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Musings from Moyieboy ...
Bigger is a better propaganda machine
November 25, 2017
By Ken Carpenter

After spending 60-plus years shuffling around the world knowing that I'll never be able to reach anything on any top shelf, I've grown used to the idea that midgets had nothing to do with designing the world.

On the plus side, us short folk don't have to worry about banging our noggins on the head jamb of any door.

The world is infatuated with the big, bigger and biggest of anything and everything.

Some group bakes a 12 foot, 2,020 pound pumpkin pie and before you know it a 20 foot, 3,699 pound pumpkin pie thrashes the record. These are true numbers, the latter made in Ohio in 2010.

India seems to be a place that is obsessed with creating the largest, most useless objects they can. It might be explained by the rumor that men from India are renowned for being less well endowed than most men from other countries.

People from India have records for the biggest, functioning scissors, 7.7 feet long and 55 pounds. I don't know what they are good for, but I wouldn't want my hair cut with them.

The most colossal suitcase of all, which took eight Indians 105 hours to construct, measures 13.34 feet by 8.75 feet by 4.16 feet.

It might almost be big enough for Donald Trump to pack his ego around.

India has the longest sewing needle, too, over eight feet long, and the makers actually used it to sew 15 stitches. Too bad those 15 stitches weren't on Trump's lips.

A wall calendar record was set in India in 2009. It measures 40 feet by 120 feet and weighs 253 pounds. It is located in a mall, and I'm quite sure a lot of wives take their husbands by it when their anniversary is drawing near. We men need all the help we can get remembering things.

The biggest useable padlock was manufactured in India for use in the Jagannath Temple. It is two feet long and weighs 110 pounds. The same manufacturer also made the smallest lock, of silver, weighing just .05 ounce and its length is .18 inch. I could barely see it, much less use it.

The world's most enormous, functioning ball point pen, also built in India, is 11 feet 11 inches long and weighs 19.8 pounds. I don't know how much ink it holds, but one estimate thinks it could even write down a whole month's worth of ridiculous exaggerations for Sarah Palin before the well went dry.

In 2002 a Canadian set a world record for the tallest and heaviest stilts ever used. They were 50 feet, 9 inches long and weighed 137 pounds combined, and he took 29 steps with them. When I was a kid I used to get a rush from stilts that put me four feet off the ground. Of course, my legs were only about two feet long.

A French company celebrated its 100th anniversary by making a chain 10.6 miles long. It connected two villages, crossing a river and two railway lines, and accomplished the stupendous achievement of encircling three Kardashian rumps. Amazing, truly amazing.

Another 100th anniversary saw Crayola create a 15-foot long, 1500 pound crayon capable of coloring a line 10 miles long. It is said to be on the Kardashian's Halloween makeup list, when they will party as a railroad caboose.

Germany is the proud home of the world's most humongous, commercially available jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle has 32,256 pieces and when completed it is 17.84 feet by 6.3 feet. There is no truth to the rumor that the picture contains a life-size portrait of the aforementioned Kardashian rumps.

The most elongated thermometer ever is in Baker, California, 134 feet tall in honor of the record high U.S. temperature, 134 degrees in 1913. There could be a picture of it on the Internet under "World's biggest rectal thermometer," but don't believe it.

The women out there may understand the significance of what I'm about to say, but I admit to knowing little about such things. The most monumental cross-stitch ever was stitched in Poland between December 2008 and August 2010. It is 30.2 feet by 13.3 feet and contains 93 miles of thread in 220 different colors. It sounds impressive, but cross-stitch is a mysterious and kind of scary term to me. I'm guessing it has little in common with sewing on a button.

As I sit here in my short, yet fairly bloated, skin, I am growing tired of talking about big things. The only consolation is that most of them are as worthless as they are gigantic.

I bet they could all grab a can of pickled fish lips off of the top shelf of the grocery store though, if they happened to have hands, so I'm just a little bit jealous.

That doesn't change the fact that I am still dubious of the old "bigger is better" theory.
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