- 292nd Day of 2012 / 74 Remaining
- 64 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:7:21
- Sunset:6:28
- 11 Hours 7 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise: 11:06am
- Moon Set:9:13pm
- Moon’s Phase: 15 %
- The Next Full Moon
- October 29 @ 12:50 pm
- Full Hunter’s Moon
- Full Harvest Moon
This full Moon is often referred to as the Full Hunter’s Moon, Blood Moon, or Sanguine Moon. Many moons ago, Native Americans named this bright moon for obvious reasons. The leaves are falling from trees, the deer are fattened, and it’s time to begin storing up meat for the long winter ahead. Because the fields were traditionally reaped in late September or early October, hunters could easily see fox and other animals that come out to glean from the fallen grains. Probably because of the threat of winter looming close, the Hunter’s Moon is generally accorded with special honor, historically serving as an important feast day in both Western Europe and among many Native American tribes.
- Tides
- High: 3:01am/2:08pm
- Low: 7:53am/8:48pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:0.04
- Last Year:1.49
- Normal To Date:0.64
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Alaska Day-Alaska
- National Chocolate Cupcake Day
- World Menopause Day
- Independence Day-Azerbaijan
- Persons Day-Canada
- Flag Day-Chile
- On This Day In …
- 1767 --- The Mason-Dixon line was agreed upon. It was the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania.
- 1842 --- Samuel Finley Breese Morse, whose friends all called him Sammy or F.B. for short, laid his first telegraph cable in New York Harbor between the Battery and Governor’s Island. This is the same Sam Morse of Morse code fame.
- 1867 --- The American flag flew for the first time in Alaska, marking the formal transfer of this massive northern territory from Russia to the United States. Separated from the far eastern edge of the Russian empire by only the narrow Bering Strait, the Russians had been the first Europeans to significantly explore and develop Alaska. During the early 19th century, the state-sponsored Russian-American Company established the settlement of Sitka and began a lucrative fur trade with the Native Americans. However, Russian settlement in Alaska remained small, never exceeding more than a few hundred people. By the 1860s, the Russian-American Company had become unprofitable. Faced with having to heavily subsidize the company if an active Russian presence in the territory was to be maintained, the tsar and his ministers chose instead to sell to the Americans. Seeing the giant Alaska territory as a chance to cheaply expand the size of the nation, William H. Seward, President Andrew Johnson's secretary of state, moved to arrange the purchase of Alaska. Agreeing to pay a mere $7 million for some 591,000 square miles of land-a territory twice the size of Texas and equal to nearly a fifth of the continental United States-Seward secured the purchase of Alaska at the ridiculously low rate of less than 2¢ an acre.
- 1873 --- The first rules for intercollegiate football were drawn up by representatives from Rutgers, Yale, Columbia and Princeton Universities.
- 1922 --- As the British observed the wild growth of radio in the U.S., they realized the potential of broadcasting in their own country, as well as the need for its regulation. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was established on this day to monitor the development of the radio biz in Great
- 1933 --- R. Buckminster Fuller applies for a patent for his Dymaxion Car. The Dymaxion—the word itself was another Fuller invention, a combination of "dynamic," "maximum," and "ion"—looked and drove like no vehicle anyone had ever seen. It was a three-wheeled, 20-foot-long, pod-shaped automobile that could carry 11 passengers and travel as fast as 120 miles per hour. It got 30 miles to the gallon, could U-turn in a distance equal to its length and could parallel park just by pivoting its wheels toward the curb and zipping sideways into its parking space. It was stylish, efficient and eccentric and it attracted a great deal of attention: Celebrities wanted to ride in it and rich men wanted to invest in it. But in the same month that Fuller applied for his patent, one of his prototype Dymaxions crashed, killing the driver and alarming investors so much that they withdrew their money from the project. When Fuller first sketched the Dymaxion Car in 1927, it was a half-car, half-airplane—when it got going fast enough, its wings were supposed to inflate—called the "4D Transport." In 1932, the sculptor Isamu Naguchi helped the inventor with his final design: a long teardrop-shaped chassis with two wheels in front and a third in back that could lift off the ground. In practice, this didn't turn out to be a great idea: As the vehicle picked up speed (theoretically in preparation for takeoff) and the third wheel bounced off the ground, it became nearly impossible for the driver to control the car. In fact, many people blamed this handling problem for the fatal crash of the prototype car, even though an investigation revealed that a car full of sightseers had actually caused the accident by hurtling into the Dymaxion's lane. Many elements of the Dymaxion Car's design—its streamlined shape, its fuel efficiency—have inspired later generations of automakers, but Fuller himself was probably best known for another of his inventions: the geodesic dome. Geodesic domes are built using a pattern of self-bracing triangles. As a result, perhaps unlike the Dymaxion Car, they are incredibly strong and stable—in fact, as one historian writes, "they have proved to be the strongest structures ever devised."
