If you wanna be a record break-er! Oo-oo-ooooh.
Hello there :)
Welcome to issue sixty eight of Manufacturing Serendipity, a loosely connected, somewhat rambling collection of the unexpected things I’ve recently encountered.
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Part I: Things I’ve Discovered Online
This fortnight, I came across this delightful long read by Imogen West-Knights about the Guinness Book of Records. For the uninitiated, the Guinness Book of Records is a British reference book published annually, listing world records both of human achievements and the extremes of the natural world.
As a child of the eighties in the UK, this thing was HUGE. Loads of children would get the book for Christmas and spend hours poring over the pages looking for a record to break. There was a TV show called Record Breakers on the BBC where the climax of each show would be a world record attempt in the studio. Breaking a Guinness World Record was a life goal for just about every child I knew.
And yet, I don’t think any of us ever thought to question how the Guinness Book of Records came about, or why an entity which so consumed children was owned by a brewery.
Well, friends, this article has the answer:
“It began with an argument in 1951. The managing director of Guinness, Sir Hugh Beaver, was on a hunting trip in Wexford, and his party couldn’t agree which game bird was fastest. This dispute seems to have stuck with Beaver. Thinking back on the incident three years later, it occurred to him that these kinds of arguments must happen all the time and there would surely be an appetite for argument-settling answers in the form of a compendious book that catalogued world records, as well as the extremes of the natural world. This volume could be distributed to pubs that sold Guinness. It could also be sold in shops, and provide another revenue stream for the brewery.
For help, Beaver turned to identical twins named Ross and Norris McWhirter who ran a fact and figure-provision service for the newspapers of Fleet Street. The first edition, published in 1955, was shaped by the brothers’ eclectic personal taste and sense of propriety. Norris hated popular music because he thought it was “ephemeral”, and so limited the number of records in this field. No records to do with sex were included, because the twins thought, as Norris put it in 1954, “You can get those records out of medical literature, but ours is the kind of book maiden aunts give to their nieces.”
Instead, readers could discover the highest lifetime milk yield of a cow (325,130lb, held by a British friesian called Manningford Faith Jan Graceful). The foreword to the first edition read: “Guinness, in producing this book, hopes that it may assist in resolving many such disputes, and may, we hope, turn heat into light.”
It may surprise you to learn that Guinness World Records endures as an organisation to this day, as Imogen West-Knights notes:
“Today, anyone arguing with their friends about the fastest game bird (the red-breasted merganser, at 130 km/h) would, of course, consult the internet, not the latest edition of Guinness World Records. There is a decidedly analogue feel to the company – the objects on display at the office, the physicality of the book itself. But when I sat down to chat with Glenday in the GWR headquarters, in a meeting room named after Elaine Davidson, the world’s most-pierced woman, he made the bold claim that the age of information on demand has not killed the need for the book. In fact, he continued still more boldly, it may have actually helped them.
He positioned GWR as a kind of factchecker of the absurd. GWR liaises closely with experts in fields as diverse as surfing, architecture, extreme weather, robotics and jigsaw puzzles. Glenday argues that the book serves as an authority in a way that the great wash of information on the internet can’t: they know what the records are because they’ve measured them, taken video evidence and can point to the guidelines they checked the record against. “You might as well just shout a question into the street and see what answer you get back: that’s what the internet is like,” Glenday said, sounding a little like someone who had time-travelled from 1995 to speak to me about a thing called the internet.”
I get the sense that Imogen West-Knights doesn’t quite buy this, and neither do I. She goes on to say:
“There are, I posit, four types of Guinness world records.
Type one: records broken without being record-breaking attempts. The most words in a hit single (Rap God by Eminem at 1,560); the most venomous viper (the saw-scaled viper Echis carinatus).
Type two: sporting achievements. The fastest boxing knockout (4 seconds), the longest tennis match (11hr 5min) and so on.
Type three are the ones that stick in our memories from childhood: records that seem to exist purely in order to be records. The largest toast mosaic (189.59 sq metres), fastest time to roll an orange one mile with your nose (22min 41sec), and perhaps the most iconic of all, longest fingernails (42ft 10.4in).
And then there is the fourth kind: marketing stunts. In 2020, for instance, Bush’s Beans set the record for largest layered dip (493kg and 70 layers) to “celebrate the Super Bowl”. Two years earlier, Moontower Pizza Bar in Burleson, Texas created the world’s largest commercially available pizza at 1.98 sq metres, retailing at $299.95, plus tax.
