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Tuesday August 12, 2014

  • 224th Day of the Year / 141 Remaining
  • Autumn Begins in 41 Days

  • Sunrise:6:23
  • Sunset:8:05
  • 13 Hours 42 Minutes

  • Moon Rise:9:21pm
  • Moon Set:8:45am
  • Moon’s Phase 94%
  • Full Moon August 10 @ 11:10am
  • Full Sturgeon Moon

The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.

  • Tides
  • High Tide:12:03am/1:08pm
  • Low Tide:6:31am/6:52pm

  • Holidays
  • Perseid Meteor Shower
  • Kool Aid Days
  • Vinyl Record Day
  • National Middle Child’s Day
  • National Sewing Machine Day
  • National Toasted Almond Bar day

  • International Youth Day
  • Defense Forces Day-Zimbabwe
  • Arequipa Week-Peru
  • Grouse Season-Great Britian

  • On This Day
  • 1851 --- Isaac Singer of New York City patented the double-treadle sewing machine on this day. Although a sewing machine had already been patented, Singer’s sewing machine was revolutionary, having a double treadle. With patent in hand, Isaac set up shop in 
    Boston, Massachusetts and began to manufacture his invention. Even after huge settlements paid to Elias Howe, another sewing machine patent holder, Singer, through business innovations like installment buying, after-sale servicing and trade-in allowances, had the marketplace all sewn up.

  • 1865 --- Joseph Lister became the first doctor to use disinfectant during surgery. Hmm. Joseph Lister. That name rings a bell. Yep. Same Joseph Lister as the one whose name is on those bottles of Listerine mouthwash.

  • 1867 --- U.S. President Andrew Johnson sparked a move to impeach him when he defied Congress by suspending Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

  • 1877 --- Thomas A. Edison finished figuring out his first phonograph. Edison handed the model of his invention to John Kreusi with instructions on how to build it. Kreusi, a confident man, bet the inventor $2 and said that there was no way that the machine would ever work. He lost the bet.

  • 1913 --- The National Biscuit Co. (Nabisco) registered the "Oreo" trademark (introduced in 1912).

  • 1930 --- Clarence Birdseye received a patent for a method to preparing food products by quick freezing them.

  • 1936 --- Berlin, Germany was host to the Olympics and the youngest winner of a gold medal (to that day). The U.S.A.’s 13-year-old diver, Marjorie Gestring, won the springboard event.

  • 1937 --- Red Skelton appeared on network radio for the first time on the "Rudy Vallee Show" on NBC. 

  • 1939 --- "The Wizard of Oz" premiered in Oconomowoc, WI. Judy Garland became famous for the movie's song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." The movie premiered in Hollywood on August 15th. 

  • 1953 --- Less than one year after the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb, the Soviets detonate a 400-kiloton device in Kazakhstan. The explosive power was 30 times that of the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the mushroom cloud produced by it stretched five miles into the sky. Known as the 
    "Layer Cake," the bomb was fueled by layers of uranium and lithium deuteride, a hydrogen isotope. The Soviet bomb was smaller and more portable than the American hydrogen bomb, so its development once again upped the ante in the dangerous nuclear arms race between the Cold War super powers

  • 1955 --- The U.S. minimum wage was raised from 75 cents to $1.00.

  • 1960 --- The first balloon satellite, Echo 1, was launched by the United States from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

  • 1960 --- The Silver Beetles recruited drummer Pete Best.

  • 1961 --- In an effort to stem the tide of refugees attempting to leave East Berlin, the communist government of East Germany begins building the Berlin Wall to divide East and West Berlin. Construction of the wall caused a short-term crisis in U.S.-Soviet bloc relations, and the wall itself came to symbolize the Cold War.

  • 1964 --- For the 10th time in his major-league baseball career, Mickey Mantle hit home runs from both the left and ride sides of the plate in the same game -- setting a new baseball record.

  • 1964 --- Charlie Wilson, part of the gang who pulled off the 1963 Great Train Robbery, one of the biggest heists of its kind, escapes from Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, England. Several men broke into the maximum-security facility to free Wilson, who remained on the loose until 1968.

  • 1966 --- John Lennon apologized at a news conference in Chicago, for his remark that "the Beatles are more popular than Jesus." 

  • 1977 --- The space shuttle Enterprise passed its first solo flight test by taking off atop a Boeing 747, separating and then touching down in California's Mojave Desert.

