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Tuesday February 14, 2012

 

  • 45th Day of 2012 / 321 Remaining
  • 35 Days Until Spring Begins
  • Sunrise:7:01
  • Sunset:5:48
  • 10 Hr 47 Min
  • Moon Rise:12:50am
  • Moon Set:11:00am
  • Moon’s Phase: Last Quarter
  • The Next Full Moon
  • March 8 @ 1:41 am
  • Full Worm Moon

As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.

  • Tides
  • High:3:21am/5:14pm
  • Low:10:26am/9:57pm
  • Rainfall
  • This Year:6.76
  • Last Year:12.85
  • Normal To Date:14.97
  • Annual Average: 22.28
  • Holidays
  • Valentine's Day
  • Ferris Wheel Day
  • National Donor Day
  • National Have A Heart Day
  • Race Relations Day
  • Admission Day-Arizona(1912)
  • Admission Day-Oregon(1859)
  • National Cream Filled Chocolates Day
  • Read To Your Child Day
  • Mawlid Al Nabi-Islamic (Begins at Sunset)
  • Wine Grower’s Day(Trifon Zarezan)-Bulgaria
  • On This Day In …
  • 0278 --- Valentine, a holy priest in Rome in the days of Emperor Claudius II, was executed. Under the rule of Claudius the Cruel, Rome was involved in many unpopular and bloody campaigns. The emperor had to maintain a strong army, but was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military leagues. Claudius believed that Roman men were unwilling to join the army because of their strong attachment to their wives and families. To get rid of the problem, Claudius banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Valentine was arrested and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14, on or about the year 270. Legend also has it that while in jail, St. Valentine left a farewell note for the jailer's daughter, who had become his friend, and signed it "From Your Valentine." For his great service, Valentine was named a saint after his death. In truth, the exact origins and identity of St. Valentine are unclear. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of 14 February." One was a priest in Rome, the second one was a bishop of Interamna (now Terni, Italy) and the third St. Valentine was a martyr in the Roman province of Africa. Legends vary on how the martyr's name became connected with romance. The date of his death may have become mingled with the Feast of Lupercalia, a pagan festival of love. On these occasions, the names of young women were placed in a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius decided to put an end to the Feast of Lupercalia, and he declared that February 14 be celebrated as St Valentine's Day. Gradually, February 14 became a date for exchanging love messages, poems and simple gifts such as flowers.
  • 1779 --- Captain James Cook, the great English explorer and navigator, is murdered by natives of Hawaii during his third visit to the Pacific island group. In 1768, Cook, a surveyor in the Royal Navy, was commissioned a lieutenant in command of the HMS Endeavor and led an expedition that took scientists to Tahiti to chart the course of the planet Venus. In 1771, he returned to England, having explored the coast of New Zealand and Australia and circumnavigated the globe. Beginning in 1772, he commanded a major mission to the South Pacific and during the next three years explored the Antarctic region, charted the New Hebrides, and discovered New Caledonia. In 1776, Cook sailed from England again as commander of the HMS Resolution and Discovery, and in January 1778 he made his first visit to the Hawaiian Islands. He may have been the first European to ever visit the island group, which he named the Sandwich Islands in honor of one of his patrons, John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich. Cook and his crew were welcomed by the Hawaiians, who were fascinated by the Europeans' ships and their use of iron. Cook provisioned his ships by trading the metal, and his sailors traded iron nails for sex. The ships then made a brief stop at Ni'ihau and headed north to look for the western end of a northwest passage from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Almost one year later, Cook's two ships returned to the Hawaiian Islands and found a safe harbor in Hawaii's Kealakekua Bay. It is suspected that the Hawaiians attached religious significance to the first stay of the Europeans on their islands. In Cook's second visit, there was no question of this phenomenon. Kealakekua Bay was considered the sacred harbor of Lono, the fertility god of the Hawaiians, and at the time of Cook's arrival the locals were engaged in a festival dedicated to Lono. Cook and his compatriots were welcomed as gods and for the next month exploited the Hawaiians' good will. After one of the crewmen died, exposing the Europeans as mere mortals, relations became strained. On February 4, 1779, the British ships sailed from Kealakekua Bay, but rough seas damaged the foremast of the Resolution, and after only a week at sea the expedition was forced to return to Hawaii. The Hawaiians greeted Cook and his men by hurling rocks; they then stole a small cutter vessel from the Discovery. Negotiations with King Kalaniopuu for the return of the cutter collapsed after a lesser Hawaiian chief was shot to death and a mob of Hawaiians descended on Cook's party. The captain and his men fired on the angry Hawaiians, but they were soon overwhelmed, and only a few managed to escape to the safety of the Resolution. Captain Cook himself was killed by the mob. A few days later, the Englishmen retaliated by firing their cannons and muskets at the shore, killing some 30 Hawaiians. The Resolution and Discovery eventually returned to England.
  • 1803 --- Moses Coats received a patent on the apple parer.
