- 71st Day of 2013 / 294 Remaining
- 8 Days Until The First Day of Spring
- Sunrise:7:24
- Sunset:7:15
- 11 Hours Minutes of 51 Daylight
- Moon Rise:7:36am
- Moon Set:8:33pm
- Moon’s Phase:1 %
- The Next Full Moon
- March 27 @ 2:30am
- Full Worm Moon
- Full Crust Moon
- Full Lenten Moon
- Full Crow Moon
- Full Sap 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:1:00am/1:13pm
- Low:6:54am/7:01pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:14.59
- Last Year:7.37
- Normal To Date:19.67
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Employee Day
- Girl Scout Day
- Genealogy Day
- National Baked Scallops Day
- Fiesta de las Fallas-Spain
- Independence Day-Mauritius
- Moshoeshoe's Day-Lesotho
- National Day-Gabon
- International Fanny Pack Day
- Arbor Day-China
- Youth Day-Zambia
- On This Day In …
- 1889 --- Almon B. Strowger stepped up to the counter at the U.S. Patent Office to file for his invention, the automatic telephone system. The system was installed in Laporte, IN in 1892. It worked, but not well enough. Mr. Bell’s invention was deemed much more reliable. Good thing or we would have been complaining about Ma Stowger for years and years.
- 1894 --- Coca Cola was first bottled by Joseph A. Biedenham of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Before that it was only mixed to order at the soda fountain.
- 1912 --- Girl Scouts of the USA was founded. Juliette Gordon Low of Savannah, Georgia is the person credited with starting this group for young girls, figuring, of course, that if there were Boy Scouts, why not Girl Scouts, too? However, at first, the girls weren’t called Girl Scouts at all. They were called Girl Guides until the name was officially changed a short time after the group’s founding. Volunteer, help a friend, set an example and complete a project, then pass those chocolate mint and peanut butter-filled cookies, please.
- 1923 --- Dr. Lee DeForest demonstrated phonofilm. It was his technique for putting sound on motion picture film.
- 1930 --- Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi begins a defiant march to the sea in protest of the British monopoly on salt, his boldest act of civil disobedience yet against British rule in India. Britain's Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet. Citizens were forced to buy the vital mineral from the British, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also exerted a heavy salt tax. Although India's poor suffered most under the tax, Indians required salt. Defying the Salt Acts, Gandhi reasoned, would be an ingeniously simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently. He declared resistance to British salt policies to be the unifying theme for his new campaign of satyagraha, or mass civil disobedience. On March 12, Gandhi set out from Sabarmati with 78 followers on a 241-mile march to the coastal town of Dandi on the Arabian Sea. There, Gandhi and his supporters were to defy British policy by making salt from seawater. All along the way, Gandhi addressed large crowds, and with each passing day an increasing number of people joined the salt satyagraha. By the time they reached Dandi on April 5, Gandhi was at the head of a crowd of tens of thousands. Gandhi spoke and led prayers and early the next morning walked down to the sea to make salt. He had planned to work the salt flats on the beach, encrusted with crystallized sea salt at every high tide, but the police had forestalled him by crushing the salt deposits into the mud. Nevertheless, Gandhi reached down and picked up a small lump of natural salt out of the mud--and British law had been defied. At Dandi, thousands more followed his lead, and in the coastal cities of Bombay and Karachi, Indian nationalists led crowds of citizens in making salt. Civil disobedience broke out all across India, soon involving millions of Indians, and British authorities arrested more than 60,000 people. Gandhi himself was arrested on May 5, but the satyagraha continued without him.