  • 1981 --- IBM (International Business Machines) introduced the Model 5150 PC (personal computer). The IBM PC ran on the Intel 8088 microprocessor at 4.77 mHz with one or two 160K floppy disk drives. It had 16 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 256k, five 8-bit ISA slots, a 65-watt power supply, no built-in clock, no built-in 
    serial or parallel ports, and no built-in video capability -- it was available with an optional color monitor. MS-DOS 1.0/1.1 was issued with the PC (IBM later released its own operating system: PC-DOS). Prices started at $1,565. The IBM PC was a smashing success and IBM quickly became the #1 microcomputer company, with Apple dropping to #2.

  • 1985 --- At 6:50 p.m. local time, a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747SR crashes into Mount Otsuka, 70 miles northwest of Tokyo. There were 524 people aboard, and all but four were dead by the time rescuers reached the remote crash site 12 hours later.

  • 1986 --- Rod Carew became the first player in the history of the California Angels franchise to have his uniform (#29) retired. 

  • 1988 --- The Last Temptation of Christ, the controversial film directed by Martin Scorsese, openeddespite demonstrations and protestations by religious groups.

  • 1988 --- Director Francis Ford Coppola's critically acclaimed biopic "Tucker: The Man & His Dream" premieres in U.S. theaters, starring Jeff Bridges as the brash Chicago businessman-turned-car-designer Preston Tucker who shook up 1940s-era Detroit with his streamlined, affordable "Car of Tomorrow."

  • 1990 --- Fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson discovers three huge bones jutting out of a cliff near Faith, South Dakota. They turn out to 
    be part of the largest-ever Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever discovered, a 65 million-year-old specimen dubbed Sue, after its discoverer. Amazingly, Sue's skeleton was over 90 percent complete, and the bones were extremely well-preserved. 
    Hendrickson's employer, the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research, paid $5,000 to the land owner, Maurice Williams, for the right to excavate the dinosaur skeleton, which was cleaned and transported to the company headquarters in Hill City. The institute's president, Peter Larson, announced plans to build a non-profit museum to display Sue along with other fossils of the Cretaceous period.

  • 1994 --- Major league baseball players went on strike rather than allow team owners to limit their salaries. The strike lasted for 232 days. As a result, the World Series was wiped out for the first time in 90 years.

  • 1998 --- Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle lawsuits filed by Holocaust survivors and theirheirs. The banks had kept millions of dollars deposited by Holocaust victims and their relatives before and during World War II.

  • 2000 --- A Russian nuclear submarine sinks to the bottom of the Barents Sea on this day in 2000; all 118 crew members are later found dead. The exact cause of the disaster remains unknown. The Kursk left port on August 10 to take part in war games with the 
    Russian military. Russian ships, planes and submarines met up in the Barents Sea, which is above the Arctic Circle, to practice military maneuvers. On August 12, the Kursk was scheduled to fire a practice torpedo; at 11:29 a.m., before doing so, two explosions spaced shortly apart occurred in the front hull of the submarine and it plunged toward the bottom of the sea. The Kursk was 500 feet long and weighed 24,000 tons. It had two nuclear reactors and could reach speeds of 28 knots. It was the largest attack submarine in the world, approximately three times the size of the largest subs in the United States Navy. With the fate of the 118 Russian soldiers onboard the Kursk unknown, several nations offered to contribute to the rescue effort, but the Russian government refused any assistance. When divers finally reached the Kursk a week later, they found no signs of life. Under a great deal of pressure, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to raise the submarine from the sea bottom for an investigation, although no ship or object that size had ever before been recovered from the ocean floor. Furthermore, given that the Barents Sea is frozen for most of the year, the operation had only a small window in which to work. Using $100 million, the best available technology and an international team of experts, the Kursk was raised on September 26, 2001. Unfortunately, however, the team was forced to cut off the front hull from the rest of the sub in order to bring it to the surface, leaving the best evidence of what caused the explosions at the bottom of the sea.

  • Birthdays
  • Lillie Devereux Blake
  • Cecil B De Mille
  • Mstislav Rostropovich
  • James Buchanan ('Diamond Jim') Brady
  • Casey Affleck
  • George Hamilton
  • Mark Knopfler
  • Pat Metheny
  • Sir Mix-A-Lot
  • Yvette Nicole Brown
  • Pete Sampras
  • Katherine Lee Bates
  • Mary Roberts Rinehart
  • Cantinflas
  • Kid Creole