Wednesday February 12, 2014

•   43^rd Day of 2014 / 322 Remaining
• 36 Days Until The First Day of Spring

• Sunrise:7:01
• Sunset:5:46
• 10 Hours 45 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:4:05pm
• Moon Set:5:23am
• Moon’s Phase: 96 %

• The Next Full Moon
• February 14 @ 3:54 pm
• Full Snow Moon
• Full Hunger Moon

Since the heaviest snow usually falls during this month, native tribes of the north and east most often called February’s full Moon the Full Snow Moon. Some tribes also referred to this Moon as the Full Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions in their areas made hunting very difficult.

• Tides
• High:8:45am/10:28pm
• Low:3:01am/3:44pm

• Rainfall
• This Year:5.84
• Last Year:13.87
• Average Year to Date:15.59

• Holidays
• Oglethorpe Day
• National Plum Pudding Day

• Youth Day-Venezuela

• On This Day In …
• 1541 --- The city of Santiago, Chile was founded.

• 1554 --- Lady Jane Grey, who had claimed the throne of England for nine days, was beheaded after being charged with treason.
  

  

• 1773 --- English colonists led by James Oglethorpe founded Savannah, Ga.

• 1878 --- Frederick W. Thayer, the captain of the Harvard University Baseball Club, patented the now-familiar, baseball catcher’s mask.
  

  

• 1879 --- The first artificial ice rink opened in North America. It was at Madison Square Garden in New York City, NY.

• 1880 --- The National Croquet League was organized in Philadelphia.

• 1909 --- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in New York.
  

  

• 1912 --- Hsian-T'ung, the last emperor of China, is forced to abdicate following Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution. A provisional government was established in his place, ending 267 years of

  

  Manchu rule in China and 2,000 years of imperial rule. The former emperor, only six years old, was allowed to keep up his residence in Beijing's Forbidden City, and he took the name of Henry Pu Yi.

• 1924 --- "The audience, including special guests John Philip Sousa and Jascha Heifetz, packed a house that could have been sold out at twice the size," wrote New York Times critic Olin Downes on

  

  February 13, 1924, of a concert staged the previous afternoon at the Aeolian Hall in New York City. Billed as an educational event, the "Experiment In Modern Music" concert was organized by Paul Whiteman, the immensely popular leader of the Palais Royal Orchestra, to demonstrate that the relatively new form of music called jazz deserved to be regarded as a serious and sophisticated art form. The program featured didactic segments intended to make this case. Segments with titles like "Contrast: Legitimate Scoring vs. Jazzing." After 24 such stem-winders, the house was growing restless. Then a young man named George Gershwin, then known only as a composer of Broadway songs, seated himself at the piano to accompany the orchestra in the performance of a brand new piece of his own composition, called Rhapsody In Blue.

• 1924 --- Calvin Coolidge, known by many as the ‘Silent President’, made the first presidential political speech on radio. The speech originated from New York City and was broadcast on five radio stations. Some five million people tuned in to hear the President speak.

• 1931 --- 'Dracula' starring Bela Lugosi premiers in New York City.
  

  

• 1940 --- Mutual Radio presented the first broadcast of the comic-strip hero, Superman. The identity of the man from planet Krypton was unknown to listeners for six years. The secret eventually leaked out that Superman’s voice was actually that of Bud Collyer, who would later host the hit television program, To Tell the Truth on CBS.
  

  

• 1956 --- Screamin' Jay Hawkins recorded "I Put a Spell On You."

• 1961 --- 'Shop Around' by 'The Miracles' becomes Motown Records first million selling single.

• 1967 --- Police raided Keith Richards home in West Wittering, Sussex, England. The police found "various substances of a suspicious nature." Richards and Mick Jagger were arrested on May 10 on drug charges.

• 1972 --- Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together knocked American Pie out of the top spot on the music charts. The record stayed at the top for one week, before giving way to Nilsson’s Without You. Green returned to his gospel roots in 1980 and is a minister in Memphis, TN. Green recorded 14 hit songs with six of them making it to the Top 10.

• 1973 --- The State of Ohio went metric, becoming the first in the U.S. to post metric distance signs along Interstate 71. These new signs showed the distance in both miles and kilometers. The metric system, though standard in many nations around the world, never quite caught on in the United States.

• 1973 --- The release of U.S. POWs begins in Hanoi as part of the Paris peace settlement. The return of U.S. POWs began when North Vietnam released 142 of 591 U.S. prisoners at Hanoi's

  

  Gia Lam Airport. Part of what was called Operation Homecoming, the first 20 POWs arrived to a hero's welcome at Travis Air Force Base in California on February 14. Operation Homecoming was completed on March 29, 1973, when the last of 591 U.S. prisoners were released and returned to the United States.

• 1976 --- The popular food coloring, Red Dye No. 2, was banned by the FDA because studies had shown it might cause cancer. Red M&Ms disappeared for 11 years because of the ban. Soviet scientists claimed a link between the dye - used in everything from sausage casings and ice cream to makeup - and cancer, and U.S. tests proved some correlation as well. Though it was never linked to any deaths or illnesses, the substance was banned from U.S. shelves in 1976. Consumer worries were enough to get the Mars candy company to pull red M&Ms from their lineup of colors, even

  

  though they never contained any Red Dye No. 2 to begin with. It would take 10 years for the collective panic to fade — and for the M&M spectrum to be complete.

• 1988 --- Two Soviet warships bump two U.S. navy vessels in waters claimed by the Soviet Union. The incident was an indication that even though the Cold War was slowly coming to a close, old tensions and animosities remained unabated. The incident between the ships took place in the Black Sea, off the Crimean peninsula. The American destroyer Caron and cruiser Yorktown were operating within the 12-mile territorial limit claimed by the Soviet Union. They

  

  were challenged by a Soviet frigate and destroyer and told to leave the waters. Then, according to a Navy spokesman, the Soviet ships "shouldered" the U.S. ships out of the way, bumping them slightly. There was no exchange of gunfire, and the American ships eventually departed from the area. There was no serious damage to either U.S. vessel or any injuries.

• 1989 --- Tiny Tim declared himself a New York City mayoral candidate.

• 1999 --- The Senate acquitted President Bill Clinton on two articles of impeachment, falling short of a majority vote on either of the charges against him: perjury and obstruction of justice.
  

  

• 2002 --- Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic goes on trial at The Hague, Netherlands, on charges of genocide and war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Milosevic served as his own attorney

  

  for much of the prolonged trial, which ended without a verdict when the so-called "Butcher of the Balkans" was found dead at age 64 from an apparent heart attack in his prison cell on March 11, 2006.

• 2004 --- Defying a California law, San Francisco officials began performing weddings for same-sex couples.
  

  

• Birthdays
• Abraham Lincoln
• Charles Darwin
• Anna Pavlova
• Judy Bloom
• Joanna Kearns
• Robert Griffin III
• Bill Russell
• Josh Brolin
• Michael McDonald
• Arsenio Hall
• Chynna Phillips
• Christina Ricci
• Thomas Campion
• Alice Roosevelt Longworth
• Joe Alioto
• Lorne Greene
• Franco Zeffirelli
• Joe Garigiola