My God, it's here: Guinness World Records 2000. Not just a book. An arbiter. The Last Word. The be-all and end-all. The Alpha and the Omega. No bar or dorm should be without one.
This book doesn't just catch the eye. It blinds the eye. You could bounce sunlight off its high-gloss silver cover. The Day-Glo orange inside is straight from a Peter Max poster. The first photo is of Austin Powers. How deliciously shagadelic!
"That is pure merchandising, to be honest," says Mark C. Young, CEO of Guinness Media Inc., USA and publisher of Guinness World Records 2000. "You have to be as topical as you can with the photographs."
The book is aimed at teen-agers, the shock troops of pop culture. A baby boomer might have trouble with the design, might even have to squint through bifocals. But for someone raised on video games and MTV this book is so of the moment.
To call it an almanac would be too dry. This gaudy, garish grab-bag is more than just facts and figures. It is a compendium of our time. Bury it in a time capsule so people 500 years from now will know what fascinated us in the waning days of the 20th century.
Now, there are shortcomings. This book doesn't name the best actress, the best basketball player or the prettiest woman. Those subjective debates have no end. "Guiness World Records 2000" is made for the quantifiable record.
"I think what makes it unique and its big attraction is people look at it and say, `Maybe I can balance nine golf balls on my chin,' or whatever," says Young, who fields thousands of inquiries from people seeking the Guinness imprimatur.
Guinness World Records 2000 answers questions of distance, speed, the number of people in the world's longest conga line. (Answer: 119,989 people during a festival in Miami.) Nearly 300 pages of the interesting, the mundane and the bizarre are here. Some things make you wonder: How does a person figure that out?
Jim Chichon discovered his talent -- and the word is used in its loosest form -- as a child. His tear ducts work in two directions. This means he can shoot a jet stream of milk from his eyes. Last year on "Guinness World Records: Primetime" he squirted milk 6 feet 7 1/2 inches. A new world record! Pause and consider that feat. It is one of thousands in this collection.
