Dropping Balls

Once again, we will miss the New Year’s Eve festivities in Times Square — there’s absolutely nothing — nothing! — appealing about waiting seven hours in the cold without access to even a porta-potty much less alcohol! In lieu of that unfulfilled experience, there’s this helpful Times op-ed about the history of balls dropping. Fascinating stuff:

New York City’s annual ball drop is probably the greatest single moment of public timekeeping in the world. Yet the Times Square ball is not the world’s most important time ball – nor was it the first. It wasn’t even the first time ball in New York. Oh, and it isn’t even dropped right.

A little history first. Public time-telling began in church. In 1335, the bells of the church of San Gottardo (then Beata Vergine) began tolling the hours in Milan, ringing once at 1 a.m. and culminating in 24 chimes at midnight. It was the first time church bells had been used to announce time regularly. The idea spread rapidly through Europe, and for the first time in history, large groups of people knew the time. The Milan clock could be off by as much as 1,000 seconds a day, but that wasn’t really a problem, because if nobody knew exactly what time it was, how could anyone really be late?

Measurement of time improved as the centuries passed, but even into the early 18th century most people had no need for precise time. (The minute hand shows up on watches, for example, around 1700). The bells tolled hourly and that was plenty.

Accuracy improved vastly during the industrial revolution and was honed at sea: ship captains needed extremely precise clocks to coordinate their celestial readings with the time those readings would occur at a known point – usually Greenwich, England (the city that later lent its name to Greenwich Mean Time, the world’s standard time). John Harrison, the famous clockmaker, developed a chronometer accurate and portable enough to do the job in 1761, and ultimately changed the world.

But once clocks were capable of precision time-telling, the question was, what to set them against? In the early 19th century, enter the time ball. Robert Wauchope, a Royal Navy captain, had an idea: a large signal in a harbor would, at a specific moment, indicate the exact time – sailors could view it through a telescope and set their chronometers precisely.

In 1829 the Admiralty gave it a shot, setting up the world’s first time ball in the harbor at Portsmouth, England. It worked so well that in 1833 they set one up at the Royal Observatory in Flamsteed House, on a Greenwich hilltop. The ball, which was visible to ships at anchor, would be dropped every day at 1 p.m. At 12:55 p.m., the red, wood-and-leather ball was raised halfway up a 15-foot mast atop the building; at 12:58 it went to the top; and on the hour the ball began to drop, the start of its downward motion signaling exactly 1 p.m.

The ball idea caught on. The United States Naval Observatory began dropping a noon time ball in Foggy Bottom in 1845 and kept it up until 1885, when the ball drop moved to the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) next to the White House, where it kept dropping until 1936. Starting in 1877, the Navy telegraphed a daily signal to the Western Union Building in New York, atop which an automatic time ball then dropped. (Twelve minutes early, to account for the difference in longitude; we didn’t get time zones until the telegraph and railroads made them necessary, in the 1880s.)

Which brings us to the famous Times Square ball:

And as for New York, in December of 1904, this newspaper celebrated the move to its new Times Square building with a New Year’s Eve party, which thereafter grew year by year. When, in 1907, a ban on fireworks prompted The Times to find a new celebration finale, a time ball was brought in, and the tradition began.

The Times Square ball isn’t quite a true time ball. The eye can easily pick up motion, so precise time balls mark time by starting to move, not by stopping. The Times Square ball marks time with the end of its motion – hard to perceive and inexact, but presumably more fun for counting backward.

Not Funny

As Staten Island boosters, we’re not amused, either. “Snapple raises stink with S.I. ‘joke'”:

Snapple, the unofficial drink of New York City, may need a lesson in good humor – not to mention good taste.
On its Web site, company officials had the gall to poke fun at Staten Island – then hurriedly pulled the punch line when contacted by the Daily News.

In explaining how to play Snapple’s “Real Facts Game,” a fill-in-the-blank question asked, “The most recognized smell in the world is —–?”

Then came the company’s insulting answer: “No, it’s not Staten Island. It’s coffee.”

Prominent Staten Islanders, among them City Councilman James Oddo, are outraged at the perfidy, comparing the company to our most perfidious allies:

“This from a company allegedly teaming with New York to market the city,” said an incredulous Oddo. “That is one hell of a partner we have. Normally one has to be dealing with France to be treated so badly by a ‘friend.'”

Bonus Point: Snopes’ Snapple Dragoon (addresses those false rumors about Snapple supporting far-right wing causes).

Jerry Orbach

Sad news about Law & Order star Jerry Orbach, who has passed away at the age of 69.

As Detective Lennie Briscoe, his glib gruffness was a treat — those glorious one-liners that preceded the opening credits each week never failed to make us smile.

See also: New York Times Jerry Orbach obituary

Kennedy Fried Chicken

The pseudo-chain Kennedy Fried Chicken has always piqued my interest. Happily, Satan’s Laundromat has put together a photo tour of Kennedy Fried Chicken establishments throughout the Northeast. Huzzah!

Bonus Points: reprint of “Chicken Little” (New York Times, August 15, 2004).

The Christmas Bonus

Another old-news kind of story, but helpful nonetheless in sketching out just who the fuck these people are. “That Line at the Ferrari Dealer? It’s Bonus Season on Wall Street”:

Samantha Kleier Forbes, a 30-year-old real estate broker, was getting ready to leave for a vacation to Florida with her mother and sister when she got an urgent call. It was a client who had spent the summer scouring the Upper East Side of Manhattan for an apartment priced between $4 million and $5 million.

The client insisted on seeing more apartments that day, but now she wanted to look in the $6 million range. Her husband, a banker at Goldman Sachs in his late 30’s, had just received his year-end bonus.

“Normally this time of year is dead,” said Ms. Forbes, a vice president at Gumley Haft Kleier, a residential real estate brokerage. But this winter there is unusual buying interest that she attributes to rich Wall Street bonuses. She is cutting her end-of-the-year vacation short, so she can prepare for an onslaught of clients eager to see apartments.

Recipients of such year-end bonuses seem quick to downplay their significance, but who are they really kidding?

This year’s bonuses do not quite reach the heights touched by star bankers and traders in the heyday of the late 1990’s technology bubble. But they are rich enough to persuade many of Wall Street’s elite to rediscover conspicuous consumption.

One senior trader is building a sports complex for triathlon training at his house in upstate New York. It will include a swim-in-place lap pool, a climbing wall and a fitness center. Another bought an Aston Martin. For some, upgrading real estate is the first order of business.

But many Wall Street professionals are urging caution, given that the bonus typically constitutes the majority of their compensation. More than a dozen bankers, all of whom would talk about their spending only on the condition of anonymity, said they were all too aware that the good times could end as quickly as they did after 2000, when a $2.5 million income could turn to $800,000 overnight.

“Given the last two to three years when people figured out that this business is pretty volatile, they are going to try and bank a lot of their bonuses,” said one managing director at a firm where bonuses have been announced. “They’ve seen too many people laid off and they realize they can’t just spend all their money.”

It should be noted that this same banker just bought a $150,000 Aston Martin to park in his garage in Greenwich, Conn.

It’s not all about multi-million-dollar apartments and cars. There are boobies, too:

“Certainly the Wall Street crowd is very special to us,” said Lonnie Hanover, a representative for Scores, a high-end strip club in Manhattan. “December is an amazing month for our business, but it’s everything, it’s Christmas bonuses, Christmas spirit. They have their official parties and then the unofficial party here.”

Bonus Points: “Got Bonus Envy?” (New York Observer, December 25, 2000); “Wall Street’s Bonus Babies,” Jim Hightower (April 26, 2000); The Dils’ Trouser Press entry.