- 248th Day of 2012 /118 Remaining
- 18 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
- Sunrise:6:43
- Sunset:7:34
- 12 Hours 31 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:9:36pm
- Moon Set:10:50am
- Moon’s Phase: 83 %
- 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:1:51am/1:46pm
- Low:7:34am/8:20pm
- 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
- Newspaper Carrier Day
- National Macadamia Nut Day
- Another Look Unlimited Day – (A day to survey your possessions and give surplus items to charity or reuse in another project. Slow the flow to landfills.)
- International Drive Your Studebaker Day
- Animals' Day-Curacao
- Civil Servant’s Day-Venezuela
- On This Day In …
- 0476 --- Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, is deposed by Odoacer, a German barbarian who proclaims himself king of Italy. Odoacer was a mercenary leader in the Roman imperial army when he launched his mutiny against the young emperor. At Piacenza, he defeated Roman General Orestes, the emperor's powerful father, and then took Ravenna, the capital of the Western empire since 402. Although Roman rule continued in the East, the crowning of Odoacer marked the end of the original Roman Empire, which centered in Italy.
- 1781 --- The Mexican Provincial Governor, Felipe de Neve, founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles, originally named Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, by Gaspar de Portola, a Spanish army captain and Juan Crespi, a Franciscan priest, who had noticed the beautiful area as they traveled north from San Diego in 1769. El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles translates into the Village of our Lady, the Queen of the Angels ... L.A. for short. Mexico ceded California to the United States in 1848, and Los Angeles, the capital of Alta California, a Mexican Province, came with it. Once a quiet, little village, the discovery of oil in the 1890s started an expansion that has grown to be the home of more than 8 1/2 million people (approx. 3 1/2 million in the actual city limits). Hollywood, movie stars, Disneyland, freeways, Beverly Hills, earthquakes, fires, floods and drive-by shootings have all managed to keep the City of Angels on the map, so to speak.
- 1833 --- Barney Flaherty answered an ad in The New York Sun and became the first newsboy. Actually, Barney became what we now call a paperboy. He was 10 years old at the time.
- 1882 --- Thomas Edison displayed the first practical electrical lighting system. The Pearl Street electric power station, Edison’s steam powered plant, began operating and successfully turned on the lights in a one square mile area of New York City.
- 1886 --- Apache chief Geronimo surrenders to U.S. government troops. For 30 years, the mighty Native American warrior had battled to protect his tribe's homeland; however, by 1886 the Apaches were exhausted and hopelessly outnumbered. General Nelson Miles accepted Geronimo's surrender, making him the last Indian warrior to formally give in to U.S. forces and signaling the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest. Geronimo was born in 1829 and grew up in what is present-day Arizona and Mexico. His tribe, the Chiricahua Apaches, clashed with non-Indian settlers trying to take their land. In 1858, Geronimo's family was murdered by Mexicans. Seeking revenge, he later led raids against Mexican and American settlers. In 1874, the U.S. government moved Geronimo and his people from their land to a reservation in east-central Arizona. Conditions on the reservation were restrictive and harsh and Geronimo and some of his followers escaped. Over the next decade, they battled federal troops and launched raids on white settlements. During this time, Geronimo and his supporters were forced back onto the reservation several times. In May 1885, Geronimo and approximately 150 followers fled one last time. They were pursued into Mexico by 5,000 U.S. troops. In March 1886, General George Crook (1829–90) forced Geronimo to surrender; however, Geronimo quickly escaped and continued his raids. General Nelson Miles (1839–1925) then took over the pursuit of Geronimo, eventually forcing him to surrender that September near Fort Bowie along the Arizona-New Mexico border. Geronimo and a band of Apaches were sent to Florida and then Alabama, eventually ending up at the Comanche and Kiowa reservation near Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory. There, Geronimo became a successful farmer and converted to Christianity. He participated in President Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade in 1905. The Apache chief dictated his autobiography, published in 1906 as Geronimo's Story of His Life. He died at Fort Sill on February 17, 1909.
- 1888 --- George Eastman registered the name "Kodak" and patented his roll-film camera. The camera took 100 exposures per roll. U.S. Patent #388,850.
- 1951 --- President Harry S. Truman's opening speech before a conference in San Francisco is broadcast across the nation, marking the first time a television program was broadcast from coast to coast. The speech focused on Truman's acceptance of a treaty that officially ended America's post-World War II occupation of Japan. The broadcast, via then-state-of-the-art microwave technology, was picked up by 87 stations in 47 cities, according to CBS. In his remarks, Truman lauded the treaty as one that would help "build a world in which the children of all nations can live together in peace." As communism was threatening to spread throughout Pacific Rim nations such as Korea and Vietnam, the U.S. recognized the need to create an ally in a strong, democratic Japan. Since the end of World War II in 1945, Japan had been occupied and closely monitored by the American military under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur. By 1951, six years later, Truman considered the task of rebuilding Japan complete. Truman praised the Japanese people's willingness to go along with the plan and expressed his pride in having helped to rebuild Japan as a democracy. Gone was the old militaristic police state; in its place was a country with a new constitution, unions for protecting the rights of laborers and voting rights for women, among many other positive changes. The Multilateral Treaty of Peace with Japan, as it was ultimately called, was ratified by the U.S. Congress on March 20, 1952.
