HOME |
RSS | 
While this picture is already enough for most people to realize this is something no one should ever do,the fact that there is actually a record for most rattlesnakes held in the mouth at one time is just plain wrong. For more bizarre records, check out this great article over at All That is Interesting.
Comments Off
Reknowned distance swimmer Diana Nyad {wiki} is almost 62 years old. But she is swimming today, off the coast of Cuba, heading to Key West. She entered the water just before Sunset last night. This time, instead of a shark cage, she will be surrounded by an electronic shark deterrent. The swim, if successful, is expected to take 60 hours. Link
CNN has an interactive map with which you can follow her progress. Link
Update: Nyad abandoned her attempt about halfway through. Link
Oddee has a great article featuring the World’s Youngest record holders for a variety of titles. While they range from shocking (the world’s youngest grandmother) to fascinating (the world’s youngest CEO). Perhaps the cutest though is the world’s youngest surfer:
Jaylan Amor is only two years old, but is already surfing the waves outside of Brisbane, Australia, and has secured multiple endorsements from surf shops. To catch a wave, his dad paddles him out to sea, then the two year old hops and rides the waves back into shore. Mr Amor isn’t worried if Jaylan falls, as the tike just swims back to his board and waits for daddy to help him back up.
Read about the rest at the link.
This weekend, the Antiques Roadshow crew sent a Tulsa man home as a record-breaker and new retiree. Though his identity is being withheld, the most expensive item ever appraised in the show’s 16-year history, worth $1 – 1.5M, has been revealed as a set of five Chinese cups carved of rhinoceros horn. Before carrying them into the Tulsa Convention Center, the man said he’d owned the cups since the 1970s.
“As each one came out of the box my jaw started to drop a little more and that of at my colleagues eyes and their jaws dropped as well,” says Mason.
“I was hoping he wasn’t going to collapse but he said that he was glad that he didn’t need his inhaler,” says Mason.
“You clearly could even see, in the tape that I was watching, the color rush over his face,” says producer Bemko.
Mason says the million dollar cups were given as gifts to wealthy people for special occasions in the late 17th to early 18th centuries.
During that time it was thought that rhinoceros horn had special powers. What makes them so valuable today is china’s power and stance in the world.
“We had not had a million dollar find until last season we found some jade in Raleigh now Tulsa, you are the top dogs now,” says the show’s host Mark Walberg.
“Top Dogs” is sure to be a title Tulsans are proud to hold.
Its safe to say none of the Roadshow crew knew they would be breaking records in Green Country.
“I certainly wasn’t expecting this in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” says Mason. “Although Tulsa is a wonderful place and now it’s even more wonderful as far as I’m concerned.”
“I am no longer surprise by what I’m going to find anywhere, but yeah okay a little surprised to find it in Tulsa, but delighted,” says Bemko.
The last time the Roadshow was in Tulsa was nearly ten years ago, hopefully with the big find this weekend they will visit us a little sooner.
Producers tell us Tulsa’s record breaking show will air on PBS some time early next year.
Link | Image: © Jeff Dunn, WGBH 2011
In 1939, Adolf Hitler commissioned the Friedrich Krupp A.G. company of Essen, Germany to build a gun that would breach the French Maginot line. They responded with the “Gustav Gun,” the largest gun ever built.
Named after the head of the Krupp family, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the Gustav Gun weighed in at a massive 1344 tons, so heavy that even though it was attached to a rail car, it still had to be disassembled before moving so as to not destroy the twin set of tracks as it passed over. This 4-story behemoth stood 20 feet wide and 140 feet long. Its 500 man crew, commanded by a Major-General (that’s two stars), needed nearly three full days (54 hours, to be exact) to set it up and prep for firing. But when it did fire, whoowhee, hold on to your hat.
The description of this gun’s destructiveness is at Gizmodo. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: American Rifleman, February 1998)
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to give birth to a 16 pound baby, even if it was through a caesarian. On top of every thing else, you’d have to worry about trying to find clothes for him. Janet Johnson, who just gave birth to a son that might be the world’s largest said she’s going to have to return all the clothes she already bought for him since he’s already the size of most 3 month olds.
How do you turn a small space into a huge cash cow? Fill it with the most claustrophobic living quarters imaginable, call its lack of width a feature, then rent it out to artists as a living/workspace. That’s just what architect Jakub Szczesny and team are doing with the skinny space between an old tenement block and a tower block in Warsaw, Poland. The design allows for a bedroom, lounge, bathroom and kitchen within the tiny space, all accessible by ladder. Read more about to Warsaw design and other skinny houses on Daily Mail. Link
via Dvice
It seems every few years someone has topped this record again, but if you think hamburgers are an American specialty, then you’ll be happy to know the U.S. reclaimed the title from the Canadians recently. The burger is 777 pounds and contains 590 pounds of beef. Obesity epidemic, eat your heart out…wait.
