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Tuesday December 27, 2011

  • 361st Day of 2011 / 4 Remaining
  • 84 Days Until Spring Begins
  • Sunrise:7:24
  • Sunset:4:58
  • 9 Hr 34 Min
  • Moon Rise:9:25am
  • Moon Set:8:34pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 11 %
  • The Next Full Moon
  • January 8 @ 11:32pm
  • Full Wolf Moon
  • Full Old Moon

Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule. Some called it the Full Snow Moon, but most tribes applied that name to the next Moon.

  • Tides
  • High:1:04am/11:51am
  • Low:6:09am/6:43pm
  • Rainfall
  • This Year:3.35
  • Last Year:9.82
  • Year To Date 7.62Average:
  • Annual Average: 22.28
  • Holidays
  • National Fruitcake Day
  • Watch the Children Day
  • Anniversary Of The Constitution-Korea
  • Commission Holiday-Niue
  • Family Day-Vanuatu
  • St Stephen’s Day-Bulgaria
  • Stanley Sports Day-Falkland Islands
  • On This Day In History
  • 1703 --- The Methuen Treaty was signed between Portugal and England, giving preference to the import of Portuguese wines into England.
  • 1831 --- British naturalist Charles Darwin set out on a voyage to the Pacific Ocean aboard the HMS Beagle. Darwin's discoveries during the nearly five-year journey helped form the basis of his theories on evolution.
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  • 1845 --- Dr. Crawford Williamson Long used anesthesia for childbirth for the first time. The event was the delivery of his own child in Jefferson, GA.
  • 1895 --- Murder and mayhem have been the subject of many popular songs over the years, though more often than not, the tales around which such songs revolve tend to be wholly fictional. Johnny Cash never shot a man in Reno, and the events related in such famous story songs as "El Paso" and "I Shot The Sheriff" never actually took place. The same cannot be said, however, about "Stagger Lee"—a song that has drifted from the facts somewhat over the course of its many lives in the last 100-plus years, but a song inspired by an actual murder that took place on this day in 1895, in a St. Louis, Missouri, barroom argument involving a man named Billy and another named "Stag" Lee. Under the headline "Shot in Curtis's Place," the story that ran in the next day's edition of the St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat began, "William Lyons, 25, colored, a levee hand... was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o'clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis... by Lee Sheldon, also colored." According to the Globe-Democrat's account, Billy Lyons and "Stag" Lee Sheldon "had been drinking and were in exuberant spirits" when an argument over "politics" boiled over, and Lyons "snatched Sheldon's hat from his head." While subsequent musical renditions of this story would depict the dispute as one over gambling, they would preserve the key detail of "Stag" Lee Sheldon's headwear and of his matter-of-fact response to losing it: "Sheldon drew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen... When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away." In his 2003 book Stagolee Shot Billy, based on his earlier doctoral dissertation on the subject, scholar Cecil Brown recounts the story of how the real "Stag" Lee became an iconic figure in African-American folklore and how his story became the subject of various musical renderings "from the [age of the] steamboat to the electronic age in the American 21st century." The most famous of those musical renditions were 1928's "Stack O' Lee Blues" by Mississippi John Hurt and 1959's "Stagger Lee," an unlikely #1 pop hit for Lloyd Price. Versions of the story have also appeared, however, in songs by artists as wide-ranging as Woody Guthrie, Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, James Brown, The Clash, the Grateful Dead and Nick Cave.
  • 1900 --- Carrie Nation staged her first raid on a saloon at the Carey Hotel in Wichita, Kansas. She broke each and every one of the liquor bottles she could see, which means, about all of them behind the bar, for sure. Nation usually did her damage with a hatchet; calling her vandalism, hatchetation.
  • 1903 --- The barbershop quartet favorite, Sweet Adeline, was sung for the first time -- in New York City. The song was composed by Henry Armstrong with the words of Richard Gerard. The title of the song came from a theatre marquee that promoted the great operatic soprano, Adelina Patti. Now female barbershop quartets call themselves Sweet Adelines.
  • 1927 --- Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party.
  • 1927 --- The Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics) musical, Show Boat, opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York City. Its star, Helen Morgan, received excellent reviews from critics of the show; a musical about riverboat show people and their romances and disappointments. It was inspired by the novel, Show Boat, written by Edna Ferber in 1926.
  • 1932 --- Radio City Music Hall, in New York City, opened. It was the largest indoor theatre in the world. The gala grand opening show was a six-hour extravaganza that lost half a million dollars within three weeks. The theatre has since been renovated to recapture its original decorative charm. An Art Deco cathedral of entertainment, it seats more than 6,200 people and is still a must-see for those visiting New York. During the holiday season, audiences continue to get a kick out of seeing the world-famous Rockettes perform in precision on Radio City Music Hall’s nearly 10,000-square-foot stage.
  • 1947 --- “Hey kids... What time is it? It’s Howdy Doody time!” Buffalo Bob (Smith), Clarabelle the Clown (Bob Keeshan), Judy Canova and a host of others joined Howdy Doody on NBC-TV. The show stayed on the air for 13 years.
  • 1971 --- Sonny & Cher were given a regular variety show on CBS-TV after their summer replacement show was a big success. "The Sonny & Cher Show" lasted four seasons.
  • 1979 --- Soviet forces seized control of Afghanistan. President Hafizullah Amin, who was overthrown and executed, was replaced by Babrak Karmal.
  • 1985 --- Naturalist Dian Fossey, who had studied gorillas in the wild, was found hacked to death at a research station in Rwanda.
  • 1992 --- In the Philippines, Manila police arrested 18 members of The Reserved Manpower of the Good Wisdom for All Nations Church for letting the air out of hundreds of automobile tires. They said God "ordered" them to do it, and that deflating tires would solve all the nation's problems.
  • Birthdays
  • Louis Pasteur
  • Cokie Roberts
  • John Amos
  • Gerard Depardieu
  • Sarah Vowell
  • Carson Palmer
  • Johannes Kepler
  • Marlene Dietrich
  • Mick Jones(Foreigner)
  • Sydney Greenstreet
  • Scotty Moore
  • Tracy Nelson
  • Terry Bozzio (Missing Persons)
  • Karla Bonoff