- 240th Day of 2013 / 125 Remaining
- 25 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
- Sunrise:6:37
- Sunset:7:43
- 13 Hours 6 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:12:36am(Thursday)
- Moon Set:2:24pm
- Moon’s Phase: Last Quarter
- The Next Full Moon
- September 19 @ 4:12am
- Full Corn Moon
- Full Barley Moon
This full Moon corresponds with the time of harvesting corn. It is also called the Barley Moon, because it is the time to harvest and thresh the ripened barley. The Harvest Moon is the full Moon nearest the autumnal equinox, which can occur in September or October and is bright enough to allow finishing all the harvest chores.
- Tides
- High:6:16am/5:04pm
- Low:11:09am
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- Normal To Date:0.00
- This Year:0.04
- Last Year:0.02
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Cherry Turnover Day
- Dream Day Quest and Jubilee
- Race Your Mouse Around the Icons Day
- Family Day-Tennessee
- 'La Tomatina' Tomato Fight-Spain --- La Tomatina is held on the last Wednesday of August each year in the town of Bunol near to Valencia in Spain. Thousands upon thousands of people make their way from all corners of the world to fight in this 'World's Biggest Food Fight' where more than one hundred metric tons of over-ripe
tomatoes are thrown in the streets. The week-long festival features music, parades, dancing, and fireworks. On the night before the tomato fight, participants of the festival compete in a paella cooking contest. Anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 (reported to be 50,000 in 2012) people come to this huge tomato fight, greatly expanding Bunol's normal 9,000 person population.
- On This Day In …
- 1609 --- English sea explorer Henry Hudson reached present-day Delaware Bay.
- 1830 --- "The Tom Thumb" was demonstrated in Baltimore. It was
the first passenger-carrying train of its kind to be built in America.
- 1837 --- John Lea and William Perrins of Worcester, England
started manufacturing Worcester Sauce (Worcestershire).
- 1850 --- Wagner’s opera, "Lohengrin," was performed for the first time.
- 1907 --- "American Messenger Company" was started by two teenagers, Jim Casey and Claude Ryan. The company's name was later changedto "United Parcel Service."
- 1917 --- President Woodrow Wilson is picketed by woman suffragists in front of the White House, who demand that he support
an amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee women the right to vote.
- 1922 --- The first radio commercial aired on WEAF in New York City. The Queensboro Realty Company bought 10 minutes of time for$100.
- 1955 --- Emmett Till, an African-American teenager from Chicago, was abducted from his uncle's home in Money, Miss., by two white men after he was accused of whistling at a white woman. He was found murdered three days later.
- 1963 --- On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the African American civil rights movement reaches its high-water mark when Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks to about 250,000 people attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The
demonstrators--black and white, poor and rich--came together in the nation's capital to demand voting rights and equal opportunity for African Americans and to appeal for an end to racial segregation and discrimination. The peaceful rally was the largest assembly for a redress of grievances that the capital had ever seen, and King was the last speaker. With the statue of Abraham Lincoln--the Great Emancipator--towering behind him, King used the rhetorical talents he had developed as a Baptist preacher to show how, as he put it, the "Negro is still not free." He told of the struggle ahead, stressing the importance of continued action and nonviolent protest. Coming to the end of his prepared text (which, like other speakers that day, he had limited to seven minutes), he was overwhelmed by the moment and launched into an improvised sermon. He told the hushed crowd, "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettoes of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair." Continuing, he began the refrain that made the speech one of the best known in U.S. history, second only to Lincoln's 1863 "Gettysburg Address": "I have a dream," he boomed over the crowd stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today." King had used the "I have a dream" theme before, in a handful of stump speeches, but never with the force and effectiveness of that hot August day in Washington. He equated the civil rights movement with the highest and noblest ideals of the American tradition, allowing many to see for the first time the importance and urgency of racial equality. He ended his stirring, 16-minute speech with his vision of the fruit of racial harmony:
"When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"
- 1967 --- The Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company played at the memorial of a Hell's Angels member who
had been struck by a car in San Francisco.
- 1968 --- At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters battle police in the streets, while the Democratic Party falls apart over an internal disagreement concerning its stance on Vietnam. Over the course of 24 hours, the predominant American line of thought on the Cold War with the Soviet Union was shattered. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. perspective on the Soviet Union and Soviet-style communism was marked by truculent disapproval. Intent on stopping the spread of communism, the United States developed a policy by which it would intervene in the affairs of countries it deemed susceptible to communist influence. In the early 1960s, this policy led to U.S. involvement in the controversial Vietnam War, during which the United States attempted to keep South Vietnam from falling under the control of communist North Vietnam, at a cost of more than 2 million Vietnamese and nearly 58,000 American lives. The "Cold War consensus," in U.S. government, however, fractured during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Democratic delegates from across the country were split on the question of Vietnam. A faction led by Eugene McCarthy, a committed anti-war
candidate, began to challenge the long-held assumption that the United States should remain in the war. As the debate intensified, fights broke out on the convention floor, and delegates and reporters were beaten and knocked to the ground. Eventually, the delegates on the side of the status quo, championed by then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, won out, but the events of the convention had seriously weakened the party, which went on to lose the following election. Meanwhile, on the streets of Chicago, several thousand anti-war protesters gathered to show their support for McCarthy and the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Chicago Mayor Richard
Daley deployed 12,000 police officers and
called in another 15,000 state and federal officers to contain the protesters. The situation then rapidly spiraled out of control, with the policemen severely beating and gassing the demonstrators, as well as newsmen and doctors who had come to help. The ensuing riot, known as the "Battle of Michigan Avenue," was caught on television, and sparked a large-scale change in American society. For the first time, many Americans came out in virulent opposition to the Vietnam War, which they had begun to feel was pointless and wrongheaded. No longer would people give the national government unrestrained power to pursue its Cold War policies at the expense of the safety of U.S. citizens.
- 1972 --- Mark Spitz captured the first of his seven gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. He set a world record when he completed the 200-meter butterfly in 2 minutes and 7/10ths of a second.
- Birthdays
- Leo Tolstoy
- LeAnn Rimes
- Lou Piniella
- Barbara Bach
- Scott Hamilton
- Shania Twain
- Jack Black
- Elizabeth Anne Seton
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe
- Nancy Culp
- Donald O’Connor
- Ben Gazzara
- Emma Samms