- 1957 --- "E-Day," according to its advertising campaign--the Ford Motor Company unveils the Edsel, the first new automobile brand produced by one of the Big Three car companies since 1938. (Although many people call it the "Ford Edsel," in fact Edsel was a division all its own, like Lincoln or Mercury.) Thirteen hundred independent Edsel dealers offered four models for sale: the smaller Pacer and Ranger and the larger Citation and Corsair. To many people, the Edsel serves as a symbol of corporate hubris at its worst: it was an over-hyped, over-sized, over-designed monstrosity. Other people believe the car was simply a victim of bad timing. When Ford executives began planning for the company's new brand, the economy was booming and people were snapping up enormous gas-guzzlers as fast as automakers could build them. By the time the Edsel hit showrooms, however, the economic outlook was bad and getting worse. People didn't want big, glitzy fin cars anymore; they wanted small, efficient ones instead. The Edsel was just ostentatious and expensive enough to give buyers pause. At the same time, there is probably no car in the world that could have lived up to the Edsel's hype. For months, the company had been running ads that simply pictured the car's hood ornament and the line "The Edsel Is Coming." Everything else about the car was top-secret: If dealers failed to keep their Edsels hidden, they'd lose their franchise. For the great E-Day unveiling, promotions and prizes--like a giveaway of 1,000 ponies--lured shoppers to showrooms. When they got there, they found a car that had a distinctive look indeed--but not necessarily in a good way. Thanks to the big impact ring or "horse collar" in the middle of its front grille, it looked (one reporter said) like "a Pontiac pushing a toilet seat." (Another called it "an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.") And its problems were more than cosmetic. Drivers changed gears by pushing buttons on the steering wheel, a system that was not easy to figure out. In addition, at highway speeds that famous hood ornament had a tendency to fly off and into the windshield
- 1962 --- John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr recorded together for the first time at EMI's St. John's Wood Studio 2 in England. They rehearsed six numbers all day and recorded "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" that evening. "Love Me Do" was right on the 17th take.
- 1972 --- Swimmer Mark Spitz captured his seventh Olympic gold medal in the 400-meter medley relay event at Munich, Germany. Spitz became the first Olympian to win seven gold medals.
- 1982 --- Versatile, prolific, iconoclastic, misanthropic—all of these labels were attached to the name Frank Zappa over the course of his unique career in music, but one label that never fit was "pop star." Even during his late 1960s and early 1970s heyday, it would have been hard to imagine a figure less likely than Frank Zappa to make a record that would capture the imagination of America's pop radio-listening 14-year-olds. But then a funny thing happened: Frank Zappa had a 14-year-old of his own, and through her creative attempts to connect with her work-obsessed father, a true pop phenomenon was born. On this day in 1982, Frank Zappa earned his first and only top-40 hit with the satirical record "Valley Girl," conceived by and featuring the voice of his 14-year-old daughter, Moon Unit. As Moon Zappa ("Unit" is her middle name) tells the story, the one and only sacred rule growing up in the Zappa household was never to disturb dad while he was working in his studio, which was most of the time. So it was via a note slipped under his studio door that Moon broached the idea of recording a song that would satirize the shallow and vapid culture of a certain element of teen culture in her Los Angeles-area environs. "Since we don't seem to be able to get together personally," she wrote to her father, "maybe we could get together professionally." Two nights later, Frank Zappa invited his daughter into his studio for the first time, and they began work on "Valley Girl." Though intended by both father and daughter as a send-up of the stereotypical mall-dwelling teens of the San Fernando Valley, "Valley Girl" took on a life of its own once loosed into the popular culture. While most may have consumed the song as satire, that didn't stop such Valley vocabulary as "Fer sure," "Ohmigod," "Gag me with a spoon" and "Grody to the max" from spreading like a virus into corners of the world previous untouched by such catchphrases. Frank Zappa's biographical overview at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—into which he was inducted in 1995, two years after his untimely death from cancer at the age of only 53—includes the following observation: "Throughout his career, Zappa darkly but humorously depicted a landscape of wasted human enterprise largely driven by Pavlovian desires for consumer goods, sports and sex." "Valley Girl" might not have been the most sharply realized example of Frank Zappa's dark humor, but when it entered the pop charts on September 4, 1982, it gave him the biggest hit of his truly unique career.
- 1993 --- New York Yankee Jim Abbott pitched a no-hitter against Cleveland and won 4-0. Abbott was born without a right hand.
- Birthdays
- Peter Rabbit
- Beetle Bailey
- Damon Wayans
- Mitzi Gaynor
- Richard Wright
- Beyonce Knowles
- Dick York
- Martin Chambers (Pretenders)