Wild world records

Last week, the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers volleyball team set the world record for highest attendance at a women’s sporting event, EVER. The world was watching as they packed 92,003 people into their stadium. This is a college volleyball team, folks. Forget the WNBA!

Yes, those players and coaches love their hometown crowds. New Rockford-Sheyenne and Carrington hosted their respective season home openers for volleyball this past week, and both put on a good show and defeated top-ranked teams. Carrington took down Thompson, the #2 ranked team in the state, in five sets. New Rockford-Sheyenne won a five-set battle against Medina/Pingree-Buchanan, who recently beat last year’s state tournament runner-up, Linton-HMB, at a pre-season tournament. It’s shaping up to be a great season!

I also heard this past week that Beyoncé now holds the record for highest grossing tour by a female artist, as she generated more than $295 million from 33 shows, according to box office data. The record was previously held by the incomparable Madonna. Taylor Swift is on track to dethrone her, as the numbers from her ERAS world tour haven’t been released yet. That is crazy!

This was the week for records, so I set out to find some more wild world records that relate to current events.

Kyrie Dauenhauer, our lady of many talents at the Transcript office, delivered her second child yesterday. Congratulations to Kyrie and Jesse on the birth of their beautiful daughter, Myleigh!

My husband has twin brothers, and we’ve all heard of Jon and Kate Plus 8, the couple who had sextuplets in 2004. Multiple births are more common today, due to fertility treatments and modern medicine.

Did you know that one woman delivered nine children at one time? Halima Cisse (Mali) gave birth to the nonuplets in the Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca, Morocco, in 2021. All nine of them survived, giving Cisse the world record for the most babies from a single birth to survive.

My oldest daughter wants to be a tattoo artist. Right now she’s finishing up her small business degree, but she did recently sit for three tattoos in one day. But that’s nothing in the tattoo world, apparently. The world record for the longest tattoo session was broken just last year, in Italy. Tattoo artist Giovanni Vassallo spent 61 hours and 37 minutes tattooing multiple people.

I like thunderstorms. The ones with lightning, thunder and rain. I’ll sit in my house and stare out the window watching the light show. We’ve only had a few this summer, but the storm we had Sunday night made up for it. The lightning was gnarly, and we got some much-needed rain in our area.

I remember being told when I was a kid that I had to be careful during thunderstorms to make sure I didn’t get hit by lightning coming in the window. Since a single lightning strike is made up of several hundred million volts, I can’t imagine what it would be like. Yet, there is one man who was struck seven times … and survived them all.

Ex-park ranger Roy C. Sullivan of Virginia was known as the “human lightning conductor.”

His attraction for lightning began in 1942 when he lost his big toe nail to lightning. He lost his eyebrows in 1969, seared his left shoulder in July 1970 and lightning set his hair on fire in April 1972. He lost his hair again the next year, in August 1973, and had his legs seared by the fifth jolt. In June 1976 his ankle was injured, and he sustained chest and stomach burns from the seventh and final strike in 1977. After all that, he died by suicide in September 1983.

My son plays video games … a lot. I’ve written about his e-sports team in this space a bit. Although his gaming is mostly done on PC rather than consoles, even he’d be impressed by this world record.

Another man from Virginia, Antonio Monteiro, has 20,139 games in his home in Richmond. He has a wide variety of games for consoles from second to eighth generation. It took eight days to count them all! The record was verified in 2019.

When I was looking for content for this week’s editorial page, I came across a column written by Michael Reagan. He wrote about how there are many politicians in Congress who are “too old” to do their job. It’s a bi-partisan problem, Reagan said. He referenced both the recent freeze-ups by Mitch McConnell and President Joe Biden’s cognitive issues, among others.

“They never say, ‘You know what? I’m a million years old and my brain is like a two-year-old’s. After six decades in office, I realize it’s time for me to let someone under 85 do my job. So for the good of the country, I resign.’

“Instead, they keep running for office – and we keep electing them,” Reagan laments.

While I agree that there does come a time when every man and woman has to decide to retire, I also know that some people are not so quick to let their careers go.

That’s why this next world record caught my eye. Sumiko Iwamura of Japan is the oldest professional club DJ in the world. By day she works in the kitchen of her Chinese restaurant, then rocks the floor from her DJ booth at night. DJ Sumirock, as she’s known on the club scene, was 83 years and 118 days old when she set the Guiness World Record in 2018. She is now 88 years old, and you can find her on Instagram!

With summer nearly over (we have until Sept. 20, folks!), most of us are getting in as many barbecues as we can before the weather changes. But our backyard barbecues pale in comparison to this one: On April 13, 2008, an impressive 26,455 lbs. of beef was cooked in a 1,500-meter-long broiler during “The World’s Biggest Barbecue” event in Brazil. Sounds like quite the feast.

I even looked for world records set by North Dakotans, and it was no surprise that we win with the sculptures. The W’eel Turtle in Dunseith, made from tires, holds the record for the largest man-made turtle. There’s also the world’s largest buffalo, or bison, in Jamestown, and Salem Sue the Holstein cow by New Salem and several other record-holding sculptures standing tall on the prairie.

The town of Aneta holds the distinction of having the world’s largest turkey barbecue. Held each year in June, they prepare more than 300 turkeys and 900 lbs of potato salad for the event and need six serving lines to make sure people get served in a timely manner. Sounds delish!