For some observers, the existence of this last category is a sad reflection of how far the company has fallen. “They’ve lost the intellectual integrity that the twins had,” Norris’s son, Alasdair McWhirter, told me. “For them, it was a knowledge-based quest, and they had tremendous enthusiasm for that. Whereas now everything is done to make money.” Since 1997, when Guinness merged with Grand Metropolitan, another conglomerate, and formed Diageo, GWR has had to operate as a self-supporting business rather than the novelty arm of a beer company. (GWR is now owned by the Canadian conglomerate the Jim Pattison Group.)
These days, GWR Consultancy, which was introduced in 2009 and offers adjudication services to customers for a fee, accounts for half of the company’s revenue. Brands looking to break a record as part of a publicity campaign cannot exactly buy their way into the book, but a fee starting at £11,000 gets them the services of a GWR consultant, who can help them brainstorm which record the company could attempt for most viral PR, and an official adjudicator for their attempt.
In 2022, Mastercard got a bunch of footballers to break the record for the highest-altitude game of football on a parabolic flight: 20,230 ft, played in zero-gravity conditions on a specially outfitted aircraft. Perhaps slightly less impressively, in 2021, Currys created the world’s largest washing machine pyramid (44ft 7in) in a car park in Lancashire. And like any business, GWR itself needs to magic up some publicity every so often. Announcements pegged to buzzy news events, like Elon Musk now holding the record for “largest amount of money lost by one person”, are astonishingly potent acts of self-promotion, guaranteeing that the words “Guinness World Records” will appear across the world’s most famous media brands from Sky News to CBS to the Hindustan Times to the Guardian.
I asked Glenday what he thought of complaints that the organisation had changed for the worse: more money, less soul. “We’ve appended that corporate side to the business, rather than replaced anything,” he said. “It’s that old, ‘nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’ thing.” Besides, he added, most of these records-as-marketing-stunts don’t make it into the book.”
Have they sold out? On the one hand I feel like the organisation is just doing what it has to do to survive, and yet, on the other, I can’t help but agree with Imogen West-Knights:
“… the company that publishes the book, also called Guinness World Records, is not the same as when I held my first annual, the green and silver 2002 edition. Sales of the book have declined in recent times, and the company has had to find new ways to make money – not all of which have met with the approval of the GWR old guard. When I spoke to Anna Nicholas, who worked as the head of PR for the book in the 80s and 90s, she lamented how things had changed: records are now more sensationalist, she said, to meet the demand of an audience that can see extraordinary things whenever they like on social media. “Guinness seemed to have had no issues with shamelessly and unapologetically selling out its devoted audience,” claimed one once-ardent fan in a 2020 blogpost.
It is strange to think of Guinness World Records – a business named after a beer company, which catalogues humanity’s most batshit endeavours – as the kind of entity that could sell out. At first glance, it seems like accusing Alton Towers or Pizza Express of selling out. But the deeper I delved into the world of record breaking, the more sense it made. In spite of its absurdity, or maybe because of it, record breaking is a reflection of our deepest interests and desires. Look deeply enough at a man attempting to break the record for most spoons on a human body, or the woman seeking to become the oldest salsa dancer in the world, and you can find yourself starting to believe that you’re peering into humanity’s soul.”
I’d strongly encourage you to check out the full article — The Strange Survival of Guinness World Records.
If you need me, I’ll be looking for a soft World Record I might be able to break.
Moar serendipitous finds:
Everything and Nothing - the Barbie movie, Lilith, Eve, and all our gendered hopes and expectations
I’ve not seen the Barbie movie yet, (mainly because I have an aversion to watching films in the cinema — for me, hell really is other people), nevertheless, I really loved this article, and this in particular, resonated:
“There have been many essays and articles and opinions about Barbie this summer. Barbie is feminist. Barbie is not feminist enough. Barbie is ruining women. Barbie is ruining capitalism. Barbie is saying something important. Barbie isn’t saying enough. Barbie is too woke. Barbie is making fun of the wokes. Barbie. Barbie. Barbie.
Barbie is the perfectly imperfect vessel of our rage and our fears, so often destroyed by children in play. That plasticine locus of our anxieties and dreams. Barbie can’t save us. But also Barbie can’t destroy us. She contains nothing. She contains everything.”
See also: The Complicated Legacy of Barbie in Art
“Long before Greta Gerwig’s movie, visual artists were incorporating, critiquing, and reimagining the doll to question gender roles, body expectations, and double standards surrounding female sexuality — and Mattel didn’t always approve.”
We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television
Parents are the most common abortion patients yet storylines about the medical choice almost always revolve around single teens:
“One of the main ways that people learn about information and experiences is through television and film, particularly when it comes to sex and healthcare, given that we don’t have a nationwide comprehensive sexual health education program,” says Renee Bracey Sherman, executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to increasing the representation and visibility of people who have abortions.
