- 197th Day of 2014 / 168 Remaining
- Autumn Begins in 68 Days
- Sunrise:6:01
- Sunset:8:30
- 14 Hours 29 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:11:25pm
- Moon Set:11:05am
- Moon Phase: 75%
- Full Moon
- July 12 @ 4:26 am
- Full Buck Moon
- Full Thunder Moon
- Full Hay Moon
July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur. It was also named for the thunderstorms that are most common during this time. And in some areas it was called the Full Hay Moon.
- Tides
- High:2:01am/3:16pm
- Low:8:28am/9:16pm
- Holidays
- National Corn Fritters Day
- National Woody Wagon Day
- Toss Away “Could Haves” and “Should Haves” Day
- La Paz Day-Bolivia
- Lunes del Cerro-Mexico
- International Snake Day
- On This Day In …
- 1439 --- In an effort to stop the spread of disease, kissing is banned in England.
- 1769 --- Father Junipero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan missionary, founds the first Catholic mission in California on the site of present-day San Diego. After Serra blessed his new outpost of Christianity in a high mass, the royal standard of Spain was unfurled over the mission, which he named San Diego de Alcala. Appointed president of the Alta California presidios, Serra eventually founded a total of nine missions, stretching from San Diego to present-day San Francisco.
- 1790 --- The young American Congress declares that a swampy, humid, muddy and mosquito-infested site on the Potomac River between Maryland and Virginia will be the nation's permanent capital. "Washington," in the newly designated federal "District of Columbia," was named after the leader of the American Revolution and the country's first president: George Washington. It was Washington who saw the area's potential economic and accessibility benefits due to the proximity of navigable rivers.
- 1791 --- Louis XVI was suspended from office until he agreed to ratify the constitution.
- 1867 --- Reinforced concrete was patented by F. Joseph Monier. He was a Paris gardener, and developed reinforced concrete to use in garden tubs, beams and posts.
- 1926 --- The first underwater color photographs appeared in "National Geographic" magazine. The pictures had been taken near the Florida Keys.
- 1935 --- The world's first parking meter, known as Park-O-Meter No. 1, is installed on the southeast corner of what was then First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City. The parking meter was the brainchild of a man named Carl C. Magee. The first meters were installed by the Dual Parking Meter Company beginning in July 1935; they cost a nickel an hour, and were placed at 20-foot intervals along the curb that corresponded to spaces painted on the pavement. Magee's invention caught on quickly: Retailers loved the meters, as they encouraged a quick turnover of cars--and potential customers--and drivers were forced to accept them as a practical necessity for regulating parking.
- 1942 --- French police officers rounded up 13,000 Jews and held them in the Winter Velodrome. The round-up was part of an agreement between Pierre Laval and the Nazis. Germany had agreed to not deport French Jews if France arrested foreign Jews.
- 1945 --- The Gadget, the experimental, plutonium bomb, exploded at 5:30 a.m. in the first U.S. test of an atomic bomb. The mushroom-shaped cloud rose to a height of 41,000 feet above the New Mexico desert at Alamogordo Air Base. All life in a one-mile radius ceased to exist.
- 1948 --- Brooklyn Dodgers Manager Leo Durocher announces that he will be joining the New York Giants, the Dodgers’ archrival. The move was the swiftest and most stunning managerial change in baseball history. Durocher went on to manage the Giants through the 1955 season. Highlights of his tenure included a victory over their archrival Dodgers in a one-game playoff for the National League pennant in 1951 and a 4-0 sweep of the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series for the team’s first championship since 1933.
- 1950 --- The largest crowd in sporting history was 199,854. They watched the Uruguay defeat Brazil in the World Cup soccer finals in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
- 1951 --- J.D. Salinger's only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is published by Little, Brown. The book, about a confused teenager disillusioned by the adult world, is an instant hit and will be taught in high schools for half a century.
- 1964 --- In accepting the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, Barry M. Goldwater said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
- 1966 --- In London, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker formed the band Cream.
- 1967 --- Arlo Guthrie performs a new song, the 20 minute 'Alice's Restaurant', at the Newport Folk Festival.
- 1969 --- At 9:32 a.m. EDT, Apollo 11, the first U.S. lunar landing mission, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a historic journey to the surface of the moon. After traveling 240,000 miles in 76 hours, Apollo 11 entered into a lunar orbit on July 19.
- 1973 --- Former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly revealed the existence of President Richard Nixon's secret taping system during the Senate Watergate hearings.
- 1980 --- The California Supreme Court rules that Ted Giannoulas can appear in public in his San Diego Chicken suit as long as it does not have the call letters of the radio station (KGB) that first used it as a promotional gambit.
- 1981 --- After 23 years of familiarity with the name, Datsun, executives of Nissan, the Japanese automaker, played with our minds and changed the name of their cars to Nissan. Nissan didn’t begin to show up on nameplates in the U.S. until the 1985 models were released.
- 1990 --- An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale devastated the Philippines, killing over 1,600 people. A thousand more were missing. Damage was reported in Manila, Cabanatuan, Baguio and Luzon.
- 2002 --- President Bush announces his plan for strengthening homeland security in the wake of the shocking September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., in which nearly 3,000 people had been killed. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, in an attempt to prevent further bloodshed on American soil, Bush launched a massive overhaul of the nation's security, intelligence and emergency-response systems through the creation of the White House Office of Homeland Security.
- 2004 --- Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement by a federal judge for lying about a stock sale.
- 2005 --- J.K. Rowling's book "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" was released. It was the sixth in the Harry Potter series. The book sold 6.9 million copies on its first day of release.
- Birthdays
- Ginger Rogers
- Barbara Stanwyck
- Orville Redenbacher
- Will Ferrell
- Margaret Smith Court
- Michael Flatley
- Phoebe Cates
- Stewart Copeland
- Roald Amundsen
- Ida Bell Wells
- Cal Tjader
- Desmond Dekker
- Jimmy Johnson
- Pinchus Zuckerman
