- 23rd Day of 2013 / 345Remaining
- 56 Days Until The First Day of Spring
- Sunrise:7:20
- Sunset:5:24
- 10 Hours 4 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:2:39pm
- Moon Set:4:35am
- Moon’s Phase: 90 %
- The Next Full Moon
- January 26 @ 8:40pm
- Full Wolf Moon
Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule. Some called it the Full Snow Moon, but most tribes applied that name to the next Moon.
- Tides
- High: 8:43am/10:51pm
- Low: 2:48am/3:56pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:13.36
- Last Year:6.03
- Normal To Date:12.43
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Handwriting Day
- National Pie Day
- National Rhubarb Pie Day
- Women's Healthy Weight Day
- Snowplow Mailbox Hockey Day
- Measure Your Feet Day
- Babin Den-Bulgaria
- On This Day In …
- 1556 --- An earthquake in Shaanxi, China, kills an estimated 830,000 people. Counting casualties is often imprecise after large-scale disasters, especially prior to the 20th century, but this disaster is still considered the deadliest of all time. The quake struck in late evening, with aftershocks continuing through the following morning. Later scientific investigation revealed that the magnitude of the quake was approximately 8.0 to 8.3, which isn't close to the strongest tremor on record. However, the quake struck in the middle of a densely populated area with poorly constructed buildings and homes, resulting in a horrific death toll. The epicenter of the earthquake was in the Wei River Valley in the Shaanxi Province, near the cities of Huaxian, Weinan and Huayin. In Huaxian, every single building and home collapsed, killing more than half the residents of the city, a number estimated in the tens of thousands. It was a similar story in Weinan and Huayin. In some places, 60-foot-deep crevices opened in the earth. Serious destruction and death occurred as much as 300 miles away from the epicenter. The earthquake also triggered landslides, which contributed to the massive death toll.
- 1789 --- Georgetown University was established in present-day Washington, D.C.
- 1862 --- Agoston Haraszthy de Mokcsa brought 1,400 varieties of grapevines from Europe to California in 1862, and planted the first large vineyard in California in the Sonoma Valley. After the phyloxera blight destroyed much of Europe’s vineyards, some of these same vines, now on resistant American root stock, helped save the European wine industries.
- 1907 --- Charles Curtis, of Kansas, began serving in the United States Senate. He was the first American Indian to become a U.S. Senator. He resigned in March of 1929 to become U.S. President Herbert Hoover’s Vice President.
- 1937 --- Seventeen people went on trial in Moscow during Soviet leader Josef Stalin's Great Purge.
- 1943 --- Duke Ellington and the band played for a black-tie crowd at Carnegie Hall in New York City. It was the first of what was to become an annual series of concerts featuring the the Duke.
- 1957 --- Machines at the Wham-O toy company roll out the first batch of their aerodynamic plastic discs--now known to millions of fans all over the world as Frisbees. The story of the Frisbee began in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where William Frisbie opened the Frisbie Pie Company in 1871. Students from nearby universities would throw the empty pie tins to each other, yelling "Frisbie!" as they let go.In 1948, Walter Frederick Morrison and his partner Warren Franscioni invented a plastic version of the disc called the "Flying Saucer" that could fly further and more accurately than the tin pie plates. After splitting with Franscioni, Morrison made an improved model in 1955 and sold it to the new toy company Wham-O as the "Pluto Platter"--an attempt to cash in on the public craze over space and Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). In 1958, a year after the toy's first release, Wham-O--the company behind such top-sellers as the Hula-Hoop, the Super Ball and the Water Wiggle--changed its name to the Frisbee disc, misspelling the name of the historic pie company. A company designer, Ed Headrick, patented the design for the modern Frisbee in December 1967, adding a band of raised ridges on the disc's surface--called the Rings--to stabilize flight. By aggressively marketing Frisbee-playing as a new sport, Wham-O sold over 100 million units of its famous toy by 1977. High school students in Maplewood, New Jersey, invented Ultimate Frisbee, a cross between football, soccer and basketball, in 1967. In the 1970s, Headrick himself invented Frisbee Golf, in which discs are tossed into metal baskets; there are now hundreds of courses in the U.S., with millions of devotees. There is also Freestyle Frisbee, with choreographed routines set to music and multiple discs in play, and various Frisbee competitions for both humans and dogs--the best natural Frisbee players. Today, at least 60 manufacturers produce the flying discs--generally made out of plastic and measuring roughly 20-25 centimeters (8-10 inches) in diameter with a curved lip. The official Frisbee is owned by Mattel Toy Manufacturers, who bought the toy from Wham-O in 1994.
- 1962 --- Tony Bennett recorded "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" in New York for Columbia Records.
- 1963 --- Three million gallons of soybean oil flooded streets in Mankato, Minnesota when a storage tank ruptured. Eventually the oil ended up in the Mississippi River. In the spring, more than 10,000 ducks were found dead in the wetlands along the river.
- 1964 --- Ratification of the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was completed. This amendment eliminated the poll tax in federal elections.
- 1968 --- The U.S. intelligence-gathering ship Pueblo is seized by North Korean naval vessels and charged with spying and violating North Korean territorial waters. Negotiations to free the 83-man crew of the U.S. ship dragged on for nearly a year, damaging the credibility of and confidence in the foreign policy of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration. The capture of the ship and internment of its crew by North Korea was loudly protested by the Johnson administration. The U.S. government vehemently denied that North Korea's territorial waters had been violated and argued the ship was merely performing routine intelligence gathering duties in the Sea of Japan. Some U.S. officials, including Johnson himself, were convinced that the seizure was part of a larger communist-bloc offensive, since exactly one week later, communist forces in South Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, the largest attack of the Vietnam War. Despite this, however, the Johnson administration took a restrained stance toward the incident. Fully occupied with the Tet Offensive, Johnson resorted to quieter diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis in North Korea.
- 1986 --- The first annual induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was held in New York City.
- 1997 --- The day after her unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Madeline Albright is sworn in as America's first female secretary of state by Vice President Al Gore at the White House.
- 2002 --- John Walker Lindh returned to the U.S. under FBI custody. Lindh was charge with conspiring to kill U.S. citizens, providing support to terrorists and engaging in prohibited transactions with the Taliban while a member of the al-Quaida terrorist organization in Afghanistan.
- Birthdays
- Antonio Villaraigosa
- John Hancock
- Édouard Manet
- Ernie Kovacs
- Mariska Hargitay
- Anita Pointer
- Richard Dean Anderson
- Camilla Collett
- Justice Potter Stewart