- 1943 --- The first broadcast of Perry Mason was presented on CBS radio. In the 15-minute (Monday-Friday) shows, Perry was played by Barlett Robinson, Santos Ortega, Donald Briggs and John Larkin. Larkin played the role the longest and was reportedly very disappointed when Raymond Burr got the gig on TV (1957).
- 1954 --- The comic strip Hi and Lois appeared in newspapers for the first time. Created by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker (and Dik Browne), Hi and Lois are still tickling us (now done by Brian and Greg Walker and artist Chance Browne). The strip appears in more than 1,100 newspapers around the world in 37 countries and is translated into ten languages.
- 1957 --- Paul McCartney made his debut appearance with the Quarrymen in Norris Green, Liverpool.
- 1961 --- Le Bateau, by French painter Henri Matisse, went on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The painting attracted large numbers (over 100,000) of viewers. For 47 days, nobody realized that Le Bateau was hanging upside down.
- 1967 --- The American League granted permission for the A's to move to Oakland. Also, new franchises were awarded to Kansas City and Seattle.
- 1968 --- United States Olympic Committee suspended two black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, for giving a "black power" salute as a protest during a victory ceremony in Mexico City.
- 1969 --- Cyclamate, a non-caloric sweetener, was banned. Discovered in 1937, and widely used in the food industry, cyclamate was found to cause cancer in laboratory rats. Cyclamate is still used in many countries around the world.
- 1977 --- In the sixth game of the World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees outfielder Reggie Jackson hits three home runs in a row off of three consecutive pitches from three different pitchers. Only the great Babe Ruth had ever hit three homers in a single World Series game (and he did it twice, once in 1926 and once in 1928) —but he didn’t do it on consecutive pitches or even consecutive at-bats. Jackson’s amazing home-run streak helped the Yankees win the game and the series, the team’s first since 1962. In the second inning, Dodger pitcher Burt Hooten managed to palm Jackson off with a walk, but on his next at-bat, in the fourth, the slugger nailed Hooten’s first pitch low and hard into the right-field bleachers--"a line drive," Los Angeles Times reporter Jim Murray wrote, "that would have crossed state lines and gone through the side of a battleship on its way to the seats." In the fifth, with two out and two on, Jackson treated reliever Elias Sosa’s first pitch the same way. And in the eighth, he emerged from the dugout to a standing ovation, reached down for pitcher Charlie Hough’s diving knuckleball, and sent it flying 450 feet into the center-field bleachers. It was, Murray wrote, a "booming Jack Nicklaus-type tee shot, high and far, the kind that pitchers wake up screaming in the middle of the night over." That last homer put the Yanks in the lead 8-3, and—in spite of the ubiquitous security guards and policemen in riot gear who lined the first- and third-base lines—the stadium was about to explode. It got so bad that Jackson had to come in from the outfield during the last inning and get a batting helmet to protect his head from the cherry bombs and firecrackers that the bleacher creatures were throwing onto the field. When the game ended, the field flooded with fans. They had a new hero: Reggie Jackson, now known as "Mr. October." Still, Jackson was uncharacteristically modest. "Babe Ruth was great," he said. "I’m just lucky."
- 1997 --- A monument honoring U.S. servicewomen, past and present, was dedicated at Arlington National Cemetery.
- Birthdays
- Wynton Marsalis
- Chuck Berry
- Keith Jackson
- Melina Mercouri
- Anita O'Day
- Peter Boyle
- George C. Scott
- Dawn Wells
- Jean-Claude Van Damme
- Pam Dawber
- Erin Moran
- Lotte Lenya
- Pierre Eliot Trudeau
- Laura Nyro
- Martina Navratilova
- Thomas Hearns