Good morning. 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 Sunday, the 21st day of June and the 171st 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 6th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a first quarter moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 6 days, 8 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
6:14 AM
and
8:26 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 12 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1948, Columbia Records introduced the long-playing record album in a public demonstration at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, New York.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Czar Michael Fjodorovitsj (1596), Abraham Mignon (1640), Martha Washington (1731), Johann Christoph Frederic Bach (1732), Simeon-Denis Poisson (1781), Henry O. Tanner (1859), Wilhelm Maler (1902), Al Hirschfeld (1903), JeanPaul Sartre (1905), Jane Russell (1921), Maureen Stapleton (1925), Mariette Hartley (1940), Ray Davies (1944), Meredith Baxter (1947), Michael Gross (1947), David Morrissey (1964), Nicole Kidman (1967), Pierre Omidyar (1967), Juliette Lewis (1973), Chris Pratt (1979), and Prince William (1982).
Today in History: Senator McCarthy and His Witches
It was on this day in 1956 that the playwright Arthur Miller refused to name communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee. For years, Miller had watched as the committee had been investigating high-profile writers and filmmakers and intellectuals, forcing them to name names or be prosecuted for contempt.
His friend the stage director and filmmaker Elia Kazan, who had directed the Broadway production of Miller's Death of a Salesman, had been approached by the committee and asked to name names, and he cooperated with the government. Miller was shocked and broke with him over it. He later wrote: "I felt my sympathy going toward him and at the same time I was afraid of him. Had I been of his generation, he would have had to sacrifice me as well."
Miller saw parallels between the McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, so he soon began writing his play The Crucible, about a farmer named John Procter who prefers to die rather than give a false confession that he is a witch. When The Crucible opened in 1954, it was not a big success. Miller said that on opening night, people he had known and worked with for years treated him like a stranger. After the play had its premiere, he learned that he had been denied a passport by the government. Two years later, on this day in 1956, he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When he refused to name names, he was charged with contempt and sentenced to a month in jail. He challenged the conviction and won his appeal. In 1958, The Crucible was revived off Broadway, and it ran for more than 600 performances. Today it remains one of Miller's most produced plays, second only to Death of a Salesman. (Source: Writer's Almanac)
Editor's Footnote: Arthur Miller was the third husband of Marilyn Monroe. They split after five years. The first and second husbands were James Dougherty and Joe DiMaggeio, respectively. Arthur Miller, who died in 2005, is buried in Roxbury Center Cemetery in Roxbury, Connecticut. Ms. Monroe is entombed in Crypt 24 in the Corridor of Memories of the mausoleum at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner owns the crypt adjacent to hers. At the time he purchased it, he said he would lie eternally next to Marilyn Monroe. Although he was married at the time, he made no provisions for his wife's interment. No, Virginia, you can't make these things up.
When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice,
ignore them both.
Al Franken
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
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