I remember when I was a kid I used to love looking through The Guiness Book of World Records. My friends and I would marvel at the photos. I can still clearly picture in my head the tallest man and the man with the longest fingernails.
We would then try to discover if there were any records that we could break. And of course there weren’t. The ones that we thought we might be able to do were squelched by our parents. By why can’t we stay awake and dance for 3 days? We can miss school. It is the Guiness Book of World Records, you know.
My 10 year old son has recently discovered the book and is just as fascinated by it as my friends and I were all those years ago. And now I find myself in the same position as my parents all those years ago. No, you are not going to try and build the tallest skate ramp in the world and skateboard down it. I don’t care if it is the Guiness Book of World Records.
Nowadays, there is a website that you can go to and browse through the catagories and even see what records people are trying to break at this exact moment.
Record my kids currently think they might be able to break:
Record that doesn’t exist, but I think that they should attempt to break:
Greatest number of consecutive days of doing your chores without being reminded
Of course looking at a website is not the same as flippping through the earmarked book, outside in your backyard, with your friends huddled around you.
I always had such fun flipping through my old b&w paperback edition that was about 1000 pages long. We have a newer one, but it’s not nearly so many pages and doesn’t even show all the old records I remember. It has some cool pictures, but it’s disappointing in its incompleteness – hopefully it was just some special edition!
Comment by Brigitte — June 23, 2009 @ 5:20 am
I remember doing the same thing as a kid and I especially remember those long fingernails. When I was a teenager, I helped build the world’s largest banana split.
Comment by Sharon — June 23, 2009 @ 9:08 am