Archives for June 2012

There is something very wrong with me. Most people see a pretty field of flowers and think “Aww, pretty.” I see a pretty field of flowers and think “I wonder if we could attach bio weapons to the pollen.” See? A slightly different point of view. Another example is obviated by my incessant ranting that we are soon to be overthrown by robot overlords. Of course there is a plus to that. I mean robot overlords automatically mean a world with sex bots. But scientists aren’t content just to supply mechanical overlords the keys to our kingdoms. No indeedy Bob, some scientists have been messing around in the Fields of the Lord and have been altering animals to make them more intelligent. Anyone who’s seen Planet of the Apes knows how well that can turn out. So, you can understand my concern when I saw an article about how scientists have invented a particle they can inject into people that will allow their blood to remain oxygenated without the person needing to breathe.

First the article, then my concerns.

This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can’t breathe anymore. It’s one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.

The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children’s Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.

The solution has already been successfully tested on animals under critical lung failure. When the doctors injected this liquid into the patient’s veins, it restored oxygen in their blood to near-normal levels, granting them those precious additional minutes of life.

Particles of fat and oxygen

The particles are composed of oxygen gas pocketed in a layer of lipids, a natural molecule that usually stores energy or serves as a component to cell membranes. Lipids can be waxes, some vitamins, monoglycerides, diglycerides, triglycerides, phospholipids, or—as in this case—fats.

These fatty oxygen particles are about two to four micrometers in size. They are suspended in a liquid solution that can be easily carried and used by paramedics, emergency crews and intensive care personnel. This seemingly magic elixir carries “three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells.”

Similar solutions have failed in the past because they caused gas embolism, rather than oxygenating the cells. According to John Kheir, MD at the Department of Cardiology at Boston Children’s Hospital, they solved the problem by using deformable particles, rather than bubbles:

We have engineered around this problem by packaging the gas into small, deformable particles. They dramatically increase the surface area for gas exchange and are able to squeeze through capillaries where free gas would get stuck.

Kheir had the idea of an injected oxygen solution started after he had to treat a little girl in 2006. Because of a lung hemorrhage caused by pneumonia, the girl sustained severe brain injuries which, ultimately, lead to her death before the medical team could place her in a heart-lung machine.

Soon after, Kheir assembled a team of chemical engineers, particle scientists, and medical doctors to work on this idea, which had promising results from the very beginning:

Some of the most convincing experiments were the early ones. We drew each other’s blood, mixed it in a test tube with the microparticles, and watched blue blood turn immediately red, right before our eyes.

It sounds like magic, but it was just the start of what, after years of investigation, became this real life-giving liquid in a bottle.

This is what the future is about. And it’s a beautiful one indeed, one that is arriving earlier than we ever could have expected. I wonder if this would find its way to other uses. I can see it as an emergency injection in a spaceship, for example. But what about getting a shot for diving?

And that last sentence sets up a future where, as this particle improves, people will be able to, eventually, live underwater without mechanical aids. And once they accomplish that they will be a separate race from us and science has shown, again and again, that two dominant species cannot coexists in the same venue. And, let’s face it, the fish people would have going on it all over us. They could infect our rivers, our lakes and our oceans without missing a beat. And before you say “They’d be killing themselves” I remind you that their blood would self create oxygen, they wouldn’t need any of ours.

DYE “Fantasy” Official Video by JEREMIE PERIN from TIGERSUSHI on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

I found about 100 stories about human trash doing trashy human stuff. And, for whatever reason, I just found it all too depressing. At some point the strippers and the politicians and the Floridians just get to be too much. Especially the Floridians. They just grind your soul into dust after a while. So, I went looking for something different. Something that would make me smile. But, with me being me, it couldn’t be the usual treacle. No plucky cancer survivor meets favorite ball player. No octogenarian graduates grammar school. No super cripples running back to back marathons and making normal humans look lazy. I toss that one in for my buddy Fred who has cerebral palsy and hates, with a passion you wouldn’t believe, every single super cripple story in the media. Mostly because they make such actions somehow seem to be the norm and then guys like Fred, who needs help getting in and out of his chair, get compared to them relentlessly. Imagine if every black male was compared to President Obama? At some point, usually very quickly, it stops being inspirational and starts becoming confrontational. Goals are those things you have to set for yourself not something that should be nailed to your forehead.

