14:59, 14:58, 14:57, 14:56 …

That is the sound of my 15 minutes of fame (verb) away.

Did you know yours truly is in the Guinness Book of World Records?  Little known fact. 

Now, I’ve got another (noun) to go along with the two Emmy awards on my mantle.  Three years ago, I made it into the Guinness Book of World Records by participating in the world’s longest Mad Lib at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton.  What an accomplishment, huh?  I feel absolutely (adjective)!

Using the literary classic Moby Dick as inspiration, it took nearly 200 of us writers to accomplish the feat back in 2006.

If you’ve been living under a (noun), a Mad Lib is a story with blank spaces where words have been left out. The leader asks the other players to provide words to fill in the blanks but doesn’t tell the player what the story is about. The result is a humorous story with lines such as, “Amusement parks are wrong to visit on a hot summer swan.  You can rent an iPod and go for a swim with Tonya Harding.  And there are lots of smarmy things to eat.”

14:55, 14:54, 14:53, 14:52 … (Wait, does fame have rollover minutes?)

A typical Mad Lib has 10 to 20 blank spaces and is played with three to four players. The Moby Dick Mad Lib featured more than 1,100 blanks.  The blanks were (adverb) filled in by the conference’s 197 attendees.  It was, at the time – the longest Mad Lib ever created.  (I think the record still stands.  I hope it still stands.  Otherwise, this blog post is moot.) 

Each writer was asked to develop a list of witty words prior to the conference for use in the final piece.  My contributions to the Moby Dick Mad Lib were:

• Proper Noun: Latoya Jackson (because you can never have enough Latoya)
• Plural Noun: Hairplugs (an obvious nod to my former boss with doll hair sprouting from his melon)
• Action Verb: Canoodling (it sounded dirty)
• Verb: Chomp (again, dirty)
• Adjective: Pensive  (I was in a mood that day … and that’s what I was feeling at the time)

When the world record was announced to participants by Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry — children danced and angels wept.  The Guinness Book of World Records has officially reviewed the event and included it in their 2007 book of records.

 I haven’t bothered to look and see if anyone has trumped our ace in the last couple years.  Of course if they have, they can go (verb) themselves.