- 334th Day of 2012 / 32 Remaining
- 22 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:7:05
- Sunset:4:52
- 9 Hours 47 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:5:59pm
- Moon Set:7:56am
- Moon’s Phase: 99 %
- The Next Full Moon
- December 28 @ 2:22 am
- Full Cold Moon
- Full Long Nights Moon
During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest. It is also sometimes called the Moon before Yule. The term Long Night Moon is a doubly appropriate name because the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the Moon is above the horizon for a long time. The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.
- Tides
- High: 10:12am
- Low: 4:33am/5:20pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:4.46
- Last Year:3.20
- Normal To Date:4.41
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Electronic Greetings Day
- National Chocolates Day
- UN International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
- Liberation Day-Albania
- Unity Day-Vanuatu
- On This Day In …
- 1825 --- Rossini’s Barber of Seville was presented in New York City. It was the first Italian opera to be presented in the United States.
- 1864 --- Colonel John Chivington and his Colorado volunteers massacre a peaceful village of Cheyenne camped near Sand Creek in Colorado Territory, setting off a long series of bloody retaliatory attacks by Indians. Chivington, a former Methodist preacher with ambitions to become a territorial delegate to Congress, saw in the Indian wars an opportunity to gain the esteem he would need to win a government office. Disappointed that the spring of 1864 failed to produce any major battles, Chivington apparently determined to burn villages and kill Cheyenne whenever and wherever he could, making little distinction between peaceful or aggressive bands. Angered by frequent Indian attacks on settlers and the theft of their horses and cattle, many Colorado settlers supported Chivington's methods, and a number of men volunteered to join his forces on hundred-day enlistments, forming the 3rd Colorado Volunteers. Fearing that U.S. troops might mistakenly identify his band of peaceful Cheyenne as having participated in the attacks on settlers, Chief Black Kettle traveled to Denver under escort of U.S. Army Major Edward Wynkoop to affirm his non-hostile intentions. Chivington and the territorial governor of Colorado clearly did not want peace, yet they could not openly reject the overtures of Black Kettle. Believing that he had a promise of safety if he brought his people into Fort Lyon, Black Kettle lead the band of Cheyenne to a spot designated by Major Wynkoop near the fort along a small stream known as Sand Creek. The tribe flew an American flag and a white flag at the camp to indicate their alliance with the U.S. and alert all to their generally peaceful intentions. Determined to have his glorious battle, Chivington refused to recognize that Black Kettle's settlement was peaceful. At daybreak, Chivington and his 700 volunteers, many of them drunk, attacked the sleeping village at Sand Creek. Most of the Cheyenne men were away hunting, so the women, children, and elders were largely defenseless. In the frenzied slaughter that followed, Chivington and his men killed more than 100 women and children and 28 men. Black Kettle escaped the attack. The soldiers scalped and mutilated the corpses, hacking off body parts that included male and female genitals, and then returned to Denver where they displayed the scalps to approving crowds during intermission at a downtown theatre. Because of Chivington's depraved slaughter, the central plains exploded with retaliatory attacks from Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho Indians. Fortunately, not everyone applauded Chivington's behavior--many Americans, particularly in the east, strongly condemned Chivington's attack and the barbaric mutilations. Subsequent congressional and military investigations denounced Chivington, but claimed they could not punish him because he had resigned from the army and was no longer under military jurisdiction. Nonetheless, Chivington spent the rest of his life trying to escape the stigma of his deplorable behavior at Sand Creek.
- 1890 --- The first Army-Navy football game was played at West Point, New York. The midshipmen from Annapolis dominated, shutting out the cadets, 24-0. They’ve been stealing each other’s mascots ever since.
- 1947 --- The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Palestine to be partitioned between Arabs and Jews.
