World records for extreme yoga moves. Youth evidently confers a big advantage in being able to do this. It would be even more impressive to see this done by someone over 60.
This move looks like its straight out of The Exorcist.
When the 35-pound contraption, made of two bicycle wheels, was ready, Williams took it to the roof of a 21-story building at MIT. He anchored the cord to an I beam, hooked up a motor which jerked the line rhythmically like a finger and let the yo-yo drop. The wheels, revolving up to 1,000 times a minute, reached a speed of more than 80 miles an hour. Then, the yo-yo climbed more than two-thirds of the way back up the 400-pound-test-weight nylon cord...
Williams was offered $5,000 for the yo-yo by a Las Vegas casino (“I feel sensitive about selling it”), and laughed off suggestions that he drop it from Canada’s tallest structure, Toronto’s 1,800-foot Canadian National Tower. “There were all sorts of radio and TV offers,” he says wearily.
Arizona Daily Star - Feb 5, 1974
The record no longer stands. According to Guinness, the current record holder is Beth Johnson who, in 2012, successfully tested a yo-yo measuring 11 ft 10.75 in diameter and weighing 4,620 lb.
Ernie Hausen, of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, had one great talent. He could pick the feathers off of chickens really, really fast.
When he started picking chickens, in 1904, it took him a full half hour to defeather one. Since he was paid 5 cents per chicken, he wasn't making much money. Over the years he sped up. By 1922, he won a Chicken Picking Championship by picking his chicken clean in 6 seconds. He topped this in 1939, upping his time to 3.5 seconds. As far as I know, that record stands to this day.
His technique:
Hausen dips the chickens in 164-degree water, quickly runs his large, powerful fingers across the wings, from the tips inward; does the same with the legs, finally peels the feathers from the back and breast. Suddenly the bird is as bare as a billiard ball.... He tells of picking 1,472 birds in 7 hours and 45 minutes in a contest. -Ithaca Journal - Feb 7, 1946
As far as I can tell, the world record for the most voluntary vasectomies performed in a single day (and at a single event) was set on December 5, 1987 in Bangkok, when 1214 men received the operation. This beat the previous record of 1202, set in 1983.
Interesting how the article specifies these were voluntary vasectomies. Is there a separate record for involuntary ones?
Anyway, 'most vasectomies' appears to be a category that Guinness doesn't bother to cover.
Since Marvel films have, for some reason, inspired these super-fan stunts, I speculated that the then imminent release of Avengers: Endgame would lead to a new attempt at a record. And sure enough, Agustin Alanis of Riverview, Florida is going for it. I believe he's already set a new record, but since Avengers: Endgame is still in theaters, he's still watching it, and is shooting for a total of 200 viewings. This is especially impressive since the movie clocks in at around 3 hours.
Odd Trivia: The shortest scheduled commercial flight in the world takes a mere 90 seconds. It's the Loganair flight between the Scottish islands of Westray and Papa Westray. From cntraveler.com:
In good conditions, Loganair’s 1.7-mile jaunt between the Scottish islands of Westray (population: 640) and Papa Westray (population: 72) in the Orkneys, off the north coast of the mainland, can take under a minute. Headwinds can make the flight a whopping two-and-a-half minutes. Retired police officer Graham Maben is one of the route’s regulars; the 70-year-old Orkney native now runs a tour business on the islands, and estimates he has taken the flight around 40 times over the past 15 years.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.