  • 1859 --- Oregon, the 33rd state, entered the United States of America this day, exactly ten years and six months to the day since it was organized as a territory. Oregon’s many national parks and recreational areas are home to the state animal, the beaver, which also provides the state with its nickname, the Beaver State. Oregon’s agricultural industry raises more hazelnuts than any other state, hence the state nut is the hazelnut. The fishing industry is also very large in this northwestern state, making the Chinook salmon the official fish. The Douglas fir, a popular Christmas tree in many American households, comes from the forests of Oregon and is the state tree. Other official Oregon state symbols are state bird: western meadowlark; state flower: Oregon grape; state insect: swallowtail butterfly. “She flies with her own wings” (Alis volat Propriis) is Oregon’s state motto. The state gemstone: sunstone; state rock: thunder egg; state song: Oregon, My Oregon; and state dance: square dance. What’s the state capital of Oregon, you ask? No, not Portland, but Salem, and that’s our final answer.
  • 1876 --- Alexander Graham Bell filed an application for a patent for the telephone. It was officially issued on March 7, 1876.
  • 1895 --- Oscar Wilde's final play, "The Importance of Being Earnest," opened at the St. James' Theatre in London.
  • 1912 --- Arizona (probably derived from the word arizonac, from two Papago Indian words meaning ‘place of the young spring’) entered the United States of America this day. For almost five decades, Arizona, the Grand Canyon State, was considered to be the last (48th) state. From its beautiful deserts come the state bird: the cactus wren; the state flower: the saguaro cactus’ flower, the state reptile: Arizona ridgenose rattlesnake; state fossil: petrified wood; state gem: turquoise; the oasis, the capital city of Phoenix. More American Indians live in Arizona than any other state, representing over 14 different tribes. But the Spanish influence is everywhere, including the official state neckwear: the bolo tie. Many outsiders don’t think of Arizona as having mountains, snow, lakes and rivers. Just to prove it, Arizona has a state fish: the Arizona trout. From the Grand Canyon to the Painted Desert, Arizona is proof of its state motto: Ditat Deus (God enriches).
  • 1920 --- The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago, and Maude Wood Park was chosen as its first president.
  • 1929 --- In Chicago, gunmen in the suspected employment of organized-crime boss Al Capone murder seven members of the George "Bugs" Moran North Siders gang in a garage on North Clark Street. The so-called St. Valentine's Day Massacre stirred a media storm centered on Capone and his illegal Prohibition-era activities and motivated federal authorities to redouble their efforts to find evidence incriminating enough to take him off the streets.
  • 1929 --- Sir Alexander Fleming was a young bacteriologist when an accidental discovery led to one of the great developments of modern medicine on this day in 1929. Having left a plate of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered, Fleming noticed that a mold that had fallen on the culture had killed many of the bacteria. He identified the mold as penicillium notatum, similar to the kind found on bread. On February 14, 1929, Fleming introduced his mold by-product called penicillin to cure bacterial infections.
  • 1932 --- The U.S. won its first Olympic bobsled competition (both the two-man and four-man races) at the Winter Olympic Games at Lake Placid, NY. Twelve other teams competed in the event. This was also the first bobsledding competition in the United States. The four-man team included Edward Eagan, who was also the 1920 Olympic light heavyweight boxing champion. Eagan's winter gold medal made him the first person to take home gold in both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
  • 1968 --- The fourth Madison Square Gardens opened.
  • 1977 --- The B-52's, one of the strangest and, to fans, most irresistible, pop groups ever to achieve mainstream success, makes its worldwide debut at a Valentine's Day house party in Athens, GA, on this day in 1977. In their official Warner Brothers bio, the B-52's described themselves this way: "As a group we enjoy science facts, thrift shopping, tick jokes, fat fad diets, geometric exercising, and discovering the 'essence from within.'" When taken together with the assertion that the band was "found in the Amazon River basin 40 years ago by Professor Agnes Potter and subsequently abandoned at Athens, Georgia," this statement says a lot about the odd, but fun-loving sensibility of the B-52s.
  • 1980 --- A big day for Dan Rather, as Walter Cronkite announced his retirement from the CBS Evening News. Rather had been selected to replace TV’s best known and most trusted television journalist. Cronkite announced that Rather would take over the anchor desk early in 1981.
  • 1989 --- Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses," a novel Khomeini condemned as blasphemous.
  • 1997 --- Astronauts on the space shuttle Discovery began a series of spacewalks that were required to overhaul the Hubble Space Telescope
  • Birthdays
  • Frederick Douglass
  • Jack Benny
  • Meg Tilly
  • Florence Henderson
  • Teller (Penn &)
  • Carl Bernstein
  • Pat O’Brien
  • Michael Bloomberg
  • Hugh Downs
  • Anna Howard Shaw
  • George Ferris
  • George Ferris
  • Mel Allen
  • Frank Borman
  • Vic Morrow
  • Gregory Hines
  • Manuela Maleeva
  • Phyllis McGuire
  • Jo Jo Starbuck
  • Francesco Cavalli
  • Margaret E. Knight