Good afternoon, and welcome to this website. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. All the information was current at the time you arrived here. Absolutely everything you're seeing is generated by code developed TOTALLY inhouse. No commercial website design software is in use here. None.
About the fruitfly: Whether the fruitfly entertains or annoys, it serves a very real and useful purpose. Using recently developed sentinelware, the image is generated by the output of many, many active server monitoring processes. When abnormal server activity is detected by the "fly controller" 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. And now you know the fly story. If the fruitfly annoys you, click in the center of the lens flare to swat it.
Today is Monday, the 27th day of July and the 207th 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 13th day of Av in the year 5786.
We are under a full moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 13 days, 6 hours, and 51 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Wednesday, August 12th at 9:11 PM. The next full moon will occur on Wednesday, July 29th at 2:49 AM. 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 Lunar and 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
6:32 AM
and
8:17 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 45 minutes of daylight.
There are 57 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 1940, Billboard magazine began publishing bestseller charts.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Giosuè Carducci (1835), Joseph Tinker (1880), Norman Lear (1922), Jerry Van Dyke (1931), Bobbie Gentry (1944), Betty Thomas (1947), Peggy Fleming (1948), Maureen McGovern (1949), Daniel C Burbank (1961), Triple H (1969), Alex Rodriguez (1975), Max Scherzer (1984), and Cheyenne Kimball (1990).
Today in History: Henry Tibbe's Corncob Pipe
It was on this day in 1869 that Henry Tibbe was granted US Patent No. 205,816 for his improvements to the corncob pipe.
For starters, Tibbe used cobs that were from a variety of corn with very small kernels. Thus, the outer texture of the cobs was relatively smooth and could be worked into finely crafted pipes. To further refine the surface, he applied "plastic, self-hardening cement." The bowl of the pipe was drilled completely through, then fitted with a wooden plug on the bottom. The pipe shaft, fashioned from hardwood, was drilled out and fitted with a snug inner tube of unspecified hard material, which extended beyond the bowl end of the shaft far enough to penetrate the bowl, thus securely connecting the tube and bowl and providing a clear passage for the smoke.
The majority of pipes sold today are made of burled wood, with meerschaum coming in at second place. Calabash pipes, sometimes referred to as Sherlock Holmes pipes, are made from the calabash gourd with an inner lining of meerschaum or porcelain, and are preferred by a relatively small [and perhaps eccentric] population of pipers. It's not clear how popular corncob pipes are outside the Appalachians, but we do know that famous corncob smokers have included Presidents Ford and Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, Mark Twain, Popeye, Mammy Yokum and Frosty the Snowman.
The evidence seems clear that those businesses which actively serve their many constituencies in creative, morally thoughtful ways, over the long run, serve their shareholders best. Companies, in fact, do well by doing good.
Norman Lear, born on this day 104 years ago
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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