- 123rd Day of 2012 / 243 Remaining
- 49 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:6:12
- Sunset:8:02
- 13 Hr 50 Min
- Moon Rise:4:24pm
- Moon Set:3:41am
- Moon’s Phase: 84 %
- The Next Full Moon
- May 5 @ 8:36pm
- Full Flower Moon
- Full Corn Planting Moon
- Full Milk Moon
In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name of this Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
- Tides
- High:8:27am/8:48pm
- Low:2:28am/2:18pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:15.65
- Last Year:25.17
- Normal To Date23.01:
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- Brothers and Sisters Day
- National Truffles Day
- National Rowdy Friends Day
- National Babies Day
- King's Birthday-Lesotho
- National Flag Day-Poland
- On This Day In …
- 1776 --- France and Spain agreed to donate arms to American rebels fighting the British.
- 1863 --- Confederate Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was accidentally wounded by his own men at Chancellorsville, Va. He died eight days later.
- 1885 --- ‘Good Housekeeping’ magazine begins publication. Founded by Clark W. Bryan, the magazine was purchased by Hearst publishing in 1911.
- 1933 --- Hitler banned trade unions in Germany.
- 1933 --- Although accounts of an aquatic beast living in Scotland's Loch Ness date back 1,500 years, the modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is born when a sighting makes local news on May 2, 1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier related an account of a local couple who claimed to have seen "an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface." The story of the "monster" (a moniker chosen by the Courier editor) became a media phenomenon, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound sterling reward for capture of the beast. Loch Ness, located in the Scottish Highlands, has the largest volume of fresh water in Great Britain; the body of water reaches a depth of nearly 800 feet and a length of about 23 miles. Scholars of the Loch Ness Monster find a dozen references to "Nessie" in Scottish history, dating back to around A.D. 500, when local Picts carved a strange aquatic creature into standing stones near Loch Ness. The earliest written reference to a monster in Loch Ness is a 7th-century biography of Saint Columba, the Irish missionary who introduced Christianity to Scotland. In 565, according to the biographer, Columba was on his way to visit the king of the northern Picts near Inverness when he stopped at Loch Ness to confront a beast that had been killing people in the lake. Seeing a large beast about to attack another man, Columba intervened, invoking the name of God and commanding the creature to "go back with all speed." The monster retreated and never killed another man. A famous 1934 photograph seemed to show a dinosaur-like creature with a long neck emerging out of the murky waters, leading some to speculate that "Nessie" was a solitary survivor of the long-extinct plesiosaurs. The aquatic plesiosaurs were thought to have died off with the rest of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Loch Ness was frozen solid during the recent ice ages, however, so this creature would have had to have made its way up the River Ness from the sea in the past 10,000 years. And the plesiosaurs, believed to be cold-blooded, would not long survive in the frigid waters of Loch Ness. More likely, others suggested, it was an archeocyte, a primitive whale with a serpentine neck that is thought to have been extinct for 18 million years. Skeptics argued that what people were seeing in Loch Ness were "seiches"--oscillations in the water surface caused by the inflow of cold river water into the slightly warmer loch.Amateur investigators kept an almost constant vigil, and in the 1960s several British universities launched expeditions to Loch Ness, using sonar to search the deep. Nothing conclusive was found, but in each expedition the sonar operators detected large, moving underwater objects they could not explain. In 1975, Boston's Academy of Applied Science combined sonar and underwater photography in an expedition to Loch Ness. A photo resulted that, after enhancement, appeared to show the giant flipper of a plesiosaur-like creature. Further sonar expeditions in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in more tantalizing, if inconclusive, readings. Revelations in 1994 that the famous 1934 photo was a hoax hardly dampened the enthusiasm of tourists and professional and amateur investigators to the legend of the Loch Ness Monster.
- 1938 --- Ella Fitzgerald recorded one of her biggest hits, A-Tisket, A-Tasket, with Chick Webb’s band. Following Webb’s death, Fitzgerald took over the band for some three years.