Anyway, I finally found something worth a smile. Marc Hartzman, at Huffington Post, has provided us with a history of presidential pets. And, thankfully, they are a very odd lot.

Like many presidents before him, Barack Obama shares space at the White House with a family dog, Bo. And should Mitt Romney make the move to Pennsylvania Avenue, I’m pretty sure he won’t be packing a dog on the roof of his moving truck. But Rafalca, the Oldenburg Mare co-owned by Mitt’s wife, Ann, might make an appearance.

Pets have roamed the White House grounds as long as presidents have. But in terms of menageries, no leader of the free world can compete with Calvin Coolidge, our 30th president. The star of his four-legged fleet was a pygmy hippopotamus named Billy.

The pet was a gift from tire manufacturer Harvey S. Firestone in 1927. The rare baby hippo was just one of eight of his kind living in America and measured six feet long, stood thirty inches tall, and weighed about 600 pounds. He was described by The New York Times as being “as frisky as a dog.” Billy had been captured in Liberia at one of Firestone’s plants, but once under Coolidge’s care, he spent his days at the much cozier National Zoo.

The hippo was only one of Coolidge’s unusual pets. The Commander in Chief’s collection also included numerous dogs and cats, along with two lion cubs, a bear, Smoky Bob the bobcat, an antelope, a raccoon called Rebecca, and a wallaby. Like many of the animals, the wallaby was a gift, in this case from an American man living in Tasmania. When the president was offered the wallaby in a letter, he hadn’t a clue as to what sort of animal it was. A quick flip-through in the dictionary told him it was a small species of kangaroo and led Coolidge to accept the gift.

Although no other president could boast such a collection of creatures, there have been many others who’ve kept curious pets. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, acquired a badger named Josiah in 1903 after a young girl threw the little beast at the president as his train pulled out of a small Kansas town. Roosevelt kept Josiah and the First Family bottle-fed him until he cut his teeth. Once armed with his own chompers, Josiah nipped at the legs of passersby throughout the White House.

William Taft, our nation’s 27th and heaviest president (tipping the scales at more than 300 pounds) kept a Holstein cow as a pet. The first, named Mooly Wooly provided milk for the First Family. However, Mooly Wooly couldn’t produce enough milk for the large Taft clan. So Wisconsin senator Isaac Stephenson bought the president a new cow, named Pauline Wayne. From 1910-1913, the Taft’s pet cow freely grazed the White House lawn.

Benjamin Harrison, President Number 23, kept a goat named Old Whiskers. Harrison’s grandchildren were big fans of Old Whiskers, as he was often hitched to a cart in order to pull them around the White House lawn. However, the goat may not have had as much fun as the kids. One day, he managed to escape the White House grounds through an open gate and ran toward freedom down Pennsylvania Avenue. The president chased after him, waving his cane and holding onto his top hat. Old Whiskers finally came to a stop. No one was injured, but many were entertained.

Herbert Hoover kept two alligators in the White House and allowed them to occasionally wander about freely. Perhaps he was inspired by John Quincy Adams, who kept only one alligator. Adams’ gator was given to him in 1826 by the Marquis de Lafayette.

While dogs like Bo have held the title of First Pet in the modern era, it would take a cuddly, loyal elephant, giraffe, or rhino to truly be a first.

A cuddly rhino sounds cool.

Although something tells me that if our current president made a pet of a wild African animal it might cause some PR difficulties.

Then again, he’s only got one more term anyway so he may as well have fun.

Nine Inch Nails: Closer (Uncensored) (1994) from Nine Inch Nails on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Some days you just stare at the news and wonder what the hell people are thinking. From Michael James Lee running around waving a gun at people so that he could save a beach to the ingenious Marsha Usher who called 911 to find a spot to pee in the woods, it seems like there’s no end to the stupid train that keeps whizzing (if you’ll pardon the expression) by. In fact the United States government, responding to the fears of some really dump people, wasted all of June 1st trying to convince people there are no such things as zombies. I can easily imagine the operators at the Center for Disease Control (the poor saps who actually have to deal with this) just snapping and saying “Look, buddy, I’m sorry you’re a moron. Go get a 4th grade education and try again. I am telling you there are no such things as ****ing zombies!”

