Three Guinness World Records You Can Beat at Home While You Wait For Everything to Go Back to Normal

What a year this has been.

We’re approaching what is approximately the 487th consecutive day of March 2020, and by this point in the pandemic, we’ve proven as a species that we are more than willing to set aside our differences, work together, and sacrifice for the greater good. Thanks to our joint efforts, COVID-19 has become nothing more than memory;  the pandemic is behind us, and we’re all out happily tongue-kissing strangers as lockdowns fade into our collective rearview mirrors.

In many parts of the world, we’re currently going through Pandemic Round 3: Genetic Drift as the world plays a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole with a half-dozen COVID-19 “variants of concern”. If you don’t live in a place where you can buy deep-fried butter on a stick, there’s a good chance that you’re currently staring down the barrel of a third, fourth or eighteenth lockdown, depending on where you are. We’ve all spent a lot of time this year hearing that we’re “all in the same boat”, but that’s not strictly true – we’re all in the same water, but some of us are gliding through it on luxury yachts and some of us are desperately clinging to the sides of half-rotted floating whale carcasses.

After more than a year of off-and-on lockdowns, you’re probably running out of ways to entertain yourself within the confines of your own home. I have no doubt that you followed all of my expert advice for having a good time in quarantine, but there are only so many local squirrels you can tame and only so many ghosts willing to chat with you.

Likewise, there are only so many home renovations you can do before you get tempted to play chicken with a load-bearing wall, and there is only so much Netflix you can watch before the company itself starts to worry about your well-being. If you’ve already given yourself a quarantine haircut it’s probably best to just leave that alone until it’s finished growing out, and the only thing you can do with your quarantine sourdough starter is throw a funeral for it because you probably haven’t fed it in eight months. The thought of working on “self-improvement” during the pandemic probably makes you want to scream until both of your lungs fly out of your mouth, but bear with me for a moment, because there’s one form of self-improvement you probably haven’t thought of yet:

Guinness. World. Records.

You probably think of Guinness World Records as those hardcover books with shiny foil covers that you flipped through to learn about the world’s shortest woman and the world’s fattest cat as you sat on the toilet as a child, but the Guinness World Record organization is still around today, diligently cataloguing the strangest and most pointless accomplishments of mankind. Applying to set a world record doesn’t require any money – in fact, it doesn’t really require leaving your house. There are plenty of records you can set from the comfort of your own prison-like home while you wait for the world to return to a state that even resembles normal.

So while the world is still going through something unprecedented, use your free time to do something that’s unprecedented in the world. Something like…

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of enjoying one, a Terry’s Chocolate Orange is a fist-sized, orange-flavoured piece of chocolate that you are not allowed to eat until you have bested it in physical combat. Originating in Great Britain, these oranges pop apart into little sections, like a real orange, once you’ve whacked them against an appropriately hard surface like a countertop, tile floor, or the top of an unsuspecting sibling’s head.  It’s the perfect dessert for someone who likes the idea of sweets, but is unable to get any real satisfaction from their food until they’ve felt the primal thrill of bashing the life from it against a rock. They are the treat of choice for people who think the sweetest taste is violence.

Under normal circumstances, sitting alone in the dark and shoving an entire chocolate orange into your mouth is a great way to signal to your family that you’ve lost control of your life and it’s time for them to get you some help. But if you manage to shove that orange into your mouth fast enough with the right person looking on, you’ll have done a lot more than just stress-eaten a stale piece of months-old chocolate from your Christmas stocking – you’ll have set a new Guinness world record.

The current world record for fastest time to eat a Terry’s Chocolate Orange is held by Leah Shutkever of the United Kingdom, who managed to scarf down the entire citrus confection in just 57.14 seconds earlier this year, shattering her own previous world record by nearly 10 seconds. Shutkever actually holds a total of 21 Guinness World Records for speed-eating, including fastest time to eat a cucumber (27.16 seconds), most sausages swallowed in one minute (12) and fastest time to drink a litre of gravy (64.9 seconds).

So when you’re ready to make history, get yourself some Terry’s Oranges from the seasonal bargain bin, and find a surface in your home that’s hard enough to deliver blunt-force trauma to a chocolate fruit. The rules for this record state that you have to begin with a boxed chocolate orange, rip it from its plastic packaging, and shatter it on the table in front of you like you like it’s your childhood dreams of being an astronaut. You also need to remove all of the chocolate wedges from the foil wrapper before you eat them; biting straight into the tinfoil and gnawing on it until all of your dental fillings catch on fire is against both the Guinness regulations and the medically advisable limits of the human body.

Will you realistically be able to beat the best time of a competitive speed-eater who has been winning eating competitions for most of her adult life? No. But will you briefly enjoy the gleeful sensation of cramming fistfuls of chocolate in your mouth before you’re eventually rushed to the ER with a life-threatening intestinal blockage? Almost definitely.