“The majority of people who have abortions are already parenting, but on television and film, it's nearly always someone young, white, and wealthy who is trying to avoid parenting. But that’s a very small minority of people who have abortions. This fails those of us who have abortions because it doesn’t allow for audiences to stretch their imaginations, empathize with our fictionalized experiences, and learn something outside of the same stereotypical narrative.
A December 2020 study about abortion representation onscreen, published by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), shows an overall decrease in abortion plotlines on television.
In 2019, 43 television shows featured an abortion storyline. In 2020, only 31 shows featured a character who underwent the procedure. In film, on the other hand, there was a large increase in the number of abortion depictions: 12 in 2020, compared to just three in 2019.
Still, the significant increase in depictions of abortion in films has done nothing to remedy the discrepancies between the fictional characters who have abortions and real patients who seek out the services. In 2020, of the characters who did have abortions on film, 73 percent were white, one-third were teenagers, and not a single one was a parent. In television, only one abortion “storyline” featured someone who was a parent at the time of their abortion—and it wasn’t even a “character” but rather an actual person featured in the MTV reality show, Teen Mom 2. ”
Water Log, by Amanda Kate Richards
“… thinking about the water-logged heroine at the heart of the story, humiliated and anxiety-ridden with her swimsuit wedged all the way up her ass. It’s not her pain that tickles me — of course not. It’s the fact that despite all of the discomfort she’ll feel over the summers, all of the shame and anxiety and judgment she’ll absorb from herself and the people around her, she somehow never stops jumping into the water like she’s entitled to be there, exposed and imperfect and free. Her time in the water will never be graceful, there’s always some form of muck to avoid, and depending on her level of enthusiasm, sometimes it ends up up hurting a little. But for all those early summers, she never stopped hurling her impressive mass into the brine, surfacing with a sputter and a cough without a fuck to give.”
When illness or death leave craft projects unfinished, these strangers step in to help
This is just wonderful.
Loose Ends (the brainchild of two long-time friends and knitters, Masey Kaplan and Jen Simonic), is a program that matches volunteer knitters, quilters and other crafters with projects left unfinished when a person dies or becomes disabled.
‘On reflection, it’s very uncool’: readers’ scrapbooks of pop fandom
With the Wham! documentary showcasing Andrew Ridgeley’s mum’s scrapbooks, Guardian readers share their own shrines to Roxy Music, Metallica, David Bowie and more:
“In 1980 I was 18 years old and had just graduated from high school. That summer before going off to college, my friends and I saw nearly every rock band that came through LA. I kept a collage of most of the ticket stubs. It is fun to look through them now because I had forgotten how many bands I saw live back then. Van Halen, Queen, Elton John, the Who – all the big name performances. It’s also interesting to see that those tickets cost in the range of USD $10-20. When I think back to those times, I was making minimum wage ($3.10) at the supermarket and could manage a ticket to a big show for less than a day’s labour. It’s surprising to compare to today.” Susan Lund, 61, Oregon, US
Part II: Books I’m Reading Right Now
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin. This novella was written in protest of America’s war on Indochina. When a world of peaceful beings are invaded by resource-hungry humans, they are forced to retaliate. They abandon their strictures against violence, and in doing so, endanger the foundations of their own society. Here, Le Guin explores exploitation, oppression, and the necessarily high cost of resistance.
The Guest by Emma Cline. A study in precarity and excess, this tense, tightly-written novel follows a week in the life of 22-year-old sex worker Alex. When Simon (a rich man, 30-years her senior) invites Alex to spend August at his beachside summer house, she sees an opportunity to escape her precarious existence in the city, and sets about making herself a permanent part of his luxurious life. However, two weeks in, she makes a fatal mistake, and Simon buys her a one-way ticket back home. Rather than return to the city, Alex attempts to grift her way through the week, attaching herself to various groups and individuals, hoping to reconcile with Simon at his Labor Day party.
Part III: Things I’ve Been Watching
Deadloch, Amazon Prime. This serial killer police procedural is so unlike anything I’ve ever watched, and it’s an absolute delight. Set in a small Tasmanian town, this darkly comic, feminist, twisty and twisted series written by Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan is well worth your time.
Part IV: What I’ve been up to…
I had a wonderful week away with my Dad doing a folk music course; completed Tania Hershman’s online poetry course; and have done an unreasonably large amount of laundry.
What’s next?
I’m (hopefully!) heading off for two weeks to do a whole lot of nothing on a beach.
That’s all from me for now :)
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As I’m (hopefully) heading off on my hols, Manufacturing Serendipity will be on hiatus — you can expect the next issue to land in your inboxes on August 24th.
Big love,
Hannah x
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