Good morning, and welcome. All the information on this site was current at the moment you arrived. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. Absolutely everything you're seeing is generated by code developed TOTALLY inhouse. No commercial website software is in use. None.
About the fruitfly: Whether the fruitfly in the margin entertains or annoys, it serves a very real and useful purpose. The fly uses recently developed sentinelware. In short, the image is generated by the output of many, many active server monitoring processes. When abnormal server activity is detected by the "fly 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 an arduous exercise. The fruitfly technology has made the plight of the server technician much more bearable. If the fruitfly annoys you, click in the center of the lens flare to swat it.
Today is Tuesday, the 11th day of August and the 222nd 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 28th day of Av in the year 5786.
We are approaching a new moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 27 days, 20 hours, and 51 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Wednesday, August 12th at 9:11 PM. The next full moon will occur on Thursday, August 27th at 3:33 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 Leo.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:42 AM
and
8:05 PM,
giving us 13 hours and 23 minutes of daylight.
There are 42 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 1929 New York Yankees slugger Babe Ruth became the first MLB player to hit 500 home runs (off Willis Hudlin) in a 6-5 loss to the Indians at League Park, Cleveland.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Johann Gottlieb Schwencke (1744), Joseph Schuster (1748), Robert Green Ingersoll (1833), Christiaan Eijkman (1858), Alex Haley (1921), Mike Douglas (1925), Claus Von Bulow (1926), Arlene Dahl (1928), Reverend Jerry Falwell (1933), Steve Wozniak (1950), Hulk Hogan (1953), Viola Davis (1965), Joe Rogan (1967), Anna Gunn (1968), Affion Crockett (1974), and JBoog (1985).
Happy Birthday, Perry Mason
Today is the birthday of detective novelist Erle Stanley Gardner, born of this day in Malden, Massachusetts in 1889.
Gardner had three passions--boxing, the law and writing. He earned a comfortable teenage income by boxing during his high school years. However, it was boxing that got him kicked out of law school. Undeterred, he studied law on his own, then passed the California bar exam when he was twenty-one. Gardner practiced law by day and wrote detective fiction at night. His Perry Mason novels were a tremendous success, so the TV powers worked out an arrangement with him, and the Perry Mason series was born.
Raymond Burr was invited to read at the casting call. After hearing Burr's first words, Mr. Gardner knew that he was an ideal fit, but the producers strongly disagreed. Gardner won. The first episode aired on September 21, 1957. After 721 episodes, the series ended in 1966. In this webmaster's opinion, the original Perry Mason episodes still rank right up there with the early seasons of Law and Order with detectives Greevy and Logan and prosecutors Stone and Robinette. If you're up to a few seconds of schmaltzy nostalgia, click below for a brief Perry Mason audio flashback.
Art imitates life. Occasionally, prime time television gets pretty close.
This country has always been a beacon to the world for liberty and justice. That's why we keep our borders open. But we're also a beacon for another kind of people, for criminals and con men; we rely on the law to protect us from them. Sometimes, that's not enough. Do we need more law, less freedom? Do we cross out parts of the Constitution? I've learned that's not the answer. The answer is that each one of us is responsible to everyone else. Not one of us can afford to turn a blind eye. By respecting the laws we do have, by living up to the true meaning of the word "citizen," we preserve our common good.
Sam Waterston as Jack McCoy at the closing of the
final episode of the ninth season of Law & Order (NBC)
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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