Thursday February 13, 2014

• 44^th Day of 2014 / 321 Remaining
• 35 Days Until The First Day of Spring

• Sunrise:7:00
• Sunset:5:47
• 10 Hours 47 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:5:00pm
• Moon Set: 5:59am
• Moon’s Phase: 99 %

• The Next Full Moon
• February 14 @ 3:54 pm
• Full Snow Moon
• Full Hunger Moon

Since the heaviest snow usually falls during this month, native tribes of the north and east most often called February’s full Moon the Full Snow Moon. Some tribes also referred to this Moon as the Full Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions in their areas made hunting very difficult.

• Tides
• High:9:24am/10:55pm
• Low:3:29am/4:14pm

• Rainfall
• This Year:5.84
• Last Year:13.87
• Average Year to Date:15.75

• Holidays
• Employee Legal Awareness Day
• Get A Different Name Day
• Madly in Love With Me Day
• National Tortellini Day

• On This Day In …
• 1633 --- Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating Copernican theory, which holds that the Earth revolves around the

  

  Sun. Galileo officially faced the Roman Inquisition in April of that same year and agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence.

• 1635 --- The Boston Public Latin School, the first public school in what is now the United States, was founded.
  

  

• 1741 --- The American Magazine, the first magazine in the U.S., was published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It beat Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine off the presses by 3 days.

• 1822 --- Jeremiah Bailey of Chester county, Pennsylvania patented the first practical mower or grass cutting machine. The two wheeled mower was horse-drawn and could mow ten acres a day.
  

  

• 1867 --- Johann Strauss' magnificent "Blue Danube Waltz" was played for the first time at a public concert in Vienna, Austria.
  

  

• 1914 --- The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (known as ASCAP) was formed in New York City. The society was founded to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members.

• 1920 --- The National Negro Baseball League was organized.
  

  

• 1920 --- The League of Nations, the international organization formed at the peace conference at Versailles in the wake of World War I, recognizes the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland.

• 1933 --- The House of Commons defeated a bill that would have prohibited the sale of alcohol in the U.K.

• 1935 --- A jury in Flemington, N.J., found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-death of the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Hauptmann was later executed.
  

  

• 1937 --- The comic strip "Prince Valiant" appeared for the first time.
  

  

• 1945 --- The most controversial episode in the Allied air war against Germany begins as hundreds of British bombers loaded with incendiaries and high-explosive bombs descend on Dresden, a historic city located in eastern Germany. Dresden was neither a war

  

  production city nor a major industrial center, and before the massive air raid of February 1945 it had not suffered a major Allied attack. By February 15, the city was a smoldering ruin and an unknown number of civilians--somewhere between 35,000 and 135,000--were dead.
  

  

• 1953 --- Major-league baseball owners were warned by Senator Edwin Johnson against televising their games nationwide. The Senator said that broadcasting these games to a national audience would be a threat to the survival of minor league baseball. Major league owners did not ‘go to bat’ for the Senator. Games, particularly on NBC, received a large and loyal following.

• 1960 --- France detonated its first atomic bomb.
  

  

• 1971 --- The Osmonds, a family singing group from Ogden, Utah, began a five-week stay at the top of the pop music charts with the hit, One Bad Apple. The song, featuring the voice of little Donny Osmond, also showcased the talent of Alan, Wayne, Merrill and Jay Osmond. The brothers were regulars on Andy Williams’ TV show from 1962 to 1967.

• 1984 --- Konstantin Chernenko succeeded the late Yuri Andropov as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee.

• 1991 --- Sotheby's announced the discovery of a long-lost manuscript of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The manuscript was the first half of Twain's original version, heavily corrected in his own handwriting, which had been missing for more than a century. The manuscript surfaced when a 62-year-old Los Angeles librarian finally

  

  got around to sorting through some old papers in six trunks sent to her when an aunt from upstate New York died. Twain, it turned out, had sent the second half of the manuscript to the librarian's grandfather, James Gluck, who had solicited it for the Buffalo and Erie Library in Buffalo, New York, where Twain had once lived. At the time, Twain was unable to find the entire manuscript, and it was presumed lost for more than 100 years. However, it turned out that Twain did eventually find the manuscript and send it to Gluck.

• 1997 --- After a two-day chase, space shuttle Discovery’s astronauts hauled the Hubble Space Telescope aboard to begin a $350 million refurbishment. The mission’s objective was to replace

  

  worn-out components and install new ones to inctrease the performance of the telescope. The tune up allowed the telescope to see further into the universe.

• 1998 --- Austrian ski racer Hermann Maier makes one of the most dramatic crashes in skiing history when he catapults 30 feet in the air, lands on his helmet and rams through two safety fences at an

  

  estimated 80 miles per hour on February 13, 1998. Amazingly, Maier suffered just minor injuries and walked away from the crash. Several days later, he won gold medals in the giant slalom and super-G events.

• 2000 --- Charles Schulz's final "Peanuts" comic strip ran in Sunday newspapers, the day after the cartoonist died at age 77.

• Birthdays
• Mena Suvari
• Mike Krzyzewski
• Chuck Yeager
• Kim Novak
• George Segal
• Peter Tork
• Stockard Channing
• Peter Gabriel
• Henry Rollins
• Georgios Papandreou
• Grant Wood
• Pauline Frederick
• Bess Truman
• Patty Berg
• Dorothy McGuire
• Oliver Reed
• Carol Lynley