The Dancing Henry Almanac

touchEternity

dancinghenry — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 13:39:24 +0000

Mobile game which became popular in 2015. The object is simple, to keep your finger pressed on an onscreen button for as long as possible. Points are accrued the longer your finger is held and reset to zero if it is removed.

The game became a sleeper sensation after a viral video emerged of the prime-minister of Denmark playing it covertly during a United Nations summit, and soon it was being downloaded and played across the whole world. The game remained fiercely popular for several weeks, with many players buying second devices specifically for games and others forced to completely adapt their lifestyle to accommodate their newfound mono-dexterity.

Eventually the craze died down after a host of imitation “staminapps” such as taptaptap and KeepWatchingTheDot diluted the marketplace, but a hardcore fanbase remains with the most dedicated players currently on upwards of 14 billion points. Some of these are convinced ...

Chicken vs Egg: The Great Decider

dancinghenry — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:37:55 +0000

Publicity stunt dreamt up by American Walt Cooper in 1936. Cooper was an unemployed farm labourer in Tiny, Arkansas who had found sporadic work in promotions since the beginning of the great depression, usually involving the distribution of flyers dressed as large pieces of meat. One day, while patrolling the sidewalk as a southern fried drumstick, it occurred to him that no had yet settled the question of which came first: the chicken or the egg. Cooper hatched a scheme to stage a public race between the two which he billed as “The Great Decider”.

Dressed alternately as a chicken and an egg, Cooper aggressively marketed the event on the streets, promising a great spectacle for the small admission fee of 50 cents and enlisting several local businesses to provide side stalls. Word of mouth grew quickly as it became known that Walt was offering odds of 20-1 on ...

Budgetary Cuts

dancinghenry — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 21:35:12 +0000

Many concerned readers have written to the Dancing Henry editorial offices recently, afraid that we might be affected by the ongoing economic crisis. Unfortunately, it is true that the Dancing Henry Corporation has had to make cutbacks. Our publishing department has ceased printing once lucrative titles such as the A-Z of Numbers textbook, the Braille Guide to Silent Film and the Best of Ceefax Annual. Our merchandising department has now stopped manufacturing our range of Sir Henry Drummond action figures, our Months of the Year socks, and our famous spearmint bananas. And throughout the company we have made other minor cutbacks, including our library of betamax cassettes, our female employees and our electronic pistachio-sheller. We appreciate your letters of support during this difficult time, however we kindly request that concerned readers pay for postage before mailing. Thank you.

Humphrey Woodspring: Space Pioneer

dancinghenry — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 18:36:40 +0000

Humphrey Woodspring was a British space-travel pioneer who conducted the first rocket experiments of the Edwardian era. Woodspring was raised in Barnsley and apprenticed as a carpenter in his father’s furniture manufacturer’s company, finally taking it over in 1903 at the age of thirty-one. That same year, Woodspring paid an enlightening visit to the cinema tent at the county fair which included a screening of the early French science-fiction film Un voyage en fusée pour visiter les dames grandes bosomed sur la surface de la lune (A trip by rocket ship to visit the well endowed ladies on the surface of the moon). Soon after he placed an advertisement in the Barnsley Echo which stated that Woodspring and Sons would henceforth dedicate itself to pursuing excellence in the twin fields of space exploration and home furnishings.

Seven years later, Woodspring was satisfied that he had finally constructed a rocket ship ...

The Birth of the Centimetre

dancinghenry — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 01:11:04 +0000

One of the most well-known and much-loved units of length in the metric system, the centimetre was first proposed simultaneously in 1710 by Italian mathematician Luciano Carelli and Norwegian physicist Bernhard Boger. A bitter authorship debate ensued, with the central issue being the question of which physical phenomenon should be used as the basis of measurement. Carelli was adamant that a centimetre should be defined as “the width of the smallest finger on my leftmost hand, at the point directly between the finger nail and the upper knuckle”, but Boger dismissed this idea as absurd, arguing that the width of Carelli’s fingers was liable to change if he were to put on excessive weight, or to die and slowly decay. He instead proposed that a much more reliable definition would be the size of the gap between his writing desk and the wall of his study, pointing out that ...

Collateral Damage: Derek Osprey and the World Debt Crisis

dancinghenry — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 11:27:20 +0000

On August 13th 2007, taxi driver Derek Osprey dropped off a fare at the Prestige Inn in Boston, Massachusetts and was instructed to wait while his passenger, a handkerchief salesman named Hamish Dolt, ran inside to fetch his suitcase. Three days later, Dolt emerged from the hotel after a sudden bout of illness and boarded a plane for Dubai. He failed to notice on leaving that Osprey was still parked outside, the meter still running. Dolt’s business trip was unsuccessful and he returned to his home in Pittsburgh soon after to work as a realtor. It was several months before he returned to Boston on business, and he stayed once more at the Prestige. After stepping outside to hail a taxi on the morning of June 12th 2008 he was surprised to find Osprey still waiting in the same spot. A heated discourse followed when Osprey demanded he pay ...

Vibe

dancinghenry — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 13:57:06 +0000

The fourth primary colour, and an exceptionally brilliant one (hence the now-familiar term ‘vibrant’), that was popular up until the mid 1930s, when it was aggressively marketed out of existence by the Technicolor corporation whose 3-strip colour film process was unable to reproduce it. After the global success of Technicolor Hollywood films such as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Sir Henry Drummond’s epic King of King of Kings, countries around the world scrambled to remove any traces of vibe from their homes, so as to make them look “more like the movies”. The only country to retain vibe in some form was the unimpressed France, which still claims to hold the world’s only collection of vibe-based paintings and plant-life. When any non-French person requests to view these artefacts however, they get all sniffy and pretend they don’t understand.

Colin Cloud

dancinghenry — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:23:05 +0000

Downbeat poet who produced numerous well-received collections, despite his poems being so complex that no one on earth was able to understand them – a fact which caused Cloud to have severe bouts of depression and pronounce himself a “misunderstood genius and cultural exile”. This changed one day, when he received a jubilant letter from an A-Level English student who had managed to glean some meaning from one line of an obscure poem published years before. Cloud promptly committed suicide.

The Dancing Henry Story… in colour!

dancinghenry — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:43:04 +0000

If you’d like a second chance to see “The Dancing Henry Story”, a twenty-four-part TV mini-series chronicling Dancing Henry founder Sir Henry Drummond’s struggle to create the Dancing Henry Almanac, despite resistance from censorship organisations, rival publishers, the church, heavy winds and gravity – then we would welcome funding for the £2.5 million production, giving you your first chance to see it as well.

The Genesis 12 Experiment

dancinghenry — Thu, 31 May 2012 21:10:00 +0000

The Genesis12 experiment was an unorthodox scientific experiment carried out in the year -2567012 by an extra-dimensional super-being and laboratory technician named Ya*howah 25j. Ya*howah was interested in exploring the properties of a small droplet of compressed space-time he had discovered in the laboratory toilet. Utilising powerful ultra-microscopic equipment, he discovered that this droplet contained an immensely array of elements which seemed to be in constant motion. Mapping out the arrangement of structures within, Ya*howah found that many of the elements took the form of spherical structures which seemed to spin around each other in a complex pattern Ya*howah dubbing this discovery the ‘uuniv`rse’, and on the night of Blensbury the unth he conducted the following experiment, described in his journal:

Day 20-two. I have been observing the uuniv`rse for some time now, and have determined that it follows a regular cycle of steady expansion, followed by a sudden contraction to near-invisible level ...