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 Monday, the 29th day of June and the 179th 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 14th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a full moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 14 days, 16 hours, and 22 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, July 14th at 8:27 AM. The next full moon will occur on Monday, June 29th at 2:05 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 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
6:17 AM
and
8:27 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 10 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1888, George Edward Gouraud recorded Handel's Israel in Egypt onto a phonograph wax cylinder, thought for many years to be the oldest known recording of music. A chorus of 4,000 sang into a huge conical horn located 100 yards away.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of William James Mayo (1861), Andre Gailhard (1885), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900), Nelson Eddy (1901), Slim Pickens (1919), Robert Evans (1930), Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle (1933), Stokley Carmichael (1941), Gary Busey (1944), Richard Lewis (1947), and Fred Grandy (1948).
Today in History: Drama Under the Flames
On this day in 1613, Shakespeare's Globe Theatre burned to the ground. The thatched roof caught on fire after a theatrical cannon misfired during a production of Henry VIII. Only one man was hurt; his breeches caught on fire, but the quick-thinking fellow put them out with a bottle of ale.
The Globe had been the home of Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, since 1599; previously, his plays had been performed in a house known simply as The Theatre, but their lease expired in 1598. The troupe found a loophole: The lease was for the land only, and the company owned the building, so the Lord Chamberlain's Men dismantled the old theater while the landlord was away for Christmas and brought it with them across the Thames from Shoreditch to Southwark. They used its timbers to build the framework of the Globe, which was also unique in being the first theater built to house a specific theatrical company, and to be paid for by the company itself.
After the fire, the Globe was rebuilt in 1614 and was in use until 1642, when the Puritans closed all the theater in London. The building was pulled down two years later to make room for tenements. It was rebuilt in the 1990s, and except for concessions made for fire safety, it is as close to the original Globe as scholars and architects were able to make it. (Source: The Writer's Almanac)
Today's quote of color:
I'm pleasant. Damn it! I saw Drum Eatenton at the Piggly Wiggly this morning, and I smiled at the son of a bitch before I could help myself.
Shirley McClaine as Ouiser
Steel Magnolias, 1989
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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