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Wednesday September 12, 2012

  • 256th Day of 2012 /110 Remaining
  • 10 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
  • Sunrise:6:49
  • Sunset:7:22
  • 12 Hours 33 Minutes of Daylight
  • Moon Rise:3:16am
  • Moon Set:5:10pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 13 %
  • The Next Full Moon
  • September 29 @ 8:18pm
  • Full Corn Moon
  • Full Harvest Moon

This full moon’s name is attributed to Native Americans because it marked when corn was  supposed to be harvested. Most often, the September full moon is actually the Harvest Moon, which is the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. In two years out of three, the Harvest Moon comes in September, but in some years it occurs in October. At the peak of harvest, farmers can work late into the night by the light of this Moon. Usually the full Moon rises an average of 50 minutes later each night, but for the few nights around the Harvest Moon, the Moon seems to rise at nearly the same time each night: just 25 to 30 minutes later across the U.S., and only 10 to 20 minutes later for much of Canada and Europe. Corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice the chief Indian staples are now ready for gathering.

  • Tides
  • High:9:40am/8:44pm
  • Low:2:53am/2:59pm
  • Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
  • This Year:0.03
  • Last Year:0.11
  • Normal To Date:0.00
  • Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
  • Holidays
  • Video Games Day
  • National Boss/Employee Exchange Day
  • National Chocolate Milkshake Day
  • Moon Festival-China
  • National Day-Cape Verde Islands
  • On This Day In …
  • 1609 --- English explorer Henry Hudson sailed down what is now known as the Hudson River.
  • 1866 --- The first burlesque show opened in New York City. The show was a four-act performance called The Black Crook. It ran for 475 performances and made about $1.3 million for its producers. Not bad money in 1866. Actually, not bad money now, either.
  • 1928 --- Actress Katharine Hepburn made her stage debut. The play was titled The Czarina. It would be four years before the ‘First Lady of the American Screen’ would indeed, make her first film, A Bill of Divorcement.
  • 1940 --- Near Montignac, France, a collection of prehistoric cave paintings are discovered by four teenagers who stumbled upon the ancient artwork after following their dog down a narrow entrance into a cavern. The 15,000- to 17,000-year-old paintings, consisting mostly of animal representations, are among the finest examples of art from the Upper Paleolithic period. First studied by the French archaeologist Henri-Édouard-Prosper Breuil, the Lascaux grotto consists of a main cavern 66 feet wide and 16 feet high. The walls of the cavern are decorated with some 600 painted and drawn animals and symbols and nearly 1,500 engravings. The pictures depict in excellent detail numerous types of animals, including horses, red deer, stags, bovines, felines, and what appear to be mythical creatures. There is only one human figure depicted in the cave: a bird-headed man with an erect phallus. Archaeologists believe that the cave was used over a long period of time as a center for hunting and religious rites. The Lascaux grotto was opened to the public in 1948 but was closed in 1963 because artificial lights had faded the vivid colors of the paintings and caused algae to grow over some of them. A replica of the Lascaux cave was opened nearby in 1983 and receives tens of thousands of visitors annually.
  • 1953 --- Six months after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev succeeds him with his election as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Born into a Ukrainian peasant family in 1894, Khrushchev worked as a mine mechanic before joining the Soviet Communist Party in 1918. In 1929, he went to Moscow and steadily rose in the party ranks and in 1938 was made first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party. He became a close associate of Joseph Stalin, the authoritative leader of the Soviet Union since 1924. In 1953, Stalin died, and Khrushchev grappled with Stalin's chosen successor, Georgy Malenkov, for the position of first secretary of the Communist Party. Khrushchev won the power struggle, and Malenkov was made premier, a more ceremonial post. In 1955, Malenkov was replaced by Bulganin, Khrushchev's hand-picked nominee.
