- 229th Day of 2012 / 137 Remaining
- 37 Days Until Autumn Begins
- Sunrise:6:27
- Sunset:8:01
- 13 Hours 24 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:5:32am
- Moon Set:7:14pm
- Moon’s Phase: 1 %
- The Next Full Moon
- August 31st @ 6:57am
- Blue Moon
But it’s Blue in name only. That’s because a Blue Moon is sometimes defined as the second full moon in a calendar month. The first full moon was August 1. The second full moon is August 31, 2012. There are two more definitions for Blue Moon. It can be the third of four full moons in a single season. Or, someday, you might see an actual blue-colored moon.
- Tides
- High:11:30am/10:34pm
- Low:4:46am/4:42pm
- 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
- Tell a Joke Day
- Joe Miller's Joke Day
- Battle Of Bennington Day-Vermont
- Baba Au Rhum Day
- National Rum Day
- Stay Home With Your Kids Day
- Remember What Your Spouse Wore the First Time You Met Day
- National True Love Forever Day
- National Follow Your Nose Day
- Children's Day-Paraguay
- Independence Day-Gabon
- Restoration Day-Dominican Republic
- The Little League Baseball World Series begins today in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
- On This Day In …
- 1777 --- During the American Revolutionary War, the Battle of Bennington took place. New England's minutemen routed the British regulars.
- 1896 --- While salmon fishing near the Klondike River in Canada's Yukon Territory on this day in 1896, George Carmack reportedly spots nuggets of gold in a creek bed. His lucky discovery sparks the last great gold rush in the American West. Hoping to cash in on reported gold strikes in Alaska, Carmack had traveled there from California in 1881. After running into a dead end, he headed north into the isolated Yukon Territory, just across the Canadian border. In 1896, another prospector, Robert Henderson, told Carmack of finding gold in a tributary of the Klondike River. Carmack headed to the region with two Native American companions, known as Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie. On August 16, while camping near Rabbit Creek, Carmack reportedly spotted a nugget of gold jutting out from the creek bank. His two companions later agreed that Skookum Jim--Carmack's brother-in-law--actually made the discovery. Regardless of who spotted the gold first, the three men soon found that the rock near the creek bed was thick with gold deposits. They staked their claim the following day. News of the gold strike spread fast across Canada and the United States, and over the next two years, as many as 50,000 would-be miners arrived in the region. Rabbit Creek was renamed Bonanza, and even more gold was discovered in another Klondike tributary, dubbed Eldorado.
- 1923 --- Carnegie Steel Corporation put into place the eight-hour workday for its employees.
- 1939 --- The famous vaudeville house, Hippodrome, in New York City, was used for the last time. There were several places called the Hippodrome around the country. They weren’t, generally, theatres, nor true nightclubs. Hippodromes were designed for the wide variety of vaudeville acts available at the time ... dancing, music, comedy and skits.
- 1954 --- The first issue of Sports Illustrated was published. No, it wasn’t the famous swimsuit edition, and you didn’t win a telephone, radio or sports books with your paid subscription. SI proudly boasted that more than 250,000 subscribers had signed up for the magazine before the first issue rolled off the presses. The first cover of Sports Illustrated showed National League umpire, Augie Donatelli, behind the plate with two major-league stars: catcher Wes Westrum, and batter Eddie Matthews.
- 1954 --- Comedian Jack Paar replaced Walter Cronkite as host of The Morning Show on CBS-TV. Cronkite came back as host in October, 1955, when Paar didn’t pan out. Television found Paar’s forte three years later as the host of The Tonight Show.
- 1955 --- Entertainer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson loses his court appeal to try to force the Department of State to grant him a passport. The continued government persecution of Robeson illustrated several interesting points about Cold War America. Robeson was the most famous African-American entertainer in the world, renowned for his work on Broadway, in films, and his incredibly powerful bass-baritone singing voice. Beyond these dramatic talents, Robeson was also an extremely intelligent advocate of civil rights in the United States. He became so dismayed about segregation and racism in America that he left the country in 1928, and lived in Europe until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. During his time abroad, Robeson became enamored with the Soviet Union, particularly its very public disavowals of racism and discrimination. During World War II, when the United States was allied with the Russians against Hitler, Robeson's views were tolerated and he gave numerous performances to U.S. troops around the world. After the war, as the Cold War developed, Robeson's very public statements in support of the Soviet Union began to cause problems. In 1950, he attempted to renew his passport so that he could travel abroad to fulfill contracts for singing and acting performances. The State Department insisted that Robeson sign an affidavit declaring that he was not a member of the Communist Party and that he was loyal to the United States. Robeson refused and filed suit in federal court. In August 1955, a federal judge ruled that the State Department was within its legal rights to refuse Robeson a passport. After the decision, Robeson declared that it was "rather absurd" that he was not "allowed to travel because of my friendship--open, spoken friendship--for the Soviet people and the peoples of all the world." Robeson was seen as a danger because he often interspersed his performances with comments about race relations in the United States. Before and after his performances, he gave numerous interviews condemning segregation and discrimination in America. For some U.S. policymakers, who viewed America's poor record of race relations as the nation's "Achilles' heel" in terms of the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, having a well known African-American denounce segregation and praise the Russians was unacceptable. In 1958, Robeson finally won his court case and his passport was grudgingly restored. The damage to Robeson's career, however, was already done. He performed for a few more years, and then retired in the 1960s, although the FBI kept up its investigations of Robeson until his death in 1976.
- 1962 --- Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, handed drummer Pete Best his walking papers. Best had been with the group for 2-1/2 years. Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey) was picked to take his place. One month later, the group recorded, Love Me Do.
- 1966 --- The House Un-American Activities Committee investigates Americans who have given aid to the Viet Cong with a view toward introducing legislation to make such activities illegal. Demonstrators disrupted the hearings and before it was over, more than 50 people were arrested for disorderly conduct. The Chairman of the subcommittee, Representative J. R. Pool (D-Texas) announced that the hearings had revealed that key leadership of groups supporting the Viet Cong were comprised of revolutionary, hard-core Communists.
- 1974 --- Five years to the day after half a million rain-soaked hippies grooved and swayed to the psychedelic sounds of the Grateful Dead at Woodstock, four young men from Forest Hills, Queens, took to the stage of an East Village dive bar in jeans, motorcycle jackets and Converse high-tops to launch a two-minute sonic attack on everything those 60s icons stood for. The date was August 16, 1974, the bar was CBGB's and the band was the Ramones, giving their debut public performance. The rapidly shouted words with which they opened that show and launched the punk-rock revolution were, as they would always be, "One! Two! Three! Four!"
- 1977 --- Elvis Presley was rushed from Graceland to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Doctors’ efforts to revive him were fruitless and he was pronounced dead (coronary arrhythmia) at 3:30 p.m. He was 42 years old.
- 1998 --- A team of monster-hunters reported it had failed to find any trace of a mysterious creature thought to have inhabited Swedens Great Lake for 360 years. The fleet of 15 boats with researchers and divers equipped with underwater video cameras and echo equipment found no signs of the monster reportedly sighted on 150 occasions by 450 people since 1635.
- Birthdays
- Madonna Ciccone
- Emily Robison
- Angela Bassett
- Frank Gifford
- Kathie Lee Gifford
- T.E. Lawrence
- Menachem Begin
- Steve Carell
- Eydie Gorme
- Julie Newmar
- Sen Carol Moseley-Braun
- James Cameron
- George Meany
- Fess Parker
- Charles Bukowski
- Robert Culp