Happy 60th birthday Guinness Book of Records

In 1964, on my 13th birthday, my parents gave me my favourite present of all time: the Guinness Book of Records. I have it with me now, battered, the flyleaf in tatters  but still containing some of the most interesting facts anyone could wish to know. As I read and re-read the book, I found myself memorising many of the facts without making any particular effort to do so, and my fondness for regurgitating them at school lead to my acquiring the nickname "Prof". It began an interest in trivia which I retain to this day.

The GBR is full of facts, over 20,000 of them, compiled by the McWhirters twins, Ross and Norris. Norris, older followers will recall, was a notable athlete and latterly commentator, while Ross carved a reputation with the libertarian far-right as a co-founder of the Freedom Association, and ruffled so many feathers on the left he was eventually assassinated by an offshoot of the IRA. At the height of their powers they would appear on programmes like Blue Peter and demonstrate their party trick of being able to quote on demand any and all of the 20,000 records contained in their famous book.

Facts like: what is the most stupid animal in history?
Answer: the stegosaurus, a dinosaur weighing the better part of 6 tonnes, but whose brain weighed a bare 2 1/2 ounces. This represents just 0.0012% of its body weight, as opposed to a figure of 1.88% for humans. The GBR says: "...it was probably only dimly aware it was alive..."
Or, what is the most unpronounceable word to a person whose mother tongue is English?
Answer: the Polish word for a May Bug, chrzaszcz. The compilers then quote a US reviewer who observed that this rhymes with thrzaszcz.
On the same page as this gem we can find the longest palindrome in the English language: detartrated, while nearby can be found a sentence which makes sense, despite having 11 consecutive uses of the word "had"- viz:
In a grammar test, John, where James had had "had", had had "had had": "had had" had had the teacher's approval.
You won't find unmatchable pearls of wisdom like this in the newer editions. Since the McWhirters relinquished their power to control the content it gradually degraded into the rather unsatisfactory book we find today- full of trivia about pop music and designed so gaudily you almost get a migraine just leafing through its pages, though it does make the point that your average smart phone contains more computing power and memory than did the world's most powerful computer in 1964- and that weighed several tonnes and needed a large room to house it. I guess things move on, huh...