All of this is why anyone driving past the CDC offices in Atlanta yesterday saw thousands of real scientists drinking corn liquor and giving up. There’ not much else to do when, after all their hard work, Bangor Maine held Preparedness Training Seminar on how to deal with a Zombie Apocalypse.

Yeah Bangoirans, those are your tax dollars hard at work.

Grab your zombie bullets and your running shoes, the undead have reached Maine!

Just days after the federal government denied the existence of zombies, the city of Bangor took the zombie apocalypse craze to a whole new level. Officials began “preparing” for the undead by running a daylong pandemic exercise Thursday that was really a lesson in city response, the Bangor Daily News reported.

But there were zombies.

About 100 emergency responders from eight Maine counties tried responding to a weird scenario: Zombies originated in Jamaica and started biting people, and the outbreak reached Maine.

Those who were “bit” during the exercise had stickers put on their name tags, labeling them as infected. They’d either have to get the anti-zombie vaccine — which stops the virus from getting to the brain and killing, then reanimating — or become one of the walking dead themselves.

And while the locals were playing flesh-eater, first responders were training to deal with mass casualties, MPBN reported.

“This gives us the opportunity to do something a little bit different, but it still has the same principles that would apply in a real situation,” Kathy Knight, director of the Northeastern Maine Regional Resource Center, told the paper. “[Emergency workers] need to figure out what they need, how they’re going to respond and how they are going to share their resources to respond to the disaster. They need to know who to go to outside their community to find the resources they don’t have, so it’s a different twist.”

Using zombie-ism as a metaphor for infectious disease has been, my apologies for this, done to death. It was funny the first time. Cute the second. A giant waste of time and money now.

But, just for the heck of it, let’s say you want to be a zombie but you are a person of refined tastes, as it were. What then? Is there any way to retain good table manners while eating the brains of your victims? Thanks to Stefanos, he’s too cool for two names, the answer is yes. He recently sold his family’s collection of silverware …. which was designed for eating people.

It’s not every day that you come across a utensil made for eating a person — even for an oddities shop owner.

But when the folks who run Loved To Death, a San Francisco curio shop — specializing in medical and biological oddities, historical curiosities, and taxidermy dioramas — met Stefanos, a spiritual teacher who came in the store with an honest-to-goodness cannibal fork, they had to bite.

“This is just some of the stuff my family had laying around, but I don’t eat people so it just doesn’t seem like something I want to have,” Stefanos explained.

The fork is nearly a foot long and comes from the Fiji Islands, whose natives have been known to engage in cannibalism from time to time over the centuries, according to salesperson Wednesday Mourning, who, along with Loved To Death owner Audra Kunkle, stars on “Oddities San Francisco,” debuting June 23 on the Science Channel.

“Someone would come and kill someone from [one] tribe and [the other] would go and retaliate and kill and eat the other person,” Mourning said. “It’s kind of like a trade of souls and flesh.”

Stefanos chewed on this for a moment before spitting out: “It’s not something I ever used it for.”

Mourning said that while cannibalism was popular in certain tribes across history, human flesh isn’t the healthiest food one can eat.

“Some rare neuro-degenerative disorders called prion diseases can be spread eating contaminated human flesh,” she said.

Kunkle was hungry for a different kind of knowledge: Figuring out why Stefanos’ parents gave him the cannibal fork in the first place.

“Well, it may sound a little odd, but I actually do drink human blood,” he said. “I do enjoy the taste and the texture.”

Blood, like flesh, can be bloody awful for one’s diet, Mourning said.

“Ingesting too much blood can be toxic because it’s very rich, and humans have problems excreting excess iron that can lead to a liver swelling disease called hemochromotosis,” she explained.

At the moment, Stefanos was more interested in green money than red blood so he sold the cannibal fork to Kunkle for $150, and some might say he made a real killing

Well, eating people and drinking their blood may be bad ideas but they aren’t the worst we have today.

Nope, that honor goes to the idiot Raelians who are holding a national day of festivals to honor the swastika.

As symbols that represent the worst of humanity go, the Nazi swastika is hard to beat, but members of a UFO group want everyone to look past the dark history.

