The New Yorker's world record blunder
My favorite magazine, The New Yorker, recently profiled Ashrita Furman, who holds more Guinness World Records than anyone else. Much to my disappointment, they failed to mention not just RecordSetter, but our community's own superstar, Brian Pankey. Pankey has set nearly six times as many records as Furman and deserves global recognition. I just sent this letter to the editor.
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Dear New Yorker,
As a lifelong fan of world records, I was thrilled to see Ashrita Furman profiled in your magazine. His achievements have been a great inspiration to myself and many others. In fact, Furman is one of the reasons I co-created RecordSetter.com, a world record organization built on a belief that everyone can be world’s best at something. Our site lets you invent world records, document them on video and upload them for others to look at and challenge.
Since launching in 2009, RecordSetter.com has received and processed over 11,000 new world records from more than 60 countries worldwide. We’ve witnessed ongoing global competitions in categories like “Most Toothpicks Fit in a Beard,” “Fastest Time to Solve a Rubik's Cube While Unicycling” and “Largest Cardboard Fort.” To use a past quote from your very magazine, RecordSetter is "a Web site that is to the Guinness World Records as Wikipedia is to the Encyclopaedia Britannica."*
In your article, you claim Furman has "set more world records than anyone else." While his 367 records are indeed impressive, that is factually inaccurate. The honor belongs to Brian Pankey of Springfield, Illinois, who has set 2,137 RecordSetter World Records, all in the past two years. His records include “Most Hats Put On in 15 Seconds,” “Longest Time Balancing Loveseat on Chin” and “Most Consecutive Table Tennis Bounces On Alternating Sides of a Skillet.”
Old-fashioned Guinness purists may scoff at our openness, but we believe the time has arrived for a more democratic, community-minded approach. World records should be something everyone can be a part of, not just something read about in a book. This vision may seem far-fetched today, but remember: people once scoffed at Wikipedia, too.
Dan Rollman
President and Co-Founder, RecordSetter.com
*This quote, taken from your May 25th, 2009 issue, was written before we changed our name from Universal Record Database to RecordSetter.