Move over, Edward Nino Hernandez, there’s a new smallest man in town. Junrey Balawing of Zamboanga del Norte, who turns 18 today, measures only 24 inches from head to foot lying down and just over 23 inches standing up.
Balawing, the eldest of four siblings, is not only the shortest living man, but the shortest living man in history, the Guinness World Records said.
No monetary prize will be given for Balawing and all other Guinness world record holders.
Balawing unseated Khagendra Thapa Magar of Nepal who is 26.4 inches tall.
Municipal administrator Allan Selda earlier said the local government is preparing to celebrate for the record with balloons and a cake for Balawing.
Link | Image: AP
"Aw, what a cute toddler," you may think, but you’d be wrong. That’s Junrey Balawing, who is going to be crowned the unenviable title of World’s Smallest Man when he turns 18 this June:
MEET Junrey Balawing, the Filipino who is about to become the world’s smallest man – and a huge star.
At just 22 INCHES high, the 17-year-old is tinier than a one-year-old.When he turns 18 on June 12, he will take the title – smashing five inches off the current record.
The titchy teen has not grown since his first birthday, struggles to walk and cannot stand up for long.
But he beams with pride when talking about his likely world record.
He said: "If I were the smallest man in the world, it would be very cool."
Rhodri Phillips of The Sun has the story: Link
Video clip after the jump: more …
Photo: James Balog
The tree in the photo above is pretty tall – so tall, in fact, that it used to be the tallest known tree in the world. Until people found other trees that are even taller. NPR’s Robert Krulwich has a very neat post about the discovery of the world’s tallest tree: Link
See also: 10 Most Magnificent Trees in the World
Purdue University holds an annual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest for students from colleges all over. A world record was set this year, as the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers team of 17 students built a contraption that took 244 steps to water a flower. That beat the existing world record of 230 steps. Read all about it at Popular Mechanics. Link -via Boing Boing
To promote the new Internet Explorer 9, Soap Creative developed a Pac-Man game that involves thousands of user-submitted screens, and could take years to play. Link to story. Link to game. -via Simply Left Behind
An 11-month-old Tibetan mastiff named Hong Dong (Big Splash) broke the record for dog prices, going to a new home in China for 10 million RMB, which is £945,000 or about $1.5 million US.
Tibetan Mastiffs are huge and fierce guard dogs that have stood watch over nomad camps and monasteries on the Tibetan plateau for centuries.
They are thought to be one of the world’s oldest breeds, and legend has it that both Genghis Khan and Lord Buddha kept them.
More recently, however, they have become highly-prized status symbols for China’s new rich. The dogs are thought to be a pure “Chinese” breed and they are rarely found outside Tibet, giving them an exclusivity that other breeds cannot match.
Accordingly, prices have risen from around 5,000 yuan a puppy five years ago to the hundreds of thousands and even millions.
Hong Dong’s new owner will command high stud fees, as much as 100,000 RMB and may earn his money back soon. Link -via The Daily What
Eunice Sanborn, who outlived three husbands, was 114 years old when she passed away Monday at her home in Texas, according to caretaker David French. Or was she 115?
Census records show Sanborn was born on July 20, 1896, in Lake Charles, La., according to the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group, which listed Sanborn as the world’s oldest person.
But French said Sanborn always maintained the Census Bureau had made a mistake and she was really born in 1895. She celebrated what she believed was her 115th birthday on July 20, Agence France-Presse reported.
Either way, with Sanborn’s death, the oldest person in the world is now 114-year-old Besse Cooper of Georgia. Link
How fast can you type? Well, Hank Torres, who lost the use of his hands after a hang-gliding accident, just set the Guinness World Record for hands-free typing:
Hank typed the following phrase — "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human." — in 83.09 seconds last Friday at the Assistive Technology Industry Association Conference in Orlando, Fla.
Hank had a nice set-up to help achieve his record. In fact, we are learning about this because, along with a head-tracking system called TrackerPro and a PC, Hank uses the Swype software keyboard found on many Android phones. (The maker of TrackerPro, AbleNet, now includes the Swype keyboard in the software bundle.)
