- 24th Day of 2013 / 341 Remaining
- 55 Days Until The First Day of Spring
- Sunrise:7:19
- Sunset:5:24
- 10 Hours 5 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:3:32pm
- Moon Set:5:20am
- Moon’s Phase: %
- 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: 9:24am/11:27pm
- Low: 3:33am/4:30pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:13.47
- Last Year:6.03
- Normal To Date:12.57
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Belly Laugh Day
- National Compliment Day
- Beer Can Appreciation Day
- National Eskimo Pie Day
- National Peanut Butter Day
- Economic Liberation Day-Togo
- On This Day In …
- 1848 --- James W. Marshall discovered a gold nugget at Sutter's Mill in northern California. The discovery led to the gold rush of '49.
- 1899 --- Humphrey O’Sullivan, patented the rubber heel on this day and, of course, nothing has ever been quite the same since. Please don’t leave black heel marks on the floor today!
- 1908 --- The Boy Scouts movement begins in England with the publication of the first installment of Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys. The name Baden-Powell was already well known to many English boys, and thousands of them eagerly bought up the handbook. By the end of April, the serialization of Scouting for Boys was completed, and scores of impromptu Boy Scout troops had sprung up across Britain. In 1900, Baden-Powell became a national hero in Britain for his 217-day defense of Mafeking in the South African War. Soon after, Aids to Scouting, a military field manual he had written for British soldiers in 1899, caught on with a younger audience. Boys loved the lessons on tracking and observation and organized elaborate games using the book. Hearing this, Baden-Powell decided to write a nonmilitary field manual for adolescents that would also emphasize the importance of morality and good deeds.
- 1920 --- The Eskimo Pie was patented by Christian K. Nelson, an ice cream salesman in Onawa, Iowa.
- 1924 --- The Russian city of St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad in honor of late revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin.
- 1935 --- Canned beer makes its debut. In partnership with the American Can Company, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger's Finest Beer and Krueger's Cream Ale to faithful Krueger drinkers in Richmond, Virginia. Ninety-one percent of the drinkers approved of the canned beer, driving Krueger to give the green light to further production. By the late 19th century, cans were instrumental in the mass distribution of foodstuffs, but it wasn't until 1909 that the American Can Company made its first attempt to can beer. This was unsuccessful, and the American Can Company would have to wait for the end of Prohibition in the United States before it tried again. Finally in 1933, after two years of research, American Can developed a can that was pressurized and had a special coating to prevent the fizzy beer from chemically reacting with the tin. The concept of canned beer proved to be a hard sell, but Krueger's overcame its initial reservations and became the first brewer to sell canned beer in the United States. The response was overwhelming. Within three months, over 80 percent of distributors were handling Krueger's canned beer, and Krueger's was eating into the market share of the "big three" national brewers--Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and Schlitz. Competitors soon followed suit, and by the end of 1935, over 200 million cans had been produced and sold.
- 1939 -- An 8.3-magnitude earthquake centered in south central Chile leaves 50,000 people dead and 60,000 injured on this day in 1939. The disaster came just 33 years after another terrible quake in Chile killed tens of thousands.
- 1950 --- P.L. Spencer received a patent for the microwave oven. (applied for on October 8, 1945).
- 1955 --- The rules committee of major league baseball announced a plan to strictly enforce the rule that required a pitcher to release the ball within 20 seconds after taking his position on the mound.
- 1956 --- Look magazine publishes the confessions of J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, two white men from Mississippi who were acquitted in the 1955 kidnapping and murder of Emmett Louis Till, an African-American teenager from Chicago. In the Look article, titled "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi," the men detailed how they beat Till with a gun, shot him and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River with a heavy cotton-gin fan attached with barbed wire to his neck to weigh him down. The two killers were paid a reported $4,000 for their participation in the article.
- 1959 --- Coors launched the 7 ounce seamless, recyclable aluminum beer can.
- 1962 --- Brian Epstein signed with the Beatles as their manager and began to direct their image away from leather jackets. He led them toward a smarter stage presentation, with matching suits and bows to the audience.
- 1967 --- "Respect," "Chain of Fools," and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" are the passionate, gospel-charged classics with which Aretha Franklin is most closely associated. They were enormous, career-defining hits that earned her universal and eternal acclaim as the Queen of Soul, among other, more formal honors. What some fans may not realize, however, is that when Aretha recorded those hits, she was already 10 years into a professional career that would have been defined very differently had it ended before January 24, 1967. That was the date on which Aretha Franklin's career was effectively reborn in a historic recording session at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama.
- 1972 -- After 28 years of hiding in the jungles of Guam, local farmers discover Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese sergeant who was unaware that World War II had ended. Guam, a 200-square-mile island in the western Pacific, became a U.S. possession in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. In 1941, the Japanese attacked and captured it, and in 1944, after three years of Japanese occupation, U.S. forces retook Guam. It was at this time that Yokoi, left behind by the retreating Japanese forces, went into hiding rather than surrender to the Americans. In the jungles of Guam, he carved survival tools and for the next three decades waited for the return of the Japanese and his next orders. After he was discovered in 1972, he was finally discharged and sent home to Japan, where he was hailed as a national hero. He subsequently married and returned to Guam for his honeymoon. His handcrafted survival tools and threadbare uniform are on display in the Guam Museum in Agana.
- 1978 --- A nuclear-powered Soviet satellite plunged through Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated. The radioactive debris was scattered over parts of Canada's Northwest Territory.
- 1982 --- The 49ers, led by Coach Bill Walsh and QB Joe Montana, won the teams 1st Super Bowl Title. San Francisco beat the Cincinnati Bengals 26-21 in the Pontiac, Michigan Silverdome. The 49ers led 20-0 at the half, but the Bengals chased and almost caught them in the second half. Tickets: $40.00. The CBS telecast was viewed by 110.2 million fans and CBS radio counted 14 million listeners to its broadcast of the game. Montana was also named the games MVP.
- 1986 --- The Voyager 2 space probe swept past Uranus, coming within 50,679 miles of the seventh planet from the sun.
- 1999 --- The International Olympic Committee voted to expel six IOC members after charges that they had accepted money and other compensation from officials from cities bidding to host the Olympics. The cities included Sydney, Australia (2000 summer games) and Salt Lake City, Utah (2002 winter games).
- 2004 --- NASA's Opportunity rover landed on Mars three weeks after its identical twin, Spirit.
- Birthdays
- Edith Wharton
- Neil Diamond
- Ray Steevens
- Aaron Neville
- Jools Holland
- Mary Lou Retton
- Mark Goodson
- Ernest Borgnine
- Warren Zevon
- Nastassja Kinski