- 40th Day of 2012 / 326 Remaining
- 40 Days Until Spring Begins
- Sunrise:7:06
- Sunset:5:42
- 10 Hr 36 Min
- Moon Rise:8:12pm
- Moon Set:7:49am
- Moon’s Phase: 95 %
- The Next Full Moon
- March 8 @ 1:41 am
- Full Worm 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:11:22am
- Low:5:24am/5:46pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:6.32
- Last Year:12.67
- Normal To Date:14.22
- Annual Average: 22.28
- Holidays
- National Stop Bullying Day
- National Bagels and Lox Day
- National Toothache Day
- Read in the Bathtub Day
- Fish Protection Day
- On This Day In …
- 1825 --- The U. S. House of Representatives elected John Quincy Adams president after no candidate won a majority of electoral votes.
- 1870 --- United States Weather Bureau was authorized by Congress. We think people always just sat around and talked about the weather, but it took an act of Congress to do something about it! The weather bureau is officially known as the National Weather Service (NWS) and is a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The National Weather Service protects the life and property of U.S. citizens by issuing forecasts and warnings for natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and severe weather conditions. NWS communicates this information to the populace through an intricate and varied network. The NOAA Weather Wire Service or NWWS is the primary satellite communications system for NWS transmission. Warnings and other services are delivered in this manner to newspapers, radio and TV stations and emergency agencies. More than 6400 individual products are transmitted every day. NWS also generates data to be delivered to the public over a nationwide network of FM radio transmitter sites. Most of the U.S. including Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa can receive these broadcasts. Cable TV weather channels and AM radio channels also broadcast this information.
- 1894 --- Hershey's Chocolate Company was founded as a subsidiary of Milton S. Hershey's Lancaster Caramel Company.
- 1943 --- The World War II battle of Guadalcanal in the southwest Pacific ended with an American victory over Japanese forces.
- 1950 --- Joseph Raymond McCarthy, a relatively obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, announces during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he has in his hand a list of 205 communists who have infiltrated the U.S. State Department. The unsubstantiated declaration, which was little more than a publicity stunt, suddenly thrust Senator McCarthy into the national spotlight.
- 1964 --- The G.I. Joe doll … (ahem) … “Action Figure” … (ahem) … debuted.
- 1964 --- At approximately 8:12 p.m. Eastern time, The Ed Sullivan Show returned from a commercial (for Anacin pain reliever), and there was Ed Sullivan standing before a restless crowd. He tried to begin his next introduction, but then stopped and extended his arms in the universal sign for "Settle Down." "Quiet!" he said with mock gravity, and the noise died down just a little. Then he resumed: "Here's a very amusing magician we saw in Europe and signed last summer....Let's have a nice hand for him—Fred Kaps!" For the record, Fred Kaps proceeded to be quite charming and funny over the next five minutes. In fact, Fred Kaps is revered to this day by magicians around the world as the only three-time Fédération Internationale des Sociétés Magiques Grand Prix winner. But Fred Kaps had the horrific bad luck on this day in 1964 to be the guest that followed the Beatles on Ed Sullivan—possibly the hardest act to follow in the history of show business. It is estimated that 73 million Americans were watching that night as the Beatles made their live U.S. television debut. Roughly eight minutes before Fred Kaps took the stage, Sullivan gave his now-famous intro, "Ladies and gentlemen...the Beatles!" and after a few seconds of rapturous cheering from the audience, the band kicked into "All My Lovin'." Fifty seconds in, the first audience-reaction shot of the performance shows a teenage girl beaming and possibly hyperventilating. Two minutes later, Paul is singing another pretty, mid-tempo number: "Til There Was You," from the Broadway musical Music Man. There's screaming at the end of every phrase in the lyrics, of course, but to view the broadcast today, it seems driven more by anticipation than by the relatively low-key performance itself. And then came "She Loves You," and the place seems to explode. What followed was perhaps the most important two minutes and 16 seconds of music ever broadcast on American television—a sequence that still sends chills down the spine almost half a century later. The Beatles would return later in the show to perform "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" as the audience remained at the same fever pitch it had reached during "She Loves You." This time it was Wells & the Four Fays, a troupe of comic acrobats, who had to suffer what Fred Kaps had after the Beatles' first set. Perhaps the only non-Beatle on Sullivan's stage that night who did not consider the evening a total loss was the young man from the Broadway cast of Oliver! who sang "I'd Do Anything" as the Artful Dodger midway through the show. His name was Davy Jones, and less than three years later, he'd star in a TV show of his own that owed a rather significant debt to the hysteria that began on this night in 1964: The Monkees.
- 1965 --- A U.S. Marine Corps Hawk air defense missile battalion is deployed to Da Nang. President Johnson had ordered this deployment to provide protection for the key U.S. airbase there. This was the first commitment of American combat troops in South Vietnam and there was considerable reaction around the world to the new stage of U.S. involvement in the war. Predictably, both communist China and the Soviet Union threatened to intervene if the United States continued to apply its military might on behalf of the South Vietnamese. In Moscow, some 2,000 demonstrators, led by Vietnamese and Chinese students and clearly supported by the authorities, attacked the U.S. Embassy. Britain and Australia supported the U.S. action, but France called for negotiations.
- 1971 --- Leroy Robert "Satchel" Paige was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the first player to be inducted from the Negro leagues. Paige was a right-handed pitcher and was the oldest rookie to play Major League Baseball at the age of 42. He played with the St. Louis Browns until age 47, and represented them in the Major League All-Star Game in 1952 and 1953. He first played for the semi-professional Mobile Tigers from 1924 to 1926. Paige began his professional career in 1926 with the Chattanooga Black Lookouts of the Negro Southern League, and played his last professional game on June 21, 1966, for the Peninsula Grays of the Carolina League.When Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, a teammate of Paige, Paige realized that it was for the better that he himself was not the first black player in major league baseball. Robinson started in the minors, and had a major league team started him in its minor league affiliate, Paige would have probably seen this as an insult. Paige eventually realized that by integrating baseball in the minor leagues first with Robinson, the white major league players got the chance to “get used to” the idea of playing alongside black players. Understanding that, Paige said in his autobiography that, “Signing Jackie like they did still hurt me deep down. I’d been the guy who’d started all that big talk about letting us in the big time. I’d been the one who’d opened up the major league parks to colored teams. I’d been the one who the white boys wanted to go barnstorming against.” Paige, and all other black players, knew that quibbling about the choice of the first black player in the major leagues would do nothing productive, so, despite his inner feelings, Paige said of Robinson, “He’s the greatest colored player I’ve ever seen.” Finally, on July 7, 1948, with his Cleveland Indians in a pennant race and in desperate need of pitching, Indians owner Bill Veeck brought Paige in to try out with Indians player/manager Lou Boudreau. On that same day, his 42nd birthday, Paige signed his first major league contract, for $40,000 for the three months remaining in the season, becoming the first Negro pitcher in the American League and the seventh Negro big leaguer overall.
- 2001 --- The American submarine USS Greenville accidentally strikes and sinks a Japanese fishing & high school training ship, the Ehime-Maru. Nine crew members of the Ehime Maru and 4 high school students were drowned. The submarine was practicing an emergency rapid surfacing maneuver at the time.
- Birthdays
- Brendan Behan
- William Henry Harrison (9th President)
- Carmen Miranda
- Ernest Tubb
- Jacques Monod (French Nobel Prize-winning biologist)
- Mia Farrow
- Judith Light
- Roger Mudd
- Carole King
- Joe Pesci
- Alice Walker
- Amy Lowell
- Dean Rusk
- Bill Veeck
- George Ade
- Gypsy Rose Lee