Not only is it amazing what Hank can do with the keyboard, it’s a pretty amazing demonstration of the keyboard’s functionality itself. Just watch this video and tell me you’re not impressed with him and with the software keyboard. You can’t.
Comments Off 
China plans to merge nine cities along the Pearl River into one huge mega-city that will cover an area twice the size of Wales and initially have a population of 42 million people.
The new mega-city will cover a large part of China’s manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.
Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.
“The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas,” said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.
The new mega-city does not yet have a name. Nearby Hong Kong, with another seven million people, will not be included in the new mega-city. Link -via Metafilter
A man from South Wales was fuming that his 14-year-old daughter got pregnant, but he couldn’t stay mad for long because 1) he became a father himself at 14, and 2) At 29, he’s just broken the UK record for youngest grandfather! He said:
“I know myself how tough it is being a teenage parent and now she has to go through the same thing. However, we’re all going to stand by her and we will welcome the little one into the family.
“I don’t feel like a grandad – I’ve not got grey hair and my hearing is top notch.”
He added that his 47-year-old mother cannot wait to become a great-grandma.“She was 18 when she had me,” he said. “She was shocked when I told her the news, but she is happy now.
“Her own mum is alive, and so too is her grandmother, who will become a great-great-great grandmother. There can’t be too many families with six generations alive at the same time.”
Link (Photo: From NeatoShop’s selection of weird and wonderful pacifiers)
Photo: Jonathan Clark/Guinness World Records
Somewhere in that photo above is Jean-Guy Laquerre, who holds the Guinness World Records for having the world’s largest collection of Santa Claus memorabilia.
Laquerre, a 74-year-old retired geography teacher from outside Montreal, has devoted all his time to his Santa collection, which he proudly displays between Dec. 15 and Jan. 15 as an invitation-only exhibit in his house.
"I’ve been collecting since 1988," he said. "Various people give me these items as gifts. I purchase them here and there, and then friends will give them to me."
If you want to beat Jean-Guy, you’ve got your work cut out for you: he’s got 25,189 items! Lee Speigel of Aol News has the story: Link
Comments Off 
Olga Kotelko is an athlete. She holds 23 world records, mostly track records for the category of age 90 and up! Kotelko is 91 years old and runs, jumps, and throws a javelin in “masters” meets for those age 35 and over. Her success has led scientists to study her abilities in hopes of finding out how some bodies age at a predictable rate and others don’t.
Kotelko herself speaks often of the perils of getting carried away. “If you undertrain, you might not finish,” she says. “If you overtrain, you might not start.” But there’s some evidence that, in trying to find the sweet spot between staying in race shape and avoiding the medical tent, a lot of seniors athletes aren’t training hard enough — or at least, aren’t training the right way to maximally exploit what their body can still do.
Kotelko plans to continue competing and is looking forward to a new set of world records -when she reaches the “95 and over” age category. Link -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Patrik Giardino for The New York Times)
Comments Off 
Formula Rossa, the new roller coaster in Abu Dhabi travels 1.2 miles in only a minute and a half, reaching speeds of up to 150mph! But what else would you expect for a theme park called Ferrari World?
Harnessing the same technology that powers fighter planes off aircraft carriers, the rollercoaster’s carriage travels the ride’s 2.07 km (1.2 miles) distance in just a minute and half.
Oh, and did we mention it was built above Abu Dhabi’s Formula 1 track? Well, it is. It’s the star piece for the “Ferrari World” theme park that’s opened just in time for the UAE’s grand prix on November 12th.
See a “point of view” video (which may cause dizziness) and a look behind the scenes at World’s Biggest. Link
Jeffrey Martin shot 8,000 photographs of London and then spent six weeks stitching them together to create this amazing seamless 360-degree panorama of the city. You can zoom in and lose yourself looking at details, or zoom back and admire the city as a whole. The quality of this panorama was impossible to achieve only a year ago -and at 80 gigapixels, it is the largest 360-degree panorama in the world! Open the map to find specific landmarks, or take the tour to see places you’d never think to look for on your own. This is the next best thing to traveling to London, and you don’t even have to leave your desk! Link
(Image credit: Jeffrey Martin, www.360cities.net)
Norway and China aren’t two countries you’d normally associate with sushi, but here we are. Behold the world’s largest sushi arrangement or moritsuke, created by Norwegian chefs in celebration of the ten millionth importation of Norwegian Salmon.
Now, I don’t know if all those sushi were consumed after being displayed for some time, but if they were, then I’d wager it also created the longest line for the bathrooms: Link
I’m sure many people have wished that their mother-in-law was toast. Laura Hadland turned a photo of her mother-in-law, Sandra Whitfield, into the world’s largest toast mosaic – comprising 9,852 slices.
