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 Sunday, the 16th day of August and the 227th 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 3rd 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 3 days, 5 hours, and 27 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
6:45 AM
and
8:00 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 15 minutes of daylight.
There are 37 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 1858 Queen Victoria sent the first ever transatlantic telegraph cable. It went to US President James Buchanan who responded, "It is a triumph more glorious, because far more useful to mankind, than was ever won by conqueror on the field of battle."
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Robert Ringling (1897), Menachem Begin (1913), Charles Bukowski (1920), Fess Parker (1925), Ann Blyth (1928), Robert Culp (1930), Frank Gifford* (1930), Eydie Gorme (1932), Lesley Ann Warren (1946), Carol Moseley-Braun (1947), Kathie Lee Gifford* (1953), James Cameron (1954), Angela Bassett (1958), Madonna (1958), Timothy Hutton (1960), Nigel Williams (1971), Emily Robison (1972), and Vanessa Carlton (1980).
* Frank and Cathy Lee Gifford share the same birthday, separated by twenty-three years.
When people ask me why Southern writers like to write about freaks, I tell them it's because we still recognize one when we see it.
Flannery O'Conner (1925-1964)
American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist
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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