- 262nd Day of 2012 /104 Remaining
- 4 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
- Sunrise:6:55
- Sunset:7:12
- 12 Hours Minutes of 17 Daylight
- Moon Rise:9:57am
- Moon Set:8:45pm
- Moon’s Phase: 10 %
- The Next Full Moon
- September 29 @ 8:18pm
- Full Corn Moon
- Full Harvest Moon
- This full moon’s name is attributed to Native Americans because it marked when corn was supposed to be harvested. Most often, the September full moon is actually the Harvest Moon, which is the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. In two years out of three, the Harvest Moon comes in September, but in some years it occurs in October. At the peak of harvest, farmers can work late into the night by the light of this Moon. Usually the full Moon rises an average of 50 minutes later each night, but for the few nights around the Harvest Moon, the Moon seems to rise at nearly the same time each night: just 25 to 30 minutes later across the U.S., and only 10 to 20 minutes later for much of Canada and Europe. Corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice the chief Indian staples are now ready for gathering.
- Tides
- High:12:54am/12:50pm
- Low:6:33am/7:19pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:0.03
- Last Year:0.11
- Normal To Date:0.00
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Hug a Greeting card Writer Day
- National Play-Doh Day
- National Cheeseburger Day
- Independence Day-Chile
- On This Day In …
- 1763 --- An instrument named the spinet was mentioned in The Boston Gazette newspaper on this day. John Harris made the spinet, a small upright piano with a three to four octave range. There is no verifiable evidence to support the rumor that a man named Spinetti made the first spinet.
- 1793 --- George Washington lays the cornerstone to the United States Capitol building, the home of the legislative branch of American government. The building would take nearly a century to complete, as architects came and went, the British set fire to it and it was called into use during the Civil War. Today, the Capitol building, with its famous cast-iron dome and important collection of American art, is part of the Capitol Complex, which includes six Congressional office buildings and three Library of Congress buildings, all developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- 1830 --- A race was held between a horse and an iron horse. Tom Thumb, the first locomotive built in America, was pitted against a real horse in a nine-mile course between Riley’s Tavern and Baltimore. Tom Thumb suffered mechanical difficulties including a leaky boiler. If you had your money on the horse, you won! Tom Thumb lost by more than a nose.
- 1846 --- Weeks behind schedule and the massive Sierra Nevada mountains still to be crossed, on this day in 1846, the members of the ill-fated Donner party realize they are running short of supplies and send two men ahead to California to bring back food. The group of 89 emigrants had begun their western trek earlier that summer in Springfield, Illinois, under the leadership of the brothers Jacob and George Donner. Unfortunately, the Donner brothers had recently read The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California, the imaginative creation of an irresponsible author-adventurer named Lansford Hastings, who wanted to encourage more overland emigrants to travel to the Sacramento Valley of California. The Donners innocently accepted Hastings' claim that a shorter route he had blazed to California would cut weeks off the usual trip and agreed to place the fate of the wagon train in his hands once they reached Fort Bridger, Wyoming. From that point forward, the men, women, and children of the Donner Party were in trouble. Though the so-called Hastings Cutoff was indeed shorter than the usual route, Hastings' glowing descriptions of his trail irresponsibly downplayed its many difficulties, as the Donner party soon discovered. After following a boulder-strewn and nearly impassable route over the Wasatch Range in Utah, the party embarked on an arduous six-day trek across the desert-a journey that Hastings had promised would take only two days. Lightening their loads by abandoning chairs, family heirlooms, wagons, and livestock to be swallowed up by the blazing sands, the emigrants struggled onward towards the Sierra Nevada. A month after the two men had left for California, one returned with the desperately needed provisions as well as two Indian guides to help lead the party on the final stage of the trip through the Sierras. But by then it was already late October. Hastings' "shortcut" had cost the Donner group so much time that they now risked being trapped in the high mountains if an early snowstorm chanced to fall. Unfortunately for the luckless emigrants, just such a snowstorm arrived on the night of October 28. The next day the Donner party was snowbound in the Sierras.
- 1851 --- The New York Times began publishing “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The Times is now a media conglomerate involving radio, TV, cable and the Internet.
- 1895 --- If you’ve ever had a chiropractic adjustment you owe it to not only your chiropractor, but to Daniel David Palmer. He gave the first chiropractic adjustment to Harvey Lillard in Davenport, Iowa (now the home of Palmer Chiropractic College).
- 1927 --- The Columbia Broadcasting System was born, although its rival, NBC, had been on the air for some time. The Tiffany Network, as CBS was called, broadcast an opera, “The King’s Henchman”, as its first program. William S. Paley put the network together, purchasing a chain of 16 failing radio stations. The controlling interest cost between $250,000 and $450,000. The following year, the 27-year-old Paley became President of CBS. It only took one more year for him to profit 2.35 million dollars as the network grew to over 70 stations. In 1978 Paley received the First Annual ATAS (Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) Governor’s Award as Chairman of the Board of CBS.
