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Friday January 13, 2012

 

  • 13th Day of 2012 / 353 Remaining
  • 67 Days Until Spring Begins
  • Sunrise:7:24
  • Sunset:5:13
  • 9 Hr 49 Min
  • Moon Rise:10:24pm
  • Moon Set:9:48am
  • Moon’s Phase: 77 %
  • The Next Full Moon
  • February 7 @ 1:56pm
  • Full Snow Moon
  • Full Hunger 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:1:54am/1:09pm
  • Low:7:26am/7:32pm
  • Rainfall
  • This Year:3.37
  • Last Year:12.35
  • Year To Date Average:9.93
  • Annual Average: 22.28
  • Holidays
  • Friday The 13th
  • National Peach Melba Day
  • Radio Day
  • Blame Someone Else Day
  • Make Your Dreams Come True Day
  • Old New Year's Eve-Russia
  • Liberation Day-Togo
  • Tyvendedagen-Norway
  • Defenders of Freedom Day-Lithuania
  • St Melenia’s Day-Ukraine
  • New Year's Day-Julian Calendar. It's still observed in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia
  • On This Day In History
  • 1128 --- Pope Honorius II granted a papal sanction to the military order known as the Knights Templar. He declared it to be an army of God.
  • 1794 --- President George Washington approved a measure adding two stars and two stripes to the American flag, following the admission of Vermont and Kentucky to the union.
  • 1898 --- Emile Zola's inflammatory newspaper editorial, entitled "J'accuse," is printed. The letter exposed a military cover-up regarding Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus, a French army captain, had been accused of espionage in 1894 and sentenced in a secret military court-martial to imprisonment in a South American penal colony. Two years later, evidence of Dreyfus' innocence surfaced, but the army suppressed the information. Zola's letter excoriated the military for concealing its mistaken conviction. Zola was a well-known writer who had published his first story collection more than three decades earlier. A high school dropout, he had worked in the sales department of a major French publisher, who encouraged his writing and published his first book. He became one of the most famous writers in France with the publication of his 1877 hit, The Drunkard, part of his 20-novel cycle exploring the lives of two families. Zola's letter provoked national outrage on both sides of the issue, among political parties, religious organizations, and others. Supporters of the military sued Zola for libel. He was convicted and sentenced to one year's imprisonment, but he fled France to avoid the sentence. In 1899, Dreyfus was pardoned, but for political reasons was not exonerated until 1906. Zola returned to France shortly after Dreyfus' pardon, and died in 1902.
  • 1910 --- Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn were heard via a telephone transmitter; rigged by DeForest Radio-Telephone Company to broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
  • 1957 --- The Wham-O Company developed the first plastic Frisbee. The most popular theory as to how this flying disc came to be dates back to the 1920s when Yale students invented a game of catch by tossing around metal pie tins from the Frisbee Baking Company in nearby Bridgeport, Connecticut. They would frequently shout “Frisbieeeee” to warn passersby of the oncoming pie plate. Building inspector Fred Morrison puttered with and refined a plastic flying disc that he sold to WHAM-O (for $1 million) on this day in 1955. The disc was introduced to the consumer market in 1957 as the Pluto Platter (the name inspired by the U.S. obsession with UFOs). Wham-O changed the name to Frisbee in 1958, upon hearing the Yale pie-tin story. (Mattel now owns the rights to Frisbee, which has become an American icon.)
  • 1962 --- Chubby Checker set a record, literally, with the hit, The Twist. The song reached the #1 position for an unprecedented second time -- in two years. The Twist was also number one on September 26, 1960. The Philadelphia boy made good twice!
  • 1966 --- President Lyndon B. Johnson appoints the first African-American cabinet member, making Robert C. Weaver head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the agency that develops and implements national housing policy and enforces fair housing laws. In keeping with his vision for a Great Society, Johnson sought to improve race relations and eliminate urban blight. As many of the country's African Americans lived in run-down inner-city areas, appointing Weaver was an attempt to show his African-American constituency that he meant business on both counts.
  • 1968 --- Johnny Cash cemented his reputation as a hero for the downtrodden with a landmark concert at Folsum Prison, California. Backed by the Tennessee Three, Carl Perkins, June Carter and the Statler Brothers, Cash performed for 2,000 inmates in the prison cafeteria.  One of Cash's compositions while in the Air Force, "Folsom Prison Blues" was originally a hit on Sun Records in 1956.
  • 1987 --- The Supreme Court ruled that states could require employers to grant unpaid leaves of absence to pregnant women.
  • 1990 --- Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the nation's first elected black governor as he took the oath of office in Richmond.
  • Birthdays
  • Julia Louis-Dreyfus
  • Penelope Ann Miller
  • Oralndo Bloom
  • Trace Adkins
  • Rip Taylor
  • Frances Sternhagen
  • Richard Moll
  • Horatio Alger
  • Sophie Tucker
  • Robert Stack
  • Charles Nelson Reilly