- 77th Day of 2016 289 Remaining
- Spring Begins in 3 Days
- Sunrise: 7:15
- Sunset: 7:19
- 12 Hours 4 Minutes
- Moon Rise: 2:14pm
- Moon Set: 3:42am
- Phase: 70% 9 Days
- Next Full Moon January 23 @ 5:46pm
- 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: 6:43am/8:46pm
- Low: 12:55am/1:51pm
- Rainfall (July 1 – June 30)
- This Year: 20.15
- Last Year: 17.04
- YTD Avg.: 20.20
- Annual Avg.: 23.80
- Holidays
- St Patrick’s Day
- Evacuation Day-Boston
- Absolutely Incredible Kid Day
- Campfire Girls Day
- Doctor Patient Trust Day
- Corned Beef & Cabbage Day
- Oranges And Lemons Day
- Submarine Day
- On This Day
- 0461 --- Saint Patrick, Christian missionary, bishop and the 'Apostle of Ireland' died. Much of what is known about Patrick’s legendary life comes from the Confessio, a book he wrote during his last years. Born in Great Britain, probably in Scotland, to a well-to-do Christian family of Roman citizenship, Patrick was captured and enslaved at age 16 by Irish marauders. For the next six years, he worked as a herder in Ireland, turning to a deepening religious faith for comfort. Following the counsel of a voice he heard in a dream one night, he escaped and found passage on a ship to Britain, where he was eventually reunited with his family. According to the Confessio, in Britain Patrick had another dream, in which an individual named Victoricus gave him a letter, entitled “The Voice of the Irish.” As he read it, Patrick seemed to hear the voices of Irishmen pleading him to return to their country and walk among them once more. After studying for the priesthood, Patrick was ordained a bishop. He arrived in Ireland in 433 and began preaching the Gospel, converting many thousands of Irish and building churches around the country. After 40 years of living in poverty, teaching, traveling and working tirelessly, Patrick died on March 17, 461 in Saul, where he had built his first church.
- 1756 --- St. Patrick's Day was celebrated in New York City for the first time. The event took place at the Crown and Thistle Tavern.
- 1762 --- The first St. Patrick's Day parade held in New York City by Irish soldiers serving in the British army. Early Irish settlers to the American colonies, many of whom were indentured servants, brought the Irish tradition of celebrating St. Patrick’s feast day to America. The first recorded St. Patrick’s Day parade was held not in Ireland but in New York City, and with the dramatic increase of Irish immigrants to the United States in the mid-19th century, the March 17th celebration became widespread.
- 1776 --- British forces are forced to evacuate Boston following General George Washington’s successful placement of fortifications and cannons on Dorchester Heights, which overlooks the city from the south. During the evening of March 4, American Brigadier General John Thomas, under orders from Washington, secretly led a force of 800 soldiers and 1,200 workers to Dorchester Heights and began fortifying the area. To cover the sound of the construction, American cannons, besieging Boston from another location, began a noisy bombardment of the outskirts of the city. By the morning, more than a dozen cannons from Fort Ticonderoga had been brought within the Dorchester Heights fortifications. British General Sir William Howe hoped to use the British ships in Boston Harbor to destroy the American position, but a storm set in, giving the Americans ample time to complete the fortifications and set up their artillery. Realizing their position was now indefensible, 11,000 British troops and some 1,000 Loyalists departed Boston by ship on March 17, sailing to the safety of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
- 1901 --- Paintings by the late Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh are shown at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris. The 71 paintings, which captured their subjects in bold brushstrokes and expressive colors, caused a sensation across the art world. Eleven years before, while living in Auvers-sur-Oise outside Paris, van Gogh had committed suicide without any notion that his work was destined to win acclaim beyond his wildest dreams. In his lifetime, he had sold only one painting. One of his paintings–the Yasuda Sunflowers–sold for just under $40 million at a Christie’s auction in 1987.
- 1906 --- A powerful earthquake and a full day of aftershocks rock Taiwan, killing over 1,200 people. This terrifying day of tremors destroyed several towns and caused millions of dollars in damages. It was early on a Saturday morning when the first earthquake struck, due to a shift in the Chinsekiryo and Baishiku faults lying beneath the island of Formosa, as Taiwan was known at the time. Centered under the city of Kagi, the quake had a magnitude of 7.1 and was felt as far away as Japan, hundreds of miles to the north.
- 1910 --- The Camp Fire Girls organization was founded by Luther and Charlotte Gulick. It was formally presented to the public exactly 2 years later.
- 1941 --- The National Gallery of Art opened in Washington, D.C., President Franklin D Roosevelt hosted the opening ceremony.
- 1959 --- The Dalai Lama fled Tibet for India in the wake of a failed uprising by Tibetans against Chinese rule.
- 1964 --- President Lyndon B. Johnson presides over a session of the National Security Council during which Secretary of Defense McNamara and Gen. Maxwell Taylor present a full review of the situation in Vietnam. During the meeting, various secret decisions were made, including the approval of covert intelligence-gathering operations in North Vietnam; contingency plans to launch retaliatory U.S. Air Force strikes against North Vietnamese military installations and against guerrilla sanctuaries inside the Laotian and Cambodian borders; and a long-range “program of graduated overt military pressure” against North Vietnam. President Johnson directed that planning for the bombing raids “proceed energetically.”
- 1968 --- Over 6,000 sheep are found dead in Skull Valley, Utah as a result of U.S. Army nerve gas testing at nearby Dugway Proving Ground on March 13.
- 1969 --- Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel.
- 1973 --- The first American prisoners of war (POWs) were released from the "Hanoi Hilton" in Hanoi, North Vietnam.
- 1995 --- Gerry Adams became the first leader of Sinn Fein to be received at the White House.
- 2000 --- In Kanungu, Uganda, a fire at a church linked to the cult known as the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments killed more than 530. On March 31, officials set the number of deaths linked to the cult at more than 900 after authorities subsequently found mass graves at various sites linked to the cult.
- 2004 --- NASA's Messenger became the first spacecraft to enter into orbit around Mercury. The probe took more than 270,000 pictures before it crashed into the surface of Mercury on April 30, 2015.
- 2005 --- Baseball players Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa testified before Congress that they hadn't used steroids; Mark McGwire refused to say whether he had.
- Birthdays
- Mia Hamm
- John Sebastian
- Billy Corgan
- Bobby Jones
- Nat “King” Cole
- Rudolf Nureyev
- Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler
- Mercedes Cambridge
- Paul Kantner
- Kurt Russell
- Gary Sinise
- Melissa Auf Der Maur
St Patrick's Day-KALW Almanac-March 17, 2016
