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Wednesday October 10, 2012

  • 284th Day of 2012 / 82 Remaining
  • 72 Days Until The First Day of Winter
  • Sunrise:7:14
  • Sunset:6:39
  • 11 Hours 25 Minutes of Daylight
  • Moon Rise:2:02am
  • Moon Set:3:40pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 26 %
  • The Next Full Moon
  • October 29 @ 12:50 pm
  • Full Hunter’s Moon
  • Full Harvest Moon

This full Moon is often referred to as the Full Hunter’s Moon, Blood Moon, or Sanguine Moon. Many moons ago, Native Americans named this bright moon for obvious reasons. The leaves are falling from trees, the deer are fattened, and it’s time to begin storing up meat for the long winter ahead. Because the fields were traditionally reaped in late September or early October, hunters could easily see fox and other animals that come out to glean from the fallen grains. Probably because of the threat of winter looming close, the Hunter’s Moon is generally accorded with special honor, historically serving as an important feast day in both Western Europe and among many Native American tribes.

  • Tides
  • High: 8:10am/7:22pm
  • Low: 1:13am/1:51pm
  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:0.03
  • Last Year:0.11
  • Normal To Date:0.20
  • Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
  • Holidays
  • Double Tenth Day
  • Tuxedo Day
  • American Indian Heritage Day-Alabama
  • Native American's Day-South Dakota
  • Oklahoma Historical Day-Oklahoma
  • National Angel Food Cake Day
  • Double Tenth Day-Taiwan
  • Independence Day-Fiji
  • Thanksgiving-Canada
  • UN World Mental Health Day
  • Moi Day-Kenya
  • Party Foundation Day-North Korea
  • On This Day In …
  • 0732 --- At the Battle of Tours near Poitiers, France, Frankish leader Charles Martel, a Christian, defeats a large army of Spanish Moors, halting the Muslim advance into Western Europe. Abd-ar-Rahman, the Muslim governor of Cordoba, was killed in the fighting, and the Moors retreated from Gaul, never to return in such force. Charles was the illegitimate son of Pepin, the powerful mayor of the palace of Austrasia and effective ruler of the Frankish kingdom. After Pepin died in 714 (with no surviving legitimate sons), Charles beat out Pepin's three grandsons in a power struggle and became mayor of the Franks. He expanded the Frankish territory under his control and in 732 repulsed an onslaught by the Muslims. Victory at Tours ensured the ruling dynasty of Martel's family, the Carolingians. His son Pepin became the first Carolingian king of the Franks, and his grandson Charlemagne carved out a vast empire that stretched across Europe.
  • 1865 --- The billiard ball was patented by John Wesley Hyatt. Mr. Hyatt won $10,000 in a contest. He was the first person to come up with a substitute for the ivory ball (in use at the time).
  • 1881 --- Charles Darwin published The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms. He considered the work a more important accomplishment than his The Origin of Species (1859), which turned out to be one of the most influential and controversial books in history. Darwin, the privileged and well-connected son of a successful English doctor, had been interested in botany and natural sciences since his boyhood, despite the discouragement of his early teachers. At Cambridge, he found professors and scientists with similar interests and with their help began participating in scientific voyages, including the HMS Beagle's trip. By the time Darwin returned, he had developed an outstanding reputation as a field researcher and scientific writer, based on his many papers and letters dispatched from South America and the Galapagos Islands, which were read at meetings of prominent scientific societies in London.
  • 1886 --- Griswold Lorillard (of Lorillard tobacco fame) wore a tailless dress coat that was tailored in England. He wore it to the country club at Tuxedo Park, New York; therefore, the name: tuxedo. The rest is formal fashion history. The tux would later replace the tailcoat.
  • 1935 --- George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess premieres on Broadway. Porgy and Bess began its journey to the Broadway stage in 1936, when George Gershwin wrote a letter late one night to the author of a book he was reading proposing that the two of them collaborate on an operatic adaptation. The African-American poet DuBose Heyward, author of the novel Porgy, immediately agreed to Gershwin's proposal, but commercial commitments in New York prevented Gershwin from actually beginning work on the project for another seven years. In the meantime, singer Al Jolson attempted to mount a musical version of Porgy starring himself in blackface, but that effort foundered in 1932, leaving the way open for the Gershwin-Heyward collaboration that would feature an all-African American cast of classically trained singers—revolutionary casting in 1930s America. Over the course of more than two years beginning in the spring of 1933, DuBose Heyward and the two Gershwins—George's brother, Ira, joined on as co-lyricist in 1934—collaborated mostly by U.S. Mail, with only occasional face-to-face meetings. In this fashion, they nevertheless managed to create some of the greatest songs in American musical-theater history, including "Summertime," "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'," "It Ain't