It’s So Long!

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader.

The longest high-five chain in the world, and a few other interesting “longest” things. (Note: This is a pretty long article. So you might have to take your device into the bathroom for a break to read the entire thing.)

LONGEST CAT FUR

In August 2013, Guinness World Records awarded its first-ever “cat with the longest fur” title. Recipient: Colonel Meow, a Himalayan Persian kitty belonging to Anne Marie Avey of Los Angeles, California. Fur length: nine inches. (The length was verified by three different veterinarians.) “We already knew that he was the best cat in the world,” a proud Ms. Avey said, “but to be recognized in the Guinness World Records book takes it to the next level.”

(Image source: Guinness World Records)

Bonus fact: The best part of the story is that Colonel Meow was a rescue kitty. He was in a shelter in Seattle, Washington— and scheduled to be euthanized— when he was rescued by a Seattle group dedicated to rescuing Himalayan Persian cats. They put him up for adoption online… and the rest is cat-fur history.

LONGEST CARROT

Joe Atherton of Nottinghamshire, England, grows carrots in plastic tubes more than 20 feet long, each one filled with nutrient-rich compost and positioned so they lie at an angle of about 45 degrees to ensure proper drainage. In September 2007, Atherton carefully extracted one of those tube-grown carrots, being careful not to break its long, fragile root. That particular carrot had been growing for 14 months: Atherton had extended its growing season beyond the usual two or three months by regularly nipping off any seed buds that appeared on it, thereby preventing it from going to seed. Result: the carrot was 19 feet, 1.875 inches long. It’s the current record holder for “longest carrot in the world.”

Bonus fact: Atherton is one of hundreds of “extreme gardeners” who participate in the National Giant Vegetables Championship, part of the Bath and West National Gardening Show, held in Somerset, England, every fall.  

LONGEST HIGH-FIVE CHAIN

In March 2014, a woman standing in a field from La Quinta hotels gave the man standing next to her a “high-five” hand slap. The man immediately turned around and gave the person standing next to him a high-five. That person gave the person next to him a high-five… and you get the picture. About three minutes and forty-five seconds later, the 1,113 people standing in the high-five line had established the new record for the longest high-five chain in history.

(Image source: Guinness World Records)

Bonus fact: The record-breakers immediately followed that feat by breaking the record for the longest “human towel chain.” The first person in the chain held the end of a regular bath towel; the next person held the other end of that towel, together with the end of another towel. The next person held the end of that second towel, together with the end of yet another towel… and so on. That chain, it must be noted, was only 1,110 people long: they’d lost three people after the high-five chain, possibly to injuries caused by high-fiving (or maybe they were on a bathroom break.).

LONGEST GOLF COURSE

(Image credit: Flickr user spelio)

Australia’s Nullarbor Links has 18 holes, just like a normal golf course, and par is 72, also just like most regulation courses. The longest hole— 588 yards from tee to cup— is also pretty normal. So why is it the world’s longest golf course? Because the first hole is in the town of Ceduna, South Australia, and the last hole is in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, 848 miles away. The average distance between holes: 41 miles (two of the holes are 120 miles apart). Nullarbor Links, which opened in 2009, incorporates seven holes from already existing courses and has eleven of its own holes. Each is located at roadhouses and rest stops along southern Australia’s Eyre Highway, part of which traverses the Nullarbor Plain, some of the flattest, dryest, and most desolate land in all of the Australian outback. Average amount of time it takes to finish a round: about four days.

Bonus Fact: If you get a chance to play this course, be warned. Summer temperatures on the Nullarbor Plain regularly reach 100 ° F. (One day in January 2014, it reached 119 ° F.)

LONGEST ECHO

(YouTube link)

In January 2014, an acoustic scientist crawled into an underground fuel tank in Scotland. The tank, part of a secret underground fuel depot constructed in the Scottish Highlands during World War II, is huge. It’s about 600 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 45 feet high, and was designed to hold 2.5 million gallons of fuel. The walls are two feet thick, and there are no doors into it: Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustic engineering at Scotland’s University of Salford, had to slither through a pipe that’s 18 inches in diameter to get into the tank. “The sound just goes on and on and on,” Cox later told The Independent newspaper. “I started off just playing around, whooping and hollering.” After he was done whooping and hollering, Cox set up very sensitive recording equipment inside the tank, and a fellow scientist fired a pistol— loaded with blanks— into the pipe. Result: they created an echo that lasted an astounding 75 seconds, a new record for the longest echo ever created. It actually went on longer; at very low frequencies the echo could be detected for 112 seconds. But across all frequencies, which was required for the record books, it lasted only 75 seconds.

Bonus Fact: The previous record was, oddly enough, also set by Scots: It was the echo of the sound of the doors to the Hamilton Mausoleum, in Hamilton, Scotland, being slammed shut. It lasted a paltry 15 seconds.

LONGEST ENGLISH WORD

The longest word in the English (or any other) language:



Okay, we have to stop there because that word has a total of 189,819 letters— enough to fill the next 100 pages of this book. What does the word mean? It’s the chemical name of what is commonly known as titin, or “connectin,” a type of protein found in muscle and the largest protein ever discovered. That, in fact, is why the name is so long: chemical names must precisely identify every part of a chemical compound— and this one has a lot of them.

Bonus fact: If you happen to have 3.5 hours to kill, you can see a video of a Russian man named Dmitry Golubovskiy pronouncing the entire word on YouTube. It has currently been viewed more than two million times. (Note: some experts insist that such chemical names aren’t really words, so this really shouldn’t be called the “longest English word.” But we say if it has letters, a meaning, and can be pronounced, it’s a word.)

(YouTube link)
 

RANDOM LONGESTS

• Longest dog ear: 13.75 inches. That was the length of the right ear of Tigger the bloodhound (the left ear was a little shorter), who belonged to Bryan and Christina Flessner of St. Joseph, Illinois, and became the record holder in 2004. (Tigger died in 2009, but he still holds the record.)

• Longest basketball shot ever made: 109 feet, 9 inches— about 15 feet longer than a regulation NBA basketball court— made by Thunder Law of the Harlem Globetrotters in Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2013.

• Longest reverse car jump: 89 feet, 3.25 inches, by professional daredevil Rob Dyrdek at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California, in February 2014.

• Longest alphabetical e-mail address: www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com. (go ahead— try it!)

• Longest time treading water: According to the Limca Book of Records, a record book published in India, the record for treading water is 85 hours— or about 3.5 days. It was set, says Limca, by 19-year-old Ashish Singhvi in March 1997. (Note: Guinness World Records does not have a category for treading water. It’s too dangerous!)

_______________________________

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader. The latest annual edition of Uncle John’s wildly successful series features fascinating history, silly science, and obscure origins, plus fads, blunders, wordplay, quotes, and a few surprises

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!


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