Good morning, and welcome. All the information on this site was current at the moment you arrived. The content updates continuously 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. None.
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.
Today is Monday, the 17th day of August and the 228th day of 2026. Most of the United States is under 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.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 4th day of Elul in the year 5786.
We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 4 days, 8 hours, and 38 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Friday, September 11th at 9:55 AM. The next full moon will occur on Thursday, August 27th at 3:33 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 constellation of Leo.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:46 AM
and
7:58 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 12 minutes of daylight.
There are 36 days until the end of summer, marked by the Vernal, or Autumnal, Equinox. On the day of the Equinox, the sun can be observed to be directly above the equator, and the night and day are 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. This year, the exact crossing time will be 9:51 am Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday, September 23rd.
On this day in 1998 US President Bill Clinton admitted in taped testimony he had an "improper physical relationship" with intern Monica Lewinski and on the same day admitted before the nation he "misled people" about the relationship.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Davy Crockett (1786), Samuel Goldwyn (1882), Mae West (1892), Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. (1914), Maureen O'Hara (1920), Jiang Zemin (1926), Ted Hughes (1930), Robert De Niro (1943), Larry Ellison (1944), Lady Colin Campbell (1949), Guillermo Vilas (1952), David Koresh (1959), Lisa Coleman (1960), Sean Penn (1960), Donnie Wahlberg (1969), Jim Courier (1970), and Mark Salling (1982).
Today in Americana
Today we mourn the passing of Aretha Franklin, our Queen of Soul. She left us early yesterday morning at her home in Detroit. She was in hospice care and died peacefully.
On August 1, 1960, Franklin had the first formal recording session of her career. It took place in Columbia's Memphis studio, where she had already been hailed by CEO John Hammond as the best act since Billie Holliday. He was right on the mark, but Columbia didn't seem to be a good fit for Franklin, and she later signed on with Capitol, where she became immensely popular, leading to countless Billboard high ranking hits that have since become the most familiar and loved tunes of her universally recognized repertoire.
Franklin is the daughter of Memphis Baptist minister C.L. Franklin, who was himself a talented musician with an excellent voice and performed often, so it was no surprise that with her DNA and upbringing in a church environment, singing Southern gospel would be a natural for her. However, Franklin literally expanded the scope of the gospel genre, quickly leading to a whole new signature style that earned her the title Queen of Soul early in her career.
It's been a long time since Franklin started singing as a child in her father's church, but she remains one of the most popular and influential singers today. In 2010 Rolling Stone magazine magazine ranked her atop its "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" list, as well as the ninth greatest artist of all time. She has won 18 Grammys and received two honorary Grammys. In 1987, Franklin became the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Franklin was inducted into the GMA Gospel Music Hall of Fame in August 2012.
The link below will take you to a live gospel performance of "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" in the traditional Southern style, which includes a backup chorus, rhythm, and of course, a vintage Hammond B3/Leslie combo. It's prime Americana.
Je pense donc je suis.
René Descartes
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 grammar and 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 is generated at the Linux/Apache server.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
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