Psy's Gangnam style video was galloping towards the one-billion-view mark on YouTube on Friday, a fresh milestone in the enduring global craze for the South Korean rapper and his horse-riding dance. The video has had over 995.8 million hits. The timing of the one-billion views breakthrough looks set to dovetail with a viral social network hoax that had the 16th century French seer Nostradamus apparently referencing Psy as a harbinger of the December 21 apocalypse.

And this comes less than a month after the video taking the all-time "most-viewed" title away from Baby by Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber.

And although its imminent demise has been predicted many times, the Psy phenomenon has simply refused to die.