Good afternoon. 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. Today is Tuesday, the 7th day of July and the 187th 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 times vary, as with the Sun as we see it, of course.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 22nd day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a last quarter moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 22 days, 16 hours, and 23 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, July 14th at 8:27 AM. 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 Cancer.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:20 AM
and
8:26 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 6 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, using a machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Johann Tobias Krebs (1690), Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752), Gustav Mahler (1860), Robert Heinlein (1907), Pierre Cardin (1922), Doc Severinsen (1927), Dick Armey (1940), Ringo Starr (1940), Shelley Duvall (1949), Jessica Hahn (1959), Cree Summer (1969), and Michelle Kwan (1980).
Today in History: The Greatest Thing Since...
Sliced bread was sold for the first time on this date in 1928. Up until that time, consumers baked their own bread, or bought it in solid loaves.
Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa, had been working for years perfecting an eponymous invention, the Rohwedder Bread Slicer. He tried to sell it to bakeries. They scoffed, and told him that pre-sliced bread would get stale and dry long before it could be eaten. He tried sticking the slices together with hatpins, but it didn't work.
Finally he hit on the idea of wrapping the bread in waxed paper after it was sliced. Still no sale, until he took a trip to Chillicothe, Missouri, and met a baker who was willing to take a chance. Frank Bench agreed to try the five-foot-long, three-foot-high slicing and wrapping machine in his bakery. The proclamation went out to kitchens all over Chillicothe, via ads in the daily newspaper: "Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped--Sliced Kleen Maid Bread." Sales went through the roof. Rohwedder not only gave Americans the gift of convenience and perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but he also provided the English language with the saying that expresses the ultimate in innovation: "the greatest thing since sliced bread." (Source: The Writer's Almanac)
Today's quote is a compilation from Groucho Marx, who was disappointed with the quality of TV in his day. No doubt more recent programming has caused him to turn over several times in his mausoleum crypt. [Trivia note: Groucho's crypt is in a small room in the large mausoleum in the middle of Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, California. His marker is in the middle of the larger indoor wall.]
• I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth--I just hate what is being done with it.
• If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.
• Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?
• Television is the first truly democratic culture--the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
Groucho Marx, born on this day 136 years ago in New York.
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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