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Thursday June 21, 2012

  • 173rd Day of 2012 / 193 Remaining
  • 93 Days Until Autumn Begins
  • Sunrise:5:48
  • Sunset:8:36
  • 14 Hours 48 Minutes of Daylight
  • Moon Rise:7:50am
  • Moon Set:10:05pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 5 %
  • The Next Full Moon
  • July 3 @ 11:51am
  • Full Buck Moon
  • Full Thunder Moon
  • Full Hay Moon

July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.

  • Tides
  • High:1:57pm
  • Low:6:48am/6:44pm
  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:15.80
  • Last Year:28.51
  • Normal To Date:23.80
  • Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
  • Holidays
  • Anne and Samantha Day
  • Baby Boomers Recognition Day
  • Cancer Begins
  • Go Skateboarding Day
  • National Daylight Appreciation Day
  • National Peaches & Cream Day
  • Stock Up on Antiperspirant Day
  • Recess at Work Day
  • Midnight Sun Baseball Game-starts tonight at 10:35 p.m. in Fairbanks, Alaska, and will be played without artificial lights
  • Summer Begins-Northern Hemisphere
  • Summer Solstice
  • Winter Begins-Southern Hemisphere
  • World Humanist Day
  • National Day-Greenland
  • Organic Act Day-US Virgin Islands
  • White Nights Festival begins (to mid July)-Russia
  • National Aboriginal Day-Canada
  • National Music Day (Fête de la musique)-France
  • Midsummer-Wiccan
  • Midsummer Day/Eve Celebrations
  • Alban Arthuan (Solstice) (Southern Hemisphere)-Celticism
  • Alban Heruin (Solstice) (Northern Hemisphere)-Celticism
  • Litha - Summer Solstice (Northern Hemisphere)-Paganism
  • Yule - Winter Solstice (Southern Hemisphere)-Paganism
  • On This Day In …
  • 1788 --- The colony of New Hampshire became the ninth state to enter the United States of America. It had been a long time coming. For 38 years, the fishing colony, first settled in 1623, and named in 1630 by Captain John Mason after his Hampshire, England home, was a part of the Massachusetts colony. Then, in 1679 it became a separate royal colony. Concord, the capital of the Granite State, was also central to much of the Revolutionary War. The official state bird is the purple finch, and has a matching state flower, the purple lilac.
  • 1834 --- Cyrus Hall McCormick received a patent for his reaping machine.
  • 1893 --- The first Ferris Wheel opened at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Invented by George Washington Ferris, it had 36 cars and carried 60 passengers 264 feet high.
  • 1948 --- For those of us who have a garage full of those 12-inch round, black disks protected by flimsy cardboard covers, this note: Columbia Records announced that it was offering a new Vinylite long-playing record that could hold 23 minutes of music on each side. One of the first LPs produced was of the original cast of the Broadway show, South Pacific. Critics quickly scoffed at the notion of LPs, since those heavy, breakable, 78 RPM, 10-inch disks with one song on each side, were selling at an all-time high. It didn’t take very long though, for the 33-1/3 RPM album -- and its 7-inch, 45 RPM cousin to revolutionize the music industry and the record buying habits of millions.
  • 1955 --- Sun Records in Memphis released Johnny Cash’s first recording, "Hey, Porter," backed with "Cry, Cry, Cry." Sun owner Sam Phillips had turned Cash away a year earlier as being "too country," but reconsidered after a second audition.
  • 1964 --- Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney are killed by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob near Meridian, Mississippi. The three young civil rights workers were working to register black voters in Mississippi, thus inspiring the ire of the local Klan. The deaths of Schwerner and Goodman, white Northerners and members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), caused a national outrage. When the desegregation movement encountered resistance in the early 1960s, CORE set up an interracial team to ride buses into the Deep South to help protest. These so-called Freedom Riders were viciously attacked in May 1961 when the first two buses arrived in Alabama. One bus was firebombed; the other boarded by KKK members who beat the activists inside. The Alabama police provided no protection. Still, the Freedom Riders were not dissuaded and they continued to come into Alabama and Mississippi. Michael Schwerner was a particularly dedicated activist who lived in Mississippi while he assisted blacks to vote. Sam Bowers, the local Klan's Imperial Wizard, decided