- 1959 --- The Grammy Awards were shown on network television for the first time. (It was actually the second year of the Grammy Awards.) “Mack the Knife” won Record of the Year and Bobby Darin, who belted it out, was Best New Artist of the Year. Frank Sinatra won Album of the Year for “Come Dance with Me”. Jimmy Driftwood penned the Song of the Year: “The Battle of New Orleans”, which also won Country and Western Performance of the Year honors for Johnny Horton. The Best Folk Performance of the Year went to The Kingston Trio for their ...”at Large” album. The Best Performance by a Top 40 Artist was Nat King Cole’s “Midnight Flyer” and the Grammy for Best Comedy Performance, Musical went to Homer & Jethro for their immortal “The Battle of Kookamonga”. The great Duke Ellington received the 1959 Grammy for Best Performance by a Dance Band this night for his “Anatomy of a Murder” movie sound track. Ellington won another Grammy and the National Academy of Recording Arts & Science’s Lifetime Achievement Award six years later. It was only appropriate that the Grammy Awards would be shown annually on television since the ‘new medium’ of TV would supply much-nominated music over the years and would also spotlight performers. Little did the Academy know what it started ... and that someday, it would award Grammys for music videos as seen on MTV.
- 1961 --- The Mercury-Atlas 5 spacecraft was launched by the U.S. with Enos the chimp on board. The craft orbited the earth twice before landing off Puerto Rico.
- 1963 --- President Lyndon B. Johnson appoints a special commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which had occurred a week earlier, on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. According to his memoirs and biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, Johnson knew he had to provide strong leadership in the wake of the shocking murder of President Kennedy. One of his first official acts was to initiate an investigation into the assassination. Johnson later wrote that, in the weeks after the assassination, the American public, and the government that he now headed was in a state of confusion and disorientation "like a bunch of cattle caught in a swamp." He felt the weight of his new responsibility keenly "in a world that is never more than minutes away from catastrophe" and knew that "the whole world would be anxiously following every move I made." On November 29, Johnson issued Executive Order No. 11130, appointing the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy--commonly referred to as the Warren Commission, after its leader, Chief Justice Earl Warren. Since the president's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself killed by Jack Ruby almost immediately after Oswald killed Kennedy, details of Oswald's motive for the assassination remained murky. During its almost year-long investigation, the Warren Commission reviewed reports by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Secret Service, Department of State and the attorney general of Texas. It also poured over Oswald's personal history, political affiliation and military record. Overall, the Warren Commission listened to the testimony of 552 witnesses and even traveled to Dallas several times to visit the site where Kennedy was shot. The commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone and that the Secret Service had made poor preparations for JFK's visit to Dallas and had subsequently failed to sufficiently protect him. The circumstances surrounding Kennedy's death, however, have since given rise to several conspiracy theories involving such disparate characters as the Mafia, Cuban exiles, military leaders and even President Johnson. The Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald was a "lone gunman" failed to satisfy some who witnessed the attack and others whose research found conflicting details in the commission's report. Critics of the Warren Commission's report believed that additional ballistics experts' conclusions and a home movie shot at the scene disputed the theory that three bullets fired from Oswald's gun could have caused Kennedy's fatal wounds as well as the injuries to Texas Governor John Connally, who was riding with the president in an open car as it traveled through Dallas' Dealey Plaza that fateful day. So persistent was the controversy that another congressional investigation was conducted in 1979. That committee agreed with the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed the president and that the Secret Service failed to protect Kennedy. It did, however, also allow for the possibility that a second gunman might have been involved, but did not pursue the matter further.
- 1996 --- A U.N. court sentenced Bosnian Serb army soldier Drazen Erdemovic to 10 years in prison for his role in the massacre of 1,200 Muslims. The sentence was the first international war crimes sentence since World War II.
- 2001 --- George Harrison of the Beatles died at age 58 following a battle with cancer.
- 2004 --- The French government announced plans to build the Louvre II in northern France. The 236,808 square foot museum was the planned home for 500-600 works from the Louvre's reserves.
- Birthdays
- Louisa May Alcott
- Vin Scully
- Jacques Chirac
- John Mayall
- Diane Ladd
- Chick Mangione
- Suzy Chaffee
- Gary Shandling
- Joel Coen
- Janet Napolitano
- Rahm Emanuel
- Kim Delaney
- Don Cheadle
- Christian Doppler
- Busby Berkeley
- CC Lewis
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr
- Billy Strayhorn
- John Harvard
- Merle Travis
- Denny Doherty