World records: Does eating bicycles put you in the same league as Lincoln?

In the annals of human achievement, we think of things like Edison’s light bulb, the Wright brothers on Kitty Hawk with their glider, Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio cure.
We don’t instantly think of the French guy, Michel Lotito, who since 1966 has eaten 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, seven TV sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a Cessna aircraft and a computer.
He Pingping, the late two and a half foot tall Mongolian, also doesn’t come to mind.
Nor does Josh Anderson of New Zealand, who can eat a 12 inch pizza in 1 minute and 45.37 seconds.
And yet all of them will go down in the history books as Guinness World Record holders: the man with the strangest diet, the smallest man and fastest time to eat a pizza.
So, should they be honored in the same regard as the great inventors, politicians and creative minds of history?
Some might say they are frivolous wastes of time.
I say record-breakers should be right alongside the Lincolns and Henry Fords in the history books.
What got me thinking about this? Two record-busting-related stories were in the News Advocate recently, both having to do with largeness: a huge trout and a huge man.
On July 16, Roger Hellen, of Franksville, Wis., caught a 41-pound 8-ounce brown trout in Lake Michigan near Racine. It may tie or beat the trout Rockford resident Tom Healy caught in the Big Manistee last September for the world record.
I hope it doesn’t, but it might.
There was also a feature story about Robert Wadlow, the eight-foot, eleven-inch gentle giant who passed away in Manistee during the 1940 Forest Festival, when one of the leg braces he was wearing gave him a blister. Wadlow died from a subsequent infection.
These record setters, and all record setters, should be celebrated.
They may not fundamentally change the way we live our life, but having records means we’re continuing to measure our progress here on earth.
And nothing says progress like getting 900 piercings.
Or lifting a 160 pound 15 ounce weight with your ear.
People are interested in the extremes. We spend most of our time with people who look similar to us, have similar talents and capabilities as us. We are average sized and take our time eating our pizza. A shopping cart is definitely not on our dinner plate. Nor is a 40 plus pound brown trout.
Records are the stuff of imagination. It’s the stuff of dreams.
When we stop being dazzled and titillated by strange feats and unusual human body parts, or anything that strives to set a record, it means we’ve lost our ability to dream, to think in new ways, to not test the boundaries of reality as we know them, to know that our civilization has reached its limit.
It means our minds have gone stale.
I used to love the “Guinness Book of World Records” when I was a kid. I think I still have a well-worn version from around 1987, when I was 10 years old.
I was way into the fellow with the really long fingernails that curled around his hand and the twin fat guys on motorcycles. I’m glad to see the series continues.
But what’s the sure sign our civilization isn’t in decline? That we’re still at the pinnacle of achievement?
It has to do with another record.
What holds the record as the most stolen book from the library?
Well, the “Guinness Book of World Records,” of course.