Before Adolf Hitler’s Nazis embraced it, making it the ultimate symbol of hatred, the swastika for thousands of years appeared on Hindu and Buddhist temples, in Native American artwork and even in Jewish synagogues in Israel.

Now, a UFO enthusiast group known as the Raelians wants to return the swastika to its original meaning, which in Sanskrit literally means “to be good.” The Raelians have declared June 23 “World Swastika Rehabilitation Day,” and members plan demonstrations worldwide, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Vancouver, Miami, Houston and New York. The goal is to show that the swastika originally had nothing to do with the Nazis or the Holocaust.

It’s the third annual swastika rehab day, and no more than a few dozen attendees are expected at each event. However, spokesman Thomas Kaenzig is hoping Buddhists, Hindus and other spiritual groups using the swastika will show up to demonstrate their support. Other cities with demonstrations include Melbourne and Sydney, Australia, Mexico City and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Along with booths filled with explanations and flyers, some supporters will roll around inside a giant transparent ball featuring different types of swastikas. Planes with banners equating swastikas with peace and love will fly over the New York and Los Angeles rallies.

To many, the Raelians are best known for the international stir they caused back in 2002, when they claimed they had cloned a human baby, which was never confirmed. The group’s theory of creation, far different from that of any mainstream religion, is that humans were created by advanced scientists known as the Elohim, symbolized by the swastika.

“The swastika is one of the best traces left by those who created us, and the attempt to bury it as a symbol of violence and hatred only gives credit to the horrible Nazi ideology,” Kaenzig told The Huffington Post. “Some people associate the swastika with something negative, but you don’t stop using the cross just because of the Ku Klux Klan.”

At the turn of the 20th century, Americans used the swastikas on postcards to express congratulations, said Kaenzig. They have also symbolized good luck, harmony and well-being at different times.

Scott Selby, author of the forthcoming “The Axmann Conspiracy: The Nazi Plan for a Fourth Reich and How the U.S. Army Defeated It” (Penguin) agrees that swastikas’ original meaning has been abused, but he’s against trying to rehabilitate its image.

“Some things are so debased that they can’t be redeemed,” Selby told The Huffington Post.

Selby, who is also a trademark attorney, said that a comparison can be made between what the Raelians are proposing and African-Americans taking back the “N-word,” but only to a point.

“The use of the ‘N-word’ in that community has been very controversial,” he pointed out. “In this case, if a group of Holocaust survivors decided to take back the swastika, it would be wrong. In the case of these people, it’s offensive and wrong.

Menachem Wecker, who blogs about art and religion for the Houston Chronicle, understands why the event may cause a furor.

“The swastika has longstanding meaning as a symbol of peace, and nothing the Nazis did can change that,” Wecker told The Huffington Post by email. “The reality is, however, that it also carries Nazi baggage now, and anyone who thinks they’re going to ‘take it back’ or ‘own it’ by holding some kind of public forum without offending a lot of people is deeply mistaken.

“Regardless how careful and intellectually honest the hosts of a ‘Swastika Rehabilitation Day’ are, it’s very hard to imagine that not offending a lot of people.”

Really? The image rehab of the swastika is being handled by Raelians? What could possibly go wrong?

The Raëlian Movement teaches that life on Earth was scientifically created by a species of extraterrestrials, which they call the Elohim. Members of this species appeared human and when having personal contacts with the descendants of the humans they made, they were mistaken for angels, cherubim or gods. Raëlians believe messengers, or prophets, of the Elohim include Buddha, Jesus, and others who informed humans of each era. The founder of Raëlism, members claim, received the final message of the Elohim and that its purpose is to pacify and inform the world about Elohim and that if humans become peaceful enough, they wish to be welcomed by them.

Well, who better to not offend millions of people than a group who don’t believe that humans are capable of creating anything?

I mean besides like damn near anyone else that is.

You know what, I think the zombies are an upgrade over the Raelians.

