Wednesday, November 17, 2004

WWVAAS?


What would Victoria and Albert say?

They gave us the term white meat (the word breast supposedly gave Victoria a case of the vapors).

They also wrote the book on public morality.

But privately...

Body art has been around for centuries. The practice of tattooing, painting, branding, modifying and piercing various parts of the body was used by different cultures worldwide as indicators of a person's social, marital, or membership status, as rites of passage, or as aesthetic art forms. Evidence of body art has shown up on a 2,000-year-old Russian mummy with tattoos on her biceps.

Even Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, of the extremely conservative Victorian fame, supposedly sported tattoos (Victoria) and piercings (Albert, the famed penile piercing that is now named after him).

In today's society, body art, the most popular form being piercings and tattoos, is so commonplace that it is no longer stigmatized in societies that did not use body art as a routine practice, such as American culture. LINK


Which brings us to this:





Most pierced : Elaine Davidson, the most pierced woman in the world, shows off some of her 2,520 piercings at the 50th anniversary of the Guiness World Records in London . (AFP/Nicolas Asfouri) LINK

Color me curious...

But yellow.

I'm satisfied looking at Ms. Davidson's photo and reading the current Guiness List of Top Ten Feats:

10. Furthest Eyeball Popper - Kim Goodman of Chicago, Ill., who can pop her eyeballs to a protrusion of 0.43 inches beyond her eye sockets. 1998.

9. Richest Living Person - Microsoft mogul Bill Gates. In 2004, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth at $46.6 billion. Gates' wealth peaked at $92.5 billion in December 1999.

8. Largest Pizza - Norwood Hypermarket, Norwood, South Africa. It measured 122 feet and 8 inches in diameter. 1990.

7. Full Body Ice Contact Endurance - The longest recorded time spent in direct, full-body contact with ice while still surviving, is 1 hour and 8 minutes, set by Wim Hof of the Netherlands in 2004.

6. Highest Shallow Dive - Danny Higginbottom of the United States dove from 29 feet and 4.3 inches into 11.8 inches of water, 2004.

5. Most Lightning Strikes Survived - Virginia park ranger Roy C. Sullivan is the only known human to live through seven separate bolts of lightning, from between 1942 and 1977.

4. Highest Fall Survived Without a Parachute - Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant from Yugoslavia, survived a fall from 33,330 feet when the DC-9 airplane she was traveling in blew up over Czechoslovakia on January 26, 1972. A terrorist bomb was thought to be the cause, and no other passengers survived. Vesna broke both legs and was temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.

3. Most Current Guinness World Records Held - Ashrita Furman of Jamaica, New York, holds 20 official world records, including milk-bottle balancing, lunging, skipping, forward rolling and glass balancing.

2. Tallest Man - Robert Pershing Wadlow of the United States, born in 1918, was 8 feet and 11.1 inches. 1940.

1. Oldest Woman - The oldest fully authenticated age to which any human has ever lived is 122 years and 164 days, by French-born Jeanne-Louise Calment. She died on August 4, 1997. LINK

I had a scathingly brilliant idea for a tattoo 12 years ago, but I'm just too chicken to make an appointment and follow through.

My idea?

Printed neatly (and spelled correctly) on the bottom of the big toe on my right foot:

PLACE
TAG
HERE


Can you think of a better way to have the last laugh?

By the way, I hope that #3 guy has figured out a way to make a living using his many valuable talents.


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