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 Thursday, the 9th day of July and the 189th 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 24th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a waning crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 24 days, 16 hours, and 17 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, July 14th at 8:27 AM. 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
6:21 AM
and
8:26 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 5 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1893, African American physician Daniel Williams performed one of the first successful pericardial surgeries. The procedure was done without anesthesia.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Ferdinand II (1578), Ann Radcliffe (1764), Elias Howe (1819), Daniel Guggenheim (1856), Ed Ames (1927), King Hassan II (1929), J.P. Getty (1932), Donald Rumsfeld (1932), Ronnie Burns (1935), David Joel Zinman (1936), O.J. Simpson (1947), John Tesh (1952), Lindsey Graham (1955), Jimmy Smits (1955), Tom Hanks (1956), Kelly McGillis (1957), Courtney Love (1964), and Fred Savage (1976).
Today in History: Henry Tibbe's Corncob Pipe
It was on this day in 1869 that Henry Tibbe was granted US Patent No. 205,816 for his improvements to the corncob pipe.
For starters, Tibbe used cobs that were from a variety of corn with very small kernels. Thus, the outer texture of the cobs was relatively smooth and could be worked into finely crafted pipes. To further refine the surface, he applied "plastic, self-hardening cement." The bowl of the pipe was drilled completely through, then fitted with a wooden plug on the bottom. The pipe shaft, fashioned from hardwood, was drilled out and fitted with a snug inner tube of unspecified hard material, which extended beyond the bowl end of the shaft far enough to penetrate the bowl, thus securely connecting the tube and bowl and providing a clear passage for the smoke.
The majority of pipes sold today are made of burled wood, with meerschaum coming in at second place. Calabash pipes, sometimes referred to as Sherlock Holmes pipes, are made from the calabash gourd with an inner lining of meerschaum or porcelain, and are preferred by a relatively small [and perhaps eccentric] population of pipers. It's not clear how popular corncob pipes are outside the Appalachians, but we do know that famous corncob smokers have included Presidents Ford and Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, Mark Twain, Popeye, Mammy Yokum and Frosty the Snowman.
Today's vocabulary word is hypocrisy.
Well, Aimee Semple McPherson has written a book. And were you to call it a little peach, you would not be so much as scratching its surface. It is the story of her life, and it is called In the Service of the King, which title is perhaps a bit dangerously suggestive of a romantic novel. It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
Dorothy Parker
"Our Lady of the Loudspeaker"
The New Yorker, February 25, 1928
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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