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Wednesday March 7, 2012

1974 Pearl Bailey w/ President Nixon tinkling the ivories (see Emperor Nero 0064 C.E.)
1974 Pearl Bailey w/ President Nixon tinkling the ivories (see Emperor Nero 0064 C.E.)

 

  • 67th Day of 2012 / 299 Remaining
  • 13 Days Until Spring Begins
  • Sunrise:6:32
  • Sunset:6:10
  • 11 Hr 38 Min
  • Moon Rise:5:51pm
  • Moon Set:5:45am
  • Moon’s Phase: 100 %
  • The Next Full Moon
  • March 8 @ 1:41 am
  • Full Worm Moon
  • Full Sap Moon
  • Full Crust Moon
  • Lenten Moon

As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.

  • Tides
  • High:9:40am/10:32pm
  • Low:3:38am/4:03pm
  • Rainfall
  • This Year:7.40
  • Last Year:18.29
  • Normal To Date:17.88
  • Annual Average: 22.28
  • Holidays
  • Carnival
  • Fun Facts About Names Day
  • National Be Heard Day
  • Peace Corps Day
  • National Crown Roast of Pork Day
  • National Cereal Day
  • Discover What Your Name Means Day(god will increase)
  • Get Grandma to Write Down Her Meatloaf Recipe Day
  • Shrove Monday
  • Bun Day-Iceland
  • Carnival-Trinidad and Tobago)
  • Discovery Day / Magellan Day-Guam
  • Eight Hour or Labor Day-Australia/Tasmania
  • Fasching-Austria/Germany
  • On This Day In …
  • 1804 --- John Wedgwood, the son of Josiah Wedgwood of pottery fame, founded the Royal Horticultural Society.
  • 1876 --- Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. He envisioned it as a device that could make it possible to communicate with deaf people. It was an invention, incidentally, that almost bankrupted his company in the beginning.
  • 1897 --- Dr. John Kellogg served corn flakes for the first time to his patients at his hospital in Battle Creek, Michigan. They wouldn't be sold commercially until 1906.
  • 1923 --- The New Republic publishes Robert Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." The poem, beginning with the famous line "Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village though," has introduced millions of American students to poetry.
  • 1926 --- The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation took place, between New York City and London.
  • 1927 --- A Texas law that banned African-Americans from voting was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
  • 1933 --- Charles Darrow created the game we know as Monopoly. Or, maybe Lizzie J. Magie’s The Landlord’s Game, patented on January 5, 1904, was the real monopoly game. Or was it? Lizzie's game was very similar to Monopoly, except she, a Quaker from Virginia, created it as a political comment to promote a single land-ownership tax. She shared it with other Quakers and proponents of the tax measure. Families copied the game, adding their own favorite street names and changing the rules as they pleased. The name of the game changed as the rules changed. A Reading, Pennsylvania college student, Dan Layman, played the version his friends called Monopoly in the late 1920s. Once out of college, and back home in Indianapolis, he produced the game under the name, Finance. His dorm-mate, Louis Thun, copyrighted several rules that the two had written. Was Layman’s the real Monopoly game? Or was it Ruth Hoskins and friends, Quakers who lived in Atlantic City, who made the Monopoly game we still play? Ruth learned how to play the game from a friend of Layman’s in Indianapolis. She then moved to Atlantic City and shared it with other friends. In 1930, they made a version complete with Atlantic City street names like Boardwalk, Park Place, Virginia and Pennsylvania Avenues; even including Marven Gardens, a residential section at the edge of Margate City, a suburb of Atlantic City. Charles Darrow, an inventor of sorts, first saw and played the game in 1931, when he and his wife were introduced to Monopoly by mutual friends of Ruth Hoskins. The Darrows, who lived in Germantown, Pennsylvania, were penniless. The Depression had left them destitute. Fascinated with the game, Darrow made some modifications, misspelled Marven Gardens as Marvin Gardens, added copyrighted artwork and produced games which he then began to sell on this day in 1933. The popularity of the game was instant. Darrow could not keep up with the demand. He eventually sold his ‘rights’ to Parker Brothers who initially turned Darrow away, saying that his game had “52 fundamental errors.” The 50-year-old company eventually agreed to give Darrow royalties on every Monopoly game sold, on the condition that they could write “short version” game rules. Ultimately, Darrow became a millionaire at age 46. So, who made the unwritten rule that the next player to land on Free Parking gets the money, if any, collected from Chance and Community Chest fees?
  • 1954 --- In a regular NBA game the Minneapolis Lakers edged the Milwaukee Hawks 65-63. There were fewer slam-dunks because, in this one-game experiment, the baskets were raised to 12 feet
  • 1955 --- For the first time in history a country & western artist made the Billboard Rhythm & Blues chart. It was Carl Perkins with "Blue Suede Shoes."
  • 1974 --- In addition to handing up criminal indictments against seven former high-ranking officials in the Nixon administration, a grand jury in the District of Columbia named the president himself as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate cover-up. The drumbeat of bad news was growing louder by the month for President Nixon, as was talk of his possible impeachment. But in politics as in entertainment, the show must go on, and though engulfed in a scandal that would soon bring his presidency to a disgraceful end, Nixon still found time to provide piano accompaniment to the legendary singer Pearl Bailey at a White House dinner on March 7, 1974. "President Nixon and Pearl Bailey, performing as an impromptu 'Dick and Pearl Show,' momentarily upstaged Watergate, the energy crisis, troubles in the Middle East and the economy Thursday night," raved the Washington Post, the very paper whose investigative reporters broke the story of the Watergate scandal. It was at the end of her scheduled solo performance before the attendees of the Midwinter Governors' Conference that Ms. Bailey invited the president onstage and coerced him into taking over at the piano. After he played a few bars of "Home on the Range," Ms. Bailey interrupted, "Mr. President, I wanted to sing a song, not ride a horse." "Wild Irish Rose" and "God Bless America" went over much better, and between the president's game spirit and Ms. Bailey's famous combination of beautiful singing and lightning quick banter, the performance was judged a great success.
  • 1985 --- The song We Are the World, from the album of the same name, was played on the radio for the first time. Forty-five of pop music’s top stars had gathered together to combine their talents to record the music of Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson. Richie and Jackson sang, too, while Quincy Jones did the producing of the USA for Africa record. The proceeds of the multimillion-selling recording went to aid African famine victims. The project, coordinated by Ken Kragen, was deemed a huge success.
  • 1987 --- Mike Tyson became the youngest heavyweight boxing champion when he beat James Smith in a 12-round fight in Las Vegas. Tyson was only 20 years old.
  • 1994 --- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parodies that poke fun at an original work can be considered "fair use" that does not require permission from the copyright holder.
  • 2003 --- Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center announced that they had transferred 6.7 gigabytes of uncompressed data from Sunnvale, CA, to Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 58 seconds. The data was sent via fiber-optic cables and traveled 6,800 miles.
  • 2009 --- NASA's Kepler Mission, a space photometer for searching for extrasolar planets in the Milky Way galaxy, was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
  • Birthdays
  • Ernie Isley
  • Luther Burbank
  • Daniel J. Travanti
  • Taylor Dayne
  • Willard Scott
  • Ivan Lendl
  • Joe Carter
  • Franco Harris
  • Lynn Swann
  • Maurice Ravel
  • Rachel Weisz
  • Janet Guthrie
  • Michael Eisner
  • Jeff Kent
  • Anna Magnani
  • Michael York
  • Tammy Faye Bakker
  • Peter Wolf
  • Wanda Sykes