Delta Heavy ‘Hold Me’ (Official video – FULL HD) from ljudbilden on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Let’s be honest, the image of the super stud slash party god slash multi-billionaire slash dedicated scientist is, as far as I can tell, a Hollywood creation. Which is a shame. But all is not lost. Science has given us all a grand dream and a worthy goal; SPACE-NOOKIE! But, as exciting as that may be for some, and you just suddenly completely rethought how you view the space station, in the main it means nothing to the rest of us. However, that may be changing. You see NASA launched this little telescope called KEPLER. It’s job was to find a new planet, one not in our solar system. Really, if it found one, the theory went, then scientists could extrapolate a wide variety of useful facts. Well, Kepler did find a planet. Then another and another and …. well, it has found a ton of them. Some very odd ones too. They found a planet made of ice, a planet made up of diamond and those are just the normal ones.

And one theme has been popping up over and over; many of these planets could hold life we would recognize. And, as you know, if we can recognize it we can have sex with it. Face it, even if they turned out to be more akin to our dino-ancestors than us there would be people lining up for some hot, reptiloid, action.

But, bizarre or not, planets seemed to follow a basic rule, rocky planets near their sun and gaseous ones in deeper orbits. Your easiest example is to see where Earth is in relation to Jupiter. That seemed to be the basic rule. There were some exceptions with gaseous planets that had active cores, like mini-stars, being in closer orbits but science seemed to expect them so there wasn’t much there to write about.

Well, that all just changed. Mike Wall at MSNBC is reporting that Kepler has found two planets that completely ignore our laws of physics. At least the ones that applied to planetary orbits.

And, yes, I meant to use past tense.

It is science fiction made fact: Astronomers have discovered two alien planets around the same star whose orbits come so close together that each rises in the night sky of its sister world like an exotic full moon.

The newfound planets are 1,200 light-years from Earth, researchers said. They differ greatly in size and composition, but come within just 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) of each other, closer than any other pair of planets known, according to a new study.

One of the newly discovered alien planets, called Kepler-36b, appears to be a rocky “super-Earth” 4.5 times as massive as our planet. The other, Kepler-36c, is a gaseous, Neptune-size world about eight times as massive as Earth. The two planets meet up every 97 days in a conjunction that would make each dramatically visible in the other’s sky.

“These two worlds are having close encounters,” Josh Carter of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a lead author of research published online Thursday by the journal Science, said in a statement.

At their closest approach, the two planets are separated by five times the distance between Earth and the moon. How such different bodies ended up in such similar orbits may be tough for current theories of planet formation and migration to explain, researchers said.

“This is unprecedented,” Eric Agol of the University of Washington, another lead author, told Space.com via email. “They are as different in density as Earth and Saturn (the highest and lowest density planets in our solar system), yet they are 30 times closer than any pair of planets in our solar system.”

The two known planets in the Kepler-36 system — which is located in the constellation Cygnus the Swan — were detected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope.

Kepler is staring continuously at more than 150,000 stars, watching for telltale brightness dips caused when planets cross in front of the stars from the telescope’s perspective. Since its March 2009 launch, Kepler has flagged more than 2,300 potential alien planets; while only a small fraction have been confirmed to date, mission scientists think more than 80 percent of them will end up being the real deal.

Kepler-36c, which is about 3.7 times wider than Earth, likely has a rocky core surrounded by a substantial atmosphere filled with lots of hydrogen and helium, researchers said.

Kepler-36b, on the other hand, is a super-Earth just 1.5 times wider than our planet. Iron likely constitutes about 30 percent of its mass, water around 15 percent and atmospheric hydrogen and helium less than 1 percent, researchers said.

Though they’re very different in size and makeup, the two planets travel on surprisingly similar paths around their host star. Kepler-36c orbits once every 16 days, at an average distance of 12 million miles (19 million kilometers). Kepler-36b orbits each 14 days and sits about 11 million miles (18 million kilometers) from the star.

Kepler-36b probably formed relatively close to the star, while Kepler-36c likely took shape farther out. Astronomers model large-scale migrations that can bring initially far-flung planets much closer together, but the peculiar Kepler-36 system may force some refinements, researchers said.

“These models rely on assumptions that will likely have to be ‘tweaked’ or refined to account for both b and c’s proximity and compositional differences,” Carter told Space.com via email. “The existence of Kepler-36 may help clarify or invalidate these assumptions.”

Both planets are likely too hot to support life as we know it, with Kepler-36b probably sporting lava flows on its surface. They orbit roughly three times closer to their host star, known as Kepler-36a, than the hellishly hot planet Mercury does to our sun. And Kepler-36a is likely a bit hotter than our star, researchers said.

