I don’t know about you, but I sure am sick of things happening.
Every time I pick up my phone, The New York Times tells me that a thing happened, and
I’m like, well, I guess I gotta get drunk.
And then the next day something else happens, and I’m like, okay, so it’s time to get
drunk again.
And now it’s 24 years later and I’m an alcoholic.
But that’s just a fact of life: things happen every day, no matter how hungover you are.
As an example, here’s a list of some of the things that happened yesterday, which
I’m going to have my editors put in at the last minute because I wrote this script a
week ago.
Wow!
Look at all of those things that happened.
I sure hope I actually made my point.
Anyway, this convoluted introduction got me thinking: what was the day when the fewest
things happened?
Or, in other words, what was the most boring day in human history?
And, it turns out, there is actually some consensus that that day is probably April
11, 1954.
Why?
Well, let me explain.
That date was calculated a few years back by a British computer scientist named William
Tunstall-Pedoe.
You see, Tunstall-Pedoe had developed a software called “True Knowledge,” which was essentially
just a massive database of discrete, crowd-sourced facts that is now known as Jeff Bezos’s
girlfriend, Alexa, but before its acquisition by Amazon, it was an independent database
that was used to understand and answer simple questions—things like “when is Bono’s
birthday” or “how old is Bono turning this year” or “why didn’t Bono invite
me to his 62nd birthday party, did he just forget or is he mad at me?”
Now, some of the facts in True Knowledge’s database took the form of general rules that
helped it understand what a question was asking, like “birthday is a sub-type of creation
date,” but the vast majority of facts were more specific, like “Bono was created on
May 10, 1960.”
So, seeing as a big chunk of the 300 million facts in his database were essentially just
dates when things happened, Tunstall-Pedoe wondered what day, since January 1st, 1900,
had the least number of facts associated with it—conflicts, elections, major accidents,
notable performances, famous births, famous deaths, you get the idea.
And just as a side note: yeah, he restricted the timeline to the last two centuries because
the real most boring day in human history was probably some day 60,000 years ago when
the most exciting thing that could happen was finding a berry on the ground, but that’s
a boring answer… and not boring in the interesting way.
Now, as you might’ve already guessed, the date that showed up the least was April 11,
1954.
But that doesn’t mean that nothing happened that day; a few things did.
So, because we’re a beacon of journalistic integrity, I had my writers scour the internet,
encyclopedias, and newspaper archives to put together the most comprehensive description
of the most boring day in human history.
Probably the most important thing that happened that day—anywhere in the world—was the
1954 Belgian general election.
And, I know, I can already hear my Belgian viewers saying “hey, what the hell, are
you saying our elections are boring?
This makes me so angry that I’m going to go eat a yeast-based waffle.”
But look: this wasn’t a particularly eventful election, even for Belgium.
The Christian Social Party lost a couple of seats in parliament and this man was elected
Prime Minister, who went on to enact some modest labor laws and have a Wikipedia page
that’s shorter than the Wikipedia page for lint.
But besides that… not a lot happened.
The very last Coppa della Toscana happened in Tuscany, golfer Marlene Hagge won the 1954
New Orleans Women’s Open, the 52nd Paris-Roubaix bike race happened in France, the 1954 All-Ireland
Senior Hurling Championship opened in Dublin, and it’s possible that a non-lethal coup
d’etat was planned that night in the French-occupied territory of Yanaon, India, but it didn’t
actually happen until 2 days later so it’s kind of hard to count that.
If we can count things that were planned as things that actually happened, then we might
as well say that I actually have a daytime talk show where I read fun facts about planes
to hot celebrities.
But surely, somewhere in the world, someone important must have been born or died that
day, right?
Well… not really.
The most important person I could find who was born on April 11, 1954 is this guy: Ian
F. Akyildiz; he’s a Turkish electrical engineer who… wrote some textbooks, I guess?
And he helped design some cellular networks?
And founded a company whose website ironically…
does not work?
But that’s it… that’s the most important guy… of the quarter-million-or-so babies
born that day, none of them have written better networking textbooks or have patented more
routing schemes.
As for famous deaths, I really had to scrape the bottom of the corpse barrel and came up
with this guy: Paul Specht.
He was a decently popular American bandleader in the 1920s whose personal history is seemingly
only recorded in this terrifying website from 2006.
Yes, I read the whole thing.
And no, none of it was interesting.
I’m not even sure if any of it is accurate because, like, look at this website.
So, now that I have hopefully established beyond a shadow of a doubt that April 11,
1954 was the most boring day in recent human history, this raises the pretty obvious follow-up
question of “then what was the most eventful day in human history?”
But that, unfortunately, is a lot harder to answer, because it’s probably not just the
day with the most total events.
After all, events are not all created equal.
Like, Paris Hilton and Joseph Gordon-Levitt might have been born on the same day, but
even with their total starpower combined they probably don’t equal one Cuban Missile Crisis.
You would need to give birth to, like, 50 Joseph Gordon-Levitts to reach one Cuban Missile
Crisis, that’s just plain math.
What’s never the most boring day in history for me, though, is any day that I use HelloFresh.
That’s because HelloFresh is a meal kit service where you select what you want to
eat one week, and then the next a box shows up at your door with all the ingredients you
need in the exact quantities you need, along with recipes, for a huge variety of meals
that you would have never thought to make by yourself.
Beyond the variety, there’s also the convenience: through cutting out shopping time and much
of the prep work, you can make home-cooked meals quicker, and they’re delicious too.
All around, I find HelloFresh to be a faster, more interesting, affordable way to eat, without
resorting to expensive takeout or unhealthy frozen food, and that’s why I’ve been
using them to make meals like this crispy buffalo-spiced chicken for almost two years–long
before they started sponsoring the channel.
So, if you want to improve dinner time too, click the button on-screen or go to HelloFresh.com
and use code HAI16 for up to 16 free meals and three surprise gifts.