- 196th Day of 2014 / 169 Remaining
- Autumn Begins in 69 Days
- Sunrise:6:00
- Sunset:8:31
- 14 Hours 31 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:10:48pm
- Moon Set:9:56am
- Moon Phase: 84%
- Full Moon
- July 12 @ 4:26 am
- Full Buck Moon
- Full Thunder Moon
- Full Hay Moon
July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also named for the thunderstorms that are most common during this time. And in some areas it was called the Full Hay Moon.
- Tides
- High:1:04am/2:30pm
- Low:7:41am/8:09pm
- Holidays
- National Tapioca Pudding Day
- Gummi Worm Day
- St Swithin’s Day-United Kingdom
- On This Day In …
- 1789 --- The electors of Paris set up a "Commune" to live without the authority of the government.
- 1789 --- One day after the fall of the Bastille marked the beginning of a new revolutionary regime in France, the French aristocrat and hero of the American War for Independence, Marie-Joseph Paul Roch Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, becomes the colonel-general of the National Guard of Paris by acclamation. Lafayette served as a human link between America and France in what is sometimes known as The Age of Revolutions.
- 1806 --- Zebulon Pike, the U.S. Army officer who in 1805 led an exploring party in search of the source of the Mississippi River, sets off with a new expedition to explore the American Southwest. Pike was instructed to seek out headwaters of the Arkansas and Red rivers and to investigate Spanish settlements in New Mexico.
- 1869 --- Hippolyte Mege Mouries patented margarine. Emperor Napoleon III had offered a prize for a suitable substitute for butter, for use by the French Navy.
- 1876 --- George Washington Bradley of St. Louis pitched the first no-hitter in baseball in a 2-0 win over Hartford.
- 1912 --- Jim Thorpe won the decathlon in the Olympic games in Stockholm, Sweden.
- 1941 --- Master spy Juan Pujol Garcia, nicknamed "Garbo," sends his first communique to Germany from Britain. The question was: Who was he spying for? Juan Garcia, a Spaniard, ran an elaborate multiethnic spy network that included a Dutch airline steward, a British censor for the Ministry of Information, a Cabinet office clerk, a U.S. soldier in England, and a Welshman sympathetic to fascism. All were engaged in gathering secret information on the British-Allied war effort, which was then transmitted back to Berlin. Garcia was in the pay of the Nazis. The Germans knew him as "Arabel," whereas the English knew him as Garbo. The English knew a lot more about him, in fact, than the Germans, as Garcia was a British double agent. None of Garcia's spies were real, and the disinformation he transmitted to Germany was fabricated—phony military "secrets" that the British wanted planted with the Germans to divert them from genuine military preparations and plans. Among the most effective of Garcia's deceptions took place in June 1944, when he managed to convince Hitler that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was just a "diversionary maneuver designed to draw off enemy reserves in order to make a decisive attack in another place"—playing right into the mindset of German intelligence, which had already suspected that this might be the case.
- 1964 --- Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) is nominated by the Republican Party to run for president. During the subsequent campaign, Goldwater said that he thought the United States should do whatever was necessary to win in Vietnam. At one point, he talked about the possibility of using low-yield atomic weapons to defoliate enemy infiltration routes, but he never actually advocated the use of nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia. Although Goldwater later clarified his position, the Democrats very effectively portrayed him as a trigger-happy warmonger. This reputation, whether deserved or not, was a key factor in his crushing defeat at the hands of Lyndon B Johnson, who won 61 percent of the vote to Goldwater's 39 percent.
- 1965 --- The unmanned spacecraft Mariner 4 passes over Mars at an altitude of 6,000 feet and sends back to Earth the first close-up images of the red planet. Launched in November 1964, Mariner 4 carried a television camera and six other science instruments to study Mars and interplanetary space within the solar system. Reaching Mars on July 14, 1965, the spacecraft began sending back television images of the planet just after midnight on July 15. The pictures--nearly 22 in all--revealed a vast, barren wasteland of craters and rust-colored sand, dismissing 19th-century suspicions that an advanced civilization might exist on the planet. The canals that American astronomer Percival Lowell spied with his telescope in 1890 proved to be an optical illusion, but ancient natural waterways of some kind did seem to be evident in some regions of the planet.
- 1968 --- Commercial air travel began between the United States and the U.S.S.R. with the first plane, a Soviet Aeroflot jet, landing at Kennedy International Airport in New York.
- 1971 --- In a surprise announcement, President Nixon says that he will visit Beijing, China, before May 1972. The news, issued simultaneously in Beijing and the United States, stunned the world. Nixon reported that he was visiting in order "to seek normalization of relations between the two countries and to exchange views on questions of concern to both sides." Privately, Nixon hoped that achieving a rapprochement with China, North Vietnam's major benefactor, would convince Hanoi to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the Vietnam War. The announcement was preceded by an April 6 invitation for the U.S. Table Tennis team to visit China, and by Nixon's end to the 20-year U.S. trade embargo against China. On July 22, the North Vietnamese announced that they viewed Nixon's visit to China as a divisive attempt by the United States to drive a wedge between Hanoi and Beijing.
- 1972 --- Elton John landed at the top spot on the Billboard album chart for the first time as Honky Chateau made it to the top for a five-week stay.
- 1973 --- For the first time in two decades, a baseball pitcher won two no-hitters in a season. Nolan Ryan, of the California Angels did the trick with his second no-hit victory of the season, a 6-0 romp over the Detroit Tigers. Ryan pitched his first no-hitter of the season against the Kansas City Royals on May 15th.
- 1980 --- Linda Ronstadt made her dramatic debut in "The Pirates Of Penzance" at the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.
- 1996 --- MSNBC, a 24-hour all-news network, made its debut on cable TV and the Internet.
- 1997 --- Former Miller Brewing Company executive Jerold Mackenzie was vindicated by a jury in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Mackenzie had brought a suit against Miller after the company fired him from his $95,000-a-year job for sexual harassment. He had been commenting on the Seinfeld episode, The Junior Mint, where Seinfeld’s TV character can’t remember the name of his new girlfriend -- only that it rhymes with a female body part. One of Mackenzie’s female co-workers complained to the Miller human resources director after she heard Mackenzie joking about the show.
- 2002 --- John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," accepts a plea-bargain deal in which he pleads guilty to one count of supplying services to the Taliban and carrying weapons. Under the terms of the deal, Walker Lindh agreed to serve 20 years in prison and cooperate with the American government in their investigation into the terrorist group al Qaeda. In return, all other charges against him were dropped, including one count of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals.
- 2010 --- BP stopped the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico after 85 days using a 75-ton cap lowered onto the well earlier in the week.
- Birthdays
- Rembrandt Van Rijn
- Dame Iris Murdoch
- Arianna Huffington
- Millie Jackson
- Jan-Michael Vincent
- Linda Ronstadt
- Forest Whittaker
- Brigette Nielsen
- Philly Joe Jones
- Lolita Davidovich
- Clement Moore
