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 Wednesday, the 22nd day of July and the 202nd 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 8th day of Av in the year 5786.
We are under a first quarter moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 8 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
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 62 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 1923, MLB pitcher Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators, became the the first to strikeout 3,000. He eventually reached 3,508
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Pope Clement XI (1649), Gregor Mendel (1822), Gustav Hertz (1887), Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890), Karl Menninger (1893), Stephen Vincent Benét (1898), Alexander Calder (1898), Amy Vanderbilt (1908), Claire Bunge (1922), Bob Dole (1923), Orson Bean (1928), Oscar de la Renta (1932), Louise Fletcher (1934), Terrence Stamp (1939), Alex Trebek (1940), Kay Bailey Hutchison (1943), Bobby Sherman (1943), Albert Brooks (1947), Danny Glover (1947), Don Henley (1947), Alan Menken (1949), Willem Dafoe (1955), David Spade (1964), Daniel Jones (1973), and Rufus Wainwright (1973).
Today in History: Happy Birthday, Stephen Vincent Benét
Today is the birthday of the American poet Stephen Vincent Bené, born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1899. His father was a military man who read poetry to his children. All of the Benét kids grew up to become writers of some sort.
Stephen published his first book at age 17, then went to Yale, and served in World War I as a civilian, because his poor vision kept him out of the Army. After the war, he submitted his third volume of poetry--Heavens and Earth (1920)--in place of a master's thesis. He also wrote three novels and some short stories, but he's best known for a long poem that he wrote while in Paris--"John Brown's Body (1928)." It's an epic in eight sections, and tells the story of the Civil War, beginning with John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry and ending just after Lincoln's assassination.
He also wrote the short story The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937), which was originally published in The Saturday Evening Post. It's a tall tale about a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the Devil and then hires orator Daniel Webster to argue his case in front of a midnight jury of American villains. Webster rises from his grave to take the case, saying, "If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians."
He wrote, "Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways." (Source: Writers Almanac)
Today's quote is from Gunshow, the first episode of the tenth season (1999) of Law and Order. Judge Wright is played by Ron McLarty... and as we all know, ADA Jack McCoy, for countless seasons, was played by Sam Waterston. And for whatever it's worth, McCoy eventually sat in the big chair in the Manhattan District Attorney's office.
Mr. McCoy, I'm not going to sanction a verdict that cannot possibly be sustained on appeal. This conviction isn't based on any proven facts. It's based on the jury's outrage at Mr. Webber's irresponsible and inexcusable conduct. You want to end the violence, the bloodletting. So do I, Mr. McCoy. In my thirty years on the bench I've seen every permutation of it and it sickens me when somebody profits from it! But tempted, though I may be, putting Mr. Webber in a jail won't end the carnage. Until we cure what ails the human heart it won't make a dent in the body count. In the meantime, no matter how profound our grief, our indignation, I can't let you use this court to raise a lynch mob. I won't allow you to exploit the same base actions that Mr. Webber counts on to beef up his bottom line. It's not about being right, Mr. McCoy. It's about doing right.
Judge Wright
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 0.00521 seconds.