About 1 million people and an estimated 100 million TV viewers watched the ball drop on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. It's a tradition that began more than 100 years ago with the dropping of a ball made from iron and wood and covered with about 100 light bulbs--a far cry from this year's massive, crystal-coated ball. The 2009 ball weighs 11,875 pounds, double the size of previous balls. It includes 2,668 Waterford crystals, 32,256 Philip Luxeon Rebel LEDs and has a palette of more than 16 million colors and billions of patterns available. http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/01/01/newyear.newyork/
The Ball has been lowered every year since 1907, with the exceptions of 1942 and 1943, when the ceremony was suspended due to the wartime "dimout" of lights in New York City. See complete history at: http://www.timessquarenyc.org/nye/nye_ball.html

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2008
Bailout, defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition as "a rescue from financial distress," received the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online over the shortest period of time. As evident from the 2008 Word of the Year contenders list below, the presidential campaign and financial issues factored heavily in the concerns of our online visitors throughout the year. Traffic to Merriam-Webster Online now exceeds 125 million individual page views per month. This corresponds to approximately ten lookup requests in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary or Thesaurus per second. During peak hours, this may increase to more than 100 requests per second.
Merriam-Webster's #1 Word of the Year for 2008:
1. bailout (noun)
a rescue from financial distress
Click on each of the other words in the Top Ten List for their definitions in Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary:
vet
socialism
maverick
bipartisan
trepidation
precipice
rogue
misogyny
turmoil
http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/08words.htm

Lake Superior State University "maverick" word-watchers, fresh from the holiday "staycation" but without an economic "bailout" even after a "desperate search," have issued their 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current.php
Two words from the list that have become diluted are maverick ("You know it's time to banish this word when even the Maverick family, who descended from the rancher who inspired the term, says it's being mis-used.") and icon ("Everyone and everything cannot be 'iconic.' Can't we switch to 'legendary' or 'famous for'? In our entertainment-driven culture, it seems everyone in show business is 'iconic' for some reason or another.")

It is commonplace for One L’s who’ve ranked highly in their class to consider transferring to a more prestigious law school after their first year. Prestige, experience, and career opportunities all play a role in the decision. But what if, based on your first-year GPA, you’d already been guaranteed a spot at, say, Northwestern.
Each year, 15 to 25 out of the 5,000 applicants that Northwestern Law School turns down receive so-called deferred conditional acceptances—meaning that, if you achieve a certain GPA at your school of choice, there’ll be a spot waiting for you. The December issue of the ABA Journal considers the issue.
Deans of lower-tier law schools argue that such recruiting is predatory, and helps top schools boost revenues while keeping up their LSAT and GPA averages, both of which are criteria in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings. We’ve reported similar practices—such as admitting students with sub-par LSATs and GPAs into the part-time program only—here and here. Northwestern Dean David Van Zandt told the ABA Journal that he understands the poaching charge, and that it’s probably true. Northwestern added 43 transfers to its 238-student first-year class.
WSJ Law Blog December 29, 2008

California has become the largest U.S. state to ban text messaging while driving--a growing practice in cities like Los Angeles where gridlock turns four wheels into a virtual second office. The ban on texting while driving, backed by fines starting at $20 per offense, comes into force on January 1. It closes a loophole in a law requiring hands-free only talking on cellphones while driving that took effect in July but which failed to include text messaging. Seven other U.S. states have bans on text-messaging while driving. A recent survey by the web site Findlaw.com found that 75 percent of U.S. drivers aged 18-34 said they had sent a text message, instant message or email while driving. http://uk.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUKTRE48O8NB20080925

Scientists report finding a thin layer of microscopic diamonds a couple of feet beneath the surface of North America. The nanodiamonds, so small that they are barely visible in an electron microscope, are thought to be remnants of a comet that hit North America 13,000 years ago--some 65 million years after the much larger collision that wiped out the dinosaurs. Heat from the explosions and fires melted substantial portions of the Laurentide glacier in Canada, sending waves of water down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico. That caused changes in Atlantic Ocean currents, which started a 1,300-year ice age known as the Younger Dryas. Battered by fire and ice, as many as 35 species of mammals including American camels, mammoths, mastodons, the short-faced bear, the giant beaver, the dire wolf and the American lion either immediately vanished or were so depleted in number that humans hunted them to extinction.
There are at least five forms of diamonds, including some that are formed only by impacts, and found only at the bottom of the black mat--not in the soil either below or above it. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/02/MNFC152KLC.DTL

January 1 is the birthday of Betsy Ross, born on this day in 1752, either in Philadelphia or on her family's property in New Jersey. She was one of 17 children. She was a young widow working at a successful upholstery business in Philadelphia when, according to legend, she was visited by George Washington in 1776. He had sketched out a flag with 13 six-pointed stars and 13 red and white stripes. Betsy Ross replaced the six-pointed stars with five-pointed stars, and sewed the first American flag.
On January 1, 1892 the first Ellis Island Immigration Station officially opened. The first person admitted to Ellis Island was a 15-year-old Irish girl named Annie Moore. Seven hundred immigrants passed through Ellis Island on its first day, and by the end of the year, almost 450,000 people had been processed there.
January 2 is the birthday of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, (books by this author) born in Petrovichi, Russia (1920). He published his first story when he was 18, and published 30 more stories in the next three years. At age 21, he wrote his most famous story after a conversation with his friend and editor John Campbell. Campbell had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, which includes the passage, "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!" Asimov went home and wrote the story "Nightfall" (1941), about a planet with six suns that has a sunset once every 2,049 years. The Writer’s Almanac