Results tagged “records”

.... and no, he's not a eunuch or anything. 52 year old Chinese music teacher Li Wenxing (李文兴) is now practicing to reach six octaves plus one minor triad to break the Guinness record for world's widest vocal range, currently held by American Tim Storms. Just for comparison, the average person sings 1-2 octaves, professional singers with extensive training can sing about 3 octaves unstrained, and Mariah Carey is able to reach 5 octaves.

The last time we heard about Yu Zhenhuan (于震环), he was aiming to be part of the torch relay for the Beijing Olympics but it looks like he didn't get in. While a pair of Mexican brothers may have taken over him as the world's hairiest, Yu continues to reign as China's hairiest man. Today, he's touring around China with his rock band and hopes to record an album soon. Watch him sing and dance here and do a talk show on ABC on his trip to the US last year.

Shanghai made it to 4th place in Forbes' list of the world's tallest cities with a total of 21 towers climbing over 700 feet. The current tallest is the Shanghai World Financial Center, at 1,614 feet, but it'll be surpassed by the Shanghai Tower, which is expected to be completed in 2014 and reach heights of 2,000 feet. It was beat out by Dubai, Hong Kong and, at number one, New York City.

Construction started Saturday on the Shanghai Tower, Shanghai's next "tallest building". At 632m tall and with 138 floors, it checks in with a price tag of $2.2 billion USD, and will take six years to build. By comparison, its next-door neighbor, the Jinmao Tower, is 421m tall, while the still-brand-spankin' new World Financial Center is tops out at "only" 492m. The Shanghai Tower will, obviously, be the tallest building in China when it is completed.

For those of you wondering how Chinese people can actually type all those weird-looking complex characters, this video will surely make you go WTF@*#$! With the help of a Yawei Steno Kit (亚伟中文速录机) which possesses only 14 keys, and which we're told appears at almost every press conference here, this lady by the name of Huang Xia hacks out 520 Chinese characters per minute. Apparently, the official record for stenotyping in American English today is 375 words per minute. As any China Twitterer will inform you, every 100 characters in Chinese can contain a ton more information than 100 characters in English. Hand this lady a 100,000 character novel and she will finishing typing it for you in 192.3 minutes.

    

He Pingping (何平平), the world's smallest man from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, meets Svetlana Pankratova from Russia, the world's leggiest woman in London's Trafalgar Square to celebrate the launch of the 2009 edition of the Guiness World Records. [Source]

A bikini battalion of 1,202 ladies gathered Sunday at the Changlong Water Amusement Park in Guangzhou to form the Olympic rings logo and broke a Guinness world record — not for the largest Olympics logo ever formed with human bodies, but for the largest swimsuit photo shoot ever (previous record was set last year at Bondi Beach by 1,010 ladies). Yet another utterly useless record, you might say, but these girls sure look like they're having a blast!