© 2024 KALW 91.7 FM Bay Area
KALW Public Media / 91.7 FM Bay Area
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Tuesday January 7, 2014

  • 7th Day of 2013 / 358 Remaining
  • 72 Days Until The First Day of Spring

  • Sunrise:7:25
  • Sunset:5:07
  • 9 Hours 42 Minutes of Daylight

  • Moon Rise:11:25am
  • Moon Set: 12:40am(Wednesday)
  • Moon’s Phase: First Quarter

  • The Next Full Moon
  • January 15 @ 8:35pm
  • Full Wolf Moon
  • Full Old Moon

January is the month of the Full Wolf Moon. It appeared when wolves howled in hunger outside the villages. It is also known as the Old Moon. To some Native American tribes, this was the Snow Moon, but most applied that name to the next full Moon, in February.

  • Tides
  • High:3:37am3:52pm
  • Low:10:07am/9:42

  • Rainfall
  • This Year:2.09
  • Last Year:13.35
  • Average Year to Date:10.11

  • Holidays
  • I'm Not Going To Take It Anymore Day
  • National Tempura Day

  • Christmas-Julian Calender
  • Easrer Day-Sudan
  • Tumbes Anniversary-Peru
  • Nanakusa-Japan (A long-standing custom of eating seven-herb rice porridge, nanakusa-gayu, on January 7).

  • On This Day In …
  • 1558 --- Calais, the last English possession on mainland France, was recaptured by the French.

  • 1610 --- Galileo Galilei sighted four of Jupiter's moons. He named them Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

  • 1618 --- Francis Bacon became Lord Chancellor of England.

  • 1785 --- Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon, becoming the first to cross the English Channel by air. The two men nearly crashed into the Channel along the way, however, as their balloon was weighed down by extraneous supplies such as anchors, a nonfunctional hand-operated propeller, and silk-covered oars with which they hoped they could row their way through the air.
    Just before reaching the French coast, the two balloonists were forced to throw nearly everything out of the balloon, and Blanchard even threw his trousers over the side in a desperate, but apparently successful, attempt to lighten the ship.

  • 1789 --- America's first presidential election is held. Voters cast ballots to choose state electors; only white men who owned property were allowed to vote. As expected, George Washington won the election and was sworn into office on April 30, 1789.

  • 1887 --- Thomas Stevens completed the first worldwide bicycle trip. He started his trek in April 1884. Stevens and his trusty bike traveled 13,500 miles, arriving back in San Francisco, California almost three years later.
  • 1896 --- Maybe you or someone you know received one for Christmas: a genuine Fannie Farmer Cookbook. There really was a Fannie Farmer, you know. Her first and now famous, Boston Cooking School Cookbook, was published this day. She became known as ‘the mother of level measurement’ and the cookbook became a best seller.
  • 1904 --- The distress signal, “CQD”, was established this day. It didn’t last long. Four years later, “SOS” became the radio distress signal because it was quicker to transmit by wireless radio and could not be misinterpreted.

  • 1924 --- George Gershwin began work on the incomparable score of Rhapsody in Blue (he completed it some three weeks later). Incidentally, George was only 26 years old at the time. Rhapsody in Blue was commissioned by Paul Whiteman and then orchestrated by Ferde Grofe of Grand Canyon Suite fame. This first orchestration of Gershwin’s score was never quite right. Grofe’s style didn’t gel with Gershwin’s. Several other artists attempted to do justice to Rhapsody in Blue, never quite making the grade. Some thirty years later, orchestra leader Hugo Winterhalter with Byron Janis at the piano did a jazzed up version; pretty close to the way Gershwin had described his piece. However, it wasn’t until Gershwin’s original solo piano was accompanied by a jazz band led by Michael Tilson Thomas, that the true arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue was heard.

  • 1926 --- A famous marriage that endured for many years is remembered this day. It’s the wedding anniversary of George Burns and Gracie Allen who were married by a Justice of the Peace in Cleveland, Ohio.
  • 1927 --- The Harlem Globetrotters basketball team travels 48 miles west from Chicago to play their first game in Hinckley, Illinois. The Globetrotters were the creation of Abe Saperstein of Chicago, who took over coaching duties for a team of African-American players originally known as the Savoy Big Five (after the famous Chicago ballroom where they played their early games). At a time when only whites were allowed to play on professional basketball teams, Saperstein decided to promote his new team’s racial makeup by naming them after Harlem, the famous African-American neighborhood of New York City. The son of a tailor, Saperstein sewed their red, white and blue uniforms (emblazoned with the words "New York") himself. The lineup in that first game, for which the Globetrotters were paid $75, was Walter "Toots" Wright, Byron "Fat" Long, Willis "Kid" Oliver, Andy Washington and Al "Runt" Pullins.

  • 1929 --- The debut of "Buck Rogers 2429 A.D." occurred in newspapers around the U.S. The title of the comic strip was later changed to "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century."
  • 1955 --- Singer Marian Anderson made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, becoming the first black person to perform there as a member.

  • 1959 --- Just six days after the fall of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba, U.S. officials recognize the new provisional government of the island nation. Despite fears that Fidel Castro, whose rebel army helped to overthrow Batista, might have communist leanings, the U.S. government believed that it could work with the new regime and protect American interests in Cuba.
  • 1970 --- Neighbors of New York landowner Max Yasgur sued him for $35,000 for property damage caused by ‘flower children’ who attended the August 1969 Woodstock Festival. More than 450,000 people attended the three-day event.
  • 1975 --- OPEC agreed to raise crude oil prices by 10%, which began a time of world economic inflation.

  • 1979 --- Vietnamese forces captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government.
  • 1980 --- U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed legislation that authorized $1.5 billion in loans for the bail out of Chrysler Corp.
  • 1985 --- Yul Brynner returned to the stage this night as The King and I returned to where Yul first began his reign, 33 years before. Through his career to that date, Brynner appeared in 4,434 shows without missing a single performance.

  • 1990 --- The Tower of Pisa was closed to the public after leaning too far. The closing of the monument allowed “the work of consolidation of the foundations and reduction of the inclination.” The tower reopened on Dec 15, 2001 to guided visits only (with a maximum of 30 people), accompanied by employed personnel (the visit takes about 35 minutes). The work, at a cost of more than 27,370,000 Euro, decreased the leaning of the tower by 40.6 centimeters. The

    tower began to lean at the beginning of its construction in 1173 because of the marshy ground on which it rests and the inclination had continued to increase each year up to the decision to intervene in 1990.

  • 1999 --- The impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, formally charged with lying under oath and obstructing justice, begins in the Senate. As instructed in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was sworn in to preside, and the senators were sworn in as jurors. Congress had only attempted to remove a president on one other occasion: the 1868 impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson, who incurred the Republican Party's wrath after he proposed a conservative Reconstruction plan.
  • 2006 --- Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, facing corruption charges, stepped down as House majority leader.

  • 2009 -- Russia shut off all gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly endorsed the move and urged greater international involvement in the energy dispute.

  • Birthdays
  • Sen Rand Paul
  • Katie Couric
  • Millard Fillmore-13th President
  • Kenny Loggins
  • Jann Wenner
  • Paul Revere
  • David Caruso
  • Nicholas Cage
  • Aristotle Onassis
  • Charles Addams
  • Butterfly McQueen
  • Rhianna