- 1955 --- What had been The Toast of the Town on CBS Television (since 1948) became The Ed Sullivan Show. This “rilly big shew” remained a mainstay of Sunday night television until June 6, 1971. Sullivan was a newspaper columnist/critic before and during the early years of this pioneering TV show
- 1960 --- Fidel Castro arrives in New York City as the head of the Cuban delegation to the United Nations. Castro's visit stirred indignation and admiration from various sectors of American society, and was climaxed by his speech to the United Nations on September 26. By the time Castro arrived in New York City in September 1960, relations between the United States and Cuba were rapidly deteriorating. Since taking power in January 1959, Castro had infuriated the American government with his policies of nationalizing U.S. companies and investments in Cuba. Some American officials, such as Vice President Richard Nixon, believed that Castro was leaning perilously toward communism. (Castro did not publicly proclaim his adherence to communism until late-1961, when he declared that he was a "Marxist-Leninist".) In March 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the CIA to begin training Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro's regime. When the United States suspended the import of Cuban sugar in 1960, Castro's government turned to the Soviet Union for economic assistance. The Russians were happy to oblige. In September 1960, Castro led a delegation to New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly. He and his entourage caused an immediate sensation by deciding to stay at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. While there, Castro met with a number of African-American leaders, including Malcolm X from the Nation of Islam and the poet Langston Hughes. On September 26, Castro delivered a blistering attack on what he termed American "aggression" and "imperialism." For over four hours, Castro lambasted U.S. policy toward Cuba and other nations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The United States, he declared, had "decreed the destruction" of his revolutionary government.
- 1970 --- Jimi Hendrix died in his London apartment at the age of 27.
- 1973 --- Future President Jimmy Carter files a report with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), claiming he had seen an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) in October 1969. He described waiting outside for a Lion's Club Meeting in Leary, Georgia, to begin, at about 7:30 p.m., when he spotted what he called "the darndest thing I've ever seen" in the sky. Carter, as well as 10 to 12 other people who witnessed the same event, described the object as "very bright [with] changing colors and about the size of the moon." Carter reported that "the object hovered about 30 degrees above the horizon and moved in toward the earth and away before disappearing into the distance." He later told a reporter that, after the experience, he vowed never again to ridicule anyone who claimed to have seen a UFO.
- 1975 --- Publishing heiress Patricia Hearst was rescued/captured by the FBI in San Francisco, CA. On February 4, 1974, the 19-year-old daughter of newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by two black men and a white woman, all three of whom were armed. Her fiancé, Stephen Weed, was beaten and tied up along with a neighbor who tried to help. Witnesses reported seeing a struggling Hearst being carried away blindfolded, and she was put in the trunk of a car. Neighbors who came out into the street were forced to take cover after the kidnappers fired their guns to cover their escape. Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a Berkeley radio station that it was holding Hearst as a "prisoner of war." Four days later, the SLA demanded that the Hearst family give $70 in foodstuffs to every needy person from Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. This done, said the SLA, negotiations would begin for the return of Patricia Hearst. Randolph Hearst hesitantly gave away some $2 million worth of food. The SLA then called this inadequate and asked for $4 million more. The Hearst Corporation said it would donate the additional sum if the girl was released unharmed. In April, however, the situation changed dramatically when Patty Hearst declared, in a tape sent to the authorities, that she was joining the SLA of her own free will. Later that month, a surveillance camera took a photo of her participating in an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank, and she was also spotted during the robbery of a Los Angeles store. On May 17, police raided the SLA's secret headquarters in Los Angeles, killing six of the group's nine known members. Among the dead was the SLA's leader, Donald DeFreeze, an African American ex-convict who called himself General Field Marshal Cinque. Patty Hearst and two other SLA members wanted for the April bank robbery were not on the premises. Finally, on September 18, 1975, after crisscrossing the country with her captors--or conspirators--for more than a year, Hearst, or "Tania," as she called herself, was captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for armed robbery. Despite her later claim that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, she was convicted on March 20, 1976, and sentenced to seven years in prison. Her prison sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was released in February 1979. In 2001, she received a full pardon from President Bill Clinton.
- 1997 --- Time Warner vice-chairman Ted Turner pledged one billion dollars for United Nations programs over ten years. The money came from Time Warner shares Turner acquired in the Time Warner-Turner Broadcasting merger.
- Birthdays
- Greta Garbo
- Elmer Maytag
- Agnes de Mille
- Fred Willard
- Frankie Avalon
- Dee Dee Ramone
- Lance Armstrong