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 Wednesday, the 24th day of June and the 174th 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 9th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 9 days, 16 hours, and 36 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
6:15 AM
and
8:27 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 12 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1917, Mary Pickford became the first female film star to sign a million dollar contract.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of E.I. DuPont (1771), John Hughes (1797), Henry Ward Beecher (1813), Ambrose Bierce (1842), Jack Dempsey (1895), Chief Dan George (1899), Memphis Minnie (1900), Mick Fleetwood (1942), Michele Lee (1942), Jeff Beck (1944), George Pataki (1945), Robert Reich (1946), Betsy Randle (1955), Joe Penny (1956), and Primera (1993).
Today in History: Midsummer's Day
Today we celebrate the The Nativity of St. John the Baptist (or Birth of John the Baptist, or Nativity of the Forerunner) a Christian feast day celebrating the birth of John the Baptist, a prophet who foretold the coming of the Messiah in the person of Jesus and who baptized Jesus.
The Nativity of St John the Baptist is one of the oldest festivals of the Christian church, being listed by the Council of Agde in 506 as one of that region's principal festivals, where it was a day of rest and, like Christmas, was celebrated with three Masses: a vigil, at dawn, and at midday. More...
The Nativity of St John the Baptist on June 24 (Midsummer's Day) occurs six months before the Christmas celebration of the birth of Jesus. The purpose of the festival is not to celebrate the exact date of St. John's birth, but simply to commemorate it in an interlinking way. The Nativity of St John the Baptist, though not a widespread public holiday outside of Quebec, is a high-ranking liturgical feast, kept in the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran Churches. (Source: Wikipedia)
Editor's note: St. John the Baptist is the only saint other than Mary, the Mother of Jesus, whose birthday is celebrated by the Church as a liturgical feast. Other saints are remembered by the day of their death when they entered the Kingdom of Heaven.
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
Robert Frost
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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