- 254th Day of 2012 /112 Remaining
- 12 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
- Sunrise:6:48
- Sunset:7:25
- 12 Hours 37 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:1:19am
- Moon Set:3:54pm
- Moon’s Phase: 29%
- 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:8:32am/6:53pm
- Low:1:22am/1:24pm
- 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
- Swap Ideas Day
- National TV Dinner Day
- Gibraltar National Day-Gibraltar
- Teacher’s Day-China
- On This Day In …
- 1813 --- The first defeat of British naval squadron occurred in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. The leader of the U.S. fleet sent the famous message "We have met the enemy, and they are ours" to U.S. General William Henry Harrison.
- 1897 --- A 25-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith becomes the first person ever arrested for drunk driving after slamming his cab into a building. Smith later pled guilty and was fined 25 shillings.
- 1913 --- The official route of the Lincoln Highway was announced. It was the first coast to coast highway, running from New York to San Francisco.
- 1935 --- "Popeye" was heard on NBC radio for the first time.
- 1963 --- Twenty black students entered public schools in Alabama at the end of a standoff between federal authorities and Alabama governor George C. Wallace.
- 1977 --- At Baumetes Prison in Marseille, France, Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of murder, becomes the last person executed by guillotine. The guillotine first gained fame during the French Revolution when physician and revolutionary Joseph-Ignace Guillotin won passage of a law requiring all death sentences to be carried out by "means of a machine." Decapitating machines had been used earlier in Ireland and England, and Guillotin and his supporters viewed these devices as more humane than other execution techniques, such as hanging or firing squad. A French decapitating machine was built and tested on cadavers, and on April 25, 1792, a highwayman became the first person in Revolutionary France to be executed by this method. The device soon became known as the "guillotine" after its advocate, and more than 10,000 people lost their heads by guillotine during the Revolution, including Louis XVI and Mary Antoinette, the former king and queen of France. Use of the guillotine continued in France in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the last execution by guillotine occurred in 1977. In September 1981, France outlawed capital punishment altogether, thus abandoning the guillotine forever. There is a museum dedicated to the guillotine in Liden, Sweden.
- 1981 -- Spanish artist Pablo Picasso's monumental anti-war mural Guernica is received by Spain after four decades of refugee existence. One of Picasso's most important works, the painting was inspired by the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazi air force during the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Picasso gave the painting to New York's Museum of Modern Art on an extended loan and decreed that it not be returned to Spain until democratic liberties were restored in the country. Its eventual return to Spain in 1981--eight years after Picasso's death--was celebrated as a moral endorsement of Spain's young democracy. Early in the Spanish civil war, Spain's leftist Republican government commissioned Picasso to paint a mural for the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Working in Paris, Picasso read in horror of the April 1937 German bombing of Guernica, a Basque town that had sided with the Republicans against General Francisco Franco's right-wing Nationalist forces. Guernica was well behind the battle lines, but Franco authorized the attack as a means of intimidating his foes in the region. The attack was later admitted to be an experiment by the German Luftwaffe in carpet bombing--air raids that targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure. More than 1,000 residents of Guernica were killed in the three-hour attack. Outraged by the brutality of the act, Picasso seized on the bombing as the subject of his mural, which he completed in just three weeks. The enormous painting, which measures 11.5 feet by 25.5 feet, is a savage indictment of man's inhumanity to man. Painted in desolate tones of black, white, and gray, the painting shows a gored horse, a screaming mother holding a dead child, a bewildered bull, and other nightmarish images that effectively evoke the horror of war.
- 1991 --- You either had to be part of a fairly small subculture of music fans or a professional on the business side of the music industry to have heard of Nirvana before the autumn of 1991. To the few who followed their particular brand of alternative music before "alternative" went mainstream, Nirvana had announced themselves as a band to watch with their independently produced 1989 album Bleach. And to the music-business pros who knew that Bleach sold 30,000 copies after being produced for only $600, Nirvana was seen as a prime candidate for a breakout with their second album being released by the major label Geffen Records. But absolutely no one—not Nirvana's biggest fans, not their biggest industry supporters and certainly not the band-members themselves— suspected the magnitude of what was about to happen. In just a few short months, a group that was a complete nonentity to the mainstream music-buying public would become the most important rock band on earth. The transformation began on this day in 1991, with the release of Nirvana's landmark single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The song Nirvana's label and management hoped would be a hit off the band's forthcoming album, Nevermind, was "Come as You Are," which was set for release later in the fall. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was released quietly and without significant promotion in the hopes that it would begin building awareness of the new album among listeners to college and alternative radio. "None of us heard it as a crossover song," Nirvana's manager, Danny Goldberg, later recalled, "but the public heard it and it was instantaneous. They heard it on alternative radio and then they rushed out like lemmings to buy it." Kurt Cobain, Nirvana's guitarist, lead singer and primary songwriter, had to be talked into even including "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on Nevermind by his bandmates bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl. He was self-conscious about a song he'd written as a conscious rip-off of the Pixies' hard-and-loud, then soft-and-quiet style. But most of the millions who would soon become Nirvana fans had probably never heard of The Pixies or the other punk, hardcore and alternative bands that had inspired and influenced Kurt Cobain. He was the product of an underground scene far outside the pop-music mainstream, but his gift for channeling the noise and anger of that scene into brilliantly accessible songs like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" ended up redefining the mainstream itself.
- 2002 --- Switzerland became the 190th member of the United Nations.
- Birthdays
- Roger Maris
- Karl Lagerfeld
- Charles Kuralt
- Jose Feliciano
- Margaret Trudeau
- Amy Irving
- Siobhan Fahey
- Randy Johnson