- 363rd Day of 2011 / 2 Remaining
- 82 Days Until Spring Begins
- Sunrise:7:24
- Sunset:5:00
- 9 Hr 36 Min
- Moon Rise:10:26am
- Moon Set:10:35pm
- Moon’s Phase: 27 %
- The Next Full Moon
- January 8 @ 11:32pm
- Full Wolf Moon
- Full Old Moon
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:2:25am/1:33pm
- Low:8:08am/8:07pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:3.35
- Last Year:11.12
- Year To Date Average:7.85
- Annual Average: 22.28
- Holidays
- Pepper Pot Day
- National Chocolate Again Day
- Illegal Pants Day
- National Yodel In The Shower Day
- Admission Day-Texas
- YMCA Day
- On This Day In …
- 1170 --- St. Thomas à Becket, the 40th archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered in his own cathedral by four knights acting on Henry II's orders.
- 1837 --- A threshing machine powered by a horse on a treadmill was patented in Winthrop, Maine, by Hiram A. and John A. Pitts.
- 1845 --- The flags of Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America and of the United States have flown over the area known as Texas, the state that became the 28th of the United States of America on this day. And, the state nickname, the Lone Star State, comes from the Texas state flag with its one star. Texas is an altered pronunciation of the Indian word, Tejas, meaning friends, and that’s why the Texas state motto is “Friendship.” The capital of the second largest state is Austin, its state bird, the mockingbird, the state flower, the bluebonnet, the state tree, the pecan tree.
- 1851 --- The first U.S.Young Men's Christian Association was organized in Boston, modeled after a group begun in London in 1844.
- 1852 --- Emma Snodgrass was arrested in Boston for wearing pants.
- 1890 --- U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. Many Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians. On December 15, 1890, “reservation police” tried to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief, who they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, and killed him in the process, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge. On December 29, the U.S. Army's 7th cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it's unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, hundreds of Indians were killed nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men. The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre. Surrounded by heavily armed troops, it's unlikely that Big Foot's band would have intentionally started a fight. Some historians believe that the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were deliberately taking revenge for the regiment's defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876. Whatever the motives, the massacre ended the Ghost Dance movement and was the last major confrontation in America's deadly war against the Plains Indians.
- 1911 --- Sun Yat-sen became the first president of a republican China.
- 1916 --- Gregory Rasputin, the monk who had wielded powerful influence over the Russian court, was murdered by a group of noblemen.
- 1949 --- KC2XAK of Bridgeport, Connecticut became the first ultrahigh frequency (UHF) television station to begin operating on a regular daily schedule. UHF stations broadcast from where the VHF (very high frequency) stations leave off -- channels 14 through 83.
- 1963 --- The Weavers gave their farewell concert at Orchestra Hall in Chicago.
- 1963 --- Much to the chagrin of the disc jockeys at 50,000-watt WABC in New York, the 5,000-watt blowtorch known as WMCA and its famed ‘Good Guys’ became the first New York radio station to play the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand. It didn’t take long for WABC to get revenge. It started calling itself the ‘official’ Beatles station (W-A-Beatle-C).
- 1978 --- French bandits dressed as Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear, who had just robbed patients at a Nancy sanatorium of $25-thousand worth of possessions, were cheered by passersby and waved through traffic in their stolen car by amused police officers.
- 1997 --- Fear of the 'bird flu' led Hong Kong to order its entire population of chickens, over 1 million birds, to be killed.
- 1998 --- Khmer Rouge leaders apologized for the 1970s genocide in Cambodia that claimed 1 million lives.
- Birthdays
- Mary Tyler Moore
- Marianne Faithful
- Paula Poundstone
- Jude Law
- Pablo Casals
- Charles Goodyear
- Ted Danson
- Andrew Johnson-17th President
- Jon Voight
- Inga Swenson
- Tom Jarriel
- Marquise de Pompadour
- Cozy Powell
- Rick Danko
- Yvonne Elliman
- Ray Nitschke