Complex Numbers

Epiphany

I came to a sudden realization of Ultimate Truth the other day.

Here's the background: I heard that Guinness World Records was going to vastly reduce the scope of its print edition, relying more on its online edition. While I can't find any confirmation of that, it doesn't really matter for the purposes of my point here. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, by the way, is totally doing that - eliminating its tree-murdering edition entirely so it can focus on its website and on fending off the attacks of its main competitor, Wikipedia).

I vaguely remembered being presented with a copy of what was then known as the Guinness Book of World Records as a kid, so I went on Wikipedia to get some background on the famous reference book (Britannica is a paysite, you see).

There, I discovered that (according to Wikipedia, anyway), GBWR, now known simply as Guinness World Records, got its start in the 1950s when some dude from the Guinness brewery in Ireland needed to settle a drunken pub argument about which bird was faster. No, it wasn't about African vs. European swallows. Realizing that people needed something to settle drunken bar arguments, he conceived of a book that would list superlatives in hundreds of categories: tallest, heaviest, shortest, fastest, most, whatever.

I guess if you couldn't find the answer to your drunken pub argument in GBWR, you could always hit your opponent over the head with a copy, thus settling the argument once and for all. This option is not available with the online edition, unless you want to pay $400 for a new iPad.

Anyway, over the years, it became disassociated from the actual Guinness brewery, though it retained the name. And while early versions had categories like "most beer consumed in an hour," such categories were expurgated from later versions, because the publisher might get sued when someone died of alcohol poisoning while trying to break that record.

So, to sum up, a book that had its origins in a drunken pub argument (including someone who worked at a brewery) can, for legal reasons, no longer contain a "drinking" category.

Resulting epiphany: Life is cocked-up on a very fundamental level.