- 276th Day of 2012 /90 Remaining
- 80 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:7:07
- Sunset:6:51
- 11 Hours 44 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:8:10pm
- Moon Set:9:37am
- Moon’s Phase: 93 %
- 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:1:00am/12:23pm
- Low:6:24am/7:04pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:0.03
- Last Year:0.11
- Normal To Date:0.20
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Country Inn, Bed-and-Breakfast Day
- Guardian Angels Day
- Intergeneration Day
- National Custodial Workers' Day
- National French Fried Scallops Day
- Phileas Fogg's Wager Day
(Anniversary, from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, of the famous wager upon which the book is based: “I will bet twenty thousand pounds against anyone who wishes, that I will make the tour of the world in eighty days or less.” Then, consulting a pocket almanac, Phileas Fogg said: “As today is Wednesday, the second of October, I shall be due in London, in this very room of the Reform Club, on Saturday, the twenty-first of December, at a quarter before nine PM; or else the twenty thousand pounds . . . will belong to you.”)
- UN International Day of Non-Violence
- World Farm Animals Day
- Independence Day-Guinea
- Feast of Gedalya-Jewish
- On This Day In …
- 1835 --- Growing tensions between Mexico and Texas erupt into violence when Mexican soldiers attempt to disarm the people of Gonzales, sparking the Texan war for independence. Texas--or Tejas as the Mexicans called it--had technically been a part of the Spanish empire since the 17th century. However, even as late as the 1820s, there were only about 3,000 Spanish-Mexican settlers in Texas, and Mexico City's hold on the territory was tenuous at best. After winning its own independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico welcomed large numbers of Anglo-American immigrants into Texas in the hopes they would become loyal Mexican citizens and keep the territory from falling into the hands of the United States. During the next decade men like Stephen Austin brought more than 25,000 people to Texas, most of them Americans. But while these emigrants legally became Mexican citizens, they continued to speak English, formed their own schools, and had closer trading ties to the United States than to Mexico. In 1835, the president of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, overthrew the constitution and appointed himself dictator. Recognizing that the "American" Texans were likely to use his rise to power as an excuse to secede, Santa Anna ordered the Mexican military to begin disarming the Texans whenever possible. This proved more difficult than expected, and on October 2, 1835, Mexican soldiers attempting to take a small cannon from the village of Gonzales encountered stiff resistance from a hastily assembled militia of Texans. After a brief fight, the Mexicans retreated and the Texans kept their cannon. The determined Texans would continue to battle Santa Ana and his army for another year and a half before winning their independence and establishing the Republic of Texas.
- 1836 --- Charles Darwin returned to England after 5 years of acquiring knowledge around the world about fauna, flora, wildlife and geology. He used the information to develop his "theory of evolution" which he unveiled in his 1859 book entitled The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
- 1920 --- The Cincinnati Reds and the Pittsburgh Pirates played the only triple-header in baseball history. The Reds won 2 of the 3 games.
- 1924 --- The Geneva Protocol adopted the League of Nations.
- 1950 --- The renowned comic strip Peanuts, from the pen of cartoonist Charles Schulz, began in seven U.S. newspapers. The strip, for the United Features Syndicate, had only three characters at its inception: Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty (Reichardt) and Shermy. The world’s most famous beagle, Snoopy, made his first appearance on October 4th. Later, we were introduced to Linus, Lucy Van Pelt, Sally and Schroeder; and learned that the Peanuts gang came from the California town of Sebastopol, which really exists. Charlie Brown starred in his own Broadway musical, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, along with the rest of the gang; and in several movies; and in several TV specials. A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and A Charlie Brown Christmas are rerun on TV year after year, no doubt attracting new audiences each time around. Snoopy, everyone’s favorite character in the strip, became so famous that the comic strip, although titled, Peanuts, is often referred to as Snoopy.
- 1953 --- Friday nights were Person to Person nights on CBS, beginning this night. Edward R. Murrow, with lit cigarette in hand, premiered the popular interview program which would establish him as a TV icon.
- 1959 --- “There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fear and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the twilight zone.” Familiar words now, but they were first spoken this Friday night on CBS-TV at 10 p.m. by the creator and host of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling.
- 1962 --- U.S. ports were closed to nations that allowed their ships to carry arms to Cuba, ships that had docked in a socialist country were prohibited from docking in the United States during that voyage, and the transport of U.S. goods was banned on ships owned by companies that traded with Cuba.
- 1967 --- Chief Justice Earl Warren swears in Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. As chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s and '50s, Marshall was the architect and executor of the legal strategy that ended the era of official racial segregation. The great-grandson of a slave, Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908. After being rejected from the University of Maryland Law School on account of his race, he was accepted at all-black Howard University in Washington, D.C. At Howard, he studied under the tutelage of civil liberties lawyer Charles H. Houston and in 1933 graduated first in his class. In 1936, he joined the legal division of the NAACP, of which Houston was director, and two years later succeeded his mentor in the organization's top legal post. As the NAACP's chief counsel from 1938 to 1961, he argued more than a dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully challenging racial segregation, most notably in public education. He won nearly all of these cases, including a groundbreaking victory in 1954's Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation violated the equal rights clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and was thus illegal. The decision served as a great impetus for the civil rights movement and ultimately led to the abolishment of segregation in all public facilities and accommodations. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals, but his nomination was opposed by many Southern senators, and he was not confirmed until the following year. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall to be solicitor general of the United States. In this position, he again successfully argued cases before the Supreme Court, this time on behalf of the U.S. government. On June 13, 1967, Johnson nominated Marshall to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark. Of his decision to appoint Marshall, Johnson said it was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man, and the right place." After a heated debate, the Senate confirmed Marshall's nomination by a vote of 69 to 11 on August 30. Marshall was officially sworn in to the nation's highest court at the opening ceremony of the Supreme Court term on October 2. During his 24 years on the high court, Associate Justice Marshall consistently challenged discrimination based on race or sex, opposed the death penalty, and vehemently defended affirmative action. He supported the rights of criminal defendants and defended the right to privacy. As appointments by a largely Republican White House changed the ideology of the Supreme Court, Marshall found his liberal views increasingly in the minority. He retired in 1991 because of declining health and died in 1993.
- 1967 --- The Grateful Dead was arrested when a small amount of marijuana was found with the band. Rolling Stone sent photographer Baron Wolman to photograph the band when it posted bail. The only problem was that no one yet had heard of Rolling Stone. Those who did assumed that it was a fanzine for Mick Jagger fans. Wolman had trouble getting credentials for the shoot because he didn’t even have the magazine’s first issue to show as proof. The day Grateful Dead went to post bail, their lawyers argued that if the cops busted everyone who smoked pot in San Francisco there wouldn’t be any doctors or lawyers left in the city. “They were having a great time at the press conference,” Wolman recalls. “They were just as much interested in having fun as playing music. On the table in front of them they had a big bowl of whipped cream. One of the band members said to the media, ‘The first one of you who asks a stupid question is going to get a cream pie to the face.’ ”
- 2001 --- NATO, for the first time, invoked a treaty clause that stated that an attack on one member is an attack on all members. The act was in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.
- Birthdays
- Mahatma (Mohandas) K Gandhi
- Groucho (Julius) Marx
- Don McLean
- Rex Reed
- Annie Leibovitz
- Nat Turner
- Bud Abbott
- Graham Greene
- Maury Wills
- Kelly Ripa
- Richard III
- Donna Karan
- Sting