Interesting Facts

The Irish brewers of Guinness are going to stop using fish bladders as part of the filtration process for the first time in their 256-year history.  (Vegans have been campaigning for this ammendment to the traditional brewing process for years.  I can only hope it doesn't change the taste (which was never fishy).)

The world's largest flag is big enough to cover three football pitches. (It measures 1,145 feet by 744 feet, weights 5 tons, and was sewn with 44 miles of thread, breaking the previous Guinness World Record held by Lebanon It took 200 volunteers to roll it out at an airfield in Clinceni, near Bucharest, Romania but it was too heavy to flutter in the wind, so I'm not sure it can be called a flag really.)

To date, the largest bubblegum bubble ever blown was  23-inches in diameter. (The bubble blown by Susan Montgomery Williams of Fresno, California in 1996 holds the Guinness World Record. People have been trying to break her record ever since:- )

We've had the shortest sentence, but what about the longest sentence? Well in literature seemingly it is 469,375 words long. It appears in Nigel Tomm's "The Blah Story". (For many years people regarded the last section of James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, which consists of two sentences to be the longest. The first sentence is 11,281 words long, and the second 12,931 words long. This held the record for the longest sentence until The Rotter's Club was published in 2001, which contains a 13,955-word sentence. There have been other contenders over the years. The Guinness Book of World Records had an entry for what it claimed was the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words. There is also a Polish novel “Gates of Paradise” written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, and published in 1960, with a 40,000 word sentence. And finally, there is a Czech novel that consists of one long sentence...

According to researchers at the University of Wisconsin, a pint of Guinness every day may work as well as a low dose aspirin to prevent heart clots that raise the risk of heart attacks. (Guinness used to use the slogan, "Guinness is Good for You", but were told to stop using it decades ago as there was no medical proof. Now perhaps they could bring it back. Of course we'll all end up alcoholics with beer guts, but at least our hearts will be healthy.)

The Guinness World Records, receives 60,000 applications a year from around the globe to break or set a new record. Not all are accepted as some are too dangerous, not enough of a challenge, too specific to an individual, or unbreakable. Only 4,000 records are published in the book each year. (Interestingly a number of high-profile records are broken on a regular basis. According to Guinness, the most popular include oldest living person, highest grossing film and fastest selling record.)