Tuesday June 26, 2012

• 178^th Day of 2012 / 188 Remaining
• 88 Days Until Autumn Begins

• Sunrise:5:50
• Sunset:8:36
• 14 Hours 46 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:1:03pm
• Moon Set:12:15am
• Moon’s Phase: First Quarter

• The Next Full Moon
• July 3 @ 11:51am
• 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 often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.

• Tides
• High:3:57am/5:07pm
• Low:10:09am/11:39pm

• Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
• This Year:15.80
• Last Year:28.51
• Normal To Date:23.80
• Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80

• Holidays
• America's Kid's Day
• Descendants Day
• Log Cabin Day
• National Chocolate Pudding Day
• Abner Doubleday Day
• Bar Code Day

• UN International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking
• UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
• Independence Day-Madagascar
• National Flag Day-Romania
• Independence Day North, ex-British Somaliland-Somalia
• National Canoe Day-Canada

• On This Day In …
• 1284 --- The Pied Piper exacted his revenge upon the German town of Hamelin this day. The townspeople had promised to pay the piper a large fee if he could rid their town the nasty rats running all over the place. He had played his trusty pipe and the rats had followed him out of town and into the River Weser. But once the rodents were eliminated, the local folks decided not to pay after all. The piper was not pleased and repaid the townspeople by playing his pipe for the children of Hamelin, just like he had done for the rats. And just like the rats, the children followed him out of town. The Pied Piper of Hamelin led the kiddies into a hole in a hillside. They were never seen again.

• 1819 --- The bicycle was patented by W.K. Clarkson, Jr. of New York City.

• 1870 --- The original wooden boardwalk in Atlantic City was built. It was taken up during the winter months, and was replaced with a larger boardwalk in 1880, which was destroyed in a hurricane in 1889. It was rebuilt again, and in 1898 rebuilt with steel.

• 1894 --- The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, called a general strike in sympathy with Pullman workers.

• 1925 --- Charlie Chaplin's comedy "The Gold Rush" premiered in Hollywood.

• 1945 --- The Charter for the United Nations is signed in San Francisco. The United Nations was born of perceived necessity, as a means of better arbitrating international conflict and negotiating peace than was provided for by the old League of Nations. The growing Second World War became the real impetus for the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union to begin formulating the original U.N. Declaration, signed by 26 nations in January 1942, as a formal act of opposition to Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Axis Powers. But now that the war—at least in the West—was over, negotiating and maintaining the peace was the practical responsibility of the new U.N. Security Council, made up of the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China. Each would have veto power over the other. A year later, after the war in the East was won as well, Winston Churchill called for the United Nations to employ its Charter in the service of creating a new, united Europe—united in its opposition to communist expansion—East and West. Given the composition of the Security Council, this would prove easier said than done.

• 1959 --- In a ceremony presided over by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II, the St. Lawrence Seaway is officially opened, creating a navigational channel from the Atlantic Ocean to all the Great Lakes. The seaway, made up of a system of canals, locks, and dredged waterways, extends a distance of nearly 2,500 miles, from the Atlantic Ocean through the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Duluth, Minnesota, on Lake Superior. Work on the massive project was initiated by a joint U.S.-Canadian commission in 1954, and five years later, in April 1959, the icebreaker D'Iberville began the first transit of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Since its official opening, more than two billion tons of cargo, with an estimated worth of more than $300 billion, have moved along its canals and channels.

• 1963 --- President John F. Kennedy expresses solidarity with democratic German citizens in a speech on this day in 1963. In front of the Berlin Wall that separated the city into democratic and communist sectors, he declared to the crowd, "Ich bin ein Berliner" or "I am also a citizen of Berlin." In his speech, Kennedy assured West Germans that free nations still stood by the people of the democratically controlled sectors of Berlin who had lived within the hostile borders of East Germany since the end of World War II. Immediately after the war, the city of Berlin was divided into West Berlin, comprised of American, British and French-administered democratic enclaves, and East Berlin, an East German communist-controlled area. In an early confrontation of the Cold War, West Berliners had endured a Soviet-imposed blockade of their part of the city between June 1948 and May 1949 that cut off their food and energy supplies. In response, the Allied Military Air Transport Service had flown food, coal and school supplies into the city in an unprecedented logistical feat known as "Operation Vittles" or the "Berlin Airlift." The problem is that, literally speaking,  Kennedy actually said 'I am a jelly donut' (Ich bin ein Berliner). Of course he meant to say 'I am a Berliner' (Ich bin Berliner). However, 'Ein Berliner' is what Germans call a popular pastry that resembles what we know as a jelly donut.

• 1965 --- Mr. Tambourine Man, by The Byrds, reached the number one spot on the pop music charts. The song was considered by many to be the first folk-rock hit. The tune was written by Bob Dylan, as were two other hits for the group: All I Really Want to Do and My Back Pages. The group of James Roger McGinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Chris Hillman and Mike Clarke charted seven hits. The Byrds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

• 1973 --- Former White House counsel John W. Dean told the Senate Watergate Committee about an "enemies list" kept by the Nixon White House.

• 1974 --- The first supermarket bar code was swiped on a pack of Wrigley's Doublemint Gum, in Troy, Ohio.

• 1985 --- You’ve heard of players, managers and owners being ejected from baseball games, right? But have you ever heard of an organist being given the heave-ho? It happened at Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater, Florida (the home of the Philadelphia Phillies during spring training; a Class A League team uses the stadium the rest of the season). Wilbur Snapp played Three Blind Mice following a call by umpire Keith O’Connor. The umpire was not amused and saw to it that Mr. Snapp was sent to the showers.

• 1992 --- Female temperance patrols in India’s state of Manipur reported they had grown to 30,000 members and were successful in reducing male drinking problems, which had led to wife-beating and unemployment. The women captured drinkers, tied them naked to a donkey, and paraded them through town. And promised to do it again if they kept drinking.

• 1993 --- In retaliation for an Iraqi plot to assassinate former U.S. President George Bush during his April visit to Kuwait, President Bill Clinton orders U.S. warships to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi intelligence headquarters in downtown Baghdad. On April 13, 1993, the day before George Bush was scheduled to visit Kuwait and be honored for his victory in the Persian Gulf War, Kuwaiti authorities foiled a car-bomb plot to assassinate him. Fourteen suspects, most of them Iraqi nationals, were arrested, and the next day their massive car bomb was discovered in Kuwait City. Citing "compelling evidence" of the direct involvement of Iraqi intelligence in the assassination attempt, President Clinton ordered a retaliatory attack against their alleged headquarters in the Iraqi capital on June 26. Twenty-three Tomahawk missiles, each costing more than a million dollars, were fired off the USS Peterson in the Red Sea and the cruiser USS Chancellorsville in the Persian Gulf, destroying the building.

• 1997 --- The U.S. Supreme Court upheld state laws that allow for a ban on doctor-assisted suicides.

• 1997 --- The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that made it illegal to distribute indecent material on the Internet.

• 1998 --- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that employers are always potentially liable for supervisor's sexual misconduct toward an employee.

• 2002 --- The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court in San Francisco ruled that the “under God” phrase (inserted by Congress in 1954) in the Pledge of Allegiance is an endorsement of religion and violates the U.S. Constitution.

• Birthdays
• Chris Isaak
• Patty Smyth
• Babe Didrikson Zaharias
• Mick Jones(The Clash)
• Abner Doubleday
• Pearl Buck
• Peter Lorre
• Col. Tom Parker
• Eleanor Parker
• Billy Davis ( The 5th Dimension)