Good morning, Whitewater.
Our last week of 2015 begins with a forecast of three-to-five inches of daytime snowfall, with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:27 and sunset 4:28, for 9h 03m 38s of daytime. (Our days are already getting longer.) The moon is a waning gibbous with 89.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1898, brothers Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas and Louis Jean Lumière screen one of the the earliest motion pictures – a documentary:
Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory in Lyon (French: La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon), also known as Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory and Exiting the Factory, is an 1895 French short black-and-white silent documentary film directed and produced by Louis Lumière. It is often referred to as the first real motion picture ever made,[1] although Louis Le Prince‘s 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene pre-dated it by seven years….
This 46-second movie was filmed in Lyon, France, by Louis Lumière. It was filmed by means of the Cinématographe, an all-in-one camera, which also serves as a film projector and developer. This film was shown on 28 December 1895 at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, along with nine other short movies.
As with all early Lumière movies, this film was made in 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, and at a speed of 16 frames per second. At that rate, the 17 meters of film length provided a duration of 46 seconds, holding a total of 800 frames.[3]
On this day in 1938, Joe McCarthy announces his candidacy for circuit judge, and begins a campaign that prefigures later and worse lies that became McCarthy’s routine political practice:
1938 – McCarthy Declares Candidacy for Judgeship
On this date future senator Joseph McCarthy announced his candidacy for the Wisconsin 10th Circuit Court judgeship, a position that had been held for 24 years by Edgar V. Werner. The 30-year-old McCarthy used Werner’s age against him, claiming that Werner was 73 while secretly knowing he was 66. In the election, held in April of the following year, McCarthy earned 15,160 votes to Werner’s 11,154. Although McCarthy’s campaign tactics and spending practices were investigated, he was cleared of wrong-doing.