Tug Of War Tournament Day-KALW Almanac-July 21, 2015

KALW | By Joe Burke

Published July 21, 2015 at 6:15 AM PDT

202^nd Day of 2015 163 Remaining
Autumn Begins in 64 Days
Sunrise:6:04
Sunset:8:27
14 Hours 23 Minutes
Moon Rise:11:25am
Moon Set:11:33pm
Phase:20%
Full Moon July 1 @ 7:22pm and July 31 @ 3:45pm
Full Thunder Moon / Full Hay Moon
July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.
Tides
High:2:21am/3:43pm
Low:8:53am/9:53pm
Holidays
Legal Drinking Age Day
National Crème’ Brule’ Day
National Junk Food Day
National Tug Of War Tournament Day
Take A Monkey To Lunch Day
Liberation Day-Guam
National Day-Belgium
On This Day
0365 --- A powerful earthquake off the coast of Greece causes a tsunami that devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Although there were no measuring tools at the time, scientists now estimate that the quake was actually two tremors in succession, the largest of which is thought to have had a magnitude of 8.0.
1831 --- Belgium became independent as Leopold I was proclaimed King of the Belgians.
1904 --- The Trans-Siberian Railway was completed, linking European Russia with the Russian Pacific Coast.
1925 --- The "Monkey Trial" ended in Dayton, TN. John T. Scopes was convicted and fined $100 for violating the state prohibition on teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. The conviction was later overturned on a legal technicality because the judge had set the fine instead of the jury.
1957 --- Althea Gibson became the first black woman to win a major U.S. tennis title when she won the Women’s National clay-court singles competition.
1960 --- The German government passes the “Law Concerning the Transfer of the Share Rights in Volkswagenwerk Limited Liability Company into Private Hands,” known informally as the “Volkswagen Law.” Founded in 1937, Volkswagen would eventually grow into Europe’s largest car manufacturer and a symbol of Germany’s economic recovery after the devastation of World War II.
1969 --- Duke Ellington and a portion of his band performed a 10-minute composition on ABC-TV titled, "Moon Maiden." The event took place just one day after Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon.
1970 --- After 11 years of construction, the Aswan High Dam across the Nile River in Egypt is completed. More than two miles long at its crest, the massive $1 billion dam ended the cycle of flood and drought in the Nile River region, and exploited a tremendous source of renewable energy, but had a controversial environmental impact.
1990 --- Roger Waters staged a production of "The Wall" at Potsdamer Platz, Germany. Sinead O'Connor, Van Morrison, The Band, Joni Mitchell, Tim Curry, James Galway, Scorpions, Maryann Faithful, Albert Finney, Bryan Adams, Phil Collins and Cyndi Lauper among others took part in the benefit.
2005 --- Terrorists attempt to attack the London transit system by planting bombs on three subways and on one bus; none of the bombs detonate completely. The attempted attack came exactly two weeks after terrorists killed 56 people, including themselves, and wounded 700 others in the largest attack on Great Britain since World War II. The previous attack also targeted three subways and one bus. One of the alleged attackers was chased by passengers at Oval Station after he had attempted to detonate a bomb during the failed attack.
2008 --- Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's top war crimes fugitives, was arrested in a Belgrade suburb by Serbian security forces.
2011 --- NASA’s space shuttle program completes its final, and 135th, mission, when the shuttle Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the program’s 30-year history, its five orbiters—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour—carried more than 350 people into space and flew more than 500 million miles, and shuttle crews conducted important research, serviced the Hubble Space Telescope and helped in the construction of the International Space Station, among other activities. NASA retired the shuttles to focus on a deep-space exploration program that could one day send astronauts to asteroids and Mars.
Birthdays
Robin Williams
Janet Reno
Brandi Chastain
Ernest Hemmingway
Louise Blanchard Bethune
Marshall McLuhan
Isaac Stern
Don Knotts
Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens
Jon Lovitz