- 114th Day of 2012 / 252 Remaining
- 58 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:6:23
- Sunset:7:54
- 13 Hr 31 Min
- Moon Rise:7:41am
- Moon Set:10:26pm
- Moon’s Phase: 5 %
- 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:1:50pm
- Low:6:54am/6:45pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:15.33
- Last Year:24.90
- Normal To Date:22.69
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- National Bulldogs Are Beautiful Day
- National Licorice Day
- UN World Book And Copyright Day
- Book Day and Lover's Day-Spain
- Children's Day/ National Sovereignty Day-Turkey
- Aragon Day-Spain
- Peppercorn Day-Bermuda
- St. George Feast Day-Catholicism
- On This Day In …
- 1772 --- Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle wrote "La Marseillaise." It is the national anthem of France.
- 1900 --- The word, hillbilly, was first used in print in an article in the New York Journal. It was spelled a little differently, as the story said that a Hill-Billie was a “free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills.” The article continued that “he has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.”
- 1951 --- The Associated Press began use of its new Teletypesetter circuit. The AP provided a perforated, paper-tape message to a news bureau in Charlotte, North Carolina. The message was then fed to a monitor for preparation into a printer. From there, the newspaper copy was completed.
- 1952 --- In his first major-league at-bat, New York Giants relief pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm hit his first and last home run. He pitched in 1,070 games in 21 years, but never hit another home run.
- 1954 --- Hank Aaron knocks out the first home run of his Major League Baseball career. Twenty years later, Aaron becomes baseball’s new home run king when he broke Babe Ruth’s long-standing record of 714 career homers. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Aaron began his professional baseball career in 1952 in the Negro League and joined the Milwaukee Braves of the major leagues in 1954, eight years after Jackie Robinson had integrated baseball. Aaron was the last Negro League player to compete in the majors. He played his first game with the Braves on April 13 and went hitless in his five times at bat. Two days later, he got his first hit, a single, in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals, and on April 23, 1954, pounded out his first major league home run off Cardinals’ pitcher Vic Raschi.
1964 --- Ken Johnson of the Houston Colt .45’s threw the first no-hit game for a loss in baseball history. Cincinnati’s Reds beat Johnson’s no hitter by a score of 1-0 by capitalizing on two costly Houston errors.
- 1967 --- Vladimir Komarov is killed when his parachute fails to deploy during his spacecraft's landing. Komarov was testing the spacecraft Soyuz I in the midst of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Earlier in 1967, the U.S. space program had experienced its own tragedy. Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chafee, NASA astronauts in the Apollo program, were killed in a fire during tests on the ground. Komarov, a fighter pilot and aeronautical engineer, had made his first space trip in 1964, three years before the doomed 1967 voyage. After 24 hours and 16 orbits of the earth, Komarov was scheduled to reenter the atmosphere, but ran into difficulty handling the vessel and was unable to fire the rocket brakes. It took two more trips around the earth before the cosmonaut could manage reentry. When Soyuz I reached an altitude of 23,000 feet, a parachute was supposed to deploy, bringing Komarov safely to earth. However, the lines of the chute had gotten tangled during the craft's reentry difficulties and there was no backup chute. Komarov plunged to the ground and was killed.
- 1969 --- Sirhan Sirhan is sentenced to the death penalty after being convicted in the assassination of politician Robert F. Kennedy. In 1972, Sirhan's sentence was commuted to life in prison after California abolished the death penalty. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant born in Jerusalem in 1944, moved to the United States with his family as a boy and attended high school in California. He later stated he killed Robert Kennedy because the senator had supported Israel in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. Following a three-month trial, during which Sirhan's lawyers argued he was mentally unstable at the time of the murder, he was convicted on April 17, 1969. On April 23, he was given the death penalty. However, in 1972, the California Supreme Court abolished the death penalty and Sirhan's sentence was commuted to life in prison. His requests for parole have been denied over a dozen times, and he continues to serve his time in a California prison.
- 1985 --- The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, GA, made a showy, glitzy announcement that it was changing its 99-year-old secret formula. New Coke was called “the most significant soft drink development” in the company’s history. Yeah, well, so much for history. Fans of the original Coke were instrumental in bringing Classic Coke back. The way they did it was, actually, quite ingenious. They didn’t buy the new Coke and it turned out to be one of the biggest corporate flops ever.
- 1987 --- Chrysler Corporation purchases Nuova Automobili F. Lamborghini, the Bologna, Italy-based maker of high-priced, high-performance cars. Although the terms of the deal were not disclosed, the media reported that Chrysler paid $25 million for Lamborghini, which at the time was experiencing financial difficulties. Lamborghini was established in 1963 by Ferruccio Lamborghini (1916-1993), a wealthy Italian industrialist who made his fortune building tractors and air-conditioning systems, among other ventures. Lamborghini owned a variety of sports cars, including Ferraris. According to legend, after experiencing mechanical problems with his Ferraris, he tried to meet with Enzo Ferrari, the carmaker's founder. When Enzo Ferrari turned him down, Ferruccio Lamborghini decided to build cars that would be even better than Ferrari's. Lamborghini's first car, the 350 GTV, a two-seat coupe with a V12 engine, launched in 1963.
- 1988 --- In Martinez, CA, a drain valve was left open at the Shell Marsh. More than 10,000 barrels of oil poured into the marsh adjoining Peyton Slough.
- 1989 --- The USSR issued ration cards for sugar due to a shortage
- 2001 --- A former personal assistant to the Duchess of York has gone on trial accused of murdering her boyfriend. Jane Andrews, 34, denies murdering businessman Thomas Cressman, 39, at their home in Fulham, West London, in September last year. But Bruce Houlder QC, for the prosecution, told the Old Bailey jury she hit him on the head with a cricket bat and then stabbed him with a kitchen knife after he refused to marry her. Miss Andrews worked for the Duchess of York for nine years. She had such a refined air about her that her employer dubbed her "Lady Jane".
- Birthdays
- William Shakespeare
- Bernadette Devlin
- Roy Orbison
- James Buchanan (15th President)
- Lee Majors
- Valerie Bertinelli
- Shirley Temple Black
- George Lopez
- Michael Moore
- Max Planck
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Sergey Prokofiev
- Roy Halston
- Hervé Villechaize
- Narada Michael Walden