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 Saturday, the 4th day of July and the 184th 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 19th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a waning gibbous moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 19 days, 16 hours, and 50 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
6:19 AM
and
8:27 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 8 minutes of daylight.
On this day, July 4th, in 1826, Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, and John Adams, second president of the United States both died. Neither knew of the other's illness. The date was exactly 50 years after they had both signed the Declaration of Independence.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Louis-Claude Daquin (1694), Jean-Pierre-Francois Blanchard (1753), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804), Phineas T Barnum (1810), Hiram Walker (1816), Stephen Foster (1826), James Anthony Bailey (1847), Stephen Mather (1867), Calvin Coolidge (1872), Rube Goldberg (1883), George Murphy (1902), Flor Peeters (1903), Gloria Stuart (1910), Mitch Miller (1911), Tokyo Rose (1916), Ann Landers (1918), Abigail Van Buren (1918), Eva Marie Saint (1924), Gina Lollobrigida (1927), Neil Simon (1927), George Steinbrenner (1930), Geraldo Rivera (1943), and Ron Kovic (1946).
Today in History: Independence is Officially Adopted
Today is Independence Day. It marks the day in 1776 when the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The document was approved and signed on July 2, and was formally adopted on July 4th.
John Adams always felt that the Second of July was America's true birthday, and wrote to his wife, Abigail, that the date "will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival." He envisioned "Pomp and Parade ... Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other." He reportedly refused to appear at annual Fourth of July celebrations for the rest of his life, in protest. It was tradition in the British Colonies to celebrate the king's birthday every summer, with bonfires, parades, and speeches. During the summer of 1776, they held mock funerals for King George instead--with bonfires, parades, and speeches. The Declaration of Independence was read aloud as soon as it was adopted. Philadelphia held the first formal Independence Day celebration in 1777, with bells and fireworks; in 1778, General George Washington called for double rations of rum for the troops, and in 1781, Massachusetts was the first to name July 4 an official state holiday. Congress declared it a national holiday in 1870.
Adams and Jefferson were the last surviving members of the original American revolutionaries who had stood up to the British empire and forged a new political system in the former colonies. Although Adams was a brilliant visionary and contributing architect and signer of the Declaration, Jefferson had actually penned most of the document. On July 4, 1826, at the age of 90, Adams lay on his deathbed while the country celebrated Independence Day. His last words were Thomas Jefferson still survives. He was mistaken: Jefferson had died five hours earlier at Monticello at the age of 82. (Sources: Writer's Almanac, HistoryDotCom)
Today's timely quote:
Every morning, I get up, get out of bed, and get on my knees and thank God for waking up in America... (She is) the light of the world... A nation of heroes... The real stars are wearing body armor on top of their battle dress uniforms in 130 degree heat and they do not have stunt doubles to come in for them when the going gets rough and the bullets and the shrapnel start flying. They are the real stars, fighting terrorism and trying to free a nation.
Ben Stein
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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