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Tuesday January 8, 2013

  • 8th Day of 2013 / 357 Remaining
  • 71 Days Until The First Day of Spring

  • Sunrise:7:25
  • Sunset:5:08
  • 9 Hours 43 Minutes of Daylight

  • Moon Rise:4:04am
  • Moon Set:2:15pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 21 %

  • 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: 9:14am/11:11pm
  • Low: 2:50am/4:06pm

  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:13.35
  • Last Year:3.34
  • Normal To Date:10.26
  • Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

  • Holidays
  • National English Toffee Day
  • National Joygerm Day
  • Show & Tell Day at Work
  • National Man Watcher’s Day

  • Midwife's Day/Women's Day-Greece

  • On This Day In …
  • 1676 --- Charles II of England revoked his previous proclamation suppressing Coffee Houses due to public response.

  • 1815 --- U.S. forces led by Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. The War of 1812 had officially ended on December 24, 1814, with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. The news of the signing had not reached British troops in time to prevent their attack on New Orleans.

  • 1856 --- Borax (hydrated sodium borate) was discovered by Dr. John Veatch near Red Bluff, California. It became a multiuse product that was popularized during the era of TV’s Death Valley Days. Remember 20 Mule Team Borax?

  • 1867 --- Congress overrides President Andrew Johnson's veto of a bill granting all adult male citizens of the District of Columbia the right to vote, and the bill becomes law. It was the first law in American history that granted African-American men the right to vote. According to terms of the legislation, every male citizen of the city 21 years of age or older has the right to vote, except welfare or charity recipients, those under guardianship, men convicted of major crimes, or men who voluntarily sheltered Confederate troops or spies during the Civil War. The bill, vetoed by President Johnson on January 5, was overridden by a vote of 29 to 10 in the Senate and by a vote of 112 to 38 in the House of Representatives.

  • 1872 --- African American inventor Thomas Elkins received his second patent. It was for a ‘Chamber Commode’ - a combination "bureau, mirror, book-rack, washstand, table, easy chair, and earth-closet or chamber-stool."

  • 1889 --- The tabulating machine was patented this day by Dr. Herman Hollerith.

  • 1906 --- Arthur Rubinstein made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The concert received only a few favorable reviews.

  • 1912 --- The African National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

  • 1925 --- Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, appeared in his first American concert, as he conducted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in a program of his own compositions.

  • 1935 --- The spectrophotometer was patented by A.C. Hardy.

  • 1941 --- One of Hollywood’s most famous clashes of the titans--an upstart “boy genius” filmmaker versus a furious 76-year-old newspaper tycoon--heats up, when William Randolph Hearst forbids any of his newspapers to run advertisements for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Though Welles was only 24 years old when he began working in Hollywood, he had already made a name for himself on the New York theater scene and particularly with his controversial radio adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds in 1938. After scoring a lucrative contract with the struggling RKO studio, he was searching for an appropriately incendiary topic for his first film when his friend, the writer Herman Mankiewicz, suggested basing it on the life of William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was a notoriously innovative, often tyrannical businessman who had built his own nationwide newspaper empire and owned eight homes, the most notable of which was San Simeon, his sprawling castle on a hill on the Central California coast. After catching a preview screening of the unfinished Citizen Kane on January 3, 1941, the influential gossip columnist Hedda Hopper wasted no time in passing along the news to Hearst and his associates. Her rival and Hearst’s chief movie columnist, Louella Parsons, was incensed about the film and its portrait of Charles Foster Kane, the Hearst-like character embodied in typically grandiose style by Welles himself. Even more loathsome to Hearst and his allies was the portrayal of Kane’s second wife, a young alcoholic singer with strong parallels to Hearst’s mistress, the showgirl-turned-actress Marion Davies. Hearst was said to have reacted to this aspect of the film more strongly than any other, and Welles himself later called the Davies-based character a “dirty trick” that he expected would provoke the mogul’s anger. Only a few days after the screening, Hearst sent the word out to all his publications not to run advertisements for the film. Far from stopping there, he also threatened to make war against the Hollywood studio system in general, publicly condemning the number of “immigrants” and “refugees” working in the film industry instead of Americans, a none-too-subtle reference to the many Jewish members of the Hollywood establishment. Hearst’s newspapers also went after Welles, accusing him of Communist sympathies and questioning his patriotism. Hollywood’s heavyweights, who were already resentful of Welles for his youth and his open contempt for Hollywood, soon rallied around Hearst. Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer even offered to pay RKO $842,000 in cash if the studio’s president, George Schaefer, would destroy the negative and all prints of Citizen Kane. Schaefer refused and in retaliation threatened to sue the Fox, Paramount and Loews theater chains for conspiracy after they refused to distribute the film. After Time and other publications protested, the theater chains relented slightly and permitted a few showings; in the end, the film barely broke even. Nominated for nine Oscars, Citizen Kane won only one (a shared Best Screenplay award for Mankiewicz and Welles) and Welles and the film were actually booed at the 1942 Academy Awards ceremony. Schaefer was later pushed out at RKO, along with Welles, and the film was returned to the RKO archives. It would be 25 more years before Citizen Kane received its rightful share of attention, but it has since been heralded as one of the best movies of all time.

  • 1959 --- Charles De Gaulle was inaugurated as president of France's Fifth Republic.

  • 1962 --- At the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, is exhibited for the first time in America. Over 2,000 dignitaries, including President John F. Kennedy, came out that evening to view the famous painting. The next day, the exhibit opened to the public, and during the next three weeks an estimated 500,000 people came to see it. The painting then traveled to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was seen by another million people.

  • 1964 --- President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty.

  • 1975 --- Ella Grasso became the governor of Connecticut. She was the first woman to become a governor of a state without a husband preceding her in the governor’s chair.

  • 1992 --- President George Bush (I) fell suddenly ill at a state dinner in Japan. The Prez became pale, slumped in his chair and promptly vomited on the Japanese Prime Minister. What must have made this even more enjoyable for Mr. Bush is the fact that all of this was recorded on video tape for future generations.

  • 1994 --- Tonya Harding won the ladies' U.S. Figure Skating Championship in Detroit, MI, a day after Nancy Kerrigan dropped out because of a clubbing attack that injured her right knee. The U.S. Figure Skating Association later took the title from Harding because of her involvement in the attack.

  • 1999 --- The top two executives of Salt Lake City’s Olympic organizing committee resigned amid investigations into how far city boosters stooped to win the 2002 Winter Games. Investigators found boosters gave IOC members cash payments up to $70,000 and expensive gifts; and paid educational, travel, housing and medical costs of IOC members and their families. The possibility that prostitutes were hired for IOC members was also under investigation.

  • 2009 --- In Egypt, archeologists entered a 4,300 year old pyramid and discovered the mummy of Queen Sesheshet.

  • Birthdays
  • Emily Greene Balch
  • Elvis Presley
  • Shirley Bassey
  • Soupy Sales
  • Stephen J Hawking
  • Bill Graham
  • Charles Osgood
  • Bob Eubanks
  • David Bowie
  • R Kelly
  • Evelyn Wood
  • Jose Ferrer
  • Gen James Longstreet
  • Larry Storch
  • Ron Moody
  • Sander Vanocur
  • Anthony Gourdine
  • Yvette Mimieux
  • Alvan F Burke Jr