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Thursday February 19, 2015

  • 50th Day of 2015 315 Remaining
  • Spring Begins in 29 Days
  • Sunrise:6:53
  • Sunset:5:53
  • 11 Hours 0 Minutes
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  • Moon Rise:7:12am
  • Moon Set:7:11pm
  • Phase: 1%
  • Full Moon March 5 @ 10:06am
  • As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins. The more northern tribes knew this Moon as the Full Crow Moon, when the cawing of crows signaled the end of winter; or the Full Crust Moon, because the snow cover becomes crusted from thawing by day and freezing at night. The Full Sap Moon, marking the time of tapping maple trees, is another variation. To the settlers, it was also known as the Lenten Moon, and was considered to be the last full Moon of winter.
  • Tides
  • High:10:40am/11:41pm
  • Low:4:34am/5:06pm
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  • Rainfall:
  • This Year to Date:17.01
  • Last Year:5.89
  • Avg YTD:16.71
  • Annual Avg:23.80
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  • Holidays
  • Introduce A Girl To Engineering Day
  • National Chocolate Mint Day
  • Prevent Plagiarism Day
  • Fritter Thursday
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  • Democracy Day-Nepal
  • Flag Day-Turkmenistan
  • Family Day-Saskatchewan, Canada
  • On This Day
  • 1777 --- The Continental Congress votes to promote Thomas Mifflin; Arthur St. Clair; William Alexander, Lord Stirling; Adam Stephen; and Benjamin Lincoln to the rank of major general. Although the promotions were intended in part to balance the number of generals from each state, Brigadier General Benedict Arnold felt slighted that five junior officers received promotions ahead of him and, in response, threatened to resign from the Patriot army.
  • 1807 --- Aaron Burr, a former U.S. vice president, is arrested in Alabama on charges of plotting to annex Spanish territory in Louisiana and Mexico to be used toward the establishment of an independent republic.
  • 1847 --- The Donner Party is rescued after being snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas. Almost half of the original 87 members died, and some of the survivors seemed to be well fed considering the ordeal they went through. Cannibalism itself is not a crime, and no charges were ever brought.
  • 1851 --- An angry mob in San Francisco's business district "tries" two Australian suspects in the robbery and assault of C. J. Jansen. When the makeshift jury deadlocked, the suspects were returned to law enforcement officials. Jansen was working at his store at the corner of Montgomery and Washington when two men beat him unconscious and stole $2,000. Another merchant, William Coleman, then decided to play prosecutor and assembled judges and jury members from a crowd that had assembled at Portsmouth Square. Fortunately for the Australian suspects, the men who defended them got three jury members to agree that Jansen hadn't been able to see the men who had robbed him clearly. Although some members of the mob wanted to hang the alleged thieves in spite of the verdict, the crowd dispersed. Later, however, local authorities convicted the men at a real trial in court. Vigilantes were fairly common during the Gold Rush boom in San Francisco. One committee spent most of its time rooting out Australian ne'er-do-wells. They hanged four and tossed another 30 out of town. In 1856, a 6,000-member vigilante group was assembled after a couple of high-profile shooting incidents. This lynch mob hanged the suspects and then directed their attention to politics. Such vigilante movements were generally popular all over the West in the middle and late 19th century. The San Francisco vigilantes were so well regarded that they took over the Democratic Party in the late 1850s and some became respected politicians.
  • 1878 --- The technology that made the modern music business possible came into existence in the New Jersey laboratory where Thomas Alva Edison created the first device to both record sound and play it back. He was awarded U.S. Patent No. 200,521 for his invention--the phonograph.
  • 1884 --- An astonishing series of 37 tornadoes sweeps across the Southeast United States. The twisters, which came at a time in which there was no warning system in place to alert area residents, killed 167 people and injured another 1,000. The tornadoes began early in the afternoon in Alabama. The town of Goshen lost 26 people to an F4 twister, classified as "devastating" with winds between 207 and 260 mph. A brick school building literally exploded when the tornado hit it dead on, killing six students and a teacher. Outside of Goshen, 13 more people lost their lives in Alabama. Late in the afternoon, the storm began battering North Carolina. The town of Philadelphia lost 23 people, while another eight were killed in other smaller tornadoes in the state. There were several reports of bodies thrown hundreds of yards by the powerful twisters. In South Carolina, 27 people died, and there were also deaths reported in Kentucky and Mississippi. Of the 37 reported tornadoes that struck the Southeast on February 19, 29 killed at least one person. The hardest-hit state was Georgia, where 68 deaths were attributed to the storm. The town of Jasper suffered 22 casualties when another F4 twister struck. Across the state, hundreds were injured, many of them rural sharecroppers.
