Seen from a far, Savjibhai Rathwa looks like he is carrying a long black rope wrapped around his right arm, but that is actually a thick dreadlock made from his still-growing 19-meter-long hair.

The 60-year-old man from Vadorara, India’s Gujarat state, has been growing his hair for decades, always treating it with great care. He spends three hours washing it every two days and dries it by walking around his farm and having his grandchildren spread out his locks while he smokes his water pipe in the shade of a tree.

To keep his hair strong and healthy, Rathwa relies on a vegetarian home-cooked diet and tries to avoid spicy food as much as possible. “When out on work, I survive on fruits only. I never ever take outside food,” Savjibhai Rathwa said. If he gets hungry, he simply eats a banana.

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A tailor from Turkey is in the news for making the smallest machine-sewn pair of jeans in the world, measuring a mere 0.9 cm in length. Kasim Andaç, 34, is now hoping that his liliput jeans will earn him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Tailoring has been in Kasim’s family for generations, and he now manages the family business in Konya city, in Turkey’s Central Anatolia region. “I was bored by the profession at first, but after working on being a tailor with my father, I learned to love it and to love the opportunities for innovation and creativity,” Kasim said.

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Binge-watching your favorite TV series sounds like an easy and enjoyable thing to do, but some people take the simple pastime to a whole new level, where it stops being fun and becomes painful and even dangerous. People like 25-year-old Alejandro ‘AJ’ Fragoso, who set a new Guinness World Record this week for the longest TV watching marathon – a whopping 94 hours. That’s two hours more than the previous world record of 92 hours, set in Austria just last month.

AJ, from Brooklyn, New York, started his epic TV binge-watching session with a couple of other contestants on Friday, as part of an event organised by multimedia software company CyberLink. He emerged as the last man standing, the following week, on Tuesday morning, having watched back-to-back episodes of shows like Game of Thrones, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Battlestar Galactica, and Bob’s Burgers, for 94 hours straight. He later gave credit to his Mediterranean diet for his endurance and high energy level.

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Working up a credit score for Walter Cavanagh has got to be a mathematical nightmare – the man has nearly 1,500 valid credit cards to his name and holds the Guinness record for the most credit cards.

‘Mr. Plastic Fantastic’ – a title conferred on him by Guinness World Records – is also the proud owner of the world’s longest wallet. It stretches 250 feet, weighs 38 pounds, and can hold 800 cards. But he uses it only to carry a few cards, while the rest are safely stowed in bank safe-deposit boxes.

Cavanagh started collecting credit cards in the late 1960s. “Me and a buddy in Santa Clara, Calif., made a silly bet: the guy who could collect the most credit cards by the end of the year would win dinner,” he recalled. “I was fresh from the Peace Corps and I got 143 cards by the end of the year. My friend gathered 138.”

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Meet Joel Miggler, a 22-year-old with a ‘disturbing’ addiction to flesh tunnels. He’s taken body piercings to a whole new level with a total of 11 flesh holes fitted with expanders on his face, including his nose and lips. Two of the largest holes are on his cheeks, each measuring 34 mm in diameter. And he soon plans to increase them to 40mm!

German-born Miggler now holds the Guinness World Record for ‘most flesh tunnels on face’. His obsession with body modification began at age 13, when he got his first ‘normal’ fleshy on his earlobe. Since then, he’s developed a taste for the process that he simply never got out of his system. “I’m very happy with my flesh tunnels, but I always want to get a new one,” he said. Read More »

Shridhar Chillal, from Pune, India, hasn’t cut his fingernails in over six decades. He began growing them when he was still in school, and now holds the Guinness World Record for the ‘Longest Fingernails on a Single Hand Ever’. The super-long talons on his left hand now have a cumulative length of 909.6 cm!