- 1939 --- Not hitting well and feeling bad, Ironman Lou Gehrig took himself out of the Yankee line-up after playing 2,130 consecutive games. The Yankees destroyed Detroit 22-2, and Gehrig never played baseball again.
- 1941 --- General Mills began shipping a new cereal called "Cheerioats" to six test markets. (The cereal was later renamed "Cheerios.")
- 1941 --- The Federal Communications Commission agreed to let regular scheduling of TV broadcasts by commercial TV stations begin on July 1, 1941. This was the start of network television.
- 1945 --- Russians took Berlin after 12 days of fierce house-to-house fighting. The Allies announced the surrender of Nazi troops in Italy and parts of Austria.
- 1954 --- Stan "The Man" Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals set a major league record when he hit five home runs in a doubleheader against the New York Giants. Though he went 6-8 with five home runs for the day, he only drove in 8 runs. In 1972 San Diego Padre Nate Colbert equaled the feat, hitting five home runs in a double header against the Atlanta Braves.
- 1956 --- For the first time in "Billboard" chart history, five singles were in both the pop and the R&B top 10. The singles were Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel," Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes," Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally," the Platters' "Magic Touch," and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers' "Why Do Fools Fall in Love."
- 1964 --- The Rolling Stones appeared on U.S. charts for the first time with "Not Fade Away."
- 1970 --- Student anti-war protesters at Ohio's Kent State University burn down the campus ROTC building. The National Guard took control of the campus.
- 1970 --- The ‘First Lady of Horse Racing’ (first to ride at a major track, first to win a major feature), Diane Crump, rode Fathom and made history as the first woman jockey to ride in the Kentucky Derby. She finished in 12th place.
- 1974 --- Filming got underway for the motion picture, Jaws, in Martha’s Vineyard, MA. What was to be a 58-day shooting schedule for the film inspired by the Peter Benchley novel soon gave way to 120 days. Costs soared from what was to be a $3.5 million project to $8 million. The director, Steven Spielberg, was able to explain away the rise in costs and the picture did very well at the box office and, later, on video cassette.
- 1994 --- Nelson Mandela claimed victory in South Africa's first democratic elections.
- 1997 --- Tony Blair became, at age 44, Britain's youngest prime minister in 185 years.
- 2007 --- Iowa spent $6,000 to change the locks at one of its state prisons after someone paid $12 on e-Bay for a set of keys belonging to a guard who retired in the 1970s. The warden said he did not know if any of the old keys actually opened any of the locks in the 135-year-old prison -- but he was not sure they didn't. The prison housed a number of violent criminals.
- 2010 --- European governments and the International Monetary Fund committed to pulling Greece back from the brink of default, agreeing on nearly $1 trillion in emergency loans.
- 2011 --- Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, is killed by U.S. forces during a raid on his compound hideout in Pakistan. The notorious, 54-year-old leader of Al Qaeda, the terrorist network of Islamic extremists, had been the target of a nearly decade-long international manhunt.The raid began around 1 a.m. local time, when 23 U.S. Navy SEALs in two Black Hawk helicopters descended on the compound in Abbottabad, a tourist and military center north of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. One of the helicopters crash-landed into the compound but no one aboard was hurt. During the raid, which lasted approximately 40 minutes, five people, including bin Laden and one of his adult sons, were killed by U.S. gunfire. No Americans were injured in the assault. Afterward, bin Laden’s body was flown by helicopter to Afghanistan for official identification, then buried at an undisclosed location in the Arabian Sea less than 24 hours after his death, in accordance with Islamic practice.
- Birthdays
- Dr. Benjamin Spock
- Bing (Harry Lillis) Crosby
- Angela Bofill
- Bianca Jagger
- David Beckham
- Engelbert Humperdinck
- Theodore Bikel
- Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
- Alessandro Scarlatti
- Dan Roche
- Catherine II (The Great) Empress of Russia
- Lorenz Hart
- Satyajit Ray
- Hedda Hopper
- Baron Von Richthofen “The Red Baron”
- Link Wray