For instance, in the baseball section you'll find "Youngest player to hit 30 home runs and steal 30 bases in a season." In basketball: "Most consecutive games scoring a three-pointer." And in cycling, "Oldest Olympic road cycling gold medalist." In case you really wanted to know.
More disturbing is the competitive food section, where a variety of utter idiots engage in trivial pursuits. Gee, Michael Jenkins drink a litre of lemon juice in under 60 seconds. Ozgur Tuna (the name is more amusing than his achievement) "held 110 eggs in a basket" on a roller coaster. Another clown ate 16 cream-filled sponge cakes in one minute. In the latter case, we're not told how big these cakes were, if they were regulation Twinkies, or who decided the number should be 16, and why one minute should be the limit when, just below it, a record for hamburgers eaten (no size indicated) had to be within three minutes.
I know, this is supposed to be a browsable book of fun and amazement, and to some degree it still is. It's just that the older editions concentrated on things most of us actually cared about or were curious about, including various categories for the biggest, the smallest, or the most expensive. At one time, (the 1999 edition) a caveat for the competitive eating section declared, "The following gluttony records are historical and should not be attempted today." It almost seemed they were going to discontinue "records" that involved stupidity.
Instead, we get to see Mr. Michael Jenkins bugging his eyes and sucking a straw and holding up lemons. He's proud to be in a book that doesn't distinguish between true achievements and the pointless abuse of food resources and the encouragement of potential physical illness and death.
It's also a bit ridiculous that "world records" can be bought. For example, Davide Andreani of Italy owns "10,558 unique single brand cans" of soft drinks, and two full pages are devoted to showing all of them lining the walls of his...what, mental ward?
Seeing photos of pop-eyed lemon juice drinkers, and grubby soda can collectors just isn't my idea of a good time.
Do we need to encourage idiots to break the record for the longest black pudding (576 feet)? Or, unable to get the ingredients, try for the world's longest matzoh or breadstick? Now that we have eBooks, will Guinness have no limits on the number of individual foodstuffs they'll "recognize?"
Anyone want to break the record for "Most mentions of a brand name on Twitter in 24 hours"? That honor currently belongs to something called Pocky, which was mentioned 3,710,044 times on November 11, 2013.
Naturally the book section was an area to browse, but here, many listings weren't necessarily "world records" as much as facts. "Self-published author John Locke has sold more than 2 million Kindle-formatted eBooks...by 6 Jul 2010, james Patterson had exceeded sales of one million eBooks...the term "graphic novel" first appeared in 1976 on the dust jacket of "Bloodstar"...a total of 325 pen names were listed for humorist Konstantin Arsenievich Mikhailov in the 1960 Dictionary Of Pseudonyms."
Precision is not necessary for a World Record. "Even without exact sales numbers," we're told, "there is little doubt that the Bible is the world's best-selling and most widely distributed book..." Perhaps some irate Muslims would insist it's the Koran? At least it's not, God help us, the Guinness World Records book.
