Records. I am often amazed by records. Not the black discs that go round and round on the player and music comes out. Albeit, those are pretty incredible too.
No. I’m talking about the kinds of records that are the most, the biggest, the fastest, and the highest. Like the Guinness World Records. I don’t know why I have the interest. Maybe because as a kid, I got the record book one year, and I would sit and read that thing for hours. Then at dinner time, I’d pipe up and say something like, “Do you know there is a guy in India who has toenails that are three feet long?” Everyone would nod and say, “That’s nice, Polly.”
But really, still, to this day, I am often left in a state of disbelief that some person, somewhere, could do such a thing. And on many occasions, it is not even a human, but perhaps an animal or an object.
A good example is the getting married one. I am amazed when I’ve seen news clips of this on TV. There are like 20,000 couples packed into some stadium somewhere, and they all get married at the same time. The world’s largest wedding. My thoughts immediately drift to, “Who are these people?” And then I wonder why they’d want to get married this way, sitting in some stadium seats somewhere, with 19,999 other participants. That’s gotta’ be the world’s largest cake too.
Sometimes, I feel sorry for the people involved in the record. Like, the heaviest person or the tallest. The tallest guy lives in Turkey. His name is Sultan Kosen, and he is 8 feet 2.8 inches tall. They always show the world’s tallest, meeting the world’s shortest. It just makes me a little sad somehow.
All of this got started because of my history feeds. On this date, January 22, back in 1964, a remarkable thing happened. Those good people up in Wisconsin made the world’s largest cheese. They conjured it up for the New York’s World Fair.
The weight of that thing was listed in kilograms, at 15,723 kg. That converts to 34,663 pounds. That’s good for a lot of cheeseburgers.
I’ll tell you. I was filled with disbelief. So I had to do some serious Googling. Finally, I found a photo of the cheese — a postcard that is housed in the Wisconsin Historical Society.
There it was, that beautiful block of cheddar, with Mr. and Mrs. Steve Siudzinski, standing in front. They were the owners of Steve’s Cheese, the company that gave birth to those tons of cheddar. They looked proud. There were ribbons hanging on that cheese. The cheese stands alone.
Some records seem worthier than others.
Or are they?
There is Linsey Lindberg from Austin, Texas (better known as Mam Lou). Now, young Mam Lou set her World Record by crushing eight apples with her bicep! As they say, I climbed the mountain because it was there.
Or how about the world’s largest yo-yo. That distinction goes to creator Beth Johnson from Ohio. It measured at 3.65 meters (11.97 feet) in diameter and weighing 2095.6 kilograms (4,260 pounds). It took her a year to complete her work on the yo-yo. That’s dedication to something that clearly meant a lot to her. I bet she had a lot of ups and downs, though.
What about sticking toothpicks in one’s beard, the most, more than all the others? That goal was achieved by Joel Strasser. It took Joel three hours and 13 minutes to put 3,500 toothpicks in his beard. I suppose, because he could.
Oh. I don’t know. Some of these seem a little ridiculous when you really consider them. Like, the largest table tennis/ping pong paddle. That beast is 11 feet, 7.8 inches tall, and 6 feet, 7.8 inches wide. This was achieved by a company called Rise Brands in Columbus, Ohio. I’m not sure they’ve seen the ball for the game.
I can’t think of any records I’d like to break, truth be told. Unless it would be something like the one for “most continual days of being kind to others.” Or, “most days with ongoing inner peace and goodwill toward the world.”
That would be a hard one to judge because I think a whole lot of people are always working toward that record. I just know, I’ve got a long way to go.
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“Kindness is the ability to know what the right thing to do is and having the courage to do it.”
— RAKtivist
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“The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth”
— Albert Einstein
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“How do we change the world? One random act of kindness at a time”
— Morgan Freeman
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Records were meant to be broken. Or kept.
