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Tuesday October 21, 2014

  • National Mammography Day
  • Count Your Buttons Day
  • National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day
  • Reptile Awareness Day
  • Apple Day

  • Army Day-Honduras
  • Revolution Day-Somalia
  • Naval Day-Egypt

  • On This Day
  • 1797 --- The USS Constitution, a 44-gun U.S. Navy frigate built to fight Barbary pirates off the coast of Tripoli, is launched in Boston Harbor. The vessel performed commendably during the Barbary conflicts, and in 1805 a peace treaty with Tripoli was signed on the Constitution's deck.
  • 1805 --- The Battle of Trafalgar.  Admiral Horatio Nelson's defeat of the combined French and Spanish Navies established Britain as the dominant world naval power for a century. Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar ensured that Napoleon would never invade Britain. Nelson, hailed as the savior of his nation, was given a magnificent funeral in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. A column was erected to his memory in the newly named Trafalgar Square, and numerous streets were renamed in his honor.

  • 1849 --- The first tattooed man, James F. O’Connell, was put on exhibition at the Franklin Theatre in New York City. 

  • 1858 --- The Can-Can was performed for the first time in Paris. 

  • 1879 --- After 14 months of experimenting in Menlo Park, NJ, Thomas Alva Edison succeeded in producing a working prototype of the electric, incandescent lamp. It could burn for thirteen and a half hours.

  • 1908 --- A "Saturday Evening Post" advertisement offered a chance to buy a two-sided record from Columbia. 

  • 1917 --- American soldiers first saw action in World War I on the front lines near Nancy, France.

  • 1925 --- The U.S. Treasury Department announced that it had fined 29,620 people for prohibition (of alcohol) violations. 

  • 1927 --- In New York City, construction began on the George Washington Bridge. 

  • 1950 --- Chinese forces invaded Tibet.

  • 1957 --- "Jailhouse Rock", the Elvis Presley film, premiered. 

  • 1958 --- Orchestral strings were used for the first time in a rock and roll tune. Buddy Holly recorded It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, written by Paul Anka. Sadly, it would be Holly’s last studio session. The song wasn’t released until after his death in February of 1959.

  • 1959 --- The Guggenheim Museum was opened to the public in New York. The building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Mining tycoon Solomon R. Guggenheim began collecting art seriously when he retired in the 1930s. With the help of Hilla Rebay, a German baroness and artist, Guggenheim displayed his purchases for the first time in 1939 in a former car showroom in New York. Within a few years, the collection—including works by Vasily 
    Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Marc Chagall—had outgrown the small space. In 1943, Rebay contacted architect Frank Lloyd Wright and asked him to take on the work of designing not just a museum, but a "temple of spirit," where people would learn to see art in a new way. 

  • 1959 --- President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order transferring the brilliant rocket designer Wernher von Braun and his team from the U.S. Army to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Von Braun, the mastermind of the U.S. space program, had developed the lethal V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany during World War II.

  • 1960 --- The fourth -- and last -- debate preceding the presidential election between U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy and U.S. Vice President Richard M. Nixon was televised from New York City.

  • 1965 --- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Robert Burns Woodward for “for his outstanding achievements in the art of organic synthesis.”

  • 1966 --- An avalanche of mud and rocks buries a school in Aberfan, Wales, killing 148 people, mostly young students. The elementary school was located below a hill where a mining operation dumped its waste.

  • 1967 --- In Washington, D.C. nearly 100,000 people gather to protest the American war effort in Vietnam. More than 50,000 of the protesters marched to the Pentagon to ask for an end to the conflict. The protest was the most dramatic sign of waning U.S. support for President Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam. Polls taken in the summer of 1967 revealed that, for the first time, American support for the war had fallen below 50 percent. When the Johnson administration announced that it would ask for a 10 percent increase in taxes to fund the war, the public's skepticism increased. The peace movement began to push harder for an end to the war—the march on Washington was the most powerful sign of their commitment to this cause. The Johnson administration responded 
    by launching a vigorous propaganda campaign to restore public confidence in its handling of the war. The president even went so far as to call General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, back to the United States to address Congress and the public. The effort was somewhat successful in tempering criticisms of the war. However, the Tet Offensive of early 1968 destroyed much of the Johnson Administration's credibility concerning the Vietnam War. The protest was also important in suggesting that the domestic Cold War consensus was beginning to fracture. Many of the protesters were not simply questioning America's conduct in Vietnam, but very basis of the nation's Cold War foreign policy.

  • 1972 --- Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly movie soundtrack album started a four-week run at number one. The title song cracked the top-ten singles list in January 1973. Other tracks on the album: Little Child Runnin’ Wild, Pusherman, Freddie’s Dead, Junkie Chase, Give Me Your Love, Eddie You Should Know Better,No Thing on Me and Think.

  • 1973 --- Baseball manager Dick Williams turned in his last lineup card as skipper as the Oakland A’s won their second straight World Series. Bert Campaneris and Reggie Jackson each hit two-run homers as the A’s defeated the New York Mets 5-2 in game 7, and took the Series four games to three.

  • 1975 --- Boston Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk hits a homer off the left-field pole to beat the Cincinnati Reds in the sixth game of the World Series. The Sox went on to lose the championship, of course. Still, even 30 years later, the films and photos of Fisk urgently trying 
    to wave the ball into fair territory provide some of the game’s most enduring and exciting images. As team president Larry Lucchino pointed out, "the appeal of baseball at its best was illustrated that night."

  • 1976 --- At the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, Canada, Keith Moon played his final tour date with the Who.

  • 1988 --- Former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, were indicted in New York on charges of fraud and racketeering.

  • 1988 --- Mystic Pizza, a romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts, Annabeth Gish and Lili Taylor as three young women who work at a 
    pizza parlor in Mystic, Connecticut, opens in theaters. The then-unknown Roberts played Daisy Arujo, a feisty, wild-child waitress from a working-class family of Portuguese descent who gets swept off her feet by a rich young man.

  • 1992 --- The erotic photograph book, "Sex," was released by Madonna. The first run of 500,000 copies sold out. 

  • Birthdays
  • Carrie Fisher
  • Dizzy Gillespie
  • Alfred Nobel
  • Whitey Ford
  • Georgia Brown
  • Steve Cropper
  • Elvin Bishop
  • Charlotte Caffey

  • 294th Day of 2014 / 71 Remaining
  • Winter Begins in 61 Days

  • Sunrise:7:24
  • Sunset:6:23
  • 10 Hours 59 Minutes

  • Moon Rise:5:15am
  • Moon Set:5:19pm
  • Moon Phase:4%
  • Next Full Moon November 6 @ 2:22pm
  • Full Beaver Moon
  • Full Frosty Moon

This was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. Another interpretation suggests that the name Full Beaver Moon comes from the fact that the beavers are now actively preparing for winter. It is sometimes also referred to as the Frosty Moon.

  • Tides:
  • High Tide:9:55am/10:27pm
  • Low Tide:3:37am/4:17pm