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Tuesday April 9, 2013

  • 99th Day of 2013 / 266 Remaining
  • 73 Days Until The First Day of Summer

  • Sunrise:6:41
  • Sunset:7:40
  • 12 Hours 59 Minutes of Daylight

  • Moon Rise:6:08am
  • Moon Set:7:22pm
  • Moon’s Phase:0 %

  • The Next Full Moon
  • April 25 @ 12:59pm
  • Full Pink Moon
  • Full Sprouting Grass Moon
  • Full Egg Moon
  • Full Fish Moon

This moon’s  name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.

  • Tides
  • High:11:18am/11:13pm
  • Low:5:00am/4:57pm

  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:16.31
  • Last Year:12.94
  • Normal To Date:22.00
  • Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

  • Holidays
  • Baby Massage Day
  • Jenkins's Ear Day
  • National Cherish an Antique Day
  • National Chinese Almond Cookie Day

  • Martyr's Day-Tunisia
  • National Day-Iraq
  • Araw Ng Kagitingan/Valour aDay-Philippines
  • Memorial Day-Georgia
  • Mikael Agricola Day/Finnish Language Day-Finland

  • On This Day In …
  • 1667 --- In Paris, The first public art exhibition was held at the Palais-Royale.

  • 1682 --- Robert La Salle claimed the lower Mississippi River and all lands that touch it for France.

  • 1833 --- Peterborough, NH, opened the first municipally supported public library in the United States.

  • 1859 --- A 23-year-old Missouri youth named Samuel Langhorne Clemens receives his steamboat pilot's license. Clemens had signed on as a pilot's apprentice in 1857 while on his way to Mississippi. He had been commissioned to write a series of comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post, but after writing five, decided he'd rather be a pilot than a writer. He piloted his own boats for two years, until the Civil War halted steamboat traffic. During his time as a pilot, he picked up the term "Mark Twain," a boatman's call noting that the river was only two fathoms deep, the minimum depth for safe navigation. When Clemens returned to writing in 1861, working for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, he wrote a humorous travel letter signed by "Mark Twain" and continued to use the pseudonym for nearly 50 years.

  • 1865 --- At Appomattox Court House, Virginia, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate Army to Union General Ulysses S. Grant in the parlor of Wilmer McClean's home. Grant allowed Rebel officers to keep their sidearms and permitted soldiers to keep their horses and mules. Though there were still Confederate armies in the field, the war was officially over. The four years of fighting had killed 360,000 Union troops and 260,000 Confederate troops.

  • 1866 --- The Civil Rights Bill passed over U.S. President Andrew Johnson's veto.

  • 1867 --- The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty with Russia that purchased the territory of Alaska by one vote.

  • 1912 --- The Boston Red Sox defeated Harvard 2-0 on this, the day that Fenway Park was opened for the first time. Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk, Jim Rice, Roger Clemens, and Babe Ruth played ball at Fenway and faced the ‘Green Monster’, the huge wall in left field. Until the Humane Society ordered him to stop, Ted Williams used to take rifle shots at the many pigeons that flew around the stadium. In 1954, a ball thrown to stop a player from making a double out of a single, hit a pigeon in flight. Allegedly, the bird fell to the ground, got up and then flew away to safer territory. The ball deflected right to the second baseman, who put the tag on the runner.

  • 1928 --- Mae West made her glamorous debut on Broadway in the classic production of Diamond Lil.

  • 1939 --- Opera singer Marian Anderson performed at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., after she was denied the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because of her race. Marian Anderson was an international superstar in the 1930s—a singer possessed of what Arturo Toscanini called "a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years." But if race had been no impediment to her career abroad, there were still places in the United States where a black woman was simply not welcome, no matter how famous. What surprised Anderson and many other Americans was to discover in 1939 that one such place was a venue called Constitution Hall, owned and operated by the Daughters of the American Revolution in the capital of a nation "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." When the D.A.R. refused to allow Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall because of her skin color, the organization lost one of its most influential members: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Roosevelt and many other women quit the D.A.R. in protest of its discriminatory action, which soon became a cause célèbre. The invitation to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial came directly from the Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, who proclaimed in his introduction of Marian Anderson on that Easter Sunday that "Genius draws no color line." There was nothing overtly political in the selection of songs Anderson performed that day before a gathered crowd of 75,000 and a live radio audience of millions. But the message inherent in an African American woman singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" while standing before the shrine of America's Great Emancipator was crystal clear.

  • 1953 --- Cincinnati baseball officials said that the National League team wanted to be known as the Redlegs and not the Reds. This was understandable, with the McCarthy Hearings bringing to light the alleged infiltration of Communist reds in the United States in government, politics and entertainment.

  • 1959 --- NASA announced the selection of America's first seven astronauts: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Donald Slayton.

  • 1965 --- Major-league baseball played its first indoor game. President Lyndon B. Johnson attended the opening of the Astrodome in Houston, Texas. The indoor stadium was termed the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’.

  • 1969 --- The Chicago Eight, indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, plead not guilty. The trial for the eight antiwar activists had begun in Chicago on March 20. The defendants included David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"); Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines. They were charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with intent to incite a riot. Attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass represented all but Seale. The trial, presided over by Judge Julius Hoffman, turned into a circus as the defendants and their attorneys used the court as a platform to attack Nixon, the war, racism, and oppression. Their tactics were so disruptive that at one point Judge Hoffman ordered Seale gagged and strapped to his chair. (Seale's disruptive behavior eventually caused the judge to try him separately). When the trial ended in February 1970, Hoffman found the defendants and their attorneys guilty of 175 counts of contempt of court and sentenced them to terms ranging from two to four years. Although declaring the defendants not guilty of conspiracy, the jury found all but Froines and Weiner guilty of intent to riot. The others were each sentenced to five years and fined $5,000. However, none of the defendants served time because in 1972 a Court of Appeals overturned the criminal convictions and eventually most of the contempt charges were also dropped.

  • 2003 --- Jubilant Iraqis celebrated the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, beheading a toppled statue of their longtime ruler in downtown Baghdad.

  • Birthdays
  • Paul Robeson
  • Carl Perkins
  • Gregory Pincus
  • Hugh Hefner
  • Hal Ketchum
  • Dennis Quaid
  • Jim Fowler
  • Keisha Knight Pulliam
  • Charles Baudelaire
  • Sol Hurok
  • Curly Lambeau
  • Ward Bond