title: Eloquent: check if date is in between start and stop date
body: <p>I have an events table with 4 events all with different start and enddate.</p>
  
  <pre><code>mysql&gt; select id, event_name, event_startdate, event_closedate from events;
  +----+--------------+---------------------+---------------------------+
  | id | event_name   | event_startdate     | event_closedate           |
  +----+--------------+---------------------+---------------------------+
  |  1 | Event 1      | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 | 2016-06-30 00:00:00       |
  |  2 | Event 2      | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 | 2016-07-30 00:00:00       |
  |  3 | Event 3      | 2016-07-01 00:00:00 | 2016-08-30 00:00:00       |
  |  4 | Event 4      | 2016-09-01 00:00:00 | 2016-10-30 00:00:00       |
  +----+--------------+---------------------+---------------------------+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to return the current events. In MySQL, the below query works:</p>
  
  <pre><code>mysql&gt; select id, event_name, event_startdate, event_closedate from events where now() &gt;= event_startdate and now() &lt;= event_closedate;
  +----+--------------+---------------------+---------------------------+
  | id | event_name   | event_startdate     | event_closedate           |
  +----+--------------+---------------------+---------------------------+
  |  1 | Event 1      | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 | 2016-06-30 00:00:00       |
  |  2 | Event 2      | 2016-06-01 00:00:00 | 2016-07-30 00:00:00       |
  +----+--------------+---------------------+---------------------------+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now, I want to create the Eloquent equivalent. I have created the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$current_events = DB::table('events')-&gt;select('id','event_name', 'event_startdate', 'event_closedate')-&gt;where(DB::raw('now()'), '&gt;=', 'event_startdate')-&gt;where(DB::raw('now()'), '&lt;=', 'event_closedate')-&gt;get();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I do a 'dd' output in Laravel, I get:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"select `id`, `event_name`, `event_startdate`, `event_closedate` from `events` where now() &gt;= ? and now() &lt;= ?"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The above is pretty similar to the query in MySQL that returns the two current events, so I was expecting to see the two events in my view but nothing is being output so I suspect I'm doing something wrong</p>
  
  <p>The view is: </p>
  
  <pre><code>@foreach( $current_events as $event )
   &lt;tr&gt;
     &lt;td align="center" class="hidden-xs"&gt;{{ $event-&gt;id }}&lt;/td&gt;
     &lt;td&gt;{{ $event-&gt;event_name }}&lt;/td&gt;
     &lt;td&gt;{{ $event-&gt;event_startdate }}&lt;/td&gt;
     &lt;td&gt;{{ $event-&gt;event_closedate) }}&lt;/td&gt;
   &lt;/tr&gt;
  @endforeach
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any reason why this does not return the two current events?</p>