Chillal’s thumb nail is the longest at two meters and curls into a tight coil at the end. The middle finger nail comes a close second at 186.6 cm. The ring finger nail measures 181.6 cm, the little finger nail is 179.1 cm, and the index nail stands at 164.5 cm. As you can imagine, his nails have sabotaged every aspect of his life, including work and love.

“I can’t move much, so every half an hour or so I wake up and move my hand to the other side of the bed,” he admitted.

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When 24-year-old Bhanu Prakash, from Hyderabad, India, realised that his job was eating into his precious selfie-time, he decided to quit working altogether. He now spends all his time taking pictures of himself, and training to break the world record for most selfies in an hour. The record currently belongs to American football player Patrick Peterson, who managed to click himself 1,449 times!

Bhanu, who studied pharmacy in college, was working as a research assistant at a hospital in Hyderabad. He was already into the selfie trend big time, ever since his brother got him a smartphone with a front-facing camera, three years ago. “Almost the first thing I did when I got the phone in my hands was click a picture,” he recalled.

But his obsession reached new heights in May this year, when he overheard a conversation between a few kids on a bus – they were talking about Dwayne Johnson’s feat of clicking 105 selfies in three minutes. “It immediately struck me that it was a guy who did this,” Bhanu said. “I mean, people keep saying selfie is a very girly thing, but here Dwayne Johnson was doing it. And I knew I was up for it now.”

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Time travel is technically possible, by just hopping on flights and traveling across time zones. A German man recently decided to take advantage of this fact to bag the Guinness Record for the world’s longest birthday. Of course, the longest birthday isn’t necessarily the most fun, given that he spent almost all of it sitting in a plane seat, eating airline food!

Sven Hagemeier enjoyed a 46-hour long 26th birthday last year, by flying from Auckland, New Zealand, to Brisbane, Australia, gaining two hours. Then he took a flight to Honolulu, Hawaii, which is 20 hours behind. He actually only spent 13 hours and 10 minutes in the air, but his birthday lasted 46 hours, if you add the time he gained by flying across the International Date Line.

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Kicking yourself in the head might simply sound stupid to most people, but it’s also unbelievably hard, requiring extreme flexibility and stability. Doing it 134 times in just 60 seconds sounds impossible, which is what makes Puskar Nepal’s record so impressive.

The young Nepalese apparently spent eight months developing his own head-kicking technique, which involved bending his upper body to an almost 90-degree angle and using both feet to kick his forehead, while maintaining his balance. One of the witnesses of Puskar’s official Guinness World Record attempt at Kantipur City College in Kathmandu, Nepal, said he was so amazed by his speed that he had to watch the whole thing in slow motion to accurately count the number of kicks.

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There are two things you need to have if you live on Baldwin Street, in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand – strong leg muscles and stamina! Locals claim that the 350-m long street holds the world record for the steepest in the world, and while this isn’t officially confirmed, it’s definitely believable – the street is so steep that it had to be laid with concrete, because asphalt would flow down the slope on a warm day.

Baldwin street has a maximum slope of 1:2.86, a 36% gradient. This means that for every 2.86 meters traveled horizontally, the street rises by one meter. That’s plenty of exercise for the residents of the residential suburb of North East Valley, where the street is located. The lower reaches are only moderately steep, but the upper reaches are hair-raisingly abrupt.

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Mill Ends Park, in Portland, Oregon, currently holds the record for the world’s smallest park. With a diameter of just two meters, it only has room for one tree and a few tiny plants, but it’s one of the city’s most popular landmarks.

Mill Ends was originally supposed to be the site of a light pole, but for some reason, the pole never arrived and weeds began to sprout from the hole. Dick Fagan, a columnist for the Oregon Journal, whose office overlooked the tiny park, noticed the derelict patch of land and decided to do something about it. He started planting foliage there and even came up with a special column in the local paper dedicated to Mill Ends Park. He managed to create a whole story around the place, including leprechauns living there that only he could see, and tiny shamrocks growing inside the other plants.

