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...giant globe that would descend from a pole in a public space to mark the exact hour. Ochs conceived of an ornate "time ball" that would descend just before midnight to mark the exact end of the year. The first ball to drop - an illuminated 400-pound iron-and-wood orb - was lowered from a flagpole. Tradition took root and the ball has heralded a new beginning almost every year since - in 1942 and 1943, during World War II, the ball was temporarily put out of commission by a war-time "dimout." Instead crowds gathered in the square and observed...
...Rhythmic, deep booms came from the north like the sound of thunderous footsteps. Again the protesters were reclaiming religious practices. This time they had improvised the battle drums associated with the Ashura festival with metal trash cans, which they wheeled down the street and pounded with heavy planks of wood and lumps of concrete...
...clue to Boxing Day's origins can be found in the song "Good King Wenceslas." According to the Christmas carol, Wenceslas, who was Duke of Bohemia in the early 10th century, was surveying his land on St. Stephen's Day - Dec. 26 - when he saw a poor man gathering wood in the middle of a snowstorm. Moved, the King gathered up surplus food and wine and carried them through the blizzard to the peasant's door. The alms-giving tradition has always been closely associated with the Christmas season - hence the canned-food drives and Salvation Army Santas that pepper...
...Mount Rainier in Washington. Arnold evoked images of "saucers skipping on water" to describe how they flew through the air, but a local newspaper misquoted him, and the term flying saucer was born. That same year, a rancher stumbled upon a 200-yard-long swathe of rubber strips, tinfoil, wood sticks and Scotch tape in Roswell, N.M., and decided to haul the wreckage to a nearby Army airfield, where an excited officer issued a press release claiming a "flying disk" had been recovered. It took less than four hours for a general in Forth Worth, Texas, to step...
...punk took back music, steampunk reclaims technology for the masses. It substitutes metal gears for silicon, pneumatic tubes for 3G and wi-fi. It maximizes what was miniaturized and makes visible what was hidden. Where the iPhone is all stainless steel and high-gloss plastic, steampunk is brass and wood and leather. Steampunk isn't mass-produced; it's bespoke and unique, and if you don't like it, you can tinker with it till...