Celebratory Ball Dropping
That’s right. You are not reading the title incorrectly. I’m questioning the big dropping ball in New York City.
Why in the world do we celebrate the New Year by New York’s ball dropping? Why do we go about our whole year and then watch a ball slowly slide down a pole and light up?
Aside from the fact that no one sits there and watches when this sort of thing happens to little boys, what’s the big deal with this celebration? Frankly, I’m not going to look it up. I’m sure there’s some special meaning in that ball, but I don’t really care.
I’m tired of watching a ball drop for New Year’s Eve. Who cares if it’s only using as much energy as a refrigerator? It cost $5 million! It could use a combination of solar and wind power and glow like the moon on a good day, who cares?
How many people drinking in Times Square really want to hear the Jonas Brothers? Who are the Jonas Brothers? I don’t know nor do I actually care, suffice to say that they aren’t very good. But hey, who am I to judge right? Just an average guy who doesn’t even understand the ball dropping.
Leaving out the prepubescent humor that I find in America’s ball dropping, I’m also pissed that we don’t get awesome shows like lots of other places do. What do we get, a big $5 million ball that gently sets down for a landing on in NY and confetti is sprayed all over the city? As if NYC wasn’t dirty enough…
They showed afterwards the celebrations that went on before ours around the world and I believe that England and Australia are kicking our butts to the max. Did you see the fireworks display from Australia? It was so awesome! Russia… was a different story. They had fireworks, which are better than confetti and a ball, but it was sad in comparison to the other displays.
Why can’t we do a ridiculous fireworks display to put every country to shame? Disney shoots off some of the most impressive shows every single night. Contract them out to do it! Combine forces with all the pyrotechnics that we have in Hollywood and Disney and put on a show that will make other countries’ balls drop.
The other thing is that all the other countries go first. So, if we see what they’re doing a few hours before… we have time to ramp it up! Let’s go America! For a country that gets the profile of being trigger happy with our bombs, we are seriously lacking in the explosions on New Year’s Eve.
Fireworks too expensive? Then save up your building demolitions for that day! Come on! You can’t tell me that they aren’t charging people to be out in Times Square that night! I won’t believe it! They’re at least making profit off of the stupid balloons and hats and fingers and beer and champagne!
Either way, are we really going to let Australia, England and Russia show us up? Since when!?
To recap: I think America is well past puberty and such in it’s aging and I think it’s about time that Uncle Sam let us come over to his house to blow some crap up. Don’t you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_ball
Time ball
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The timeball at Greenwich is shown in the top right of picture
The Port Lyttelton, New Zealand, timeball started signaling Greenwich mean time to ships in the harbor beginning in 1876.[1]
A time ball is a large painted wooden or metal ball that drops at a predetermined time, principally to enable sailors to check their marine chronometers. Accurate timekeeping is one way of enabling mariners to determine their longitude at sea.
Time ball stations set their clocks according to transit observations of the positions of the sun and stars. Originally they either had to be stationed at the observatory itself, or had to keep a very accurate clock at the station which was set manually to observatory time. Through the use of the electric telegraph (from around 1850), time balls could be located at a distance from their source of Mean Time and operated remotely.
Time balls are usually dropped at 1pm (although in the USA they were dropped at noon). They were raised half way about 5 minutes earlier to alert the ships, then with 2–3 minutes to go they were raised the whole way. The time was recorded when the ball began descending, not when it reached the bottom.[1] The time ball was not usually dropped at noon as the observatories would be too busy taking readings.
The first time ball was erected at Portsmouth in 1829 by its inventor Robert Wauchope, a Captain in the Royal Navy. Others followed in the major ports of the UK (including Liverpool) and around the maritime world. One was installed in 1833 at the Greenwich Observatory by Astronomer Royal John Pond, and has dropped at 1pm every day since then.
With the commencement of radio time signals (in Britain from 1924), time-balls gradually became obsolete and many were demolished in the 1920s.[2]
Wow. That was alot of information. Uh, thanks for that, Anonymous information donor…
It still doesn’t explain why we do it now though. Tradition for the sailors in NYC?
Hmm… I also will ask you to check this out before consulting Wikipedia again: http://peoplewhodeserveit.com/2009/01/06/73-inaccurate-wikipedia-contributor/