- 225th Day of 2013 /140 Remaining
- 40 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
- Sunrise:6:24
- Sunset:8:04
- 13 Hours 40 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:1:15pm
- Moon Set:11:52pm
- Moon’s Phase:43 %
- The Next Full Moon
- August 20 @ 6:45 pm
- Full Sturgeon Moon
- Full Red Moon
- Full Green Corn Moon
- Full Grain Moon
The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.
- Tides
- High:4:06am/4:10pm
- Low:9:30am/11:03pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- Normal To Date:0.00
- This Year:0.04
- Last Year:0.02
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Filet Mignon Day
- International Left Handers Day
- Independence Day-Central African Republic
- Women’s Day-Tunisia
- O-Bon/Festival Of Souls-Japan
- On This Day In …
- 1521 --- After a three-month siege, Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés capture Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire. Cortés' men leveled the city and captured Cuauhtemoc, the Aztec emperor. Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325 A.D. by a wandering tribe of hunters and gatherers on islands in Lake Texcoco, near the present site of Mexico City. In only one century, this civilization grew into the Aztec empire, largely because of its advanced system of agriculture. The empire came to dominate central Mexico and by the ascendance of Montezuma II in 1502 had reached its greatest extent, extending as far south as perhaps modern-day Nicaragua. At the time, the empire was held together primarily by Aztec military strength, and Montezuma II set about establishing a bureaucracy, creating provinces that would pay tribute to the imperial capital of Tenochtitlán. The conquered peoples resented the Aztec demands for tribute and victims for the religious sacrifices, but the Aztec military kept rebellion at bay.
- 1784 --- The Continental Congress met for the final time in Annapolis, Maryland. It moved a few more times, from Philadelphia, PA to New York City and, finally, to its permanent seat of government in Washington, DC.
- 1792 --- French revolutionaries took the entire French royal family and imprisoned them.
- 1889 --- A patent for a coin-operated telephone was issued to
William Gray.
- 1907 --- The first taxicab started on the streets of New York City.
- 1913 --- True Stainless steel was cast for the first time in Sheffield, England. Harry Brearly of Thomas Firth & Sons discovered how to make 'the steel that doesn't rust'
- 1934 --- Cartoonist Al Capp began his famous comic strip, Li’l Abner. In those early days, the cartoon strip was carried in eight
newspapers. Eventually, it would be in more than 500, and would be the basis for a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie, too.
- 1938 --- Robert Johnson played a show at a roadhouse outside
Greenwood, MS. It speculated that Johnson was poisoned by the bar owner. Johnson died several days later.
- 1942 --- Walt Disney's "Bambi" opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
- 1948 --- Responding to increasing Soviet pressure on western Berlin, U.S. and British planes airlift a record amount of supplies into sections of the city under American and British control. The massive resupply effort, carried out in weather so bad that some pilots referred to it as "Black Friday," signaled that the British and Americans would not give in to the Soviet blockade of western Berlin.
- 1948 --- Cleveland Indians rookie pitcher Satchel Paige threw his first complete game in the major leagues. He allowed the Chicago
White Sox only five hits in the 5-0 shutout. Incidentally, the rookie pitcher was 42 years old.
- 1952 --- Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" (1956) is one of the biggest and most instantly recognizable pop songs in history. It's a song so closely associated with the King of Rock and Roll, in fact, that many may mistakenly assume that it was a Presley original. In fact, the story of the song that gave Elvis his longest-running #1 hit (11 weeks) in the summer of 1956 began four years earlier, when "Hound Dog" was recorded for the very first time by the rhythm-and-blues singer Ellie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton in Los Angeles, California. Big Mama Thornton was a native of Montgomery, Alabama, who came of age on the R&B circuit in the 1940s after starting her professional career in 1941 at the age of 14. In 1951, she signed her first record contract with Peacock Records and was soon paired with another of its artists, bandleader Johnny Otis, who brought Thornton out to join his band in California. It was there, in late 1952, that Otis asked two young songwriters on the Los Angeles music scene if they would write something especially for Thornton. Those songwriters were Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, who would go on to have an enormous impact on R&B and early rock and roll through their work with groups like the Coasters and the Drifters. But hits like "Yakkity Yak," "Charlie Brown," "Stand By Me," "Jailhouse Rock" and "Love Potion No. 9" were still ahead of Lieber and Stoller when they did what Otis asked and came back to him with a 12-bar country blues tune called "Hound Dog." Big Mama Thornton and the Johnny Otis Band recorded "Hound Dog" and turned it into a smash hit on the R&B charts, where it stayed at #1 for seven weeks. It wasn't Thornton's recording, however, that inspired Elvis to record "Hound Dog" three years later. Presley's inspiration came from a rewrite by a singer named Freddie Bell, who changed the original lyrics to include the now-familiar "Cryin' all the time" and "You ain't never caught a rabbit." During his first Las Vegas engagement in the spring of 1956, Elvis Presley heard Freddie Bell and the Bellboys performing the reworked "Hound Dog" and added it to his repertoire almost immediately.
- 1960 --- "Echo I," a balloon satellite, allowed the first two-way telephone conversation by satellite to take place.
- 1961 --- East German soldiers begin laying down barbed wire and bricks as a barrier between Soviet-controlled East Berlin and the democratic western section of the city. After World War II, defeated Germany was divided into Soviet, American, British and French zones of occupation. The city of Berlin, though technically part of the Soviet zone, was also split, with the Soviets taking the eastern part of the city. After a massive Allied airlift in June 1948 foiled a Soviet attempt to blockade West Berlin, the eastern section was drawn even more tightly into the Soviet fold. Over the next 12 years, cut off from its western counterpart and basically reduced to a Soviet satellite, East Germany saw between 2.5 million and 3 million of its citizens head to West Germany in search of better opportunities. By 1961, some 1,000 East Germans--including many skilled laborers, professionals and intellectuals--were leaving every day.
- 1965 --- The Jefferson Airplane made its stage debut at the Matrix
Club in San Francisco, CA.
- 1967 --- The Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow Joan Baez to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. because of her opposition to the Vietnam War.
- 1981 --- Ronald Reagan signs the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), a historic package of tax and budget reductions that set the tone for his administration's overall economic policy. During his campaign for the White House in 1980, Reagan argued on behalf of "supply-side economics," the theory of using tax cuts as incentives for individuals and businesses to work and produce goods (supply) rather than as an incentive for consumers to buy goods (demand). In Congress, Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, and Senator Bill Roth, Republican of Delaware, had long supported the supply-side principles behind the ERTA, which would also be known as the Kemp-Roth act. The bill, which received broad bipartisan support in Congress, represented a significant change in the course of federal income tax policy, which until then was believed by most people to work best when used to affect demand during times of recession.
- 1994 --- It was reported that aspirin not only helps reduce the risk of heart disease, but also helps prevent colon cancer.
- 2003 --- Libya agreed to set up a $2.7 billion fund for families of 270 people killed in the 1988 Pan Am bombing.
- 2008 --- American Michael Phelps swam into history as the
winningest Olympic athlete ever with his 10th and 11th career gold medals.
- Birthdays
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Annie Oakley
- Fidel Caastro
- Jocelyn Elders
- Kathleen Battle
- Danny Bonaduce
- Lucy Stone
- Bert Lahr
- Ben Hogan
- George Shearing
- Neville Brand
- Don Ho