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 ...]]>
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 ...]]>
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 ...]]>
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 ...]]>
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 ...]]>
![Full Primary Colours Chart. [Content now removed due to legal request.]](http://www.dancinghenryalmanac.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/vibe1-150x150.jpg)
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.
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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.
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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 ...]]>