Wednesday, January 1, 2014

The Times Square New Year's Eve ball should be much, much bigger

While watching Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve '14 with Ryan Seacrest (How about that for a title?  It makes me think of "Ladies and gentleman, the Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson... with Jay Leno") last night, I was a little surprised when I heard Seacrest say in an excited voice "The ball measures 12 feet in diameter!"

Smaller than a '97 Rav4...
Twelve feet?  That's it?  That doesn't sound impressive at all.  Come on, this is New Year's Eve in Times Square, the biggest party in the world!  I wonder if half the people there can even see it?  Twelve feet is smaller than my car, and I have a tiny car.  This thing should be huge!  I'd say at least 50 feet, bare minimum.  The jumbo-tron in Cowboy Stadium is 71 feet high and 159 feet wide, something like that is probably a good goal.  And the crazy part is that throughout most of its history the ball was only 5 or 6 feet across, it doubled in size in 2009.

I also think it's funny that if you're watching the countdown on TV, because of the Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake Super Bowl halftime show fiasco ten years ago, midnight actually comes a little ahead of when you see it happen.  The clock on my cable box said it was 12:00 am about ten seconds before Ryan Seacrest did.

4 comments:

  1. AOL is currently running a piece on some predictions Isaac Asimov had made back in '64 about life in 2014.
    I don't know if Asimov was a sports fan. but I can't imagine even his clairvoyance would have foreseen a situation where an athlete's trade value would be measured in the gain an organization could derive from cutting the unmotivated __________ (I'll let you choose your own noun of derision!).


    Happy New Year, Mark.

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  2. Miami, the Jets, Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Oakland, Washington, Arizona, and Detroit are the teams that didn't make 12 wins in one season in that span. The only teams to average over 10 wins were the Pats, the Colts, the Packers, and Pittsburgh.

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  3. awesome man, thanks!

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  4. So true! It's very frustrating how NBA trades have less and less to do with the skills of the actual players involved...

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