that Schwerner was a bad influence, and had to be killed. When Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, a young black man, were coming back from a trip to Philadelphia, Mississippi, deputy sheriff Cecil Price, who was also a Klan member, pulled them over for speeding. He then held them in custody while other KKK members prepared for their murder. Eventually released, the three activists were later chased down in their car and cornered in a secluded spot in the woods where they were shot and then buried in graves that had been prepared in advance. When news of their disappearance got out, the FBI converged on Mississippi to investigate. With the help of an informant, agents learned about the Klan's involvement and found the bodies. Since Mississippi refused to prosecute the assailants in state court, the federal government charged 18 men with conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney. Bowers, Price, and five other men were convicted; eight were acquitted; and the all-white jury deadlocked on the other three defendants. On the forty-first anniversary of the three murders, June 21, 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter. The 80-year-old Killen, known as an outspoken white supremacist and part-time Baptist minister, was sentenced to 60 years in prison.
  • 1972 --- Billy Preston received a gold record for the instrumental hit, Outa-Space. Preston, who played for gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, back in 1956, was also in the film St. Louis Blues as a piano player. He was a regular on the Shindig TV show in the 1960s; and recorded with The Beatles on the hits Get Back and Let It Be. Preston also performed at The Concert for Bangladesh in 1969. Many well-known artists utilized his keyboard talents, including Sly & The Family Stone and the Rolling Stones.
  • 1977 --- An article in the Wall Street Journal revealed that Kellogg had reduced the iron content of its Frosted Rice after consumers discovered they could move flakes of the cereal around with magnets.
  • 1989 --- The U.S. Supreme Court in Texas v. Johnson ruled that burning the American flag as a political protest is protected by the First Amendment. In 1984, on Dallas City Hall property, Gregory Lee Johnson burned an American flag to protest Reagan administration policies. He was tried and convicted (one year in jail and $2,000 fine) under a Texas law outlawing flag desecration. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had reversed the conviction and the state then appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-to-4 against the Texas law.
  • 1997 --- The New York Liberty defeated the Los Angeles Sparks, 67-57, in the innaugural WNBA game before a sold-out crowd of 14,284 fans at the Great Western Forum. In other opening-day action: The Houston Comets beat Cleveland, 76-56, and the Sacramento Monarchs beat the Utah Starzz, 70-60.
  • 2005 --- Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was found guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., 41 years to the day earlier.
  • Birthdays
  • Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Martha Washington
  • Prince William
  • Kathy Mattea
  • Meredith Baxter
  • Michael Gross
  • Juliette Lewis
  • Bernie Koppell
  • Joe Flaherty
  • Nils Lofgren
  • Berke Breathed
  • Mary McCarthy
  • Jane Russell
  • Maureen Stapleton
  • Carl Stokes
  • Sammi Davis-Voss
  • Henry Ossawa Tanner --- His subject matter pictured life of blacks in the U.S. South during the 1880s. He was probably one of the first black artists to be exhibited in galleries throughout the U.S. This, however, is not what made Henry Ossawa Tanner famous. Rather, it was just his sheer talent. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied painting under the noted artist Thomas Eakins while attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. It was Eakins who encouraged the young Tanner to paint professionally. Several years later, in 1891, Henry Tanner moved to Europe to escape racial prejudice. He settled in Paris where he continued his studies and turned to painting pictures with religious themes. His art with its glowing, warm colors and dramatic light and dark contrasts was influenced greatly by the Dutch artist Rembrandt. Still, it was his early work like The Banjo Lesson that is best known. Tanner died in the city he came to love and call his own, Paris. His work lives on in the United States, having been displayed in galleries in Louisville to New Orleans, from Chicago to New York City.