Is Guinness Helping or Hurting Humanity

The alcohol is fine.  We love Guinness stout.  I’m concerned about these parents that allow their teenagers to go all out so they can get into… the book, the Guinness World Records, known until 2000 as The Guinness Book of World Records.

Recently there was 17 year old Mike Perham who became the youngest person to sail the globe alone.
Perham made the 24,000 mile trek around the world in his yacht.  His feat was recorded by Guinness people where as American Zac Sunderland who made the same sailing trip a few months earlier didn’t make it.  Apparently, Sunderland had too much help on his trip.  Somehow encountering pirates and getting repairs to his ship disqualified him from the record.

Thanks to Dutch courts, Mike Perham won’t have to worry about being losing his record to a 13 year old girl.  Laura Dekker has the blessing of her parents, but judges have ordered the state child care authorities to take responsibility for Miss Dekker over the next two months while an independent child psychologist assesses her capacity to undertake the risky voyage.  Thankfully, somebody thinks that this is getting out of hand.

Laura Dekker fought the law and the law won

What ever happened to the simple stuff?  Like who’s the tallest, or the shortest?  The book was originally created to settle disputes in bars over random trivia.  Now its this weird collection of records nobody has every heard of like this woman in India who designed the biggest scissors.  I didn’t know we had a pressing need for huge scissors.