Great balls of time!

One of New York’s honoured New Year’s Eve traditions is the Times Square ‘ball drop’ which starts at 11:59pm on December 31 and ends at precisely 0:00 on New Year’s Day. The ‘time ball’ was originally a visual way to signal time to ships in harbours so they could synchronise their ship clocks - accurate time being a critical way to know your longitude at sea.

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It's not Christmas Eve in Sweden without a visit from Donald Duck

Don’t even think about calling your Swedish friend between 3-5pm on Christmas Eve, because like most of the country they’ll be watching Donald Duck cartoons. In 1959 at 3pm, TV station TV1 showed the Disney special “From All of Us to All of You” or, “Kalle Anka och hans vanner onskar God Jul” (“Donald Duck and his friends wish you a Merry Christmas”), and the station has been repeating the show each year since.

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Carp diem! Christmas dinner in the Czech Republic

Carp. We know them as overgrown goldfish that live in ponds. But many Central and Eastern Europeans know them as Christmas dinner. Parents usually buy living carp a few days before Christmas, with the lucky carp’s temporary new home becoming the family bathtub. Just before dinner, the carp leaves the bathtub for an untimely and brutal meeting with a mallet. Holy carp! As a result many families have found their Christmas dinner plans spoiled, because what happens when you mix live animals with children? The carp quickly stops becoming a Christmas meal and instead gets a name and the protection of a loving child.

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That time Pepsi owned the sixth largest military in the world...

What to do when you’ve gots to get your cola but you’ve got no hard currency? In 1989, the Soviet Union paid for a whopping $3b worth of Pepsi with 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate and a destroyer. Had Pepsi chosen to re-operationalise their newly acquired military hardware, they’d have been the 6th largest military power in the world and the 4th largest submarine power.

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