Wild world records

Last week, the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers volleyball team set the world record for highest attendance at a women’s sporting event, EVER. The world was watching as they packed 92,003 people into their stadium. This is a college volleyball team, folks. Forget the WNBA!

Yes, those players and coaches love their hometown crowds. New Rockford-Sheyenne and Carrington hosted their respective season home openers for volleyball this past week, and both put on a good show and defeated top-ranked teams. Carrington took down Thompson, the #2 ranked team in the state, in five sets. New Rockford-Sheyenne won a five-set battle against Medina/Pingree-Buchanan, who recently beat last year’s state tournament runner-up, Linton-HMB, at a pre-season tournament. It’s shaping up to be a great season!

I also heard this past week that Beyoncé now holds the record for highest grossing tour by a female artist, as she generated more than $295 million from 33 shows, according to box office data. The record was previously held by the incomparable Madonna. Taylor Swift is on track to dethrone her, however, as the numbers from her ERAS world tour haven’t been released yet. That is crazy!

This was the week for records, so I set out to find some more wild world records that relate to current events.

Kyrie Dauenhauer, our lady of many talents at the Transcript office, delivered her second child yesterday. Congratulations to Kyrie and Jesse on the birth of their beautiful daughter, Myleigh!

My husband has twin brothers, and we’ve all heard of Jon and Kate Plus 8, the couple who had sextuplets in 2004. Multiple births are more common today, due to fertility treatments and modern medicine.

Did you know that one woman delivered nine children at one time? Halima Cisse (Mali) gave birth to the nonuplets in the Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca, Morocco in 2021. All nine of them survived, giving Cisse the world record for the most babies from a single birth to survive.

I like thunderstorms. The ones with just lighting, thunder and rain. I’ll sit in my house and stare out the window watching the light show. We’ve only had a few this summer, but the storm we had Sunday night made up for it. The lightning was gnarly, and we got some much-needed rain in our area.

I remember being told when I was a kid that I had to be careful during thunderstorms to make sure I didn’t get hit by lightning coming in the window. Since a single lightning strike is made up of several hundred million volts, I can’t imagine what it would be like. Yet, there is one man who was struck seven times … and survived them all.

Ex-park ranger Roy C. Sullivan of Virginia was known as the “human lightning conductor.”

His attraction for lightning began in 1942 when he lost his big toe nail to a strike. He lost his eyebrows in 1969, seared his left shoulder in July 1970 and lightning set his hair on fire in April 1972. He lost his hair again the next year, in August 1973, and had his legs seared by the fifth jolt. In June 1976 his ankle was injured, and he sustained chest and stomach burns from the seventh and final strike in 1977. After all that, he died by suicide in September 1983.

With summer nearly over, (we have until Sept. 20, so hold the pumpkin spice for a bit!) most of us are getting in as many barbecues as we can before the weather changes. But our backyard barbecues pale in comparison to this one: On April 13, 2008, an impressive 26,455 lbs. of beef was cooked in a 1,500-meter-long broiler during “The World’s Biggest Barbecue” event in Brazil. Sounds like quite the feast.

I even looked for world records set by North Dakotans, and it was no surprise that we win with the sculptures. The W’eel Turtle in Dunseith, made from tires, holds the record for the largest man-made turtle. There’s also the world’s largest buffalo, in Jamestown, Salem Sue the Holstein and several other record-holding sculptures standing tall on the prairie.

The town of Aneta, N.D. holds the distinction of having the world’s largest turkey barbecue. Held each year in June, they prepare more than 300 turkeys and 900 lbs of potato salad for the event and need six serving lines to get everyone fed. Sounds delish!