“Planet c would appear roughly 2.5 times the size of the full moon when viewed from the surface of planet b. Conversely, planet b would appear about the size of the full moon on planet c,” Carter said.

“We can speculate on the appearance of planet c: It may appear slightly more purple that Neptune,” he added. “The purple hue owes to absorption of red and yellow by sodium and potassium. There could also be a slight brown tint owing to hazes of photo-disassociated methane.”

Such dramatic vistas could well be around for many years to come, researchers said, for the orbits of Kepler-36b and c appear unlikely to change anytime soon.

“We are addressing this in a follow-up paper, but the short answer is that yes, these do appear to be stable on a long timescale,” Agol said.

Okay, so there’s no space-nookie waiting for us there but there is a lot of knowledge. when we figure out how two planets can live stably like that we will have a much keener understanding of exo-planetary dynamics.

Closer to home, relativistically speaking, Irene Klotz from Discover writes that Pluto is showing scientists how binary star system can have stable planetary orbits. And stability is the first requirement for life.

And life is a major prerequisite for space nookie.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

Wednesday night my buddy, Jamie Duffy, killed himself. I got up early today and wrote a piece about all the people I have known who killed themselves, one way or another. From the gassy deaths of Jeff Ward and Jim Ellison to the cocaine and food fueled system failures of Darryl Pandy and Buddy Miles, it made for a really long article. Also depressing as hell. And while it was cathartic for me, I couldn’t think of three people I could lump together who would be able to make it the whole way through without yawning. So I set it aside and did some Googling. And I found stuff. Good stuff. Some of it even funny. For example, Sandusky Ohio launched a tourism campaign. In it they have a link that takes you to Twitter for all things related to #Sandusky. A great idea if there wasn’t a very famous, alleged, pedophile with that name. So whenever people clicked the link they would get a screen full of kiddy porn references. Which, as it turns out, wasn’t really what the Sandusky tourism council had in mind. So they killed the ad. Forgive me for pointing out that, even in Ohio, they have newspapers and TVs and the Sandusky trial has been a major news event for some time. Simply put, this was avoidable. But, since it gave me a funny intro to today’s blog, I’m glad they did it anyway.

For whatever it’s worth, I don’t weant to talk about death today. At least not directly. Instead I’d like to celebrate life. In fact I want to celebrate long life. And, since this is me you’re reading, let’s celebrate a long life fueled by nicotine, booze and sleazy women.

I give you the life of Henry Allingham.

We mourn the loss today of Tomoji Tanabe, who, until early this morning, was better known as the world’s oldest living man.

Tanabe died in his home in southern Japan at 113 years and 274 days old.

Still, in this sadness, we must also greet Henry Allingham who inherits Tanabe’s title. Born on June 1896, Allingham has the distinction of having fought for the British in both World Wars. We now add this decorated war veteran to our photo gallery of World Record Holders.

Though both were born in 1895, these two could hardly be more different. Tanabe, a land surveyor, attributed his long life to abstinence from cigarettes and alcohol, and lived a quiet life in southern Japan.

Allingham laughingly describes his great age to a love of “cigarettes, whiskey and wild, wild women.” His father died when he was just a baby, and his mother begged him to stay out of the military. Still, he went on to become a founding member of the Royal Air Force.

‘War Is Stupid’
“War is stupid,” Allingham told the BBC. “Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway.”

“We’re pleased to see an English man take the world record,” says Craig Glenday, editor-in-chief of Guinness World Records, on a statement on the Guinness website.

“The last time someone from England held the title was Frederick Butterfield, who died on 9 March 1974, aged 110”

Old Hank did eventually kick the bucket a couple of years ago, but given the many depressing stories out there today I hope you don’t mind me pulling this one out instead.

And, besides, when old fogies like me tell you that certain habits are bad for you, you can just hand them the nifty print out of this article.

In fact, I strongly suggest you get it framed.

As to my friend Jamie, and anyone else contemplating a permanent solution to temporary problems, I ask that you go see The Bridge. It is a documentary about people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Every one that lived says the same thing; as soon as they hit the air they knew they’d made a mistake.

Don’t make that mistake.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.