Tuesday June 12, 2012

• 164^th Day of 2012 / 202 Remaining
• 8 Days Until Summer Begins

• Sunrise:5:47
• Sunset:8:33
• 14 Hours 46 Minutes of Daylight

• Moon Rise:1:30am
• Moon Set:2:32pm
• Moon’s Phase: 37 %

• The Next Full Moon
• June 3 @ 11:51am
• Full Buck Moon
• Full Thunder Moon
• Full Hay Moon

July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also often called the Full Thunder Moon, for the reason that thunderstorms are most frequent during this time. Another name for this month’s Moon was the Full Hay Moon.

• Tides
• High:6:23am/6:47pm
• Low:12:47am/12:03pm

• Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
• This Year:15.80
• Last Year:28.51
• Normal To Date:23.74
• Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80

• Holidays
• Abused Women and Children's Awareness Day
• Crowded Nest Awareness Day
• Multicultural American Child Awareness Day
• National Peanut Butter Cookie Day

• Pentecost-Christian
• Race Unity Day
• Whitsunday-Christian
• Independence Day-Philippines
• Independence Day-Russia
• Chaco Peace-Paraguay
• Dia dos Namorados/Valentine's Day-Brazil

• On This Day In …
• 1776 --- The Virginia Convention, assembled in Williamsburg, unanimously adopts George Mason's declaration of rights. The assembled slaveholders of Virginia promised to "the good people of VIRGINIA and their posterity" the equal right to life, liberty and property, with the critical condition that the "people" were white men. These same white men were guaranteed that "all power" would be "vested in, and consequently derived from" them. Should a government fail to represent their common interest, a majority of the same held the right to "reform, alter or abolish" the government. Much of the Virginia Declaration had roots in the English Bill of Rights, drafted in 1689 upon the overthrow of Catholic King James II by Protestant Queen Mary and her husband King William III. However, the ruling class of Virginia, which was largely derived from the disinherited younger sons of the British nobility, was eager to abolish the hereditary privileges from which they and their ancestors had been excluded and Article 4 of the declaration banned them, thereby moving beyond the English statement in the parameters of its social reform. Virginia's Declaration of Rights later became the basis for the Bill of Rights amended to the federal Constitution.

• 1873 --- Rocky Mountain locusts enter southwestern Minnesota. The beginning of a 4 year crop destroying locust (grasshopper) plague.

• 1839 --- Abner Doubleday created the game of baseball, according to the legend. However, evidence has surfaced that indicates that the game of baseball was played before 1800.

• 1880 --- John Lee Richmond of the Worcester Ruby Legs pitched baseball's first perfect game against the Cleveland Blues. Cleveland ace Jim McCormick gave up only one run. Richmond won 32 games that year. He also lost 32. McCormick's record was 43-28. (Some sources call the "Ruby Legs" the "Brown Stockings," others simply the Worcester Worcesters.) Five days later, on June 17, the second, official perfect game was pitched by John Ward in another National League game between Providence and Buffalo. It was two and a half decades later before this feat was accomplished again. This time, the now famous Cy Young of the Boston Red Sox, stopped the Philadelphia Athletics in an American League game. Perfect games are very rare! So if you get a chance to see one, either in person or on TV, you’ll be watching history in the making.

• 1897 --- Carl Elsener patented the Swiss Army Knife.

• 1935 --- U.S. Senator Huey Long of Louisiana made the longest speech on Senate record. The speech took 15 1/2 hours and was filled by 150,000 words.

• 1935 --- Ella Fitzgerald recorded her first sides for Brunswick Records. The tunes were Love and Kisses and I’ll Chase the Blues Away. She was featured with Chick Webb and his band. Ella was 17 at the time and conducted the Webb band for three years following his death in 1939.

• 1939 --- The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, New York. This was exactly one hundred years to the day on which the game was invented by Abner Doubleday.

• 1942 --- Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, receives a diary for her 13th birthday. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in rooms behind her father's office. For two years, the Franks and four other families hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends. The families were discovered by the Gestapo, which had been tipped off, in 1944. The Franks were taken to Auschwitz, where Anne's mother died. Friends in Amsterdam searched the rooms and found Anne's diary hidden away. Anne and her sister were transferred to another camp, Bergen-Belsen, where Anne died of typhus a month before the war ended. Anne's father survived Auschwitz and published Anne's diary in 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl. The book has been translated into more than 60 languages.

• 1944 --- Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung announced that he would support Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in the war against Japan.

• 1955 --- The first network radio show to be produced with no script, The University of Chicago Round Table, was heard for the final time after 24 years on NBC radio. The program was the first network radio program to win the coveted George Foster Peabody Award.`

• 1963 --- Elizabeth Taylor starred in the $40,000,000 film epic, Cleopatra. (It is rumored that the caterers were the only ones who made money on this movie.) The movie certainly gave ticket buyers their money’s worth. It lasted for four hours, three minutes. Cleopatra opened at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City on this day. Richard Burton starred as Marc Antony, Rex Harrison played Julius Caesar, Hume Cronyn played Sosigines, Carroll O’Connor was Casa and Roddy McDowell appeared as Octavian. We were at a loss, however, to find the name of the asp that bit Cleopatra. We do know where she was bitten -- just not what happened to the little snake.

• 1963 --- In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers is shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. During World War II, Evers volunteered for the U.S. Army and participated in the Normandy invasion. In 1952, he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a field worker for the NAACP, Evers traveled through his home state encouraging poor African Americans to register to vote and recruiting them into the civil rights movement. He was instrumental in getting witnesses and evidence for the Emmitt Till murder case, which brought national attention to the plight of African Americans in the South. On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers was killed. After a funeral in Jackson, he was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. President John F. Kennedy and many other leaders publicly condemned the killing. In 1964, the first trial of chief suspect Byron De La Beckwith ended with a deadlock by an all-white jury, sparking numerous protests. When a second all-white jury also failed to reach a decision, De La Beckwith was set free. Three decades later, the state of Mississippi reopened the case under pressure from civil rights leaders and Evers' family. In February 1994, a racially mixed jury in Jackson found Beckwith guilty of murder. The unrepentant white supremacist, aged 73, was sentenced to life imprisonment.

• 1965 --- The Queen of England announced that The Beatles would receive the coveted MBE Award. The Order of the British Empire recognition had previously been bestowed only upon British military heroes, many of whom were so infuriated by the news, they returned their medals to the Queen. In fact, John Lennon wasn’t terribly impressed with receiving the honor. He returned it, “as a protest against Britain's involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam and against 'Cold Turkey' slipping down the charts”, four years later.

• 1967 --- The U.S. Supreme Court struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.

• 1975 --- Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, is found guilty of electoral corruption in her successful 1971 campaign. Despite calls for her resignation, Gandhi refused to give up India's top office and later declared martial law in the country when public demonstrations threatened to topple her administration.

• 1992 --- In a letter to the U.S. Senate, Russian Boris Yeltsin stated that in the early 1950's the Soviet Union had shot down nine U.S. planes and held 12 American survivors.

• 2004 --- A federal judge upheld a rule issued by the USDA on June 2, 2003 which declared that frozen, batter coated french fries are fresh vegetables. The judge stated that the term 'fresh vegetables' was ambiguous. In 1981 the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) had unsuccessfully tried to classify ketchup and pickle relish as vegetables. Public protest caused them to drop the idea.

• Birthdays
• George H. W. Bush
• Anne Frank
• Ally Sheedy
• Chick Corea
• Marv Albert
• Irwin Allen
• Uta Hagen
• Vic Damone
• Jim Nabors
• Junior Brown
• Hideki Matsui