The Dancing Henry Almanac » Food & Sport

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 ...

Johann van Cruyst

dancinghenry — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 13:57:58 +0000

Eccentric Dutch football manager who invented the concept of “partial football” – an unusual playing style in which players would form a rigid 3-5-2 formation, refuse to move either forwards or backwards, and attempt to clumsily shuffle the ball towards the opposition goal. Cruyst was fired from the international job after a disastrous early exit at the 1972 European Championships, and subsequently forged an illustrious career designing table-based pub games.

Eric Z. Arnold

dancinghenry — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:03:14 +0000

American born inventor of the EZ-Arnold range of kitchen products, an array of devices designed to overcome common kitchen problems such as unopenable bottles, leaking teabags, and purple toast. Initially rising to fame on the Home Shopping Network, Arnold boasted that with the use of his EZ-Arnold devices he could prepare and cook a five-course meal in under 7 minutes, claiming he never left home without them. Tragedy struck on a self-catering holiday in rural France when Arnold’s luggage was lost and he was forced to survive for an entire week without the use of his user-friendly kitchen gizmos. He was found in his cottage two weeks later, having died of malnutrition on the kitchen floor while attempting to prise open a can of beans with a plastic fork, and missing several small body parts in apparently separate stove and blender accidents.

Satsuma-Friendly Tangerines

dancinghenry — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:07:10 +0000

Prior to 1994, the methods used in bagging tangerines meant that stray satsumas occasionally got caught up in the netting. After left-wing pressure groups protested the number of small orange fruits that were being unfairly caught up with their small orange fruits, a United Nations motion was passed which banned the unethical catching of all things that weren’t the specific thing being caught. As well as enforcing satsuma-friendly methods of tangerine capture, this law also necessitated the introduction of tangerine-friendly satsumas, mandarin-friendly clementines and hot dog-friendly baked beans.

Francois Souffe

dancinghenry — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:14:22 +0000

Owner of the most prestigious restaurant in France, this chef is so convinced of the superiority of his food that he refuses to let the customers eat it, claiming it would be wasted on their rudimentary palates. Since its opening in 1994, every major celebrity and political personality in France has visited Souffe’s restaurant, eating packed lunches while he gorges on his own cuisine in the kitchen.