Today is Monday, January the 2nd, 2023.

Happy New Year and welcome to the Daily Article podcast.

I'm Chris Elkins with the Denison Forum,

narrating today's article written by Dr. Jim Denison.

Lebanon, Pennsylvania dropped a giant package of bologna to mark the New Year.

Talapusa, Georgia dropped a possum.

Boise, Idaho, unsurprisingly, dropped a giant potato.

And as everyone knows, New York City stage its iconic ball drop once again as around a million people packed the Times Square area and millions more

watched on television. When you think about it, watching a giant ball descend to bring in the new year

is a rather strange custom. Who thought of this? Why do we still do it? Before the 20th century,

timekeeping was much less precise.

Sailors and ship captains needed to know the exact time so they could chart their navigational courses.

So, Robert Washup, a captain in the British Navy, created the Time Ball in 1829. Raised balls visible to ships along the British coastline

were manually dropped at the same time each day, allowing ships to set their chronometers

to the accurate time. The devices fell out of fashion by the 1880s due to the availability of

self-winding clocks, But the New York Times,

looking for a way to celebrate the new year in 1907 after fireworks had been banned, decided a

lighted midnight ball drop was a good way to honor the occasion. Now comes the ironic part.

So many drunken revelers woke up yesterday with

hangovers that a term has been coined for them, anxiety. By contrast, Captain Waship, the inventor

of the event they were celebrating, titled his autobiography, A Short Narrative of God's Merciful Dealings.

Anxiety or God's Merciful Dealings?

...