I remember back when I was pretty young, I was quite intrigued by the idea of someday holding the world record for something. I remember thinking up all sorts of bizarre things that I could possibly obtain the record in. I decided early on that I wasn’t likely to ever get the record in an established category, which pretty much left me the option of thinking up my own, completely unique, category. The category usually took the form of “largest collection of stuff“, where stuff was something that took a long time to collect  I figured that if I got an early enough start, then once my collection was up to a decent size, I could reveal it, and then I could hold the record for as long as I kept collecting, since everyone else would have to start from scratch, and I’d already have a large collection.

The particular item I thought of most often was belly-button lint.  But as these things tend to go, I never did get around to collecting it.

So imagine my surprise today when I read an article about why the belly button collects lint in the first place.  At the end of the article, there’s a casual mention that the scientist has been collecting his own belly button lint since 1984, and has the world’s largest collection!  That would mean that he’s been collecting it since before I was born!

So had I ever started collecting, I would have had to wait until he stopped collecting, and then continued on for several more years–hardly the easy plan I thought it was.  Guess that just goes to show that I’m less unique than my 11 year old self thought I was.