  • 1903 --- Tsingtao, China's first brewery, was founded by German settlers.
  • 1913 --- Cracker Jack begins to put prizes in each box.
  • 1942 --- President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, initiating a controversial World War II policy with lasting consequences for Japanese Americans. The document ordered the removal of resident enemy aliens from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941, Roosevelt came under increasing pressure by military and political advisors to address the nation's fears of further Japanese attack or sabotage, particularly on the West Coast, where naval ports, commercial shipping and agriculture were most vulnerable. Included in the off-limits military areas referred to in the order were ill-defined areas around West Coast cities, ports and industrial and agricultural regions. While 9066 also affected Italian and German Americans, the largest numbers of detainees were by far Japanese.
  • 1945 --- Operation Detachment, the U.S. Marines' invasion of Iwo Jima, is launched. Iwo Jima was a barren Pacific island guarded by Japanese artillery, but to American military minds, it was prime real estate on which to build airfields to launch bombing raids against Japan, only 660 miles away. The Americans began applying pressure to the Japanese defense of the island in February 1944, when B-24 and B-25 bombers raided the island for 74 days. It was the longest pre-invasion bombardment of the war, necessary because of the extent to which the Japanese--21,000 strong--fortified the island, above and below ground, including a network of caves. Underwater demolition teams ("frogmen") were dispatched by the Americans just before the actual invasion. When the Japanese fired on the frogmen, they gave away many of their "secret" gun positions. The amphibious landings of Marines began the morning of February 19 as the secretary of the navy, James Forrestal, accompanied by journalists, surveyed the scene from a command ship offshore. As the Marines made their way onto the island, seven Japanese battalions opened fire on them. By evening, more than 550 Marines were dead and more than 1,800 were wounded. The capture of Mount Suribachi, the highest point of the island and bastion of the Japanese defense, took four more days and many more casualties.
  • 1958 --- The Miracles released their first single "Get A Job." 
  • 1963 --- "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan was published.
  • 1964 --- Simon & Garfunkel completed the original acoustic version of "Sounds of Silence." 
  • 1970 --- The Chicago Seven (formerly the Chicago Eight--one defendant, Bobby Seale, was being tried separately) are acquitted of riot conspiracy charges, but found guilty of inciting riot. The eight antiwar activists were charged with the responsibility for the violent demonstrations at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The defendants included David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"); Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines.
  • 1974 --- Alexander Solzhenitsyn awaits reunion with his family after exile from Russia. Publication of The Gulag Archipelago, a detailed history of the Soviet prison system, prompted Russia to exile the 55 year-old author. One of Russia's most visible and vocal dissidents, Solzhenitsyn once served an 11-year prison term. Solzhenitsyn had previously been prevented by the Soviets from receiving a Nobel Prize for literature, but finally in 1978, he received the award in Switzerland.

  • 1976 --- Rick Stevens (Tower of Power) was arrested and charged in the murders of three men the night before in San Jose, CA. The reason was believed to be drugs. Stevens and another were found guilty on two counts of murder the following November. Stevens was released in 2012.
  • 1981 --- George Harrison was ordered to pay ABKCO Music the sum of $587,000 for "subconscious plagiarism" between his song, "My Sweet Lord" and the Chiffons "He's So Fine." The suit more likely than not was filed in retribution for Harrison’s criticism of ABKCO’s management of The Beatles.
  • 1987 --- A controversial, anti-smoking publice service announcement aired for the first time on television. Yul Brynner filmed the ad shortly before dying of lung cancer. Brynner made it clear in the ad that he would have died from cigarette smoking before ad aired. 
  • 2001 --- The first suspected case of foot-and-mouth disease is detected in Essex. The disease ravages livestock in Britain in the worst epidemic since 1967.  By March it has spread to mainland Europe. 
  • 2002 --- NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft began using its thermal emission imaging system to map Mars. 
  • 2003 --- In West Warwick, RI, 99 people were killed when fire destroyed the nightclub The Station. The fire started with sparks from a pyrotechnic display being used by Great White. Ty Longley, guitarist for Great White, was one of the victims in the fire. 
  • 2004 --- Former Enron Corp. chief executive Jeffrey Skilling was charged with fraud, insider trading and other crimes in connection with the energy trader's collapse. Skilling was later convicted and sentenced to more than 24 years in prison. 
  • Birthdays
  • Amy Tan
  • Nicolaus Copernicus
  • Stan Kenton
  • Merle Oberon
  • Smokey Robinson
  • Lee Marvin
  • Dave Wakeling
  • Falco
  • Justine Bateman
  • Benicio Del Toro