Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday in town will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:41 and sunset 8:20, for 14h 39m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1953, an armistice ends the fighting in the Korean War:

Tokyo, Monday, July 27–Communist and United Nations delegates in Panmunjom signed an armistice at 10:01 A.M. today [9:01 P.M., Sunday, Eastern daylight time]. Under the truce terms, hostilities in the three-year-old Korean war are to cease at 10 o’clock tonight [9 A.M., Monday, Eastern daylight time].

[President Syngman Rhee of South Korea promised in a statement at Seoul Monday to observe the armistice “for a limited time” while a political conference tried to unify Korea by peaceful means, The United Press said.]

The historic document was signed in a roadside hall the Communists built specially for the occasion. The ceremony, attended by representatives of sixteen members of the United Nations, took precisely eleven minutes. Then the respective delegations walked from the meeting place without a word or handshake between them.

The matter-of-fact procedure underlined what spokesmen of both sides emphasized: That though the shooting would cease within twelve hours after the signing, only an uneasy armed truce and political difficulties, perhaps even greater than those of the armistice negotiations, were ahead.

On this day in 1894, a fire strikes Phillips, Wisconsin:

1894 – Forest Fire Destroys Phillips
On the afternoon of this day, a forest fire swept over the Price Co. town of Phillips from the west, destroying nearly all the buildings and forcing 2,000 people to flee for their lives. When the sun came up the next morning, 13 people had been killed, the entire downtown was in ashes, and exhausted survivors were wandering through the ruins in a daze. The fire ultimately consumed more than 100,000 acres in Price County. Much of the town was rebuilt within a year.

Puzzability has a new series for the week, entitled Showstoppers.  Here’s Monday’s game:

This Week’s Game — July 27-31

Showstoppers

It’s curtains for us this week. For each day, we started with the title of a Broadway musical’s Act I closing number and replaced all the letters in each word—except the last letter—with asterisks. The name of the musical is presented the same way in parentheses.

Example:

******G ******Y (*****D)

Answer:

“Defying Gravity” (Wicked)

What to Submit:

Submit the song title and the musical’s title (as “Defying Gravity (Wicked)” in the example) for your answer.

Monday, July 27

**********’S *****G *P ****S (****Y)

Good morning, Whitewater.

Sunday in town will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:40 and sunset 8:21, for 14h 41m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Friday’s FW poll asked whether readers thought that there might be a lion walking around Milwaukee, as some Milwaukeeans suspect they’ve a big cat prowling their neighborhoods. A plurality of respondents (45.16%) thought that there might be a lion, with lesser but roughly equal proportions of responders thinking that it might be a big dog, or nothing at all. (The smaller number thought that it might be a cougar, but not a lion-sized lion.)

On this day in 1931, the Midwest is beset with grasshoppers:

…a swarm of grasshoppers descends on crops throughout the American heartland, devastating millions of acres. Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota, already in the midst of a bad drought, suffered tremendously from this disaster.

Since the very beginning of agriculture, people have struggled to prevent insects from eating their crops. Locusts and grasshoppers, insect cousins, are among the most feared pests. A plague of these insects can occur when conditions cause their populations to suddenly explode. Usually this happens under drought or very dry conditions, since their egg pods are vulnerable to fungus in wet soil. When the soil is very dry, swarms can develop.

Professor Jeff Lockwood of Wyoming describes being in a swarm as follows, They explode from beneath your feet. There’s sort of a rolling wave that forms out it front of you. They hit up against your body and cling against your clothes. It’s almost like being immersed in a gigantic living being. Locusts and grasshoppers undergo a significant transformation when they become part of a swarm. Their wings and jaws grow, enabling them to travel greater distances and increasing their appetite.

The July 1931 swarm was said to be so thick that it blocked out the sun and one could shovel the grasshoppers with a scoop. Cornstalks were eaten to the ground and fields left completely bare. Since the early 1930s, swarms have not been seen in the United States. However, North Africa and parts of the Middle East continue to experience problems with insect swarms, which sometimes includes as many as 1 billion bugs.

Good morning, Whitewater.

Saturday in the Whippet City will be warm, with partly cloudy skies and a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:39 and sunset 8:22, for 14h 43m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.4% of ts visible disk illuminated.

Buddy the Chihuahua went blind, but (thanks to his owner’s ingenuity) the canine can walk around the house comfortably without bumping into furniture:

During the Spanish-American War, U.S. forces launch their invasion of Puerto Rico, the 108-mile-long, 40-mile-wide island that was one of Spain’s two principal possessions in the Caribbean. With little resistance and only seven deaths, U.S. troops under General Nelson A. Miles were able to secure the island by mid-August. After the signing of an armistice with Spain, American troops raised the U.S. flag over the island, formalizing U.S. authority over its one million inhabitants. In December, the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Spanish-American War and officially approving the cession of Puerto Rico to the United States.

On this day in 1999, the Brewers get their first Hall of Famer:

1999 – First Brewer Inducted into Hall of Fame

On this date Robin Yount became the first player inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in a Brewer’s jersey. Yount entered the major leagues at the age of 18 and spent his entire career with the Milwaukee Brewers as number 19 at short stop and center field. His awards are numerous, including being selected as an all-star three times as well as American league MVP twice. [Source: Milwaukee Brewers]

Good morning, Whitewater.

Our Friday will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:38 and sunset 8:23, for 14h 45m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 53.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

American archeologist Hiram Bingham gets his first look at Machu Picchu, an ancient Inca settlement in Peru that is now one of the world’s top tourist destinations.

