I guess it’s that time on a sweltering Friday afternoon that I am not quite up to finishing any of the more substantive posts on the runway, and only feel like tackling the stupid stuff. (These are the posts long-time critic/commenter Neil Dorr prefers. This one’s for you, Neil!)
Tara Berry just set the Guinness Book of Records record for “‘most tattoos of the same musician on the body.” She has 18. ( The former record-holder has 15 portraits of Eminem tattooed on her body.) A big Madonna fan from the beginning of The Material Girls’ pop-culture ascent in 1983 ,Tara only started her Madonna tattoo collection in 2016 when she was looking for fans who had Madonna’s image tattooed on their bodies to feature in a video. I guess she’s suggestive (or <cough> or something): she had an overwhelming urge to get her own Madonna tattoo. Once she started, she couldn’t stop.
Well, bless her heart. It’s her skin and her body: this is one example of “choice” that doesn’t hurt anybody except the chooser. Hey, if she wants to go for 20, or 50, I won’t criticize.
I do hear a bit of a ping one of my smaller ethics alarms about the Guinness Book of Records. Why does it even have a record in this category? I’ve touched on the issue in the past: the GBOR seeds the needs of narcissists and sad, insecure people searching for some level of fame or notoriety with records that can only be set or sought with some danger to the aspiring record-setter. There were “the Biking Vogels,” the various children endangered by their parents to have them be the “youngest” to achieve some pointless and dangerous goal, and my personal favorite, Sheyla Hershey, who ended up with size M breasts to set the Guinness record for “largest breast implants.” I concluded that 2010 post by stating that it was unethical for Guinness to publish “records” that can only be achieved by risking long-term harm.
And yet…blaming Guinness for Tara Barry mutilating her body is like blaming hip-hop records and violent TV shows or movies for people doing in reality what is only sung about or shown on a screen. It was her choice, albeit a crazy one. Tara is supposedly an “artist,” so maybe being festooned with pictures of a washed-up and aging pop-star won’t harm her at all, as long as she doesn’t seek employment at a school or a bank. Or with me.
As I said, that ethics alarm isn’t pinging very loudly. The GBOR doesn’t make anyone do anything. But the alarm has been pinging, however faintly, for 13 years.
Ethics Alarms 
I am a bit conflicted. GBOR started out with the noble purpose of preventing bar fights by being an authoritative source for settling disputes about the greatest number of cigarettes one could fit in one’s mouth at one time.
at some point, the tail started wagging the dog. No longer were people shoving packs of cigarettes in their yap for that smooth, smooth tobacco flavor; they were doing it to show they could. And GBOR, having set out to record the tallest human, the shortest adult human, and the heaviest person, got roped into recording all manner of human stupidity.
I suppose one could say, in defense of GBOR, this is not an instance of mission creep. The mission is the same; its mission has just attracted some of the dumbest people on the planet.
GBOR could provide the record for the dumbest person in the world, but that person probably already won a record for the most nose piercings in a 5-minute period.
kind of derivative if you think about it.
-Jut
Guinness “Book of World Records” sells better than Guinness “Coffee Table Travelling Freak Show”.