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 15th day of July and the 195th 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 1st day of Av in the year 5786.
We are under a new moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 1 day, 6 hours, and 25 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 we are under the constellation of Cancer.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:25 AM
and
8:24 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 59 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1799, the Rosetta Stone was found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Rembrandt Van Rijn (1606), Clement Clarke Moore (1779), Eric Hoffer (1902), Alex Karras (1935), Jan-Michael Vincent (1944), Linda Ronstadt (1946), Arianna Huffington (1950), Jesse Ventura (1951), Forest Whitaker (1961), Scott Foley (1972), Brian Austin Green (1973), Taylor Kinney (1981), and Emily Roeske (1991).
Today's History Lesson: Evangelizing Hollywood Style
It was on this day in 1926 that the flamboyant and charismatic radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished in Venice California.
She and her secretary were swimming at the beach when Aimee disappeared. The secretary reported the news, suggesting that Aimee had drowned. She was scheduled to preach later in the day, so her mother, a Salvation Army evangelist, stood in for her. Realistically, what mother, assuming her only child had just drowned, could have reacted with such composure? At the very least she could have shed a few Tammy Faye Bakker tears, but instead she stoically announced the suspected drowning and declared that "Sister is with Jesus" and then preached a Hollywood style sermon with fervor. Mama Preacher's handling of the assumed tragedy sparked much skepticism about the incident, although an extensive search for Sister Aimee immediately got underway. It was widely speculated [yet known to several] that Sister Aimee was having an affair with Kenneth Ormiston, an engineer for KFSG, the radio station that aired the live broadcasts of Mrs. McPherson's sermons. He coincidentally disappeared at the same time.
On June 23, Sister Aimee stumbled out of the desert in Mexico, just south of the Arizona border. She claimed to have been held captive by a Mexican couple, but managed to escape and embark on a three hour journey through the desert to the town of Agua Prieta, Sonora. The problem was that she was healthy, well groomed, and showed no signs of fatigue. The hunt for her had been a headline story beginning the day she disappeared. Law enforcement and volunteers had expended numerous resources and countless hours searching for her body. Two volunteers had even lost their lives--one to drowning, and the other to exposure.
Investigators soon discovered that Mr. Ormiston had rented a cottage near Carmel-by-the-Sea during the time he and Sister Aimee were missing. Numerous witnesses who lived near the cottage came forward and reported that they had seen the evangelist and her broadcast engineer together in plain sight in public places. A grand jury was convened on July 8, 1926, but adjourned after 12 days citing a lack of solid evidence. After letters in Sister Aimee's handwriting that were dated during her disappearance and written on letterheads from several hotels surfaced, a second grand jury was convened on August 3, 1926. Sister Aimee and Mama Sister were indicted. They were both charged with obstruction of justice. As with Tammy Faye Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart decades later, there was much public support for evangelists afflicted with the curse of loose morals. Los Angeles district attorney Asa Keyes, with his eye set on re-election, dropped all charges on January 10, 1927. Subsequently, poetic justice intervened and DA Keyes, who was by no means a choirboy, was found guilty of accepting a bribe from the Julian Petroleum Company and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. He was pardoned by Governor James Rolph in August 1933.
Footnote: Sister Aimee was widowed once and divorced twice, and was rumored to have had several trysts. Dorothy Parker pretty much got it right in her New Yorker article. Her legendary quote from that article is today's quote (see bottom of page).
Today's Wisdom and Insight:
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our [children].
Lauren Caitlin Upton (born March 27, 1989)
Miss Teen USA 2007 contestant,
Fourth Place holder
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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Cell: 903-360-0002
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