Wednesday December 11, 2013

• 345^th Day of 2013 / 20 Remaining
• 10 Days Until The First Day of Winter

• Sunrise:7:15
• Sunset:4:51
• 9 Hours 36 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:1:23pm
• Moon Set:1:47am
• Moon’s Phase: 72 %

• The Next Full Moon
• December 17 @ 1:29amam
• Full Cold Moon
• Full Long Nights Moon

During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest. It is also sometimes called the Moon before Yule. The term Long Night Moon is a doubly appropriate name because the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the Moon is above the horizon for a long time. The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.

• Tides
• High:5:58am/6:57pm
• Low:12:52pm

• Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
• This Year: 2.09
• Last Year:8.89
• Normal To Date:6.05
• Annual Seasonal Average:23.80

• Holidays
• Poinsettia Day
• National Noodle-Ring Day
• Statehood Day-Indiana

• Constitution Day-Russia
• Guadalupe Day-Mexico
• Neutrality Day-Turkmenistan
• Proclamation of the Republic-Burkina Faso

• On This Day In …
• 1769 --- Edward Beran of London patented venetian blinds.

• 1816 --- The Hoosier state, Indiana, entered the United States of America as the 19th state. The nickname, meaning rustic, is not a good decription of Indianapolis, the major metropolis that is its capital. However, much of the state is still farmland, and the little state flower, the peony, grows in many Hoosier front yards. The cardinal, the state bird, is also the state bird of each of the states (except Michigan) that border Indiana: Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio.

• 1844 --- Nitrous oxide used in first successful surgical operation under anaesthetic. In Harford, Connecticut Dr. John M. Riggs extracted a tooth from fellow dentist Dr. Horace Wells.

• 1872 --- Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback became America's first black governor when he took office as acting governor of Louisiana.

• 1872 --- Already appearing as a well-known figure of the Wild West in popular dime novels, Buffalo Bill Cody makes his first stage appearance on this day, in a Chicago-based production of The Scouts of the Prairie.
  

  

• 1915 --- With war raging in Europe, conflict also reigns in the Far East between two traditional enemies, Japan and an internally-divided China. On December 11, 1915, the first president of the new Chinese republic, Yuan Shih-kai, who had come to power in the wake of revolution in 1911 and the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912, accepts the title of emperor of China.

• 1919 --- The kind citizens of Enterprise, Alabama dedicated the first known monument to an insect! The town turned out to honor the boll weevil; the evil weevil that destroyed cotton plants. However, by

  

  forcing folks to diversify their crops, the farmers wound up tripling their income. Thus, the tribute to those bugs.

• 1936 --- After ruling for less than one year, Edward VIII becomes the first English monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne. He chose to abdicate after the British government, public, and the Church of England condemned his decision to marry the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. On the evening of December 11, he gave a

  

  radio address in which he explained, "I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love." On December 12, his younger brother, the duke of York, was proclaimed King George VI.

• 1946 --- In the aftermath of World War II, the General Assembly of the United Nations votes to establish the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), an organization to help provide relief and support to children living in countries devastated by the war.

• 1957 --- Jerry Lee Lewis secretly married his 13-year-old third cousin Myra Gale Brown. It was his third marriage.
  

  

• 1964 --- Officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were dispatched to the Hacienda Motel, where they found Sam Cooke dead on the office floor, shot three times in the chest by the motel's manager, Bertha Franklin. The authorities ruled Cooke's death a case of justifiable homicide, based on the testimony of Ms. Franklin, who claimed that Cooke had threatened her life after attempting to rape a young woman with whom he had earlier checked in.

• 1967 --- The French prototype Concorde 001 was rolled out in Toulouse, France (the British 002 prototype was not quite finished in Bristol). The joint British-French venture and the world’s first

  

  supersonic airliner, took two more years of testing and fine-tuning the powerful engines before it made its maiden flight.

• 1969 --- The secretary of the Moscow writer's union declares that nudity as displayed in the popular play "Oh! Calcutta!" is a sign of decadence in Western culture. More disturbing, he claimed, was the fact that this "bourgeois" thinking was infecting Russian youth.

• 1972 --- Man landed on the moon for the last time during the Apollo 17 mission.

• 1980 --- U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed into law legislation creating $1.6 billion environmental "superfund" that would be used to pay for cleaning up chemical spills and toxic waste dumps.

• 1994 --- Thousands of Russian troops, armored columns and jets entered Chechnya. The move by Moscow was an effort to restore control the breakaway republic.
  

  

• 1997 --- Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams became the first political ally of the IRA to meet a British leader in 76 years. He conferred with Prime Minister Tony Blair in London.
  

  

• 1997 --- Negotiators from around the world (more than 150 countries) agreed on a package of measures that for the first time would legally obligate industrial countries to cut emissions of waste industrial (greenhouse) gases that scientists say are warming the Earth’s atmosphere.

• 2002 --- A congressional report found that intelligence agencies before Sept. 11, 2001, were poorly organized, poorly equipped and slow to pursue clues that might have prevented that day's terrorist attacks.

• 2008 --- Bernard Madoff is arrested at his New York City apartment and charged with masterminding a long-running Ponzi scheme later

  

  estimated to involve around $65 billion, making it one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history. (He later pleaded guilty and is serving 150 years in prison.)

• Birthdays
• Frank Sinatra
• James L Kraft
• Walter Knott
• David Gates
• Sen Max Baucas
• Mo’Nique
• Rita Moreno
• Tom Hayden
• Lynda Day George
• Brenda Lee
• Teri Garr
• Mos Def
• Fiorello H LaGuardia
• Louis-Hector Berlioz
• Annie Jump Cannon
• Carlo Ponti
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• Willie Mae Thornton
• Jermaine Jackson