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Wednesday November 7, 2012

  • 312th Day of 2012 / 54 Remaining
  • 44 Days Until The First Day of Winter

  • Sunrise:6:42
  • Sunset:5:05
  • 10 Hours 23 Minutes of Daylight

  • Moon Rise: 12:50am(thu)
  • Moon Set:1:10pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 42 %

  • The Next Full Moon
  • November 28 @ 6:47 am
  • Full Beaver Moon
  • Full Frosts Moon

For both the colonists and the Algonquin tribes, this was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. This full Moon was also called the Frost Moon.

  • Tides
  • High: 8:00am/7:52pm
  • Low: 1:10am/2:06pm

  • Holidays
  • Job Action Day
  • Republican Elephant Day
  • National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day

  • Solidarity Day-Bangladesh
  • Accor & Reconciliation Day-Russia
  • Commemoration Day-Tunisia
  • October Revolution Day-Belarus
  • Revolution Day-Bangladesh
  • Thanksgiving Day-:Liberia

  • On This Day In …
  • 1637 --- Anne Hutchinson, the first female religious leader in the American colonies, was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy.

  • 1665 --- "The London Gazette" was first published.

  • 1805 --- “Great joy in camp we are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific Ocean which we been so long anxious to see. And the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey shores (as I suppose) may be heard distinctly.” These words were written by William Clark after the Lewis & Clark Expedition sighted the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

  • 1874 --- The mighty elephant, trumpeter of the jungle and circus entertainer -- lumbering, powerful fieldworker and mode of transportation -- became a symbol of the Republican Party. How was it that an animal who uses its nose to feed and wash itself and can form a circle with others of its kind by attaching trunks to tails, became a symbol of the Grand Old Party (G.O.P.), a political party of the United States? Thomas Nast, a political cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, created a satirical drawing of an elephant about to fall into a giant hole. The elephant represented the Republican party and was used in reference to Ulysses S. Grant’s possible bid for a third term. Grant was a Republican. The symbol stuck and has been used ever since to represent the G.O.P. both in political cartoons and by the party itself.

  • 1885 --- At a remote spot called Craigellachie in the mountains of British Columbia, the last spike is driven into Canada's first transcontinental railway. In 1880, the Canadian government contracted the Canadian Pacific Railroad to construct the first all-Canadian line to the West Coast. During the next five years, the company laid 4,600 kilometers of single track, uniting various smaller lines across Canada. Despite the logistical difficulties posed by areas such as the muskeg (bogs) region of northwestern Ontario and the high rugged mountains of British Columbia, the railway was completed six years ahead of schedule. The transcontinental railway was instrumental in populating the vast western lands of Canada, providing supplies and commerce to new settlers. Many of western Canada's great cities and towns grew up around Canadian Pacific Railway stations.

  • 1911 --- Marie Curie became the first multiple Nobel Prize winner when she was given the award for chemisty eight years after garnering the physics prize with her late husband, Pierre. (She remains the only woman with multiple Nobels and the only person to receive the award in two science categories.)

  • 1917 --- Russia's Bolshevik Revolution took place. The provisional government of Alexander Kerensky was overthrown by forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

  • 1929 --- The Museum of Modern Art in New York City opened to the public.

