic, is not a good description of Indianapolis, the major metropolis that is its capital. However, much of the state is still farmland, and the little state flower, the peony, grows in many Hoosier front yards. The cardinal, the state bird, is also the state bird of each of the states (except Michigan) that border Indiana: Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio.

  • 1844 --- Nitrous oxide used in first successful surgical operation under anaesthetic. In Harford, Connecticut Dr. John M. Riggs extracted a tooth from fellow dentist Dr. Horace Wells.
  • 1872 --- Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became America's first black governor when he took office as acting governor of Louisiana. 
  • 1872 --- Already appearing as a well-known figure of the Wild West in popular dime novels, Buffalo Bill Cody makes his first stage appearance on this day, in a Chicago-based production of The Scouts of the Prairie.

  • 1882 --- Boston's Bijou Theater had its first performance. It was the first American playhouse lit exclusively by electricity. 

  • 1919 --- The kind citizens of Enterprise, Alabama dedicated the first known monument to an insect! The town turned out to honor the boll weevil; the evil weevil that destroyed cotton plants. However, by forcing folks to diversify their crops, the farmers wound up tripling their income. Thus, the tribute to those bugs.

  • 1936 --- After ruling for less than one year, Edward VIII becomes the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne. He chose to abdicate after the British government, public, and the Church of England condemned his decision to marry the American divorcée 
    Wallis Warfield Simpson. On the evening of December 11, he gave a radio address in which he explained, "I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love." On December 12, his younger brother, the duke of York, was proclaimed King George VI.
  • 1939 --- Betty Grable and her famous legs were featured on the cover of LIFE magazine. Legend has it that she didn’t care much for the picture, but it became an international symbol of ‘back home’ for those at war.
  • 1941 --- Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The U.S in turn declared war on the two countries. 
  • 1944 --- Toronto is battered with its worst-ever snowfall. Twenty-one people died as a result of the record storm, in which nearly 20 inches of snow fell in a single day.

  • 1946 --- In the aftermath of World War II, the General Assembly of the United Nations votes to establish the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), an organization to help provide relief and support to children living in countries devastated by the war.
  • 1951 --- Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement from baseball. Joltin’ Joe played only for the New York Yankees during his 13-year career. His lifetime batting average was .325; and his streak of 56 games batted safely in, still stands as a record.

  • 1957 --- Jerry Lee Lewis secretly married his 13-year-old third cousin Myra Gale Brown. The marriage caused Lewis to be blacklisted from many radio stations and he was dropped from Dick Clark's shows. 
  • 1964 --- Sam Cooke was shot to death at the Hacienda Motel in Los Angeles.
  • 1967 --- The French prototype Concorde 001 was rolled out in Toulouse, France (the British 002 prototype was not quite finished in Bristol). The joint British-French venture and the world’s first supersonic airliner, took two more years of testing and fine-tuning the powerful engines before it made its maiden flight.

  • 1969 --- The secretary of the Moscow writer's union declares that nudity as displayed in the popular play "Oh! Calcutta!" is a sign of decadence in Western culture. More disturbing, he claimed, was the fact that this "bourgeois" thinking was infecting Russian youth. Sergei Mikhailkov, best known for writing books for children in Russia, lashed out at the Broadway show (where performers were seen in their "birthday suits"), and pornography in general. Such exhibitions were "a general striptease-that is one of the slogans of modern bourgeois art." It was unfortunate, he lamented, that even Russian youth were becoming enamored of such decadence.
  • 1972 --- Man landed on the moon for the last time during the Apollo 17 mission.

  • 1991 --- Salman Rushdie, under an Islamic death sentence for blasphemy, made his first public appearance since 1989 in New York, at a dinner marking the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment.
  • 1993 --- Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle was number one on U.S. album charts. The rest of the top five: 2-Vs., Pearl Jam; 3-Music Box, Mariah Carey; 4-The Spaghetti Incident?, Guns N’ Roses; 5-The Beavis & Butt-Head Experience, Various artists.
  • 1997 --- Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams became the first political ally of the IRA to meet a British leader in 76 years. He conferred with Prime Minister Tony Blair in London. 

  • 1997 --- Jewel, Sinead O'Connor and Emmylou Harris performed the Beatles' "In My Life" together at the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo.
  • 1997 --- Negotiators from around the world (more than 150 countries) agreed on a package of measures that for the first time would legally obligate industrial countries to cut emissions of waste industrial (greenhouse) gases that scientists say are warming the Earth’s atmosphere.
  • 1998 --- The Mars Climate Orbiter blasted off on a nine-month journey to the Red Planet. However, the probe disappeared in September of 1999, apparently destroyed because scientists had failed to convert English measures to metric values. 
  • 2002 --- A congressional report found that intelligence agencies before Sept. 11, 2001, were poorly organized, poorly equipped and slow to pursue clues that might have prevented that day's terrorist attacks.

  • 2008 --- Bernard Madoff was arrested, accused of running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. He later pleaded guilty and is serving 150 years in prison.
  • Birthdays
  • Fiorello H LaGuardia
  • Hector Berlioz
  • Annie Jump Cannon
  • Teri Garr
  • Carlo Ponti
  • Willie Mae Thornton
  • Rita Moreno
  • Ron Carey
  • Donna Mills
  • Brenda Lee
  • Jermaine Jackson
  • Mo’Nique
  • David Gates
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  • 345th Day of 2014 / 20 Remaining
  • Winter Begins in 10 Days

  • Sunrise:7:15
  • Sunset:4:51
  • 9 Hours 26 Minutes

  • Moon Rise:10:03pm
  • Moon Set:10:46am
  • Moon Phase:74%
  • Next Full Moon January 4 @ 8:54pm
  • Full Wolf Moon
  • Full Old Moon
  • Moon After Yule

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 Tide:2:38am/1:10pm
  • Low Tide:7:59am/8:06