  • 1954 --- Lassie was seen on CBS-TV for the first time. Despite being called “girl” by Tommy Rettig, who starred as Jeff Miller, and Jan Clayton, who starred as Jeff’s mom, Ellen, Lassie was, in reality, a male dog. In fact, there were more than a half-dozen Lassie dogs doing stunts.
  • 1959 --- The TV show 'Bonanza' premiers. The frontier adventures of the Cartwright family, father, 3 sons and Chinese cook Hop Sing, on the 'Ponderosa' ranch near Lake Tahoe, Nevada.
  • 1966 --- “Hey, hey we’re the Monkees ” The theme song from the NBC-TV show, “The Monkees”, kicked off a fun-filled weekly series. Some 400 aspiring actors had auditioned for the Columbia television series by producer Don Kirschner. Davy Jones, a former English horse racing jockey; Michael Nesmith, a session guitarist; Peter Tork of the Phoenix Singers; and Micky Dolenz, who had appeared in the TV series Circus Boy were picked to be America’s answer to The Beatles. The four were picked to become the fabricated music group -- not because they could sing, act or play musical instruments -- but because they looked the parts. Dolenz and Jones were actors, Tork and Nesmith had some musical experience.”The Monkees” were the first made-for-TV rock group. Ironically -- or maybe not -- The Monkees TV show won an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series of 1967.
  • 1970 --- James Taylor’s first single, Fire and Rain, was released. Taylor scored 14 hits on the music charts in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • 1977 --- Steven Biko, leader of South Africa's "Black Consciousness Movement," dies of severe head trauma on the stone floor of a prison cell in Pretoria. Six days earlier, he had suffered a major blow to his skull during a police interrogation in Port Elizabeth. Instead of receiving medical attention, he was chained spread-eagled to a window grill for 24 hours. On September 11, he was dumped, naked and shackled, on the floor of a police vehicle and driven 740 miles to Pretoria Central Prison. He died the next day. In announcing his death, South African authorities claimed Biko died after refusing food and water for a week in a hunger strike. Steven Bantu Biko, born in 1946, was the most influential anti-apartheid leader of the 1970s. As a medical student in 1968, he founded the all-black South African Students' Organization with the aim of overcoming the "psychological oppression of blacks by whites." Similar to the "Black Power" movement in the United States, Biko's Black Consciousness Movement stressed black identity, self-esteem, and self-reliance. In the 1970s, Black Consciousness spread from the university communities to black communities throughout South Africa. In 1972, Biko helped organize the Black People's Convention, and in the next year he was banned from politics by South Africa's white-minority government. As a "banned person," he was forbidden by law from speaking in public or being quoted, leaving the area around King William's Town, and being in the company of more than one person at a time. However, he continued to oppose apartheid covertly and was arrested four times during the next few years and held without trial for months at a time. On August 18, 1977, he was arrested with another activist at a roadblock outside the small town of Grahamstown on his way to a political meeting in Cape Town. Taken to a prison in Port Elizabeth, he was stripped naked, manacled to a grate, and forced to lie on a filthy blanket for 18 days. On September 6, he was brought to the Sanlam Building, where police tortured prisoners as a means of interrogation. Five security officers took Biko into room 619 for interrogation. When he emerged, he was in a semiconscious state, having suffered severe head trauma that left him with multiple brain lesions. His injuries were left unattended, and he was chained, standing up, to a window grill for 24 hours. On September 7, two government doctors finally examined Biko and found him hyperventilating, frothing at the mouth, and unable to speak or stand. They pronounced him fit to travel. On September 11, Biko, by then comatose, was thrown naked and chained into the back of a police truck, which drove 10 hours to Pretoria in the north. Dropped in a cell in Pretoria Central Prison, he succumbed to his injuries on September 12. He was 30 years old.
  • 1979 --- Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox became the first American League player to get 3,000 career hits -- and 400 career home runs -- as the Red Sox downed the New York Yankees 9-2 at Fenway Park in Boston.
  • Birthdays
  • Jesse Owens
  • H. L. Mencken
  • Maurice Chevalier
  • Alfred Knopf
  • Margaret Hamilton
  • Yma Sumac
  • Maria Muldaur
  • Barry White