  • 1940 --- Only four months after its completion, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State suffers a spectacular collapse. When it opened in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was the third-longest suspension bridge in the world. Built to replace the ferry system that took commuters from Tacoma across the Tacoma Narrows to the Gig Harbor Peninsula, the bridge spanned 2,800 feet and took three years to build. To save cost, the principle engineer, Leon Moisseiff, designed the bridge with an unusually slender frame that measured 39 feet and accommodated just two vehicular lanes. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened with great fanfare on July 1, 1940. Human traffic across the waters of the Tacoma Narrows increased dramatically, but many drivers were drawn to the toll bridge not by convenience but by an unusual characteristic of the structure. When moderate to high winds blew, as they invariably do in the Tacoma Narrows, the bridge roadway would sway from side to side and sometimes suffer excessive vertical undulations. Some drivers reported that vehicles ahead of them would disappear and reappear several times as they crossed the bridge. On a windy day, tourists treated the bridge toll as the fee paid to ride a roller-coaster ride, and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge earned the nickname "Galloping Gertie." Attempts were made to stabilize the structure, but they were in vain. On November 7, with a steady wind blowing at 42 mph, the roadway began to twist back and forth in an increasingly violent fashion. Before closing the span, the toll keeper on the bridge's west side let one last motorist pass, Tacoma News Tribune copy editor Leonard Coatsworth. Halfway across the bridge, Coatsworth lost control of his car. When the roadway tipped so sharply that it seemed his car would topple off, he decided to flee on foot. He tried to retrieve his daughter's black cocker spaniel from the back seat of the car, but the dog snapped at him and refused to budge. Coatsworth ran to safety and called the Tribune, who dispatched a reporter and photographer to the scene. Tribune photographer Howard Clifford was the last man on the bridge before the center span broke off at 11 a.m. and plunged 190 feet into the turbulent Tacoma Narrows. Trapped on the suddenly destabilized side spans, he narrowly avoided being thrown off and ran to safety. The sole casualty of the disaster was the cocker spaniel in Coatsworth's car, which fell into the Narrows and disappeared beneath the foam. At the time, the engineering community was perplexed about how a bridge designed to withstand winds of up to 120 mph could collapse in a wind of 42 mph. Experts still disagree on the exact cause of the bridge's destruction, but most agree the collapse was related to resonance, a phenomenon that also comes into play when a soprano shatters a glass with her voice. In the case of the Tacoma Narrows, the wind resonated with the natural frequency of the structure, causing a steady increase in amplitude until the bridge was destroyed.

  • 1944 --- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected to an unprecedented fourth term in office. FDR remains the only president to have served more than two terms. Roosevelt rose above personal and political challenges to emerge as one of the nation's most revered and influential presidents. In 1921, at the age of 29, he contracted polio and thereafter was burdened with leg braces; eventually, he was confined to a wheelchair. From the time he was first elected to the presidency in 1932 to mid-1945, when he died while in office, Roosevelt presided over two of the biggest crises in U.S. history: the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II. FDR implemented drastic and oft-criticized legislation to help boost America out of the Great Depression. Although he initially tried to avoid direct U.S. involvement in World War II, which began in 1939, the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 thrust American headlong into the conflict. By the time Roosevelt was elected to his fourth term, the war had taken a turn in favor of the Allies, but FDR's health was already on the decline. His arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) had been worsened by the stress of serving as a war-time president. In April 1945, seven months before the war finally ended in an Allied victory, FDR died of a stroke at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia.

  • 1965 --- The Pillsbury Doughboy, 'Poppin' Fresh,' was born. He made his debut in a commercial for crescent rolls.

  • 1967 --- U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a bill establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

  • 1967 --- The U.S. Selective Service Commission announced that college students arrested in anti-war demonstrations would lose their draft deferments.

  • 1967 --- Carl Stokes was elected the first black mayor Cleveland, OH, becoming the first black mayor of a major city.

  • 1985 --- The Colombian army stormed the country's Palace of Justice. The siege claimed the lives of 100 people, including 11 Supreme Court Justices. The Palace had been seized by leftist guerrillas belonging to the April 19 Movement.

  • 1988 --- John Fogerty won his self-plagiarism court battle with Fantasy Records. The label claimed Fogerty copied his own song, "Run Through The Jungle" when he wrote "The Old Man Down The Road".

  • 1991 --- Earvin "Magic" Johnson stuns the world by announcing his sudden retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers, after testing positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. At the time, many Americans viewed AIDS as a gay white man's disease. Johnson (1959- ), who is African American and heterosexual, was one of the first sports stars to go public about his HIV-positive status. Revered as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Johnson spent his entire 13-season NBA career with the Lakers, helping them to win five championships in the 1980s.

  • Birthdays
  • Madame Marie Curie
  • David Petraeus
  • Billy Graham
  • Joni Mitchell
  • Leon Trotsky
  • Albert Camus
  • Al Hirt
  • Jim Kaat
  • Johnny Rivers
  • Tommy Hart