Tucked away in the rocky countryside northwest of Cuzco, Machu Picchu is believed to have been a summer retreat for Inca leaders, whose civilization was virtually wiped out by Spanish invaders in the 16th century. For hundreds of years afterwards, its existence was a secret known only to the peasants living in the region. That all changed in the summer of 1911, when Bingham arrived with a small team of explorers to search for the famous “lost” cities of the Incas.

Traveling on foot and by mule, Bingham and his team made their way from Cuzco into the Urubamba Valley, where a local farmer told them of some ruins located at the top of a nearby mountain. The farmer called the mountain Machu Picchu, which meant “Old Peak” in the native Quechua language. The next day–July 24–after a tough climb to the mountain’s ridge in cold and drizzly weather, Bingham met a small group of peasants who showed him the rest of the way. Led by an 11-year-old boy, Bingham got his first glimpse of the intricate network of stone terraces marking the entrance to Machu Picchu.

The excited Bingham spread the word about his discovery in a best-selling book, sending hordes of eager tourists flocking to Peru to follow in his footsteps up the Inca trail. The site itself stretches an impressive five miles, with over 3,000 stone steps linking its many different levels. Today, more than 300,000 people tramp through Machu Picchu every year, braving crowds and landslides to see the sun set over the towering stone monuments of the “Sacred City” and marvel at the mysterious splendor of one of the world’s most famous man-made wonders.

A Google a Day asks a question about literature:

Which mourning character does the second narrator visit in Europe at the end of Conrad’s 1902 novella?

Good morning, Whitewater.

Thursday will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:37 and sunset 8:24, for 14h 46m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 42.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Downtown Whitewater, Inc.’s board meets this morning at 8 AM.

On this day in 1914, delivery of an ultimatum is a prelude to war:

At six o’clock in the evening on July 23, 1914, nearly one month after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a young Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Baron Giesl von Gieslingen, ambassador of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Serbia, delivers an ultimatum to the Serbian foreign ministry.

Acting with the full support of its allies in Berlin, Austria-Hungary had determined in the aftermath of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination to pursue a hard-line policy towards Serbia. Their plan, developed in coordination with the German foreign office, was to force a military conflict that would, Vienna hoped, end quickly and decisively with a crushing Austrian victory before the rest of Europe—namely, Serbia’s powerful ally, Russia—had time to react. As the German ambassador to Vienna reported to his government on July 14, ‘the [note] to Serbia is being composed so that the possibility of its being accepted is practically excluded.’

In New York, residents look back on life in the Big Apple in 1981, and they don’t like what they remember seeing:

A Google a Day ask a question from literature:

What was the drug that Hermes gave Odysseus to help resist the magic of the witch-goddess?

Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:36 and sunset 8:25, for 14h 48m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 33.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets this afternoon at 5 PM.

On this day in 1931, an aviator first completes a solo flight around the world:

Wiley Hardeman Post (November 22, 1898 – August 15, 1935) was a famed American aviator during the period known as the Golden Age of Aviation, the first pilot to fly solo around the world. Also known for his work in high-altitude flying, Post helped develop one of the first pressure suits and discovered the jet stream….

Post wanted to open his own aeronautical school, but could not raise enough financial support because of doubts many had about his rural background and limited formal education. Motivated by his detractors, Post decided to attempt a solo flight around the world and to break his previous speed record. Over the next year, Post improved his aircraft by installing an autopilot device and a radio direction finder that were in their final stages of development by the Sperry Gyroscope Company and the United States Army. In 1933, he repeated his flight around the world, this time using the auto-pilot and compass in place of his navigator and becoming the first to accomplish the feat alone. He departed from Floyd Bennett Field and continued on to Berlin where repairs were attempted to his autopilot, stopped at Königsberg to replace some forgotten maps, Moscow for more repairs to his autopilot, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk for final repairs to the autopilot, Rukhlovo, Khabarovsk, Flat where his propeller had to be replaced, Fairbanks, Edmonton, and back to Floyd Bennett Field. Fifty thousand people greeted him on his return on July 22 after 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes^[2][3]

A Google a Day asks a question about animation:

What comedians were the inspiration for the names of the two hungry cats in the short that marked Tweety Bird’s first appearance?

Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday in town will be sunny, with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:35 and sunset 8:26, for 14h 50m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 25.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

The inaugural Whitewater City Market, situated alongside the Cravath lakefront arch, takes places this afternoon from 3-7 PM. They’ll have nineteen vendors under pleasant skies, offering both produce, goods, and food.

Common Council meets tonight, at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1861, Union and Confederate soldiers fight the first large battle of the war:

The First Battle of Bull Run, also known as First Manassas (the name used by Confederate forces), was fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia, near the city of Manassas, not far from the city of Washington, D.C. It was the first major battle of the American Civil War. The Union’s forces were slow in positioning themselves, allowing Confederate reinforcements time to arrive by rail. Each side had about 18,000 poorly trained and poorly led troops in their first battle. It was a Confederate victory followed by a disorganized retreat of the Union forces….

Confederate reinforcements under Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Johnston arrived from the Shenandoah Valley by railroad and the course of the battle quickly changed. A brigade of Virginians under the relatively unknown brigadier general from the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas J. Jackson, stood their ground and Jackson received his famous nickname, “Stonewall Jackson”. The Confederates launched a strong counterattack, and as the Union troops began withdrawing under fire, many panicked and the retreat turned into a rout. McDowell’s men frantically ran without order in the direction of Washington, D.C. Both armies were sobered by the fierce fighting and many casualties, and realized the war was going to be much longer and bloodier than either had anticipated.

A Google a Day asks a geography question:

The castle that sits on top of the volcanic mound, Beblowe Craig, was founded by what 16th century king?