Forget the Big Apple -- Drop a Peach

Why drop a ball? Of all the ways mankind could mark one turn around the sun and the beginning of the next, why do we feel compelled to drop a big honking globe from the top of a pole?

"Yeah, dropping a ball is a little random," Don Wisniewski agreed.

That's why for the first time at the stroke of midnight tonight, he and the entire city of Annapolis will drop a sailboat.

No, not the polished wooden kind -- sockless sailors everywhere would cringe -- but a three-foot steel frame outlined in bright lights. And the Annapolitans are not alone.

In Georgia, they will drop giant peaches and chicken nuggets. In Maine, a sardine. In Key West, Fla., revelers will lower an elegantly dressed drag queen named Sushi wearing in eight-foot-long ruby stilettos.

And that's not even counting Pennsylvania, where townfolk will apparently drop anything except the kitchen sink. (Wouldn't put that past them either, this being the state where everything from pickles to giant Peeps to stuffed goats is hoisted up high.)

But what people don't appreciate these days, with the cornucopia of objects plummeting around us, are the logistics and artistry that go into a halfway decent drop, Wisniewski said.

As novice droppers, he and other Annapolitans had to learn the ropes this year. Their first order of business was picking the all-important object. And as anyone outside New York will tell you, dropping a ball is so last year.

"We kicked around a few ideas, but a sailboat pretty much said it all for Annapolis," Wisniewski said. He had two buddies from a local power plant weld a stainless steel model, complete with keel and rudder, onto which they scotch-taped a string of Christmas lights.

He has practiced a few times using a flagpole in his front yard, but the pressure has mounted as tonight's main event at the Annapolis City Dock draws closer. Timing is crucial, he has been told, as are details such as the lowering mechanism. "No one wants to start the new year with a steel sailboat landing on them," he said.

Of course, Annapolis and other towns trace their ritual to the granddaddy of all drops in the Big Apple. But academics who study New Year's droppage (yes, they really do exist), say the history stretches even further, to the 19th century.

It began as a time-telling tool to allow ships in harbor to set their chronometers. The earliest balls built in English ports in the 1820s and '30s began their descent every day at exactly 1 p.m. (Thus the correct way to drop a ball, those same academics will point out, is to mark the hour with the moment a ball drop begins rather than when it ends, as they do so famously in New York.)