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The traditional bouquet toss at a wedding is mostly a symbolic gesture, but to 37-year-old Utah resident Jamie Jackson, it’s a sport.  She has caught 46 bouquets since 1996, earning herself the nickname ‘The Bouquet Slayer’. Ironically, she’s still single, but that doesn’t seem to bother her.

It all started out when Jamie attended her cousin’s wedding in Layton, Utah, in 1996. “I’m kind of competitive by nature, so when his new bride tossed her bouquet, I went for it,” she said. “Some single girls might shy away from it, but not me. After that wedding, I just knew that I could do it again.”

“I’ve pretty much crushed that ‘next-to-be-married’ myth,” Jamie told People magazine. “I’ve had boyfriends, sure. But I’m liking the single life. Besides, if I were married, I’d have to give up my favorite sport.”

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With most of us having to replace light-bulbs every few months, it’s amazing that the Centennial Light-Bulb at Fire Station No. 6 in Livermore, California, has been burning continuously ever since 1901.

The exact date the centennial bulb was turned on is unknown, although its birthday is usually celebrated on June 18. However, we do know that it has been alight 24 hours a day since then, shining a dim light over the fire engines. Apart from the few power outages it has faced in the last 113 years, the unbreakable light-bulb has only had two breaks – one in 1976, when it was moved from one fire station and installed in another, and one in 2013, when it was off for 9 3.4 hours. When the bulb was moved, almost 40 years ago, people were so cautious not to break it that they severed the cord, instead of unscrewing it, and transferred it with a full police and fire truck escort. The whole business lasted just 22 minutes, after which it was back to business as usual.

The impressive light-bulb is apparently an improved hand-blown incandescent lamp with carbon filament. Debora Katz, a physicist at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., has conducted extensive research on the centennial light-bulb and what makes it so special, using a vintage light bulb from Shelby Electric Co. that is a near replica of the Livermore lamp. “The Livermore light bulb differs from a contemporary incandescent bulb in two ways,” says Katz. “First its filament is about eight times thicker than a contemporary bulb. Second, the filament is a semiconductor, most likely made of carbon. When a conductor gets hotter, its ability to conduct electricity goes down. When the Shelby bulb gets hotter, it becomes a better conductor of electricity.”

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If you thought Skywriting was a romantic way to propose, wait till you hear about GPS writing. The ingenious idea belongs to Yasushi Takahashi – a.k.a Yassan – who spent six whole months trekking through Japan as a way of proposing to his girlfriend. At the end of his journey, the GPS records of his travels spelled the phrase ‘Marry Me’ with a heart sign to boot.

It all started in 2008, when Yassan, then 31, quit his job and planned a journey through Japan, taking with him a GPS device and a map. His purpose was two-fold: to experience a Japan that he only knew in books, and also to draw a special message for his girlfriend using GPS tracking technology. Yassan managed to cover over 7,000 kilometers in six months, mostly by foot and sometimes by car, ferry or bicycle. Every place that he walked through was carefully planned beforehand to get the gigantic magic phrase just right.

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When Australian lawyer David Richards started decorating his family home for Christmas four years ago, little did he know that the simple pastime would snowball into a huge passion. The father-of-three is now a self-proclaimed ‘crazy Christmas lights guy’.

Impressed with the display of lights at his home last year, Richards was invited to transform Petrie Plaza in Canberra’s Central Business District into an epic Christmas spectacle this year. And Richards has not disappointed – this year’s display consists of a whopping 120 kilometers of lights and over one million light bulbs. Petrie Plaza now features a 3-D image constructed of lights, covering more than 41,000 square feet, in the shape of three large Christmas presents.

The spectacular display has won Richards a place in the Guinness Book for the third time. He won the record last year when he decorated his home with 502,165 lights, and once before in 2011. “Christmas lights really get people into the festive spirit,” Richards told Guinness. “We decorated our home for years, and people came from everywhere to see our lights. This year, who knows how many people will come along?”

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