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Tuesday October 16, 2012

  • 290th Day of 2012 / 76 Remaining
  • 66 Days Until The First Day of Winter

  • Sunrise:7:20
  • Sunset:6:31
  • 11 Hours 11 Minutes of Daylight

  • Moon Rise: 8:48am
  • Moon Set: 7:23pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 2 %

  • The Next Full Moon
  • October 29 @ 12:50 pm
  • Full Hunter’s Moon
  • Full Harvest Moon
  • This full Moon is often referred to as the Full Hunter’s Moon, Blood Moon, or Sanguine Moon. Many moons ago, Native Americans named this bright moon for obvious reasons. The leaves are falling from trees, the deer are fattened, and it’s time to begin storing up meat for the long winter ahead. Because the fields were traditionally reaped in late September or early October, hunters could easily see fox and other animals that come out to glean from the fallen grains. Probably because of the threat of winter looming close, the Hunter’s Moon is generally accorded with special honor, historically serving as an important feast day in both Western Europe and among many Native American tribes.

  • Tides
  • High: 12:01am/1:;33am
  • Low: 5:23am/6:13pm

  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:0.04
  • Last Year:1.49
  • Normal To Date:0.64
  • Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

  • Holidays
  • Dictionary Day
  • National Boss Day
  • Ether Day
  • Feral Cat Day
  • National Liqueur Day

  • UN World Food Day
     
  • National School Lunch Week

  • On This Day In …
  • 1793 --- Nine months after the execution of her husband, the former King Louis XVI of France, Marie-Antoinette follows him to the guillotine. The daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, she married Louis in 1770 to strengthen the French-Austrian alliance. At a time of economic turmoil in France, she lived extravagantly and encouraged her husband to resist reform of the monarchy. In one episode, she allegedly responded to news that the French peasantry had no bread to eat by callously replying, "Let them eat cake." The increasing revolutionary uproar convinced the king and queen to attempt an escape to Austria in 1791, but they were captured by revolutionary forces and carried back to Paris. In 1792, the French monarchy was abolished, and Louis and Marie-Antoinette were condemned for treason.

  • 1846 --- The painkiller, >ether, was demonstrated successfully for the first time -- in Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. The drug was administered by William T.G. Morton, a ‘dentist’ (he never attended dental or medical school), of Charlestown, MA.

  • 1854 --- An obscure lawyer and Congressional hopeful from the state of Illinois named Abraham Lincoln delivers a speech regarding the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Congress had passed five months earlier. In his speech, the future president denounced the act and outlined his views on slavery, which he called "immoral." Under the terms of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, two new territories—Kansas and Nebraska—would be allowed into the Union and each territory's citizens would be given the power to determine whether slavery would be allowed within the territory's borders. It was believed that the act would set a precedent for determining the legality of slavery in other new territories. Controversy over the act influenced political races across the country that fall. Abolitionists, like Lincoln, hoped to convince lawmakers in the new territories to reject slavery. Lincoln, who was practicing law at the time, campaigned on behalf of abolitionist Republicans in Illinois and attacked the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He denounced members of the Democratic Party for backing a law that "assumes there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man by another." He believed that the law went against the founding American principle that "all men are created equal." Lincoln was an abolitionist at heart, but he realized that the outlawing of slavery in states where it already existed might lead to civil war. Instead, he advocated outlawing the spread of slavery to new states. He hoped this plan would preserve the Union and slowly eliminate slavery by confining it to the South, where, he believed, "it would surely die a slow death."

