Thursday March 20, 2014

• 79^th Day of 2014 / 286 Remaining
• Spring Begins @ 12:57pm

• Sunrise:7:11
• Sunset:7:22
• 12 Hours 11 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:11:42pm
• Moon Set:9:28am
• Moon’s Phase: 83 %

• The Next Full Moon
• April 15 @ 12:45 am
• Full Pink Moon
• Full Sprouting Moon
• Full Egg Moon
• Full Grass Moon
• Full Fish Moon

This name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.

• Tides
• High:1:33am/2:35pm
• Low:8:03am/7:54pm

• Rainfall
• This Year:8.68
• Last Year:14.73
• Average Year to Date:20.49

• Holidays
• Vernal Equinox
• Great American Meatout
• Kiss Your Fiance Day
• National Agriculture Day
• National Jump Out! Day
• Proposal Day
• Won't You Be My Neighbor Day
• Bock Beer Day
• National Ravioli Day

• Ostara-Wiccan
• Independence Day-Tunisia
• Abolition Day-Puerto Rico
• Legba Zaou-Haiti
• Petroleum Day-Iran
• World Frog Day

• On This Day In …
• 0141 --- The 6th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet took place.
  

  

• 1345 --- According to scholars at the University of Paris, the Black Death is created on this day in 1345, from what they call "a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius, occurring on the 20th of March 1345". The Black Death,

  

  also known as the Plague, swept across Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the 14th century, leaving an estimated 25 million dead in its wake.

• 1602 --- The Dutch East India Company was established and the Netherlands granted it a monopoly on trade with Asia.

• 1616 --- Walter Raleigh was released from Tower of London to seek gold in Guyana.

• 1760 --- The great fire of Boston destroyed 349 buildings.
  

  

• 1778 --- Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane and Arthur Lee present themselves to France's King Louis XVI as official representatives of the United States on this day in 1778. Louis XVI was skeptical of

  

  the fledgling republic, but his dislike of the British eventually overcame these concerns and France officially recognized the United States in February 1778.

• 1815 --- Napoleon Bonaparte entered Paris, beginning his Hundred Days rule.

• 1852 --- Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic book was published. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, subtitled Life Among the Lowly became an instant

  

  success, selling 300,000 copies in its first year. Stowe’s novel remains a must-read for school children -- and a reminder to all of us of an ugly time in the history of the United States.

• 1854 --- In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party meet to establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834 to oppose the "tyranny" of President Andrew Jackson, had shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over slavery.

• 1865 --- A plan by John Wilkes Booth to abduct President Abraham Lincoln was foiled when Lincoln changed plans and failed to appear at the Soldier’s Home near Washington, DC. Booth would later assassinate the President while Lincoln was attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre in the nation’s capital.

• 1891 --- The first computing scale company was incorporated in Dayton, OH. Look around antique stores and you may find some of

  

  the old -- and possibly still working -- Dayton Scales. There were other famous scales, too, that were direct from Ohio, ‘the birthplace of weights and measures’. Remember Toledo Scales for weighing fruit and produce in grocery stores?
  

  

• 1897 --- The first U.S. orthodox Jewish Rabbinical seminary was incorporated in New York.

• 1899 --- At Sing Sing prison, Martha M. Place became the first woman to be executed in the electric chair. She was put to death for the murder of her stepdaughter.
  

  

• 1932 --- The German dirigible, Graf Zepplin, made the first flight to South America on regular schedule.
  

  

• 1934 --- Mildrid "Babe" Didrikson pitches one inning of exhibition baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics in a game against the Brooklyn Dodgers. She started the first inning, and allowed just one

  

  walk and no hits. Though Didrickson was not the first woman to play baseball with major league ballplayers, she had attained national-hero status with an unprecedented performance at the 1932 Olympics.

• 1965 --- President Lyndon B. Johnson notifies Alabama's Governor George Wallace that he will use federal authority to call up the Alabama National Guard in order to supervise a planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
  

  

• 1968 --- Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Richie Furay and Jim Messina were arrested on drug charges in Los Angeles.

• 1969 --- John Lennon married Yoko Ono at the Rock of Gibraltar on this day. Lennon called the location, “quiet, friendly and British.” He

  

  was the second Beatle to marry in eight days. Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman were wed a week earlier.

• 1976 --- Patricia Hearst was convicted of armed robbery for her role in the hold up of a San Francisco Bank.
  

  

• 1985 --- Libby Riddles won the $50,000 top prize in the 1,135-mile Anchorage-to-Nome dog race. The Iditarod was called Alaska’s ultimate endurance test and this was the first time a woman had won. Libby completed the course in 18 days, twenty minutes and

  

  seventeen seconds. Another woman, Susan Butcher, won the next three Iditarod trail-sled dog races. The annual race commemorates the emergency during a 1925 diphtheria epidemic when medical supplies had to be rushed to Nome by dog sled.

• 1990 --- Imelda Marcos, widow of ex-Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, went on trial for racketeering, embezzlement and bribery.

• 1995 --- At the height of the morning rush hour in Tokyo, Japan, five two-man terrorist teams from the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult, riding on separate subway trains, converge at the Kasumigaseki station and secretly release lethal sarin gas into the air. The terrorists then took a sarin antidote and escaped while the commuters, blinded and gasping for air, rushed to the exits. Twelve people died, and 5,500 were treated in hospitals, some in a comatose state. Most of the

  

  survivors recovered, but some victims suffered permanent damage to their eyes, lungs, and digestive systems. In the attack's aftermath, Japanese police raided Aum Shinrikyo headquarters and arrested hundreds of members, including the cult's blind leader, Shoko Asahara. The cult, which combined Buddhism and yoga with apocalyptic Christian philosophy, was already under investigation for a 1994 sarin attack that killed seven, and for the murder of several political opponents.

• 1997 --- Liggett Group, the maker of Chesterfield cigarettes, settled 22 state lawsuits by admitting the industry marketed cigarettes to teenagers and agreed to warn on every pack that smoking is addictive.

• 1999 --- Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones became the first men to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon. The non-stop trip began on March 3 and covered 26,500 miles.
  

  

• Birthdays
• Spike Lee
• Holly Hunter
• Fred “Mr.” Rogers
• Dame Vera Lynn
• Carl Reiner
• Marian McPartland
• Ray Goulding
• Theresa Russell
• Hal Linden
• PM Brian Mulroney
• William Hurt
• Michael Rapaport
• Ovid
• Henrik Ibsen
• John Erlichman
• BF Skinner
• Ozzie Nelson
• Jimmy Vaughn