Good morning. Today is Tuesday, the 28th day of March. It's the 87th day of the year. This is not a leap year, so there are 278 days remaining in 2023. On the Jewish calendar, today is the 6th day of Nisan in the year 5783. On this day in 1933, The Imperial Airways biplane City of Liverpool is believed to be the first airline lost to sabotage when a passenger set a fire on board.
This website is a demonstration of smart content rendering. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. All the information was current at the time you arrived here. If you're looking for information on the technology, it's at the bottom of this page.
Today in History
On this day in 1920, silent screen stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were married.
They met at a party in 1916. Although both were already married, they began a tryst that eventually led to divorce for both. Fairbanks divorced in 1919, and Ms. Pickford filed for divorce a few days later. The couple was married a short time after Pickford's divorce was final, and the newlyweds made their home in a hunting lodge in the Hollywood hills, then an undeveloped area with unpaved roads. Their closest friend, who also happened to be their nearest neighbor, was Charlie Chaplin. During the first ceremony of its type, Fairbanks and Pickford placed their hand and foot prints in wet cement at the newly opened Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on April 30, 1927. The marriage of the superstars ended in divorce in 1936. Both had new spouses within months of the divorce. Hollywood film technology has come a long way since the silent screen days of Fairbanks, Pickford and Chaplin, but the culture seems to have changed little, if any. Sidenote: Pickford was strongly opposed to the notion of talking films when the technology was first introduced. In the words of Ms. Pickford, "Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo."
Today's Birthday Boys and Girls
Today is the birthday of Raphael (1483), Frederick Pabst (1836), Maxim Gorky (1868), Paul Whiteman (1890), Spyros Skouras (1898), August Anheuser Busch, Jr. (1899), Marlin Perkins (1905), Edmund Sixtus Muskie (1914), Dirk Bogarde (1921), George Bruce (1930), Ken Howard (1944), Dianne Wiest (1948), Reba McEntire (1955), Iris Chang (1968), Vince Vaughn (1970), Juliandra Gillen (1971), and Julia Stiles (1981).
On Wall Street
About the stock numbers: There's no current stock market reporting at the moment because of a snag in the link that retrieves the data and gets it to the screen. The stock market stuff is on the work bench until it's working again.
The New York Stock Exchange is open and trading. Currently, The S&P500 index is at , up by . The NASDAQ is up by to . The link to the Dow Jones Industrial Average is not working.
Note: During trading hours all data is in real time. The data is preserved at the end of the trading day. It remains until the next opening bell. The process of retrieving stock info involves many links between the sources and what you're reading on the screen. At the moment, there's a technical issue up the line with the DJ average. Occasionally, the data appears as random characters. If there's numerical data on the screen, it's accurate. The other indicies are working and accurate.
Earth and All Spheres
The current weather conditions and forecast usually appear in this section. However, there have been technical issues the last few days with the NOAA system, so the data is not always available. Reloading the page will sometimes bring up the info.
We are under a first quarter moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 6 days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Thursday, April 20th at 3:05 AM CDT. The moon will reach full luminescence on Wednesday, April 5th at 8:43 AM. For now, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are visible in the night sky. Mars, seen in the southern sky, is clearly visible and its red glow clearly identifies it. It can be seen beginning at nightfall; it moves slowly in a westerly fashion before disappearing. Mercury can be seen in the eastern sky just before dawn.
We are under the sign of Aries in the 96th day of winter, which arrived in the Northern Hemisphere on December 21st at 4:02 AM CST with the occurrence of the Winter Equinox. On the date of the Equinox, the sunrise and sunset times were 5:12 AM CDT and 7:23 PM CDT. For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
7:11 AM
and
7:35 PM,
giving us 12 hours and 24 minutes of daylight. For now, we're on Standard Time. We will switch to Daylight Saving Time on Sunday, March 14th at 2:00 AM, following the NIST standard.
The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand PHP scripting. The code tightly integrates computed and imported data with text, spewing forth natural-sounding narrative output with flawless syntax. The birthdays, history section and the text below--which all change daily--are from an in-house database. Raw data used in the financial and weather sections is imported at page generation time. All the other data, particularly the celestial stuff, is derived and rendered by several hundred lines of code at the time the page request reaches the server. THIS SITE IS SELF-MAINTAINING. The daily content updates at midnight CDT. The weather target is -96.852/32.847.
Sad as it may be, there are those who have made a convincing case that pop culture is the most powerful factor influencing the way we think and conduct ourselves. If that's indeed the case, it's re-assuring to know that there are pop culture icons who are deep thinking intellectuals, eager to impart their wisdom, thus making them ideal role models for the younger generations. Today we acknowledge and celebrate the noble efforts of Britney Spears--actress, model, magician musician, and woman of letters. In her words...
The cool thing about being famous is traveling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.
Britney Spears
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
_______________
Vox humana dialogus:
Office: 214.778.5014
Cell: 903.722.3975
