- 122nd Day of 2013 / 243 Remaining
- 50 Days Until The First Day of Summer
- Sunrise:6:11
- Sunset:8:01
- 13 Hours 50 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:1:55am
- Moon Set:1:05pm
- Moon’s Phase: Last Quarter
- The Next Full Moon
- May 24 @ 9:27pm
- Full Flower Moon
- Full Corn Planting Moon
- Full Milk Moon
In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name of this Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
- Tides
- High:4:39am/6:35pm
- Low:11:27am
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:16.32
- Last Year:15.62
- Normal To Date:23.01
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Brothers and Sisters Day
- Robert's Rules Day
- National Truffles Day
- Dos de Mayo-Spain
- King’s Birthday-Lesotho
- Flag Day-Poland
- On This Day In …
- 1776 --- France and Spain agreed to donate arms to American rebels fighting the British.
- 1798 --- The black General Toussaint L’ouverture forced British troops to agree to evacuate the port of Santo Domingo.
- 1853 --- Franconi’s Hippodrome opened at Broadway and 23rd Street in New York City. The 4,000-seat facility opened in grand style for a hippodrome (an arena for a circus or games) with a chariot-and-ostrich race.
- 1885 --- A new magazine for homemakers went on sale. You can still get it by mail or find it right next to the cash register at your favorite grocery store. The magazine is Good Housekeeping. It has our seal of approval.
- 1887 --- Hannibal W. Goodwin of Newark, NJ applied for a patent for celluloid photographic film -- the stuff from which movies are shown.
- 1902 --- "A Trip to the Moon," the first science fiction film was released. It was created by magician George Melies.
- 1932 --- Jack Benny's first radio show debuted on the NBC Blue Network.
- 1933 --- Hitler banned trade unions in Germany.
- 1933 --- Although accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland's Loch Ness date back 1,500 years, the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is born when a sighting makes local news on May 2, 1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier related an account of a local couple who claimed to have seen "an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface." The story of the "monster" (a moniker chosen by the Courier editor) became a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound sterling reward for capture of the beast. A famous 1934 photograph seemed to show a dinosaur-like creature with a long neck emerging out of the murky waters, leading some to speculate that "Nessie" was a solitary survivor of the long-extinct plesiosaurs. The aquatic plesiosaurs were thought to have died off with the rest of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Loch Ness was frozen solid during the recent ice ages, however, so this creature would have had to have made its way up the River Ness from the sea in the past 10,000 years. And the plesiosaurs, believed to be cold-blooded, would not long survive in the frigid waters of Loch Ness. More likely, others suggested, it was an archeocyte, a primitive whale with a serpentine neck that is thought to have been extinct for 18 million years. Skeptics argued that what people were seeing in Loch Ness were "seiches"--oscillations in the water surface caused by the inflow of cold river water into the slightly warmer loch. Amateur investigators kept an almost constant vigil, and in the 1960s several British universities launched expeditions to Loch Ness, using sonar to search the deep. Nothing conclusive was found, but in each expedition the sonar operators detected large, moving underwater objects they could not explain. In 1975, Boston's Academy of Applied Science combined sonar and underwater photography in an expedition to Loch Ness. A photo resulted that, after enhancement, appeared to show the giant flipper of a plesiosaur-like creature. Further sonar expeditions in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in more tantalizing, if inconclusive, readings. Revelations in 1994 that the famous 1934 photo was a hoax hardly dampened the enthusiasm of tourists and professional and amateur investigators to the legend of the Loch Ness Monster.
- 1936 --- Edna St. Vincent Millay's work in progress, Conversations at Midnight, is burned in a hotel fire on Sanibel Island, Florida, on this day in 1936. She recreated the work, which was published in 1937.
- 1938 --- Ella Fitzgerald recorded "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" with Chick Webb’s band.
- 1941 --- General Mills began shipping a new cereal called "Cheerioats" to six test markets. (The cereal was later renamed "Cheerios.")
- 1941 --- The Federal Communications Commission agreed to let regular scheduling of TV broadcasts by commercial TV stations begin on July 1, 1941. This was the start of network television.
- 1945 --- The Soviet Union announced the fall of Berlin and the Allies announced the surrender of Nazi troops in Italy and parts of Austria.
- 1954 --- Stan ‘The Man’ Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals smacked five home runs in a twin bill against the New York Giants -- establishing a major-league record.
- 1956 --- For the first time in "Billboard" chart history, five singles were in both the pop and the R&B top 10. The singles were Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes," Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally," the Platters' "Magic Touch," and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers' "Why Do Fools Fall in Love."
- 1960 --- He's been called America's Oldest Living Teenager, but behind his famously boyish demeanor, Clark was a razor-sharp businessman—sharp enough to be accused of questionable practices during the early years of rock and roll, yet smart enough to set those practices aside when public scrutiny demanded it. On April 2, 1960, Dick Clark concluded his second day of testimony in the so-called Payola hearings—testimony that both saved and altered the course of his career. If Alan Freed, the disk jockey who gave rock and roll its name, was Payola's biggest casualty, then Dick Clark was its most famous survivor.
- 1970 --- The ‘First Lady of Horse Racing’ (first to ride at a major track, first to win a major feature), Diane Crump, rode Fathom and made history as the first woman jockey to ride in the Kentucky Derby. She finished in 12th place.
- 1974 --- Filming got underway for the motion picture, Jaws, in Martha’s Vineyard, MA. What was to be a 58-day shooting schedule for the film inspired by the Peter Benchley novel soon gave way to 120 days. Costs soared from what was to be a $3.5 million project to $8 million. The director, Steven Spielberg, was able to explain away the rise in costs and the picture did very well at the box office.
- 1994 --- Nelson Mandela claimed victory in South Africa's first democratic elections.
- 1997 --- A sandstorm sweeps across much of Egypt, causing widespread damage and killing 12 people. Most of the casualties were victims of the strong winds, which also toppled trees and buildings.
- 2011 --- Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, is killed by U.S. forces during a raid on his compound hideout in Pakistan. The notorious, 54-year-old leader of Al Qaeda, the terrorist network of Islamic extremists, had been the target of a nearly decade-long international manhunt.
- 2012 --- Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was sworn in to Myanmar's military-backed parliament.
- Birthdays
- Dr. Benjamin Spock
- Christine Baranski
- David Beckham
- Englebert Humperdink
- Theodore Bikel
- Lesley Gore
- Sarah Hughes
- Alessandro Scarlatti
- Catherine The Great (Russia)
- Lorenz Hart
- Vernon Castle
- Satyajit Ray
- Hedda Hopper
- Baron Von Richthofen
- Bing Crosby
- Roscoe Lee Brown
- Link Wray