Good afternoon, 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 Thursday, the 13th day of August and the 224th 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 30th day of Av in the year 5786.
We are under a new moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 0 days, 14 hours, and 55 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 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
6:43 AM
and
8:03 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 20 minutes of daylight.
There are 40 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 1910 the Brooklyn Superbas and Pittsburgh Pirates played "the game of perfect symmetry" in baseball to an 8-8 tie, both had 8 runs, 13 hits, 2 errors, 12 assists, 5 strikeouts, 3 walks, 1 hit batsman, and 1 passed ball.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Annie Oakley (1860), Bert Lahr (1895), Alfred Hitchcock (1899), Felix Wankel (1902), Ben Hogan (1912), George Shearing (1919), Rex Humbard (1919), Fidel Castro (1926), Pat Harrington, Jr. (1929), Don Ho (1930), Jocelyn Elders (1933), Kevin Tighe (1944), Dan Fogelberg (1951), Quinn Cummings (1967), James Carpinello (1975), and Sebastian Stan (1983).
Today in History: Alfred Hitchcock Makes His Debut
Alfred Hitchcock was born on this day in London in 1899. His father was a greengrocer, and a strict man. Once, when the five-year-old Alfred misbehaved, his father sent him to the police station and they locked him in a cell for a few minutes to teach him a lesson. Hitchcock was so terrified that he was afraid of the police for the rest of his life, and he rarely drove a car so that he could not be pulled over.
Hitchcock directed great suspense and horror films, including Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Rope (1948), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963). He was a notoriously difficult director--he knew exactly how he wanted the entire film to look as soon as he and the writers had finished going through the script, and he was known to refer to his actors as "cattle." Critics have interpreted Hitchcock's behavior as a director in countless ways, writing long treatises on how he channeled his own repression, passions, and other psychological issues into his films and his treatment of his actors. But his life off the set seems to have been relatively quiet and uneventful. In 1926, he married Alma Reville, his assistant. They had a close working relationship--Alma went through every detail of each of her husband's films, pointing out whenever the dialogue sounded slightly wrong, or there was a slight flaw in the filming. Hitchcock was rumored to fall for many of his blond leading ladies, despite a lack of affection in return; and he often remarked to interviewers and friends that he was celibate, or impotent, or both. Whatever his married life was like, he and Alma were devoted enough to each other that they remained married until Hitchcock's death more than 50 years later. They enjoyed going to art galleries and dining out.
Hitchcock had a legendary appetite. He liked to say, "I'm not a heavy eater. I'm just heavy, and I eat." Apparently, shortly after Hitchcock came to America from England, he went out to New York City's 21 Club. Hitchcock ordered a steak dinner, followed by an ice cream parfait; then he ordered another steak dinner, and another ice cream; and then the entire thing one more time. At the end of his three meals and three desserts, he drank a cup of strong tea and a glass of brandy, and told his companions: "There is as much anticipation in confronting good food as there is in going on a holiday or seeing a good show. There are two kinds of eating--eating to sustain and eating for pleasure. I eat for pleasure." He had a full wine cellar in his home in Bel Air, and he had a soft spot for Burgundy wines, which is why he featured one so prominently in Notorious. Alma was a great cook, and her husband liked to help in the kitchen himself, and the couple often hosted large dinner parties. When Hitchcock received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 1979, he said: "I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville."
Hitchcock said, "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder." (Source: The Writer's Almanac)
I'm saying this is the South, and we're proud of our crazy people. We don't hide them up in the attic. We bring 'em right down to the living room and show 'em off. See, no one in the South ever asks if you have crazy people in your family. They just ask what side they're on... Which side are mine on? Both.
Dixie Carter as Julia Sugarbaker
Designing Women Episode 43
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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