Necessarily So" and "Bess, You Is My Woman Now." The critics of the day were decidedly mixed in their reception of Porgy and Bess, however. While Olin Downes of The New York Times found "much to commend it from the musical standpoint," composer/critic Virgil Thomson, writing for the New York Herald-Tribune, was less kind, calling Gershwin's incorporation of blues and jazz influences into a "serious" operatic score to be "falsely conceived and rather clumsily executed...crooked folklore and half-way opera." Many of the songs had been cut from show between its trial run in Boston and its Broadway debut, however—a fact that may well have hurt Porgy and Bess with critics. In fact, the full George Gershwin score of Porgy and Bess would not be performed again until a triumphant 1976 revival by the Houston Grand Opera helped establish its current place in the standard operatic repertoire. George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward died in 1937 and 1940, respectively, not knowing that the poorly-received Porgy and Bess, which premiered on this day in 1925 and closed some four months later, would later gain recognition as one of the most important American musical works of the 20th century.
  • 1957 --- In the conclusion to an extremely embarrassing situation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower offers his apologies to Ghanian Finance Minister, Komla Agbeli Gbdemah, who had been refused service at a restaurant in Dover, Delaware. It was one of the first of many such incidents in which African diplomats were confronted with racial segregation in the United States. While the matter might appear rather small relative to other events in the Cold War, the continued racial slights to African (and Asian) diplomats during the 1950s and 1960s were of utmost concern to U.S. officials. During those decades the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for the "hearts and minds" of hundreds of millions of people of color in Asia and Africa. Racial discrimination in America--particularly when it was directed at representatives from those regions--was, as one U.S. official put it, the nation's "Achilles' heel." Matters continued to deteriorate during the early 1960s, when dozens of diplomats from new nations in Africa and Asia faced housing discrimination in Washington, D.C., as well as a series of confrontations in restaurants, barbershops, and other places of business in and around the area. It was clear that American civil rights had become an international issue.
  • 1962 --- The BBC banned the song "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett.
  • 1966 --- The Beach Boys released the single "Good Vibrations.
  • 1968 --- Two of the season’s best pitchers were on the mound for game seven of the World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals. It was Mickey Lolich against Bob Gibson, with Lolich winning and being named Series MVP in the process. The Tigers were only the third team to win a world championship after being down three games to one. The clubs combined for ninety-nine strikeouts in sixty-three innings of play.
  • 1970 --- During the October Crisis, the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ), a militant separatist group, kidnaps Quebec labor minister Pierre Laporte in Montreal. Five days earlier, FLQ terrorists had seized British trade commissioner James Richard Cross. In exchange for the lives of the men, the FLQ demanded the release of two dozen FLQ members convicted of various charges, including kidnappings, bombings, and arms theft. Believing the situation to be out of control, the Quebec government asked the Canadian federal government to send troops to the French-Canadian province to help maintain order. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau responded by proclaiming the War Powers Act, under which the FLQ was banned, some civil liberties were suspended, and thousands of troops were sent to Montreal. In a series of police raids, more than 400 Quebec separatists were taken into custody and held without charges. On October 18, the body of Pierre Laporte was found in the trunk of a car near Saint-Hubert Airport. The apartment building holding Cross and his kidnappers was discovered in late November. After a tense standoff, the kidnappers agreed to release Cross in return for safe passage to Cuba for themselves and their families. Cross was freed on December 4 after the group arrived in Cuba. Laporte's kidnappers were later arrested and convicted of kidnapping and murder. The October Crisis was a rare period of violence during Quebec's Quiet Revolution, an otherwise peaceful effort by Quebecois politicians to gain greater autonomy within the English-dominated federation of Canada.
  • 1973 --- Vice President Spiro T. Agnew pleaded no contest to one count of federal income tax evasion and resigned his office.
  • 1984 --- The U.S. Congress passed the 2nd Boland Amendment which outlawed solicitation of 3rd-party countries to support the Contras. The amendment barred the use of funds available to CIA, defense, or intelligence agencies for "supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization or individual."
  • Birthdays
  • Helen Hayes
  • Thelonious Monk
  • Giuseppe Verdi
  • David Lee Roth
  • Dale Earnhardt Jr
  • Peter Coyote
  • John Prine
  • Ben Vereen
  • Frederick Douglass Patterson
  • Cyril Neville