Today is Wednesday, August 24, 2022, the 236th day of the year; 129 days remain until the end of the year.
- Sunrise: 6:33am
- Sunset: 7:50pm
…giving us 13 hours and 20 minutes of daylight.
The waning crescent moon is 6.2% illuminated.
- Moonrise: 3:42am
- Moonset: 6:54pm
San Francisco Bay Tides
- High: 11:53am/10:19pm
- Low: 4:42am/4:30pm
...Water Temp in Aquatic Park – around 57 degrees
Today’s special holidays and celebrations:
- International Strange Music Day
- Knife Day
- Ukraine Independence Day
- National Waffle Iron Day
- Pluto Demoted Day
- Vesuvius Day
- National Peach Pie Day
On this day in…
0079 - Mount Vesuvius erupted killing approximately 20,000 people. The cities of Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum were buried in volcanic ash.
0410 - The Visigoths overran Rome. This event symbolized the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
1456 - The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.
1572 - The Catholics began their slaughter of the French Protestants in Paris. The killings claimed about 70,000 people.
1814 - Washington, DC, was invaded by British forces that set fire to the White House and Capitol.
1869 - A patent for the waffle iron was received by Cornelius Swarthout.
1891 - Thomas Edison applied patents for the kinetoscope and kinetograph (U.S. Pats. 493,426 and 589,168).
1932 - Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the U.S. non-stop. The trip from Los Angeles, CA to Newark, NJ, took about 19 hours.
1949 - The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) went into effect. The agreement was that an attack against on one of the parties would be considered "an attack against them all."
1968 - France became the 5th thermonuclear power when they exploded a hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific.
1985 - 27 anti-apartheid leaders were arrested in South Africa as racial violence rocked the country.
1986 - Frontier Airlines shut down. Thousands of people were left stranded.
1989 - Pete Rose, the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, was banned from baseball for life after being accused of gambling on baseball.
1989 - The U.S. space probe, Voyager 2, sent back photographs of Neptune.
1990 - Iraqi troops surrounded foreign missions in Kuwait.
1991 - Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the head of the Communist Party.
1992 - China and South Korea established diplomatic relations.
1995 - Microsoft's "Windows 95" went on sale.
1998 - U.S. officials cited a soil sample as part of the evidence that a Sudan plant was producing precursors to the VX nerve gas. And, therefore made it a target for U.S. missiles on August 20, 1998.
1998 - A donation of 24 beads was made, from three parties, to the Indian Museum of North America at the Crazy Horse Memorial. The beads are said to be those that were used in 1626 to buy Manhattan from the Indians.
2001 - The remains of nine American servicemen killed in the Korean War were returned to the U.S. The bodies were found about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It was estimated that it would be a year before the identies of the soldiers would be known.
2001 - NASA announced that operation of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite would end by September 30th due to budget restrictions. Though the satellite is best known for monitoring a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, it was designed to provide information about the upper atmosphere by measuring its winds, temperatures, chemistry and energy received from the sun.
2006 - The planet Pluto was reclassified as a "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Pluto's status was changed due to the IAU's new rules for an object qualifying as a planet. Pluto met two of the three rules because it orbits the sun and is large enough to assume a nearly round shape. However, since Pluto has an oblong orbit and overlaps the orbit of Neptune it disqualified Pluto as a planet.
In addition to, perhaps…you, today’s birthday celebrants include or included…
- Jose Luis Borges 1899
- Yasser Arafat 1929
- Kenny Baker 1934 - Actor (R2D2 in "Star Wars")
- Mason Williams 1938
- David Freiberg 1938 - Musician (Jefferson Starship)
- Stephen Fry 1957
- Steve Guttenberg 1958 - Actor
- Cal Ripken, Jr. 1960 - Baseball player
- Jared Harris 1961 - Actor ("Mad Men")
- Craig Kilborn 1962 - Talk show host
- Marlee Matlin 1965 - Actress
- David Chappelle 1973 - Actor, comedian ("Chappelle's Show")
- Rupert Grint 1988 - Actor ("Harry Potter" movie series)
