|
|
|
|
One for the Record Book
By Jeremy Skorochid
June 1, 2002
Have you ever wanted to set a new world record, or break an existing one? Thinking up a brand new record could be quite a challenge as pretty much anything imaginable has already been done. The alternative then is breaking an existing record. As long as you can blow 138 soap bubbles in one minute with a tarantula in your mouth, or spit a dead cricket over nine meters this option should be easy, right?
Weather you want to try to break a world record, or you're just into reading about strange and unbelievable feats and phenomena, the Guinness Book of World Records Online is where you should be.
As soon as you log onto www.guinnessworldrecords.com you are greeted with an interesting fact and then with the click of a button you are taken into the site. You have to enter your email address and a screen name. Doing this every time you visit the site is a little annoying, but as it provides access to a whole bunch of very cool and interesting facts and records.
The Guinness website is divided up into several sections. At the top of the page are a lot of different categories. Here you can choose any of the categories and read all the records associated with it. Next is the GWR (Guinness World Records) News section. Each day a new piece of news or news about a recent world record can be found . There is also a section with the most popular records that can be found on the site. The Guinness Video Vault contains several videos of favourite world records.
The interactive section of the site is very entertaining. It contains message boards where anyone can enter into discussion about records they saw on the site. Contained within the interactive section is a game section. This is the most amusing part of the site. You can choose from several games based on previous world records. The games range from eating worms to cramming as many cheerleaders as possible into a car. If you do well enough in one of the games your name is entered into the top 100 scores for that game. No matter how many times I tried, I could never manage to get my name into the top score list.
So do you think you have an idea for a new record or want to try to break an old one? Under Contact Us there is a heading that says, "Break a record". Here you can tell Guinness what record you are going to attempt. You never know if it's good enough maybe you could be featured on their site, in one of their books or on their TV. show.
Personally I can live without the kind of fame garnered by sitting in a tank full of ice cubes for eighty minutes, but others, it appears, cannot. And that makes fascinating reading!
|
|
