That’s right, it’s only two days until January twoth, or New Year’s Day (observed).
While we’re on the subject, can someone explain to me why people get excited about the ball dropping in Times Square? I can think of few things in our society that are so lame and yet still get so much press. It’s a electrified sphere. It drops a few feet, slowly, in a fashion that completely fails to create suspense. It’s a ball. It drops. In Prague at midnight you’d be dodging fireworks.
Meanwhile, to those who still follow that old-fashioned calendar, enjoy New Year’s Eve. I’ve got a good feeling about this next year. Something big is going to happen.
I suspect this is a manifestation of the “time balls” used in the 19th century to mark noon so that all ships in harbor could adjust their clocks – essential for successful determination of longitude. We have visited two of these – one in Cape Town, and one in Botany Bay. A canon would be fired a minute before noon, to attract attention to the tower with the time ball. The ball would be raised, and then dropped precisely at noon. Most time ball towers were associated with observatories that measured the transit time of the sun to keep their own clocks set.
I never had any desire to go to Time Square to watch the ball drop. I hadn’t realized the history of ‘time balls’ and find that pretty interesting.
That said, Jerry, I hope your New Year is excellent.
Wow, that is cool history. I had never heard about time balls before.
The better half went to times square once; before she knew me. She and friend didn’t even get close. The crowd was terrible, the cops mean, and police horses scary.
BUt heyy! I watched endless Rose Parade yesterday, before at the bitter end they showed 2.5 microseconds of the New mexico float. Actually, it was badass, and it won the governor’s trophy for most creative. I wish HGTV had lingered on it more, tho I am sure I could scare up some pics on the web. (or even better, Keith could scare them up as he seems particularly good at web searches).
I think there has to be something deep and philosophical to say about the amount of work, the amount of materials and hard to find vegetable matter that go into building these floats, and then they appear to the masses (non-attending) for less than 30, nay 10, seconds.
At least the lentils for the aliens were relatively easy to come by.
And actually, the trophy won the Grand Marshall’s prize for “creativity and vision.” Except that the skeleton staff working at the Journal over the holiday spelled it “martial.” Yeah, the Grand Marshall, Emeril Lagasse, does say “BAM” a lot — but I don’t think of him as being particularly military.
Meanwhile, on the time ball issue, I’d expect what was fired was a piece of artillery rather than a collection of accepted religious orthodoxy.
But maybe the canon really was a church lawyer who moonlighted as a circus stuntman? Or maybe this was during a time of violent anti-ecclesiastical protests and a church legist was set aflame each day at noon?