- 242nd Day of 2012 /124 Remaining
- 24 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
- Sunrise:6:38
- Sunset:7:43
- 12 Hours 5 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:6:26pm
- Moon Set:4:42am
- Moon’s Phase: 96 %
- The Next Full Moon
- August 31st @ 6:57am
- Blue Moon
But it’s Blue in name only. That’s because a Blue Moon is sometimes defined as the second full moon in a calendar month. The first full moon was August 1. The second full moon is August 31, 2012. There are two more definitions for Blue Moon. It can be the third of four full moons in a single season. Or, someday, you might see an actual blue-colored moon.
- Tides
- High:10:36am/9:56pm
- Low:3:51am/3:57pm
- 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
- More Herbs, Less Salt Day
- "According to Hoyle" Day
- National Whisky Sour Day
- National Cornbread and Milk Day
- Eid-Al-Fitr-Islam(begins at sundown)
- Nut Spas-Russia
- National Uprising Day-Slovakia
- Onam-India
- National Uprising Day-Slovakia
- La Tomatina- Bunol, Spain
- (The world's largest tomato fight takes place at noon. Some 35,000 will hurl 120 tons of tomatoes at each other for two hours.)
- On This Day In …
- 1886 --- Li Hung-Chang’s chef devised a tasty dish in New York City. It satisfied both American and Oriental tastes. The delicacy was called chop suey. Who was Li Hung-Chang, you ask? He was China’s Ambassador to the United States.
- 1911 --- Ishi, described as the last surviving Stone Age Indian in the contiguous United States, is discovered in California. By the first decade of the 20th century, Euro-Americans had so overwhelmed the North American continent that scarcely any Native Americans remained who had not been assimilated into Anglo society to some degree. Ishi appears to have been something of an exception. Found lost and starving near an Oroville, California, slaughterhouse, he was largely unfamiliar with white ways and spoke no English. Authorities took the mysterious Indian into custody for his own protection. News of the so-called "Stone Age Indian" attracted the attention of a young Berkeley anthropologist named Thomas Waterman. Gathering what partial vocabularies existed of northern California Indian dialects, the speakers of which had mostly vanished, Waterman went to Oroville to meet the Indian. After unsuccessfully hazarding words from several dialects, Waterman tried a few words from the language of the Yana Indians. Some were intelligible to Ishi, and the two men were able to engage in a crude dialogue. The following month, Waterman took Ishi to live at the Berkeley University museum, where their ability to communicate gradually improved. Waterman eventually learned that Ishi was a Yahi Indian, an isolated branch of the northern California Yana tribe. He was approximately 50 years old and was apparently the last of his people. Ishi said he had wandered the mountains of northern California for some time with a small remnant of the Yahi people. Gradually, accident or disease had killed his companions. A white man murdered his final male companion, and Ishi wandered alone until he reached Oroville. For five years, Ishi lived at the Berkeley Museum. He and Waterman became close friends, and he spent his days describing his tribal customs and demonstrating his wilderness skills in archery, woodcraft, and other traditional techniques. He learned to understand and survive in the white world, and enjoyed wandering the Bay area communities and riding on the trolley cars. Eventually, though, Ishi contracted tuberculosis. He died on March 25, 1916, at an estimated age of 56. His body was cremated according to the customs of his people.
- 1944 --- American troops marched down the Champs Elysees in Paris as the French capital continued to celebrate its liberation from the Nazis.
- 1949 --- At a remote test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, the USSR successfully detonates its first atomic bomb, code name "First Lightning." In order to measure the effects of the blast, the Soviet scientists constructed buildings, bridges, and other civilian structures in the vicinity of the bomb. They also placed animals in cages nearby so that they could test the effects of nuclear radiation on human-like mammals. The atomic explosion, which at 20 kilotons was roughly equal to "Trinity," the first U.S. atomic explosion, destroyed those structures and incinerated the animals. According to legend, the Soviet physicists who worked on the bomb were honored for the achievement based on the penalties they would have suffered had the test failed. Those who would have been executed by the Soviet government if the bomb had failed to detonate were honored as "Heroes of Socialist Labor," and those who would have been merely imprisoned were given "The Order of Lenin," a slightly less prestigious award.
- 1958 --- 15-year-old George Harrison joined John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ken Brown in the group, the Quarrymen, to perform at Liverpool’s Casbah Coffee Club. The Beatles’ final public concert would come eight years later to the day in San Francisco.
