- 66th Day of 2013 / 299 Remaining
- 13 Days Until The First Day of Spring
- Sunrise:6:32
- Sunset:6:10
- 11 Hours 38 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:3:32am
- Moon Set:2:07pm
- Moon’s Phase:19 %
- The Next Full Moon
- March 27 @ 2:30am
- Full Worm Moon
- Full Crust Moon
- Full Lenten Moon
- Full Crow Moon
- Full Sap 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:7:40am/9:27pm
- Low:1:39am/2:30pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:14.54
- Last Year:7.37
- Normal To Date:19.10
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Cereal Day
- Fun Facts About Names Day
- National Be Heard Day
- National Crown Roast Of Pork Day
- Peace Corps Day
- Bun Day-Iceland
- Carnival-Trinidad and Tobago
- Discovery Day / Magellan Day-Guam
- Eight Hour or Labor Day-Australia/Tasmania
- Fasching-Austria / Germany
- On This Day In …
- 1850 --- In a three-hour speech to the U.S. Senate, Daniel Webster endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union.
- 1876 --- 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention--the telephone. The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard. While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse's invention of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible between two distant points. The drawback of the telegraph, however, was that it still required hand-delivery of messages between telegraph stations and recipients, and only one message could be transmitted at a time. Bell wanted to improve on this by creating a "harmonic telegraph," a device that combined aspects of the telegraph and record player to allow individuals to speak to each other from a distance. With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype. In this first telephone, sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate--called the diaphragm--to vibrate. These vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument. When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message--the famous "Mr. Watson, come here, I need you"--from Bell to his assistant.
- 1897 --- Dr. John Kellogg served corn flakes for the first time to his patients at his hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. They wouldn't be sold commercially until 1906.
- 1911 --- Willis Farnsworth of Petaluma, CA patented the coin-operated locker. So, if you hang around the bus or train station or visit an amusement park today, remember this when placing your belongings inside a locker.
- 1923 --- The New Republic publishes Robert Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." The poem, beginning with the famous line "Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village though," has introduced millions of American students to poetry. Like most of Frost's poetry, "Stopping by Woods" adopts the tone of a simple New England farmer contemplating an everyday site.
- 1926 --- The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation took place, between New York City and London.
- 1933 --- Charles Darrow created the game we know as Monopoly. Or was it? Maybe Lizzie J. Magie’s The Landlord’s Game, patented on January 5, 1904, was the real monopoly game. Or was it? Lizzie's game was very similar to Monopoly, except she, a Quaker from Virginia, created it as a political comment to promote a single land-ownership tax. She shared it with other Quakers and proponents of the tax measure. Families copied the game, adding their own favorite street names and changing the rules as they pleased. The name of the game changed as the rules changed. A Reading, Pennsylvania college student, Dan Layman, played the version his friends called Monopoly in the late 1920s. Once out of college, and back home in Indianapolis, he produced the game under the name, Finance. His dorm-mate, Louis Thun, copyrighted several rules that the two had written. Was Layman’s the real Monopoly game? Or was it Ruth Hoskins and friends, Quakers who lived in Atlantic City, who made the Monopoly game we still play? Ruth learned how to play the game from a friend of Layman’s in Indianapolis. She then moved to Atlantic City and shared it with other friends. In 1930, they made a version complete with Atlantic City street names like Boardwalk, Park Place, Virginia and Pennsylvania Avenues; even including Marven Gardens, a residential section at the edge of Margate City, a suburb of Atlantic City. Charles Darrow, an inventor of sorts, first saw and played the game in 1931, when he and his wife were introduced to Monopoly by mutual friends of Ruth Hoskins. The Darrows, who lived in Germantown, Pennsylvania, were penniless. The Depression had left them destitute. Fascinated with the game, Darrow made some modifications, misspelled Marven Gardens as Marvin Gardens, added copyrighted artwork and produced games which he then began to sell. The popularity of the game was instant. Darrow could not keep up with the demand. He eventually sold his ‘rights’ to Parker Brothers who initially turned Darrow away, saying that his game had “52 fundamental errors.” The 50-year-old company eventually agreed to give Darrow royalties on every Monopoly game sold, on the condition that they could write “short version” game rules. Ultimately, Darrow became a millionaire at age 46.
- 1939 --- Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians recorded one of the most popular songs of the century. The standard, Auld Lang Syne, was recorded for Decca Records ... about two months and a week late, we’d say.
- 1973 --- Sheikh Mujib Rahman, a leader of the Bangladeshi independence movement and first prime minister of Bangladesh, wins a landslide victory in the country's first general elections. At the end of British rule in the Indian subcontinent in 1947, East Pakistan was declared a possession of Pakistan to the west, despite the fact that the two regions were separated by over 1,000 miles of Indian territory. Although the two Pakistans shared the Islamic religion, significant cultural and racial differences existed between the regions, and by the late 1960s East Pakistan began to call for greater autonomy from West Pakistan. In March 1971, the independent state of Bangladesh was proclaimed and West Pakistani forces were called in to suppress the revolt. An estimated one million Bengalis--the largest ethnic group in Bangladesh--were killed by the Pakistani forces during the next several months, while more than 10 million took refuge in India. In December 1971, India, which had provided substantial clandestine aid to the East Pakistani independence movement, launched a massive invasion of the region and routed the West Pakistani occupation forces. A few weeks later, Sheikh Mujib was released from a yearlong imprisonment in West Pakistan and returned to Bangladesh to assume the post of prime minister. In March 1973, the Bangladeshi people overwhelmingly confirmed his government in democratic elections, and in the next year Pakistan agreed to recognize the independence of Bangladesh.
- 1975 --- The U.S. Senate revised the filibuster rule. The new rule allowed 60 senators to limit debate instead of the previous two-thirds.
- 1987 --- Mike Tyson defeats James "Bonecrusher" Smith to unify the WBA and WBC heavyweight titles. Already the youngest-ever heavyweight champion after winning the title at just 19 years old the year before, Tyson became the youngest undisputed heavyweight champion in boxing history.
- 1994 --- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parodies that poke fun at an original work can be considered "fair use" that does not require permission from the copyright holder.
- 2009 --- NASA's Kepler Mission, a space photometer for searching for extrasolar planets in the Milky Way galaxy, was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
- 2010 --- Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Academy Award for best director for her Iraq War thriller "The Hurt Locker," which won six Oscars, including best picture.
- Birthdays
- Luther Burbank
- Maurice Ravel
- Rachel Weisz
- Willard Scott
- Janet Guthrie
- Daniel J Travanti
- Michael Eisner
- Peter Wolf
- Franco Harris
- Lynn Swann
- Ivan Lendl
- Taylor Dayne
- Wanda Sykes
- Tammy Faye Bakker
- Ernie Isley