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Thursday January 17, 2013

  • 17th Day of 2013 / 348 Remaining
  • 62 Days Until The First Day of Spring

  • Sunrise:7:23
  • Sunset:5:18
  • 9 Hours 55 Minutes of Daylight

  • Moon Rise:10:41am
  • Moon Set:12:05am(Fri)
  • Moon’s Phase: 39 %

  • The Next Full Moon
  • January 26 @ 8:40pm
  • Full Wolf 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: 9:14am/11:11pm
  • Low: 2:50am/4:06pm

  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:13.36
  • Last Year:3.34
  • Normal To Date:11.59
  • Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

  • Holidays
  • National Hot Buttered Rum Day
  • Kid Inventor's Day
  • Ditch New Year’s Resolutions Day

  • Liberation Day-Poland
  • St. Anthony's Day-Christian
  • Antonovden (St Antony’s Day)-Bulgaria

  • On This Day In …
  • 1806 --- Thomas Jefferson's daughter, Martha, gave birth to James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House.

  • 1871 --- Andrew Smith Hallidie of San Francisco, California received a patent for a cable car system. The public transportation system was put into operation in the city by the bay in 1873, providing a fast, safe way to travel up and down San Francisco’s steep hills. Now, Hallidie didn’t just wake up one day and invent his cable car system. This was one situation that proves the truth of the old adage, ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’ Hallidie realized the necessity for the cable car system when he saw a loaded horse-drawn San Francisco streetcar slide backwards on a slippery hill. It was a summer day in 1869, but the cobblestones were wet from the usual San Francisco dampness. The heavily weighted car dragged five of the horses to their deaths. The catastrophe prompted Andrew Hallidie and his partners to do something to prevent this from happening again.
     Coincidentally, Hallidie already had the basic product needed to produce his cable car system. His father had filed the first patent in Great Britain for the manufacture of wire rope. Although Andrew was born in England, he had moved to the U.S. in 1852. As a young man, he was able to use his father’s new, tough rope when he designed and built a suspension bridge across Sacramento’s American River. He also had used the wire rope to pull heavy ore cars out of underground gold mines on tracks. The light bulb went on and his wire-rope manufacturing plant (that he had already moved to San Francisco) began the process of making the new cable car system. A little known fact is that Mr. Hallidie didn’t call them cable cars at first. Originally, one took a trip on ‘the endless wire rope way.’ The cars ran on rails, pulled by an endless steel cable moving on a slot beneath the street surface. In fact, the San Francisco landmark and tourist attraction works the same way today.

  • 1893 --- On the Hawaiian Islands, a group of American sugar planters under Sanford Ballard Dole overthrow Queen Liliuokalani, the Hawaiian monarch, and establish a new provincial government with Dole as president. The coup occurred with the foreknowledge of John L. Stevens, the U.S. minister to Hawaii, and 300 U.S. Marines from the U.S. cruiser Boston were called to Hawaii, allegedly to protect American lives. The first known settlers of the Hawaiian Islands were Polynesian voyagers who arrived sometime in the eighth century, and in the early 18th century the first American traders came to Hawaii to exploit the islands' sandalwood, which was much valued in China at the time. In the 1830s, the sugar industry was introduced to Hawaii and by the mid-19th century had become well established. American missionaries and planters brought about great changes in Hawaiian political, cultural, economic, and religious life, and in 1840 a constitutional monarchy was established, stripping the Hawaiian monarch of much of his authority. Four years later, Sanford B. Dole was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to American parents. During the next four decades, Hawaii entered into a number of political and economic treaties with the United States, and in 1887 a U.S. naval base was established at Pearl Harbor as part of a new Hawaiian constitution. Sugar exports to the United States expanded greatly during the next four years, and U.S. investors and American sugar planters on the islands broadened their domination over Hawaiian affairs. However, in 1891 Liliuokalani, the sister of the late King Kalakaua, ascended to the throne, refusing to recognize the constitution of 1887 and replacing it with a constitution increasing her personal authority. In January 1893, a revolutionary "Committee of Safety," organized by Sanford B. Dole, staged a coup against Queen Liliuokalani with the tacit support of the United States. On February 1, Minister John Stevens recognized Dole's new government on his own authority and proclaimed Hawaii a U.S. protectorate. Dole submitted a treaty of annexation to the U.S. Senate, but most Democrats opposed it, especially after it was revealed that most Hawaiians did want annexation. President Grover Cleveland sent a new U.S. minister to Hawaii to restore Queen Liliuokalani to the throne under the 1887 constitution, but Dole refused to step aside and instead proclaimed the independent Republic of Hawaii. Cleveland was unwilling to overthrow the government by force, and his successor, President William McKinley, negotiated a treaty with the Republic of Hawaii in 1897. In 1898, the Spanish-American War broke out, and the strategic use of the naval base at Pearl Harbor during the war convinced Congress to approve formal annexation. Two years later, Hawaii was organized into a formal U.S. territory and in 1959 entered the United States as the 50th state.

  • 1900 --- Mormon Brigham Roberts was denied a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for his practicing of polygamy.

  • 1928 --- The fully automatic, film-developing machine was patented by A.M. Josepho.

  • 1929 --- Popeye the spinach loving sailor first appeared in the comic strip 'Thimble Theatre.'

  • 1934 --- Ferdinand Porsche submitted a design for a people's car, a "Volkswagen," to the new German Reich government.

  • 1945 --- Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, was taken into Soviet custody in Budapest, Hungary. (His fate has never been determined.)

  • 1953 --- A prototype Chevrolet Corvette sports car makes its debut at General Motors' (GM) Motorama auto show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. The Corvette, named for a fast type of naval warship, would eventually become an iconic American muscle car and remains in production today.

  • 1959 --- Senegal and the French Sudan joined to form the Federal State of Mali.

  • 1961 --- In his farewell address to the nation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warns the American people to keep a careful eye on what he calls the "military-industrial complex" that has developed in the post-World War II years. A fiscal conservative, Eisenhower had been concerned about the growing size and cost of the American defense establishment since he became president in 1953. In his last presidential address to the American people, he expressed those concerns in terms that frankly shocked some of his listeners. Eisenhower began by describing the changing nature of the American defense establishment since World War II. No longer could the U.S. afford the "emergency improvisation" that characterized its preparations for war against Germany and Japan. Instead, the United States was "compelled to create a permanent armaments industry" and a huge military force. He admitted that the Cold War made clear the "imperative need for this development," but he was gravely concerned about "the acquisition of unwarranted influence...by the military-industrial complex." In particular, he asked the American people to guard against the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

  • 1994 --- The Northridge earthquake rocked Los Angeles, CA, registering a 6.7 on the Richter Scale. At least 61 people were killed and about $20 billion in damage was caused.

  • 1995 --- A 7.2-magnitude earthquake hit Kobe, Japan. The ‘Great Hanshin Earthquake’ happened at 5:46 a.m., killing at least 6,000 people and injured more than 26,000. The quake damaged or destroyed more than 56,000 buildings.

  • 2001 --- Norway lifted a ban on exports of whale meat.

  • Birthdays
  • Muhammad Ali
  • First Lady Michelle Obama
  • James Earl Jones
  • Anne Bronte
  • Benjamin Franklin
  • Betty White
  • Al Capone
  • Maury Povich
  • Mick taylor
  • Steve Earle
  • Susanna Hoffs(The Bangles)
  • Steve Harvey
  • Jim Carrey
  • Kid Rock
  • Mack Sennett
  • Anton Chekov
  • Eartha Kitt
  • Vidal Sassoon
  • Shari Lewis
  • Andy Kaufman