- 152nd Day of 2012 / 214 Remaining
- 20 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:5:50
- Sunset:8:26
- 14 Hours 36 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:4:25pm
- Moon Set:2:47am
- Moon’s Phase: 81 %
- The Next Full Moon
- June 4 @ 4:11am
- Full Strawberry Moon
- Full Rose Moon
- Full Milk Moon
This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe. However, in Europe they called it the Rose Moon. Also because the relatively short season for harvesting strawberries comes each year during the month of June, so the full Moon that occurs during that month was christened for the strawberry!
- Tides
- High:8:20am/8:05pm
- Low:2:06am/1:35pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:15.67
- Last Year:27.30
- Normal To Date:20.74
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- What You Think Upon Grows Day
- National Macaroon Day
- What You Think Upon Grows Day
- Take This Job and Shove It Day
- National Speak In Complete Sentences Day
- World No Tobacco Day
- Armed Forces Day-Brunei Darussalam
- Dia de Castilla la Mancha-Spain
- On This Day In …
- 1678 --- Lady Godiva rode naked on horseback through the city of Coventry, England. According to legend, she made the ride as part of a bargain to get her husband Leofric, Earl of Mercia, to ease taxes on the people of Conventry, England. [Another source says the ride took place on July 10th.]
- 1836 --- The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel opened in New York City.
- 1859 --- The famous tower clock known as Big Ben, located at the top of the 320-foot-high St. Stephen's Tower, rings out over the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, London, for the first time. After a fire destroyed much of the Palace of Westminster--the headquarters of the British Parliament--in October 1834, a standout feature of the design for the new palace was a large clock atop a tower. The royal astronomer, Sir George Airy, wanted the clock to have pinpoint accuracy, including twice-a-day checks with the Royal Greenwich Observatory. While many clockmakers dismissed this goal as impossible, Airy counted on the help of Edmund Beckett Denison, a formidable barrister known for his expertise in horology, or the science of measuring time. Denison's design, built by the company E.J. Dent & Co., was completed in 1854; five years later, St. Stephen's Tower itself was finished. Weighing in at more than 13 tons, its massive bell was dragged to the tower through the streets of London by a team of 16 horses, to the cheers of onlookers. Once it was installed, Big Ben struck its first chimes on May 31, 1859. Just two months later, however, the heavy striker designed by Denison cracked the bell. Three more years passed before a lighter hammer was added and the clock went into service again. The bell was rotated so that the hammer would strike another surface, but the crack was never repaired. The name "Big Ben" originally just applied to the bell but later came to refer to the clock itself. Two main stories exist about how Big Ben got its name. Many claim it was named after the famously long-winded Sir Benjamin Hall, the London commissioner of works at the time it was built. Another famous story argues that the bell was named for the popular heavyweight boxer Benjamin Caunt, because it was the largest of its kind.
- 1859 --- The Philadelphia Athletics were formally organized to play the game of Town Ball.
- 1880 --- The first U.S. national bicycle society was formed in Newport, RI. It was known as the League of American Wheelmen.
- 1884 --- Dr. John Harvey Kellogg applied for a patent for 'flaked cereal' (corn flakes). It was his brother Will Keith Kellogg who became rich & famous by marketing the new cereal commercially.
- 1909 --- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) held its first conference.
- 1913 --- The 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was declared in effect.
- 1917 --- The first jazz record, "Dark Town Strutters' Ball," was released.
- 1964 --- The longest major-league baseball doubleheader (to the time) ended in 19 hours, 16 minutes. The New York Mets and the San Francisco Giants battled it out at Shea Stadium in New York. The first game of the doubleheader set a major-league mark for the longest game (by time) as the Giants beat the Mets 8-6. The game lasted 23 innings and was played in 7 hours and 23 minutes.
- 1967 --- Gestapo official Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel for his role in the Holocaust.
- 1969 --- Stevie Wonder’s My Cherie Amour was released by Tamla Records. The song made it to number four on the pop music charts on July 26 and stayed on the nation’s radios for eleven weeks. Trivia: My Cherie Amour was not the original title of the song. Wonder had named the song, Oh My Marcia, for a former girlfriend. Of course, singing it back with the original tune, one could see that Oh My Marcia doesn’t quite fit as well as My Cherie Amour.
- 1969 --- John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded "Give Peace a Chance" during their Montreal bed-in.
