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.
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 any 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 a tedious 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 Thursday, the 23rd day of July and the 203rd 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 9th day of Av in the year 5786.
We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 9 days, 6 hours, and 22 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
6:29 AM
and
8:20 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 51 minutes of daylight.
There are 61 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 1903, Ford Motor Company sold its first car.On this day in 1872, African American inventor Elijah McCoy was granted a patent for lubricators for steam-engines.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Arthur Treacher (1894), Harold "Pee Wee" Reese (1918), Bert Convy (1933), Don Drysdale (1936), Don Imus (1940), Woody Harrelson (1961), Slash (1965), Charisma Carpenter (1970), Marlon Wayans (1972), Nomar Garciapara (1973), Monica Lewinsky (1973), Michelle Williams (1980), and Daniel Radcliffe (1989).
Today in History: The American Spirit Hits Broadway
It was on this day in 1942 that composer and World War I Veteran Irving Berlin's musical, "This is the Army, Mr. Jones" opened on Broadway.
At the request of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Berlin wrote a musical production that was intended to promote the sale of war bonds. Only six months earlier, the US had been pulled into the World War II arena following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Berlin was 52 at the time and was already established as America's most prolific composer and lyricist, so it was only natural for him to be chosen to handle the task at hand.
"This is the Army, Mr. Jones" amounted to numerous compositions that were of the standard that they could have stood independently as hit tunes. Berlin's musical sold far more war bonds than anticipated, yet he refused payment for his monumental contribution to the war effort. Yes, Berlin, who was a first generation American Jewish Russian born as Israel Isidore Baline, was a true patriot in every sense of the word.
After receiving an overwhelming reception as a Broadway musical, Berlin's play was adapted into a movie in 1943 and co-starred Joan Leslie and Ronald Reagan. Kate Smith sang "God Bless America" in the film with a backdrop showing families anxious over the coming war. The film became a tremendous hit among the Allied Powers and was a morale-boosting road show that toured the battlefronts of Europe. All told, the play and film earned more than $10 million for the Army--and that was a boatload of money back in the day.
Berlin drafted his first version of "God Bless American" in 1918 while he was serving in the Army. He revised it to what we sing today when he scored the music for the film. "God Bless America" is often referred to as our Second Nation Anthem. 
The inspiration for the lyrics came from Berlin's Russian born mother who--upon becoming an American citizen--often said "God Bless America." The Second Nation Anthem was sung from shore to shore following the September 11th attack. In the late afternoon of September 11, 2001, our Senate and House--joined by the Bush administration--all came together and sang it in a memorial service.
The only TRUE performance versions of "God Bless America" are the ones of the archived renderings by Kate Smith. Click below for her version from the 1943 film. Any attempt to upstage or alter Berlin and Smith's interpretation amounts to blasphemy. Only a precious few have even bothered. It'd be pretty much like tampering with Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." [Aside: Audiences almost always stand during performances of the "Hallelujah Chorus" and usually for "God Bless America." It's a part of who we are.]
Political correctness has breathed new life into the paralipsis, the rhetorical device whereby we make a statement by first announcing that we are not going to make it. When pundits write "No one is suggesting..." the American eye reads "I'm suggesting."
Florence King
"If Words Mean Things, Then All is Lost"
Times-Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia)
February 9, 1995
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
These links will take you to other things on this site.
[ Microwave Slide Rule ]
[ Art Lamps ]
This page was generated in 0.00422 seconds.