The toast mosaic – 128 square metres of browned and scorched bread – was officially named the world’s largest at 5pm on October 17 at Warrington’s Parr Hall by Guinness World Records adjudicator Claire Burgess. The previous record holder measured 121.93 square metres and was created by staff and students at a school in Eindhoven, Netherlands, in February.
A tiny British cow has been named the world’s smallest cow by the Guinness Book of World records. The cow lives in West Yorkshire, England and measures just 33 inches tall.
The 11-year-old cow is named Swallow and her owner, Caroline Ryder, said she would spend Thursday either grazing with her herd or listening to BBC radio in her cowshed.
Swallow is a Dexter cow, a breed known for its diminutive stature, but is small even by Dexter standards.
She already has nine regular-sized calves and is pregnant with her 10th. Guinness said her youngest calf has already grown larger than she is.
In the photo, Swallow is the little black object to the right of a normal size bull. Link -via Fark
If you can’t beat ‘em, let ‘em be world record-breaking art: Brazil unveiled the world’s largest graffiti at 37,000 square feet (3,500 m2). Oddee has the exclusive photos: Link
Edward Nino Hernandez of Bogota, Colombia has been named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. The 24-year-old Hernandez is 27 inches (70 cm) tall and weighs only 22 pounds. The previous record holder was He Pingping of China, who was slightly taller than Hernandez and died last March. Hernandez is currently working as a actor in a Colombian film in which he plays a “drug thug.”
Doctors never could explain why Nino is so small, his parents say.
“They never gave us a diagnosis,” his mother, Noemi Hernandez, said during an interview in the family’s sparely furnished apartment in Bosa, a mostly poor district of southern Bogota.
Hernandez, 43, said Nino weighed just 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms) at birth and was 15 inches (38 centimeters) long.
She said doctors at the National University studied him until he was 3, then lost interest. She and her husband, a security guard, lost a daughter who was similarly small in 1992 when she was about to complete a year of life.
The couple’s youngest child, 11-year-old Miguel Angel, stands 37 inches (93 centimeters) tall and has facial features similar to Nino. The other three boys are of normal height and appearance.
“I feel happy because I’m unique,” Nino said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press.
The next time you get spare change, take a closer look at the coins. Who knows, you may get very lucky and land yourself an 1873-CC Liberty Seated Dime (valued at $2.5 million) or the 1913 Liberty Nickel (valued at $6 million):
Though it seems only a fool would pay upwards of six million dollars for a five-cent coin, this particular piece of metal is highly unusual because it was somehow produced without the knowledge of its maker–the U.S. Mint. Not much is known about the actual minting of the 1913 Liberty Head Nickels. Since the mints were to start production of the famous Buffalo Nickels that year, no Liberty Head type nickels were to be minted that year. However, the die for the nickel bearing the year 1913 had already been produced and delivered and it is believed that five specimens were struck at the Philadelphia mint before the die could be destroyed.
One theory says that the coins were struck as advance test pieces while another theory proposes that someone illegally struck the five specimens before the dies were destroyed for fun. In either case, it’s clear that the coins left the Mint in some unauthorized fashion, and didn’t surface until 1920, after the statute of limitations for theft had safely run out. Apparently, U.S. Treasury officials have concluded that they were legally struck, making it possible to own one of the five known examples if you can afford the price tag.
TopTenz has the list of the 10 Most Valuable American Coins: Link
There are surfers and then there’s Mike Parsons. In this video clip, the Australian pro surfer surfed a 64-foot tall wave at Jaws in Hawaii, a world record at the time: Link
"Lullabies of the world" is a project by Russian animator Elizaveta Skvortsova. Sixty (for now, work in progress) short animation pieces, 60 lullabies from different countries and ethnic groups.
“Our movies are made for everybody, but mostly for children. The viewer
will feel as if he is lulled by a loving mother. Every lullaby is
performed in its original language. The plot of the movie is based on
the story told in the lullaby. Visual images reflect the lifestyle and
traditions of each nation”
The original collection with Russian text is here. Ruthenia has commentary in English with a dozen songs to enjoy.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Ruthenian.
Comments Off 
| FEATURED ITEMS FROM THE NEATOSHOP | |
 |
Mustache Bottle Opener |
 |
My Cryptozoological Family - Family Car Stickers |
 |
Zombie Hand Bottle Opener |
View more: New Items &
Best Sellers |
|
