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 Wednesday, the 8th day of July and the 188th 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 23rd 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 23 days, 16 hours, and 16 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
6:21 AM
and
8:26 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 5 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1913, Alfred Carlton Gilbert was granted U.S. Patent 1,066,809 for his Erector Set. He went on to patent numerous enhancements to his concept, making the Erector Set one of the most popular toys of all time.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Joseph Chamberlain (1836), Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin (1838), John D. Rockefeller (1839), Percy Grainger (1882), George W. Romney (1907), Nelson Rockefeller (1908), Billy Eckstine (1914), Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926), Jerry Vale (1931), Roone Arledge (1931), Marty Feldman (1933), Steve Lawrence (1935), Anjelica Huston (1951), Christopher G. Moore (1952), Marianne Williamson (1952), Kevin Bacon (1958), Toby Keith (1961), Kathleen Robertson (1973), and Sophia Bush (1982).
Today in History: The First Documented Visit
On this day in 1947, the Roswell Daily Record in New Mexico reported that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field, New Mexico. On July 2, witnesses reported seeing a disc-shaped object flashing through the sky. The next morning, rancher Mac Brazel was moving sheep from one pasture to another when he came upon some strange debris--scraps of metal of varying sizes, very lightweight and very durable--scattered over a couple of hills. A few days later, the Army's public information officer issued a press release saying that they had recovered a crashed "flying disc." The Air Force contradicted the statement the following day with a statement of their own, claiming it was a weather balloon.
The incident was forgotten until 1978, when physicist and UFO researcher Stanton Friedman interviewed Major Jesse Marcel, who was involved in the original recovery. It was Marcel's opinion that the military had recovered an alien spacecraft, and the weather balloon story was just a cover-up. The National Enquirer tabloid took the story national in 1980, conducting its own interview with Marcel. Hundreds of witnesses--very few of them credible--began to come forward, claiming to have seen alien bodies, or heard about secretly conducted alien autopsies. By the time CNN and Time conducted a joint poll in 1997, most of the public believed that aliens had landed at Roswell and the government was covering it up. The most recent theory, put forth in Annie Jacobsen's 2011 book Area 51, claims that there were indeed bodies recovered at the crash, but that they were the bodies of deformed children, the products of a joint attempt by Joseph Stalin and Josef Mengele to produce a race of child-sized aviators. (Source: The Writer's Almanac)
Editor's note: Believe what you want, but the Roswell coverup is about as plausible as the theory that Tammy Faye Bakker was actually Jimmy Hoffa in drag hiding under several layers of makeup, or that "as seen on TV" wrinkle cream potions and male enhancement pills actually do something. Until 1978 when The National Enquirer took on the project, Roswell was a small desert town where sheep ranching was the biggest industry. Today, Roswell is a thriving town of almost 50,00 earthlings, and its income is almost entirely derived from the vast tourism industry generated by the UFO story. If there are conspirators, you can bet they are the local innovative entrepreneurs. In fact, the official Roswell Chamber of Commerce's website states:
With the help of the government and their denials about the "Roswell Incident," by which it has become known, we have now become a mecca for people wanting to know more. The result has been thousands of people visiting annually and a new multi-million dollar tourism industry. Seven new hotels, with more on the way, and many new restaurants have sprung up to answer this burgeoning call. Even McDonald's has gotten into the mix by building their seventh worldwide theme park restaurant here, designed to look like a spaceship residing on Main Street.
Today's "Oops" quote:
Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.
Mary Pickford, silent film star
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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