- 15th Day of 2013 / 350 Remaining
- 64 Days Until The First Day of Spring
- Sunrise:7:23
- Sunset:5:15
- 9 Hours 52 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:9:38am
- Moon Set:10:05pm
- Moon’s Phase: 20 %
- The Next Full Moon
- January 26 @ 8:40pm
- Full Wolf 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: 2:38am/2:12pm
- Low: 8:17am/8:22pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:13.36
- Last Year:3.34
- Normal To Date:11.31
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Humanitarian Day
- National Stawberry Ice Cream Day
- John Chilembwe Day-malawi
- National Soup Day-United Kingdom
- On This Day In …
- 1551 --- England's Queen Elizabeth I was crowned in Westminster Abbey.
- 1777 --- Having recognized the need for their territory to assert its independence from both Britain and New York and remove themselves from the war they were waging against each other, a convention of future Vermonters assembles in Westminster and declares independence from the crown of Great Britain and the colony of New York on this day in 1777. The convention's delegates included Vermont's future governor, Thomas Chittenden, and Ira Allen, who would become known as the "father" of the University of Vermont.
- 1799 --- John Hetheringoton, a London haberdasher, created the top hat. A large crowd gathered to see this new hat, and he was charged with disturbing the peace (charges later dropped). The hat was an immediate success.
- 1831 --- Victor Hugo finishes writing Notre Dame de Paris, also known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Distracted by other projects, Hugo had continually postponed his deadlines for delivering the book to his publishers, but once he sat down to write it, he completed the novel in only four months.
- 1870 --- A cartoon by Thomas Nast titled "A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion" appeared in "Harper's Weekly." The cartoon used the donkey to symbolize the Democratic Party for the first time.
- 1889 --- A patent was issued to Daniel Johnson of Kansas City, Kansas, for a ‘Rotary Dining Table’ for use on ships. The table and attached chairs rotated so that everyone could be served from one spot, making it unnecessary to carry food around the table to serve everyone.
- 1892 --- YMCA Canada’s Y Triangle magazine published the story of a new game. James Naismith, a teacher at the YMCA International Training School in Massachusetts (later named Springfield College), had invented the game of basketball on December 21, 1891. Naismith attached peach baskets to the lower rail of a balcony, one at either end of the gym. There were eighteen men in Naismith’s class and he promised them that if this game proved to be a failure he would not try any more experiments on them. They went over the rules, divided the group into two teams of nine players each and tossed up the first basketball in history.
- 1899 --- Edwin Markham’s poem, The Man With a Hoe, was published for the first time. The California school teacher’s work was published by the San Francisco Examiner.
- 1919 --- Fiery hot molasses floods the streets of Boston, killing 21 people and injuring scores of others. The molasses burst from a huge tank at the United States Industrial Alcohol Company building in the heart of the city. The United States Industrial Alcohol building was located on Commercial Street near North End Park in Boston. It was close to lunch time on January 15 and Boston was experiencing some unseasonably warm weather as workers were loading freight-train cars within the large building. Next to the workers was a 58-foot-high tank filled with 2.5 million gallons of crude molasses. Suddenly, the bolts holding the bottom of the tank exploded, shooting out like bullets, and the hot molasses rushed out. An eight-foot-high wave of molasses swept away the freight cars and caved in the building's doors and windows. The few workers in the building's cellar had no chance as the liquid poured down and overwhelmed them. The huge quantity of molasses then flowed into the street outside. It literally knocked over the local firehouse and then pushed over the support beams for the elevated train line. The hot and sticky substance then drowned and burned five workers at the Public Works Department. In all, 21 people and dozens of horses were killed in the flood. It took weeks to clean the molasses from the streets of Boston. This disaster also produced an epic court battle, as more than 100 lawsuits were filed against the United States Industrial Alcohol Company. After a six-investigation that involved 3,000 witnesses and 45,000 pages of testimony, a special auditor finally determined that the company was at fault because the tank used had not been strong enough to hold the molasses. Nearly $1 million was paid in settlement of the claims.
- 1943 --- The world’s largest office building was completed, just outside of Washington, DC, in Arlington, VA. The massive structure covers 34 acres of land and has 17 miles of corridors, plus, a whole lot of secret places that we’ll never know about. Why? Because it’s the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States defense effort.
- 1967 --- Super Bowl I (at Los Angeles): Green Bay Packers 35, Kansas City Chiefs 10. Most Valuable Player was Packers’ QB, Bart Starr. Max McGee scored the first touchdown. 61,946 fans attended the game at ten bucks a ticket.
- 1967 --- Ed Sullivan told The Rolling Stones to change the lyrics AND the title to the song, Let’s Spend the Night Together, or “be off my riiiillly big shew!” So, the Stones gave in... changing the tune to Let’s Spend Some Time Together.
- 1970 --- Muammar al-Qaddafi, the young Libyan army captain who deposed King Idris in September 1969, is proclaimed premier of Libya by the so-called General People's Congress. Born in a tent in the Libyan desert, Qaddafi was the son of a Bedouin farmer. He attended university and the Libyan military academy and steadily rose in the ranks of the Libyan army. An ardent Arab nationalist, he plotted with a group of fellow officers to overthrow the Libyan monarchy, which they accomplished on September 1, 1969.
- 1992 --- The Yugoslav federation effectively collapsed as the European Community recognized the republics of Croatia and Slovenia.
- 1995 --- The San Francisco 49ers beat the Dallas Cowboys 38-28 in the NFC championship game and the San Diego Chargers edged the Pittsburgh Steelers 17-13 in the AFC title game. (The 49ers beat the Chargers 49-26 in Super Bowl XXIX.)
- 2001 --- Wikipedia, a web-based encyclopedia, made its debut.
- 2004 --- The NASA Spirit rover rolled onto the surface of Mars.
- 2009 --- US Airways Capt Chelsey Sullenberger guided a jetliner disabled by a bird strike just after takeoff from New York's LaGuardia Airport to a safe landing in the Hudson River. All 155 people aboard survived.
- Birthdays
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Abigail Kelley Foster
- Gene Krupa
- Gamal Nasser (PM Egypt)
- Andrea Martin
- Mario Van Peebles
- Mary Pierce
- Moliere (Jean B Poquelin)
- Lloyd Bridges
- Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet)
- Charo
- Martha Davis
- Lisa Lisa
- Edward Teller
- Ronnie Van Zant