  • 1859 --- Abolitionist John Brown leads a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in an attempt to start an armed slave revolt and destroy the institution of slavery. Born in Connecticut in 1800 and raised in Ohio, Brown came from a staunchly Calvinist and antislavery family. He spent much of his life failing at a variety of businesses--he declared bankruptcy at age 42 and had more than 20 lawsuits filed against him. In 1837, his life changed irrevocably when he attended an abolition meeting in Cleveland, during which he was so moved that he publicly announced his dedication to destroying the institution of slavery. As early as 1848 he was formulating a plan to incite an insurrection. In the 1850s, Brown traveled to Kansas with five of his sons to fight against the proslavery forces in the contest over that territory. On May 21, 1856, proslavery men raided the abolitionist town of Lawrence, and Brown personally sought revenge. On May 25, Brown and his sons attacked three cabins along Pottawatomie Creek. They killed five men with broad swords and triggered a summer of guerilla warfare in the troubled territory. One of Brown's sons was killed in the fighting. By 1857, Brown returned to the East and began raising money to carry out his vision of a mass uprising of slaves. He secured the backing of six prominent abolitionists, known as the "Secret Six," and assembled an invasion force. His "army" grew to include 22 men, including five black men and three of Brown's sons. The group rented a Maryland farm near Harpers Ferry and prepared for the assault. On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and his band overran the arsenal. Some of his men rounded up a handful of hostages, including a few slaves. Word of the raid spread, and by morning Brown and his men were surrounded. A company of U.S. marines arrived on October 17, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. On the morning of October 19, the soldiers overran Brown and his followers. Ten of his men were killed, including two of his sons. The wounded Brown was tried by the state of Virginia for treason and murder, and he was found guilty on November 2.The 59-year-old abolitionist went to the gallows on December 2, 1859. Before his execution, he handed his guard a slip of paper that read, "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." It was a prophetic statement. Although the raid failed, it inflamed sectional tensions and raised the stakes for the 1860 presidential election. Brown's raid helped make any further accommodation between North and South nearly impossible and thus became an important impetus of the Civil War.

  • 1916 --- Margaret Sanger, Fania Mindell and Ethel Burne, all from New York, decided that the poor should have some help in controlling the size of their families. They felt they could help if they opened a birth control clinic because “no social progress is possible, especially where poverty is a factor, unless the size of families is limited.” Talk about being way ahead of your time. They opened the doors of the first such clinic in the United States, right smack in the middle of Brooklyn at 46 Amboy Street. Ms. Sanger served 30 days in jail for her bold action. A year earlier she had been indicted for using the U.S. mail to disseminate birth control information in three languages throughout the United States. A public nurse, Margaret Sanger went on to become the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation in 1953.

  • 1928 --- The frosted electric light bulb was patented. No, it wasn’t the work of Thomas Edison, Westinghouse, General Electric, or any of his army, either. It was one Marvin Pipkin who lit up at receiving this patent.

  • 1962 --- The New York Yankees scored the game’s only run in the fourth inning of World Series game 7. In the bottom of the ninth, pinch-hitter Matty Alou, batting for reliever Billy O'Dell, led off the inning with a bunt hit after first having a foul ball dropped, but Terry struck out the next two batters, Felipe Alou and Chick Hiller. Willie Mays hit a double into the right-field corner, but Maris played the carom well, then hit cut-off man Richardson with a throw that was quickly relayed home. Alou, aware of Maris' strong arm, stopped at third. Facing Willie McCovey with two outs, Terry elected to pitch to him rather than walk the bases loaded, which would have brought up slugger Orlando Cepeda. Terry's inside fastball on the second pitch handcuffed McCovey, who nonetheless adjusted his bat in mid-swing to extend his arms and hit what he later claimed was the hardest ball he had ever struck. The line drive appeared at first to be going over the head of a well-positioned Richardson, but was in fact sinking from topspin and Richardson made the catch without leaping to end the game. Terry was named the World Series MVP. The Yankees won their 20th World Series; they would not win another until 1977. The Giants would not return to the World Series until 1989, when they would lose to the Oakland A's in a series interrupted by a major earthquake.

  • 1964 --- China detonated its first atomic bomb.

  • 1965 --- The Beatles were decorated with the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth.

  • 1969 --- The once-lowly New York Mets won their first World Series baseball championship. The ‘Miracle Mets’ were 100-to-1 long shots at the beginning of the season. Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner were at the mike on radio for one of the most exciting finishes in baseball history.

  • 1984 --- Bishop Desmond Tutu, General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “his role as a unifying leader figure in the campaign to resolve the problem of apartheid in South Africa.”

  • 2002 --- The Arthur Andersen accounting firm was sentenced to five years probation and fined $500,000 for obstructing a federeal investigation of the energy company Enron.

  • Birthdays
  • Bob Weir
  • Angela Lansbury
  • Bob Mould
  • Eugene O'Neill
  • Oscar Wilde
  • Flea (Michael Peter Balzary)
  • Suzanne Somers
  • Tim Robbins
  • Wendy Wilson
  • Sue Bird
  • Noah Webster
  • Michael Collins
  • David Ben-Gurion
  • Nico (Velvet Underground)
  • Albert Franz Doppler