With just days to go before the world rings in a new year — and new decade — Tom Brennan, master artisan with Fiskars, a division of Waterford, is hard at work to make sure the famed crystal ball in Times Square is ready to dazzle revelers at the stroke of midnight on January 1.
"This is the only moment in time that everybody pauses for just a moment," Brennan told Cheddar on Friday while standing next to the pièce de résistance. "We don't do this other times of the year."
A team of engineers is installing 192 new Waterford crystal triangles on the ball that features this year's unique design, which Waterford is calling "Gift of Goodwill," the latest in its "Greatest Gifts" series.
The new crystals will make up just a fraction of the 2,688 triangles on the ball, which measures 12 feet across and weighs nearly six tons.
The New Year's tradition has been going on in Times Square, the crossroads of the world, since 1904, and the first ball drop happened in 1907.
Brennan stresses that it's not just him, or the team on the ground in New York that pulls off this global feat. "It is a global togetherness," he said. Waterford has craftsmen working on the project in its factories in Ireland, plus the engineers and marketers.
"It's amazing to think that this small city in the southeast of Ireland with just 47,000 people are here on top of the world. We're going to have 1.2 billion people watching us in just a few days' time, so no pressure."
A movie about the life of the late Betty White will premiere on what would have been her 100th birthday, January 17. The film will celebrate highlights from the trailblazer’s nearly eight-decade-long career.
Zogblog.com founder Zack O'Malley Greenburg joins Cheddar News to discuss his new Rolling Stone article, 'Nine of the 10 Highest-Paid Musicians of 2021 Were Men.'
Makena Kelly, politics reporter at The Verge, joins Cheddar News to discuss what's next for net neutrality as Biden's other nominee for the FCC, Gigi Sohn, awaits votes from the committee and Senate.
Food Network star Alex Guarnaschelli joined Cheddar's Baker Machado to dish on her new cooking competition show "Alex vs. America." The Iron Chef will be taking on three challengers at a time in a contest she hopes brings a unique look at the genre. "I think the reality of the show, the truth of those competitions, the grittiness, the waiting, the choices," said Guarnaschelli, listing what she hopes comes across from her show.
Jewell Jackson McCabe, chair of the Keep Love Alive Campaign and founder of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, and Marvin Owens, chief engagement officer of Impact Shares and former senior director of Economic Development at the NAACP, join Cheddar News to reflect on racial issues still prevalent in America.
Grocery stores are restricting hours and services due to omicron-related labor and supply chain issues. This also comes at a time of labor unrest for supermarket giant Kroger as more than 8,000 workers at its King Soopers chain in Colorado have gone on strike.
Sky Harbour, a company developing private aviation infrastructure, is gearing up to land on Wall Street. The company announced plans to go public through a SPAC deal with Yellowstone Acquisition Company, valuing the combined venture at $777 million. The company will trade on the New York Stock Exchange as $SKYH.
On this episode of ChedHER: Model and Fashion Designer Catie Li breaks down what work needs to be done to improve representation in the beauty industry; Jessie Woolley-Wilson, President and CEO of DreamBox Learning, explains how technology is transforming the way the world learns, and her career journey as a leading woman of color in the tech industry.
Model and Fashion Designer Catie Li joins ChedHER to discuss her unique journey into the modeling world, designing her very own Amazon The Drop collection, and what work needs to be done to improve representation in the beauty industry.
Jessie Woolley-Wilson, President and CEO of DreamBox Learning, joins ChedHER to discuss how technology is transforming the way the world learns, and her career journey as a leading woman of color in the tech industry.