- 1966 --- The Beatles gave their final concert at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966. Songs performed at the show were "Rock and Roll Music", "She's a Woman", "If I Needed Someone", "Day Tripper", "Baby's in Black", "I Feel Fine", "Yesterday", "I Wanna Be Your Man", "Nowhere Man", "Paperback Writer", and "Long Tall Sally". A rough recording of most of the concert was left unreleased, although the audio has leaked on to the internet. The recording cuts off during the last minute of the concert, interrupting "Long Tall Sally". Film of the concert was captured by a 15-year-old fan named Barry Hood and featured in a documentary called The Unseen Beatles, as well as by news teams from television stations from San Francisco and Sacramento.
- 1973 --- Judge John Sirica ordered President Nixon to turn over secret Watergate tapes. Nixon refused and appealed the order.
- 1977 --- Memphis police caught three body snatchers trying to steal Elvis’ remains, just a week and a half after his burial. As a result, Vernon Presley had his son’s and wife’s bodies moved from Forest Hill cemetery to the grounds at Graceland.
- 1987 --- In one of pop music's most famous and beautiful turns of phrase, songwriter Don McLean called the date on which the world lost Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson "the Day the Music Died. " But while three rising young pop stars may have died on February 3, 1959, their music certainly didn't die with them. On August 29, 1987, nearly 30 years after the most famous plane crash in music history, Ritchie Valens, the youngest of that crash's three famous victims, made a return of sorts to the top of the pop charts when his signature tune, "La Bamba," became a #1 hit for the band Los Lobos, from Valens' own hometown of Los Angeles, California. Richard Stevens Valenzuela was a 17-year-old San Fernando Valley high school student when he adapted "La Bamba," a traditional folk song from Veracruz, Mexico, into the vernacular of rock and roll. In climbing to #22 on the Billboard pop chart in January 1959, "La Bamba" became the biggest Spanish-language rock-and-roll hit in history, though the young man who recorded it did not himself speak Spanish. This interesting fact about Ritchie Valens's life did not become known to many until the release of the hugely successful Hollywood biopic La Bamba, which sent the song from which it took its title on a second run up the pop charts, culminating in its ascent to the #1 slot on this day in 1987. The Los Angeles band Los Lobos was a natural choice to record the La Bamba soundtrack. Los Lobos were longtime veterans of the L.A. club scene who could tear through early rock-and-roll classics as easily as they could open for acts as diverse as Bob Dylan and Public Image, Ltd. Though their posthumous memorials to Ritchie Valens ("La Bamba" and "Come On Let's Go," both from the La Bamba soundtrack) were the only top-40 hits ever recorded by Los Lobos, their under-the-radar pop career includes many unique and critically acclaimed works (e.g., 1983's Will The Wolf Survive? and 2003's Good Morning Aztlàn) that fell just far enough outside both the pop and Latin mainstreams as to miss being true commercial hits.
- 1991 --- The Supreme Soviet, the parliament of the U.S.S.R., suspended all activities of the Communist Party, bringing an end to the party’s 75-year controlling regime in the Soviet Union.
- 2002 --- A Slovakian motorist who blew up his car and a gas station when he used a cigarette lighter to look into his gas tank was charged with endangering public safety. The 30 year-old man said his fuel gauge had broken. The lighter flame ignited the tank and the fire demolished much of the small gas station in the west Slovak town of Horna Streda.
- 2005 --- Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive hurricane ever to hit the United States, makes landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast, near New Orleans, Louisiana. Katrina, which formed over the Bahamas on August 23, was the third major hurricane of a particularly severe 2005 season. The storm caused massive devastation in and around the city of New Orleans and major damage elsewhere in Louisiana and along the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama. On August 28, Katrina briefly achieved Category 5 status—becoming the second Category 5 storm of the season—and that day, the National Weather Service predicted "devastating" damage to the Gulf region. Although New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin then ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city, an estimated 150,000 people who either could not or would not leave stayed behind. The next day, Katrina made landfall as a Category 4 storm, bringing with it sustained winds of 145 mph with gusts of up to 175 mph and massive storm surges that overwhelmed the city's levees, flooding 80 percent of the city, as well as many of the outlying neighborhoods, or parishes.
- Birthdays
- Michael Jackson
- Charlie Parker
- Dinah Washington
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- Robin Leach
- Elliott Gould
- Senator John McCain
- Richard Attenborough
- Ingrid Bergman
- John Locke
- Isabel Sanford
- Me'Shell NdegeOcello