- 1977 --- Thirty years after its release, John Lydon—better known as Johnny Rotten—offered this assessment of the song that made the Sex Pistols the most reviled and revered figures in England in the spring of 1977: "There are not many songs written over baked beans at the breakfast table that went on to divide a nation and force a change in popular culture." Timed with typical Sex Pistols flair to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, the release of "God Save The Queen" was greeted by precisely the torrent of negative press that Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren had hoped. On May 31, 1977, the song earned a total ban on radio airplay from the BBC—a kiss of death for a normal pop single, but a powerful endorsement for an anti-establishment rant like "God Save The Queen." While some in the tabloid press accused the Sex Pistols of treason and called for their public hanging, the BBC was more moderate in its condemnation. In response to lyrics like "God Save The Queen/She ain't no human being," the BBC labeled the record an example of "gross bad taste"—a difficult charge to argue, and one the Sex Pistols wouldn't have wanted to dispute. Even with the radio ban in place, however, and with major retailers like Woolworth refusing to sell the controversial single, "God Save The Queen" flew off the shelves of the stores that did carry it, selling up to 150,000 copies a day in late May and early June. With sales figures like that, it seems implausible that "God Save The Queen" really stalled at #2 on the official UK pop charts, yet that is where it appeared, as a blank entry below "I Don't Want to Talk About It" by Rod Stewart, the ultimate anti-punk. Like every other effort to suppress the song, refusing even to print its name in the official pop charts played right into the Sex Pistols' hands Like naughty schoolboys concerned only with the approval of their peers, the Sex Pistols baited the British establishment throughout their brief career, but never more so than during the Silver Jubilee. When they took to the waters of the Thames and attempted to blast "God Save The Queen" from giant speakers loaded onto a boat chartered by Virgin Records chief Richard Branson, the police dutifully responded by chasing the boat down and arresting its passengers when they reached the dock. When members of Parliament threatened to ban all sales of the single, a Virgin spokesman replied: "It is remarkable that MPs should have nothing better to do than get agitated about records which were never intended for their Ming vase sensibilities." Like the BBC ban announced on this day in 1977, these incidents only fed the controversy the Sex Pistols had set out to create.
- 1990 --- A little summer replacement TV show named Seinfeld debuted. It ran only through July, but the ‘show about nothing’ returned in January 1991 to become a full-blown smash, running through May 14, 1998. The sitcom’s original cast, Jason Alexander as George, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Elaine, Michael Richards as (Cosmo) Kramer and, of course, Jerry Seinfeld as himself, became part of Americana, with millions of viewers discussing the show at work, and quoting the funny lines. Seinfeld stills lives in rerun form, with classics such as: The Contest (about “you know”), The Pick (Elaine and her revealing Christmas card), The Junior Mint (Jerry and the woman whose name rhymes with a female body part & Kramer’s operating-room accident), The Puffy Shirt, The Soup Nazi and the trip to India, where the show’s sequence runs backwards (The Betrayal), yadda yadda yadda. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
- 2005 --- W. Mark Felt’s family ends 30 years of speculation, identifying Felt, the former FBI assistant director, as “Deep Throat,” the secret source who helped unravel the Watergate scandal. The Felt family’s admission, made in an article in Vanity Fair magazine, took legendary reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who had promised to keep their source’s identity a secret until his death, by surprise. Tapes show that Nixon himself had speculated that Felt was the secret informant as early as 1973. The question “Who was Deep Throat?” had been investigated relentlessly in the ensuing years since Watergate in movies, books, televisions shows, and on the Internet. America was obsessed with the shadowy figure who went to great lengths to conceal his involvement with the Washington Post reporters. Although his name was often mentioned as a possibility, Felt consistently denied being Deep Throat, even writing in his 1979 memoir, “I never leaked information to Woodward and Bernstein or to anyone else!” Even as recently as six years before the admission, he was quoted as saying, “It would be contrary to my responsibility as a loyal employee of the FBI to leak information.” After the death of J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI, Felt, who was serving as the bureau’s assistant director, wanted the job and was angry over Nixon’s failure to appoint him. He was also upset over Nixon’s attempts to stall the bureau’s investigation into the Watergate break-ins. So, when Bob Woodward called the veteran FBI employee to request information about the bureau’s Watergate investigation, Felt agreed to talk. But his cooperation came with strict restrictions. Felt refused to be quoted, even anonymously, and agreed only to confirm information already obtained, refusing to provide new information. And, of course, the reporters had to promise to keep his identity a secret. Felt was only contacted on matters of great importance. Although the two initially talked by phone, Felt soon began to worry that his phones could be tapped. So, he and Woodward devised a set of signals and began to meet in the middle of the night in a parking garage. Over the ensuing months, Felt corroborated stories linking Nixon’s reelection committee to the Watergate break-ins and illegal investigations of the Democratic Party. He also alerted Woodward to the far-reaching nature of the scandal, indicating that it could be traced back to government higher-ups, including President Nixon himself.
- Birthdays
- Walt Whitman
- Sharon Gless
- Johnny Paycheck
- Clint Eastwood
- Brooke Shields
- Tom Berenger
- Chris Elliott
- Peter Yarrow
- Joe Namath
- DMC
- Christian McBride
- Norman Vincent Peale
- Don Ameche
- John Bonham
- William Pirrie-Irish shipbuilder; built the Titanic
- Patricia Harris- 1st African-American woman to serve in a presidential cabinet