Over on alt.games.mornington.cresent, a game has been running for a very long time. Many years ago (so the legend goes) the newgroup received a spam with the subject line "10,000 celebrity CDs". People started replying to the thread, decrementing the number and adding (vaguely) related text each time. Here is an example:
>> >>>> >>>>>>> 4840 Film scores that include 'Suspicious minds'
>> >>>> >>>>>>4839 Jukeboxes playing 'Suspicion'
>> >>>> >>>>> 4838 Suspicious boxes leading to evacuated buildings
>> >>>> >>>>4837 Other excuses for time of work
>> >>>> >>> 4836 hours to retirement
>> >>>> >>4835 hours to many
>> >>>> > 4834 second rate customer services
>> >>>> 4833 Vodaphone helpdeskers
>> >>>4832 Desk Tidies (A real help)
>> >> 4831 Deck reshuffles
>> >4830 Aces up my sleeve
>> 4829 dead rabbits
>4828 1.5v cells
4827 years before Red got his redemption
At some point, the subject line got changed to celerity and it stuck (or maybe it was misspelled in the original spam, I'm not sure).
I first learnt of this at university, some 10 years ago. I check back on this thread every once in a while to see where it's got to. It seems to have slowed down a bit in recent years - I think when I looked at it a few years ago I calculated that it should be over by now.
It would be an interesting task (maybe for a Googler?) to run a program over the history of this thread and plot a scattergraph showing how the number has changed over time. This would show the various rival threads as they fork off, skip ahead (or backwards) and sometimes die, and show how interest in the thread has waxed and waned over time.