November 17th, 2008 by BGonaSTICK
What’s this?
It’s great, is what it is!
Friday (14th November) saw the 10th anniversary of what has become a bit of a cult event held annually at Leeuwarden, Netherlands, organised by Mr. Domino (Robin Paul Weijers) and sponsored by those idiots an Endemol.
The point of the exercise? Well, if you want to argue the point that there really is a point, it is actually a serious world record attempt at toppling the greatest number of dominoes in one event. Plus some other lesser domino-related world record attempts.
OK, so it’s not justifiable in any respect, but it is a pretty damn good spectacle all the same! 
Stupid, you say?
Come off it.
Don’t try and tell me you’ve never had your childhood set of dominoes set up on the coffee table ready to march over a pile of your mums ‘womens’ magazines, ‘cos it just won’t wash. There is just something vaguely masochistic about watching something that took so very long to create be destroyed in a tiny fraction of that time.
Last years effort was an unmitigated disaster, with many of the ‘fields’ of dominoes failing to fall for a number of different reasons. Most of those reasons were directly attributable to the personal failings of previously ‘cool’ young people involved in what are known as ‘Builders Challenges’.
This is basically where some devious git decides that the final decision as to whether two months of painstaking setup work will be rewarded with total dominolition rests solely on the ability of two of the aforementioned kids (chosen at random) to bridge a gap in the domino line with some extra stones (yes, that’s what they’re called - I looked it up, alright?) in less than two minutes.
Given that the majority of the ‘engineers’ are spottier than the tools of their trade and tend to turn to jelly at the slightest hint of pressure, hope maybe wasn’t as high this year that a new record would be set.
As a spoiler, I’ll go right ahead and tell you that the 2008 participants flattened a total of 4,345,027 of the annoying little tokens - beating their previous world record of 4,079,381 set at D-Day 2006.
Domino Day is quite a big deal in Germany and Holland in particular, and lengthy live coverage of the event is usually shown on RTL television, free to air, on Astra 19.2E.
Recently, UK channel Five have also picked up on its popularity, and it’s now attracting an increasingly normal following here. Indeed Five showed an hour-long highlights show early on Saturday evening - some screen grabs of which are randomly included in this post as cheap window-dressing.
See if you can piece together any logical meaning to their haphazard arrangement.
A prize will be awarded to anyone with the time to waste on such an ultimately unfullfilling quest. An altogether more interesting prize will be awarded to whomesoever can name the annoying American bloke on the left. No prizes for naming the slaphead, obviously.
Yay! Time to hear about another of my pet hates!
