Every day he is plied with aerograms, express telegrams, faxes, e-mails and voice mails and personal telephone calls from jerks and crackpots around the globe purporting to have performed a most outlandish (and landish) feat and on the basis of that dubious (and ersatz) claim, try brazenly to gatecrash into the hallowed pages of the Guinness.
So much so, he was recently forced to issue a strongly worded statement which read, in part, “People are welcome to do what they want. They might end up in the hospital,but not in the Guinness Book.”
That grim and unequivocal ‘diktat’ ought to put off that quaint, oddball character like that Aussie from Down Under who claimed to have walked a kilometre on his hands. To save shoe leather, perhaps!
But Donna Griffiths, a 14-year-old schoolgirl from Pershore, England has willy nilly made it to the Guinness by sneezing non-stop for four hours, 59 minutes and 49 seconds, beating the old record, also held by another English school girl Patricia Reay.
Psst... do the British know something about sneezing that we don’t?
Wisened old Uncle Sam routinely spends 10,000 million dollars a year on scientific research in areas ranging from high energy particle physics to death ray weapons to the sex-life of the Mediterranean fruit-fly. Dr David Metz of Brooklyn is among the many who has benefited from his largesse. Over the past five years, he has conducted an elaborate research into sneezing and he has just published his epoch-making discoveries in two voluminous tomes.
One would think that so elementary a reflex like sneezing would come spontaneously. Not so, says Dr Metz. A number of people cause themselves serious internal injuries by performing this simple act the wrong way round. So, there is a right way and a wrong way of sneezing. How little one knew how the other half of the world of sneezers lived.
A number of sneezers cause the force of the sneeze to be expended outwards, leading to migraine headaches and bleeding noses.
The ‘polite’ sneezers ‘smother’ the sneeze or worse still, ‘abort’ it. Either technique leads to a pressure within the cerebrum, causing bleeding in the middle ear and sinusitis.
The ‘fire-alarm’ sneezer scares the living daylights out of everyone within a 10 metre radius with a blast reminiscent of the nasal eruption method accompanied by the splitting vocal accompaniment. You will meet this kind of a sneezer during a chamber music performance.
The ever-helpful Dr Metz offers useful pointers on the safe way to sneeze. All one has to do is to allow the force of the sneeze to be expended orally. To block the spray effect, cup the hands at the mouth. Elementary, my dear Watson. Anything else you wanted to know about sneezing?