Merry Men

You may be indifferent to learn that this past weekend, the previous record for "number of people dressed as Robin Hood in one place at one time" was practically doubled.

This proves a few interesting things to me about "records":

First, you can pretty much think of anything to set a record for. I mean, would you have thought: "I'm gonna wrangle a thousand people together and we're all going to dress as Robin Hood!"? Similarly, nobody else out there is going to think of trying to stuff as many pretzels as possible into an ocelot, or whatever fever dream you might concoct to get your tiny slice of fame. In short, if you want to set a World Record, there is nothing stopping you but your own imagination.

Secondly, no matter how ridiculous your record is, you're not going to hold on to it for very long. Once you throw down the gauntlet, it's a big wide world, and someone's going to take it up. In this instance, somebody saw that a mere 606 people had dressed up as Robin Hood, and thought, "that's nothing... we can break a thousand, easy!" And poof! Record fallen. Someone's going to come along with a bigger ocelot, or smaller pretzels, and then you're handing over your slice of fame to somebody else. So enjoy it while it lasts.

Some people I know actually set a Guiness World Record once. It appeared in one printing of the book, before the record fell the following year. I learned from that process that there are actually a few hoops you have to jump through to make your record "official." One of these is that you have to have some sort of doctor certification that says you are in a state of health such that you can make the attempt. And lest you think this is only for strenuous, physically demanding records, the people I know had to do this in order to sit there and play cards for 40+ hours.

So, what I'm getting at here is, I think that 1,116 doctor's notes were drafted to certify people fit to dress as Robin Hood. I have no idea how that appointment would be billed to your insurance.