But what about those of you who are unable to cram a tennis-ball-sized piece of chocolate into your mouth due to dietary restrictions, or a hatred of fun and whimsy rarely seen outside a Charles Dickens novel? In that case, you can aim for…

Do you own a toothbrush? Can you find a basketball somewhere? Have you spent so much time trapped indoors staring at the wall that you’re ready to start hallucinating strange women crawling around in your wallpaper in a fit of Charlotte Perkins Gilman-style boredom-induced madness? Yes?

Then I have just the thing for you.

If you – like me – always wanted to be recognized for some sort of athletic prowess but were held back by the cold, hard realities of being a butternut-squash-shaped child who got most of their school gym credits from just showing up with the right type of pants on, fear not – there is still a chance for you to find your place in the annals of basketball history. A career in professional basketball is out of the question, as that’s simply not in the cards for a person who can’t reach the top of the fridge and physically resembles a decorative gourd, but with a little bit of patience and a genuinely reckless amount of spare time, you can make your athletic mark by seeing how long you can spin a basketball on top of a toothbrush.

The current champion of spinning sports equipment atop an oral hygiene apparatus is Sandeep Singh Kaila of Canada, who managed to keep that bad boy spinning for a record-setting 68.15 seconds. Singh Kaila has held the world record on three separate occasions, because apparently the world of combined basketball-dentistry is more competitive than any of us could have imagined.

Before you pick up a toothbrush and set out to win hearts, world records and a sweet Oral-B sponsorship, you should know that there’s more to this record than you might expect from the description. For one thing, it’s not enough to simply spin a basketball on a toothbrush that you’re holding in your hand – any newborn with a steady hand and a sufficiently strong grip reflex can pull that off. No, to make your official mark in rapidly rotating history, you need to start spinning the ball on the toothbrush, then place the toothbrush in your mouth – preferably while confused but supportive members of your community look on – and clench the brush in your teeth as the ball twirls madly above you like it’s trying to set a record of its own.

But maybe spinning a basketball on top of a toothbrush just isn’t for you. Maybe you’re like me, so completely and utterly lacking in both physical coordination and spatial reasoning that you struggle to ride an escalator without ending up on the evening news. In that case, you could aim for a world record that has less to do with talent, and more to do with available storage space. Like…

If there’s one important lesson we’ve all learned during the pandemic, it’s that there’s no need, want, or deep unfilled emotional void that cannot be fixed with a few impulsive Amazon orders.

Like so many other people, I have survived this pandemic through the pseudo-magic of online orders. Being able to get essentials like groceries dropped off right at my door has allowed me to limit my contact with the public and get through multiple 14-day isolations without having to resort to hunting neighbourhood pigeons from my balcony; it’s also allowed me to burden several other human beings with the terrible knowledge of how much feta cheese I consume in an average week.

But it turns out that online shopping is good for more than just filling the deep voids of sadness inside you with plastic cat-ear headphones and novelty inflatable party sheep. If your body simply won’t allow you to balance sporting equipment on your toothbrush or choke down enormous quantities of food like some sort of starving pelican, fear not – it turns out that setting a Guinness World Record can be as simple as clicking “add to cart”. You don’t actually need to have any sort of talent to gain recognition – you just need disposable income and a very large house.

There’s an entire section of the Guinness World Records dedicated to people who have managed to own large collections of unusual items. Fill your basement with thousands of random items you picked up at yard sales, and you’ve got a hoarding problem. Fill your basement with thousands of the same item that you picked up at yard sales, and you might just have a world record on your hands.

Which brings us to rubber ducks.

Currently, the world’s largest collection of rubber ducks belongs to Charlotte Lee of the United States, who was verified by Guinness World Records in 2011 as owning exactly 5,631 rubber replicas of one of the world’s most bad-tempered birds. Lee keeps all of her ducks in glass cases in a dedicated “duck room”, which is presumably useful for both keeping track of her enormous collection and scaring the absolute shit out of anyone who breaks into her home.

How much money would you have to spend to unseat the reigning Queen of Quackers? The short answer is, about as much as you’d spend to buy a well-used sedan.

Amazon sells a 20-pack of small rubber ducks with horrifyingly long eyelashes for $6.99. To ascend to duck-hoarding glory, you would need to purchase 282 packs of ducks, at a total cost of $1,971.18, plus shipping and the costs of renting a larger apartment with a dedicated duck room so you don’t have to have an ankle-high layer of bath toys blanketing your entire living space.

Is it a practical use of your money? No. Will it be worth it? Probably not. But will you get a shiny certificate to hang on your wall? Almost definitely.

It’s been a weird year. A stressful year. For so many people, an absolutely terrible year. And since so many people are apparently still determined to carry on with their regular routine of holding unmasked stranger-licking contests in unventilated indoor spaces, for some of us it still feels like there’s no end in sight right now.

But as you sit in your living room waiting for normal life to return, looking for something to keep yourself occupied, just remember: this has been a weird year. And it’s not too late to make it even weirder.