- 1933 --- E ight days after his inauguration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gives his first national radio address or "fireside chat," broadcast directly from the White House. Roosevelt began that first address simply: "I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking." He went on to explain his recent decision to close the nation's banks in order to stop a surge in mass withdrawals by panicked investors worried about possible bank failures. The banks would be reopening the next day, Roosevelt said, and he thanked the public for their "fortitude and good temper" during the "banking holiday." At the time, the U.S. was at the lowest point of the Great Depression, with between 25 and 33 percent of the work force unemployed. The nation was worried, and Roosevelt's address was designed to ease fears and to inspire confidence in his leadership. Roosevelt went on to deliver 30 more of these broadcasts between March 1933 and June 1944. They reached an astonishing number of American households, 90 percent of which owned a radio at the time. Journalist Robert Trout coined the phrase "fireside chat" to describe Roosevelt's radio addresses, invoking an image of the president sitting by a fire in a living room, speaking earnestly to the American people about his hopes and dreams for the nation. In fact, Roosevelt took great care to make sure each address was accessible and understandable to ordinary Americans, regardless of their level of education. He used simple vocabulary and relied on folksy anecdotes or analogies to explain the often complex issues facing the country. Over the course of his historic 12-year presidency, Roosevelt used the chats to build popular support for his groundbreaking New Deal policies, in the face of stiff opposition from big business and other groups. After World War II began, he used them to explain his administration's wartime policies to the American people. The success of Roosevelt's chats was evident not only in his three re-elections, but also in the millions of letters that flooded the White House. Farmers, business owners, men, women, rich, poor--most of them expressed the feeling that the president had entered their home and spoken directly to them. In an era when presidents had previously communicated with their citizens almost exclusively through spokespeople and journalists, it was an unprecedented step.
- 1947 --- President Truman established what became known as the Truman Doctrine to help Greece and Turkey resist Communism.
- 1951 --- The comic strip, Dennis the Menace, appeared for the first time in 16 newspapers across the U.S. The strip became an international favorite in thousands of newspapers and spawned a CBS-TV program that starred Jay North as Dennis. The series lasted for several seasons and is still seen in syndicated re-runs. A somewhat popular movie starring Walter Matthau as Mr. Wilson and Christopher Lloyd as the bad guy was released in 1993.
- 1955 --- One of the great groups of jazz appeared for the first time at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The Dave Brubeck Quartet presented a magnificent concert for jazz fans. Joining with Brubeck, in what would become one of the most popular concert draws on college campuses, were names that would become legends in their own right, including Paul Desmond on alto sax, Joe Morello on drums and Eugene Wright on bass.
- 1987 --- The musical "Les Miserables" opened on Broadway.
- 1993 --- Following her confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Janet Reno is sworn in as the first female attorney general of the United States. Sworn in to the office on March 12, 1993, Janet Reno presided over a period of falling national crime rates, and her Dade Country programs of judicial reform proved effective on the national level. However, only two months after assuming office, Reno was severely criticized for failing to prevent the disastrous end of the Waco standoff in Texas and in later years was also accused by some of protecting President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore from investigation on various charges of impropriety.
- 1994 --- A photo by Marmaduke Wetherell of the Loch Ness monster was confirmed to be a hoax. The photo was taken of a toy submarine with a head and neck attached.
- 1998 --- Astronomers cancelled a warning that a mile-wide asteroid might collide with Earth saying that calculations had been off by 600,000 miles.
- 1999 --- Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic became members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). All three countries were members of the former Warsaw Pact.
- 2003 --- The Chinese government ordered the Rolling Stones to eliminate four songs from their upcoming performances in Shanghai and Beijing. The banned songs were "Brown Sugar," "Honky Tonk Women," "Beast of Burden," and "Let's Spend the Night Together."
- 2009 --- Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty in New York to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in Wall Street history.
- Birthdays
- Jack Kerouac
- Edward Albee
- Elaine de Kooning
- Andrew Young
- Barbara Feldon
- Al Jarreau
- Liza Minelli
- James Taylor
- Marlon Jackson
- Alfred Ochs
- Clement Studebaker
- Vaslav Nijinsky
- Christian K Nelson
- Wally Schirra
- Gordon MacRae
- Bill Payne
- Adam Clayton
- Mitt Romney