Tuesday February 25, 2014

• 56^th Day of 2014 / 309 Remaining
• 23 Days Until The First Day of Spring

• Sunrise:6:45
• Sunset:5:59
• 11 Hours 14 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:3:43am
• Moon Set:2:13pm
• Moon’s Phase:17 %

• The Next Full Moon
• March 16 @ 10:10am
• Full CrowMoon
• Full Crust Moon
• Full Sap Moon
• Full Lenten 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:6:44am/8:40pm
• Low:12:42am/1:44pm

• Rainfall
• This Year:5.89
• Last Year:14.35
• Average Year to Date:17.64

• Holidays
• National Chocolate Covered Peanuts Day
• National Clam Chowder Day

• National Day-Kuwait
• Revolution Day-Surinam

• On This Day In …
• 1570 --- Pope Pius V excommunicated England's Queen Elizabeth I.

• 1793 --- The department heads of the U.S. government met with U.S. President Washington for the first Cabinet meeting on U.S. record.
  

  

• 1836 --- Samuel Colt received a patent for a pistol that used a revolving cylinder containing powder and bullets in six individual

  

  tubes. (Pre-assembled loads [cartridges] came later.) Up to that time, the single-shot flintlock pistol had been the fastest firearm around.

• 1862 --- The U.S. Congress passes the Legal Tender Act, authorizing the use of paper notes to pay the government's bills. This ended the long-standing policy of using only gold or silver in transactions, and it allowed the government to finance the enormously costly Civil War long after its gold and silver reserves were depleted.

• 1870 --- Hiram R. Revels, R-Miss., became the first black member of the United States Senate as he was sworn in to serve out the unexpired term of Jefferson Davis. During the Civil War, Revels, a college-educated minister, helped form African American army

  

  regiments for the Union cause, started a school for freed men, and served as a chaplain for the Union army. Posted to Mississippi, Revels remained in the former Confederate state after the war and entered into Reconstruction-era Southern politics.

• 1908 --- At midnight (Feb 25/26), service through the Hudson & Manhattan railway tunnels opened to the public, carrying

  

  passengers between Manhattan and Hoboken New Jersey. It was the first railroad tunnel under a major river in the U.S.

• 1913 --- The 16th Ammendment to the U.S. Constitution was officially declared ratified. It gave Congress the power to levy an income tax.

• 1928 --- The Federal Radio Commission issued the first U.S. television license to Charles Jenkins Laboratories in Washington, DC. The first commercial TV license was issued in 1941.

• 1940 --- The New York Rangers and the Montreal Canadiens played in the first hockey game to be televised in the U.S. The game was aired on W2WBS in New York with one camera in a fixed position. The Rangers beat the Canadiens 6-2.

• 1948 --- Under pressure from the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, President Eduard Benes allows a communist-dominated government to be organized. Although the Soviet Union did not

  

  physically intervene (as it would in 1968), Western observers decried the virtually bloodless communist coup as an example of Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe.

• 1949 --- Actor Robert Mitchum is released from a Los Angeles County prison farm after spending the final week of his two-month sentence for marijuana possession there.
  

  

• 1956 --- Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev criticized the late Josef Stalin in a speech before a Communist Party congress in Moscow.

• 1957 --- Buddy Holly and The Crickets traveled to Clovis, NM, to record That’ll Be the Day (one of the classics of rock ’n’ roll) and I’m Looking for Someone to Love. Both songs were released on Brunswick Records in May of that year.

• 1963 --- Please Please Me was the second record released in the U.S. by The Beatles. Some labels carried a famous misprint, making it an instant, and valuable, collector’s item. The label listed the group as The Beattles.

• 1964 --- 22-year-old Cassius Clay shocks the odds-makers by dethroning world heavyweight boxing champ Sonny Liston in a seventh-round technical knockout. The dreaded Liston, who had twice demolished former champ Floyd Patterson in one round, was

  

  an 8-to-1 favorite. However, Clay predicted victory, boasting that he would "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" and knock out Liston in the eighth round. The fleet-footed and loquacious youngster needed less time to make good on his claim--Liston, complaining of an injured shoulder, failed to answer the seventh-round bell. A few moments later, a new heavyweight champion was proclaimed.

• 1966 --- Nancy Sinatra was high-stepping this day with a gold record award for the hit, These Boots are Made for Walkin’. When she cracked open the wooden-framed award to check out the gold disk inside, she heard Pink Shoe Laces by Dodie Stevens.

• 1971 --- In both houses of Congress, legislation is initiated to forbid U.S. military support of any South Vietnamese invasion of North Vietnam without congressional approval. This legislation was a result of the controversy that arose after the invasion of Laos by South Vietnamese forces in Operation Lam Son 719. On February 8, South Vietnamese forces had launched a major cross-border operation into Laos to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail and destroy the North Vietnamese supply dumps in the area. Although the only direct U.S. support permitted was long-range cross-border artillery fire from firebases in South Vietnam, fixed-wind air strikes, and 2,600 helicopters to airlift Saigon troops and supplies, President Richard Nixon's critics condemned the invasion. Foreign Relations Committee chairman Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas) declared the Laotian invasion illegal under the terms of the repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed the president only the mandate to end the war.

• 1984 --- Ironweed, by William P. Kennedy, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this day. The novel, about a man trying to make peace with the ghosts of his past -- and present, also captured the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

• 1986 --- In the face of mass demonstrations against his rule, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and his entourage are airlifted from the presidential palace in Manila by U.S. helicopters. Elected in 1966, Marcos declared martial law in 1972 in response to leftist violence. In the next year, he assumed dictatorial powers.

  

  Backed by the United States, his regime was marked by misuse of foreign support, repression, and political murders. In 1986, Marcos defrauded the electorate in a presidential election, declaring himself the victor over Corazon Aquino, the wife of an assassinated rival. Aquino also declared herself the rightful winner, and the public rallied behind her. Deserted by his former supporters, Marcos and his wife, Imelda, fled to Hawaii in exile, where they faced investigation on embezzlement charges.

• Birthdays
• Pierre Auguste Renoir
• John Foster Dulles
• Monte Irvin
• Bob Schieffer
• Tea Leoni
• Carrot Top
• Sean Astin
• Enrico Caruso
• Vyacheslav M Molotov
• Dame Myra Hess
• Zeppo Marx
• Jim Backus
• Millicent Fenwick
• Bobby Riggs
• Ralph Stanley
• Larry Gelbart
• Sally Jessy Raphael
• Lee Evans
• George Harrison