Good afternoon, and welcome. All the information on this site was current at the moment you arrived. The content updates continuously (per load) without the help of Internet monkeys. Absolutely everything you're seeing is generated by code developed TOTALLY inhouse. No commercial website software is in use. NOTE: You can click on the bright spot inside the lens flair to swat the fruitfly. If it doesn't annoy you, perhaps you're weird. [ more in the Technology section... ]
Today is Friday, the 9th day of October and the 281st day of 2026. Most of the contiguous United States is observing Daylight Saving Time (DST) at the moment. It will end on November 1st at 2:00 AM when clocks "fall back" one hour. While many countries observe DST, the beginning and ending dates and times vary, so as to add another layer of confusion to the scheme. Dates and times on this site are for the Central Time Zone in the United States.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 28th day of Tishri in the year 5787.
We are approaching a new moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 28 days, 6 hours, and 45 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Saturday, October 10th at 10:40 PM. The next full moon will occur on Sunday, October 25th at 5:02 PM. For now, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are visible in the night sky. Mercury can be seen in the eastern sky just before dawn. Looking into the night sky, far beyond our Solar System neighbors, we see that we are under the sign of Libra.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
7:18 AM
and
6:52 PM,
giving us 11 hours and 34 minutes of daylight.
We are in the 16th day of autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. Summer has ended, but not the hot weather. The autumnal equinox, which occurred on September 23rd, marked the end of summer. On the day of the equinox, the sun could be observed to be directly above the equator, and the night and day were the same length. The actual crossing of the sun over the equator takes approximately two and a half days. The equinox occurs halfway through the transit when the center of the sun is directly over the equator. Winter will begin on December 21st when our days begin to grow longer. It's weird, but longer periods of sunlight is when our weather becomes colder... more details as we get closer to the date.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Robert de Sorbon (1201), Charles X (1757), Giuseppe Verdi (1813), Camille Saint-Saëns (1835), Aimee Semple McPherson (1890), Bruce Catton (1899), Jacques Tati (1908), John Lennon (1940), Brian Lamb (1941), John Entwistle (1944), Jackson Browne (1948), Sharon Osbourne (1952), Tony Shalhoub (1953), Scott Bakula (1954), Steve Burns (1973), Brandon Routh (1979), and Zachery Ty Bryan (1981).
On this day in 1888, The Washington Monument officially opened to the general public.
Today's Birthday Girl: Sister Aimee Semple McPherson
Flamboyant radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson has the brightest candles on today's Birthday Cake of Infamy.
On May 18, 1926, Sister Aimee and her secretary were swimming at the beach when Aimee disappeared. The secretary reported the news, suggesting that Aimee had drowned. She was scheduled to preach later in the day, so her mother, a Salvation Army evangelist, stood in for her. Realistically, what mother, assuming her only child had just drowned, could have reacted with such composure? At the very least she could have shed a few Tammy Faye Bakker tears, but instead, she stoically announced the suspected drowning and declared that "Sister is with Jesus" and then preached a Hollywood style sermon with fervor. Mama Preacher's handling of the assumed tragedy sparked much skepticism about the incident, although an extensive search for Sister Aimee immediately got underway. It was widely speculated [yet known to several] that Sister Aimee was having an affair with Kenneth Ormiston, an engineer for KFSG, the radio station that aired the live broadcasts of Mrs. McPherson's sermons. He coincidentally disappeared at the same time. On June 23, Sister Aimee stumbled out of the desert in Mexico, just south of the Arizona border. She claimed to have been held captive by a Mexican couple, but managed to escape and embark on a three hour journey through the desert to the town of Agua Prieta, Sonora. The problem was that she was healthy, well groomed, and showed no signs of fatigue. The hunt for her had been a headline story beginning the day she disappeared. Law enforcement and volunteers had expended numerous resources and countless hours searching for her body. Two volunteers had even lost their lives--one to drowning, and the other to exposure.
Investigators soon discovered that Mr. Ormiston had rented a cottage near Carmel-by-the-Sea during the time he and Sister Aimee were missing. Numerous witnesses who lived near the cottage came forward and reported that they had seen the evangelist and her broadcast engineer together in plain sight in public places. A grand jury was convened on July 8, 1926, but adjourned after 12 days citing a lack of solid evidence. After letters in Sister Aimee's handwriting that were dated during her disappearance and written on letterheads from several hotels surfaced, a second grand jury was convened on August 3, 1926. Sister Aimee and Mama Sister were indicted. They were both charged with obstruction of justice. As with Jim Bakker and Simmy Swaggart decades later, there was much public support for evangelists afflicted with the curse of loose morals. Even in matters of the law, the market place rules, so Los Angeles district attorney Asa Keyes, with his eye set on re-election, dropped all charges on January 10, 1927. Subsequently, poetic justice intervened and DA Keyes, who was by no means a choirboy, was found guilty of accepting a bribe from the Julian Petroleum Company and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. He was pardoned by Governor James Rolph in August 1933.
Footnote: Sister Aimee was widowed once and divorced twice, and was rumored to have had several trysts. Dorothy Parker pretty much got it right in her New Yorker article. Her legendary quote from that article is today's quote (see bottom of page).
Today's vocabulary word is hypocrisy.
Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
Dorothy Parker
"Our Lady of the Loudspeaker"
The New Yorker, February 25, 1928
The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand PHP scripting. The code tightly integrates computed data with text, spewing forth natural-sounding narrative output with flawless grammar and syntax. The narrative sections--which all change daily--are from an in-house database. The real time data is derived [and rendered] primarily by PHP code at the time the output is generated at the Linux/Apache server.
About the fruitfly: Whether the fruitfly in the margin entertains or annoys, it serves a very real and useful purpose. The fly uses recently developed sentinelware. In short, the image is generated by the output of many, many active server monitoring processes. When abnormal server activity is detected by the "fly system," the fly's appearance deviates from the default, and a system exception raises a flag that is immediately addressed by the humans who monitor the server via the fruitfly's movements and morphology. Until fairly recently, server issues weren't always obvious, and if so, isolating and mending them was an arduous exercise. The fruitfly technology has made the plight of the server technician much more bearable. If the fruitfly annoys you, click in the center of the lens flare to swat it.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
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