Thursday March 6, 2014

• 65^th Day of 2014 / 300 Remaining
• 14 Days Until The First Day of Spring

• Sunrise:6:32
• Sunset:6:08
• 11 Hours Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:9:53am
• Moon Set:12:12am(Friday)
• Moon’s Phase: 33 %

• The Next Full Moon
• March 16 @ 10:10am
• Full Crow Moon
• Full Crust Moon
• Full Sap Moon
• Full Lenten Moon

As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.

• Tides
• High:1:57am/3:22pm
• Low:8:46am/8:38pm

• Rainfall
• This Year:8.39
• Last Year:14.54
• Average Year to Date:18.98

• Holidays
• Namesake Day
• Shrovetide
• Fritter Thursday (Thurs after Shrove Tues)
• National Chocolate Cheesecake Day
• National Frozen Food Day

• International School Meals Day
• Carnival of Binche-Belgium
• Fasching Sunday-Austria,Germany
• Independence Day-Ghana
• World Day of Prayer

• On This Day In …
• 1646 --- Joseph Jenkes of Massachusetts received the first machine patent. Trouble was, though he had patent in hand, he didn’t quite have a clue as to just what machine he patented, since there were no machines back then.

• 1820 --- The Missouri Compromise was enacted by the U.S. Congress and signed by U.S. President James Monroe. The act admitted Missouri into the Union as a slave state, but prohibited slavery in the rest of the northern Louisiana Purchase territory.

• 1825 --- Beethoven's Opus 127: String Quartet No. 12 in E flat major was performed for the first time.

• 1834 --- The city of Toronto was incorporated.

• 1853 --- Giuseppe Verdi's "La Traviata" opera debuted in Venice.

• 1857 --- United States Supreme Court issues a decision in the Dred Scott case, affirming the right of slave owners to take their slaves

  

  into the Western territories, thereby negating the doctrine of popular sovereignty and severely undermining the platform of the newly created Republican Party.

• 1899 --- The Imperial Patent Office in Berlin registers Aspirin, the brand name for acetylsalicylic acid, on behalf of the German pharmaceutical company Friedrich Bayer & Co. Now the most common drug in household medicine cabinets, acetylsalicylic acid was originally made from a chemical found in the bark of willow

  

  trees. In its primitive form, the active ingredient, salicin, was used for centuries in folk medicine, beginning in ancient Greece when Hippocrates used it to relieve pain and fever. Known to doctors since the mid-19thcentury, it was used sparingly due to its unpleasant taste and tendency to damage the stomach.

• 1902 --- Madrid Foot Ball Club is founded by a group of fans in Madrid, Spain. Later known as Real Madrid, the club would become the most successful European football (soccer) franchise of the 20th century.
  

  

• 1912 --- Oreo sandwich cookies were first introduced by the National Biscuit Co., which later became Nabisco. (Some sources say 1909).
  

  

• 1930 --- Retail frozen foods go on sale for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts. Various fruits, vegetables, meat and

  

  fish were offered for sale. Clarence Birdseye had developed the method used to successfully freeze foods on a commercial scale.

• 1946 --- Ho Chi Minh, the President of Vietnam, struck an agreement with France that recognized his country as an autonomous state within the Indochinese Federation and the French Union.

• 1948 --- Ralph Edwards created a quiz on radio’s Truth or Consequences called The Walking Man. After ten weeks of guesses by contestants playing the game, it was finally revealed that Jack Benny was The Walking Man.

• 1950 --- Silly Putty was introduced to the world at the International Toy Fair in New York.
  

  

• 1951 --- The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins in New York Southern District federal court. Judge Irving R. Kaufman presides

  

  over the espionage prosecution of the couple accused of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians (treason could not be charged because the United States was not at war with the Soviet Union).

• 1953 --- Just one day after the death of long-time Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Georgi Malenkov is named premier and first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Malenkov's tenure was extremely brief, and within a matter of weeks he was pushed aside by Nikita Khrushchev. Malenkov was one of the few old-time Bolsheviks who had survived Stalin's bloody purges of the 1930s. A quiet figure who seemed to prefer working in the background, Malenkov was not taken seriously by many of his peers in the

  

  Soviet government, but under Stalin's watchful eye he proceeded up the Communist Party hierarchy throughout the 1930s and 1940s. By the late-1940s it was widely assumed that he would succeed Stalin. When Stalin died in March 1953, Malenkov took the position of premier and first secretary of the Communist Party. It appeared that he might have a reformist streak, as he called for cuts in military spending and eased up on political repression in the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc nations. These actions might have proved his undoing. In just two weeks, his main political opponent in the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, had organized a coalition of political and military leaders against Malenkov and took over as first secretary.

• 1970 --- A bomb being built inside a Greenwich Village townhouse by the radical Weathermen accidentally went off, destroying the house and killing three group members.
  

  

• 1973 --- John Lennon's visa extension was canceled by the New York Office of the Immigration Department. It had been granted only five days before.

• 1976 --- The Waylon & Willie (Jennings and Nelson) song, Good Hearted Woman, started the last of three weeks at the top of the country music charts. Waylon and Willie wrote the song in 1969

  

  during a poker game in Ft. Worth, TX. According to Jennings, “I’d been reading an ad for Ike and Tina Turner and it said, ‘Tina Turner singing songs about good-hearted women loving good-timing men.’ I thought, ‘What a great country song title that is!’”

• 1981 --- Walter Cronkite, the dean of American television newscasters, said “And that’s the way it is” for the final time, as he closed the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. An audience

  

  estimated at 17,000,000 viewers saw ‘the most trusted man in America’ sign-off. Cronkite retired after more than 30 years in broadcasting. He was replaced by Dan Rather at the anchor desk.

• 1992 --- The last episode of "The Cosby Show" aired. The show had been on since September of 1984.
  

  

• 1992 --- The computer virus "Michelangelo" went into effect.

• 1997 --- A gunman stole "Tete de Femme," a million-dollar Picasso portrait, from a London gallery. The painting was recovered a week later. Curiously, the piece was stolen again in 2011 from the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco. It measures 10 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches. The thief simply took it from the wall, walked out of the

  

  gallery and escaped in a taxi. Talk about lax security! But at least the gallery had an online graphic of the stolen work, so the police knew what they were looking for.

• 2007 --- Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of lying and obstructing an investigation into the 2003 leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity.
  

  

• Birthdays
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Michelangelo
• Ring Lardner
• Rob Reiner
• Alan Greenspan
• Mary Wilson
• David Gilmour
• Kiki Dee
• DL Hughley
• Shaquille O’Neal
• Cyrano de Bergerac
• Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
• Bob Wills
• Lou Costello
• Ed McMahon
• Wes Montgomery
• Dame Kiri Te Kanawa
• Dick Fosbury