Eight Years in the Life
Created | Updated Dec 17, 2010
Eight Years in the Life
So, The Post has been going for 8 years! For those of you who may not understand the significance of this, let's illustrate that timespan in a few ways you may not have considered.
Eggs
First things first - we could have soft-boiled 1.4 million eggs. We might have saved more energy if we'd boiled them all at the same time, though, assuming we could have found a large-enough saucepan.
Ricky!
We could have watched 140,000 episodes of BBC soap Eastenders, and in doing this we'd have heard an estimated 675,000 times the phrase 'What's goin' on?'.
Jogging
If she didn't need to rest, beanpole athlete Paula Radcliffe could have run about 1.2 million kilometres at London Marathon pace, allowing for impromptu toilet breaks. That's almost twice to the moon and back, but in a different direction, obviously.
Inspiring
Each of us could have breathed around 8.5 million gallons of air - enough to fill about 13 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Actually, thinking about it, maybe you did do this.
Scarf
Apparently a lady in the Netherlands is the world's fastest speed-knitter, producing 257 stitches in 3 minutes. If she were to join up with 1,000 equally adept knitters from her village and, foregoing breaks, work on a scarf of 50 stitches width and three stitches per centimetre length, then after eight years the scarves laid out end-to-end would stretch to 24,000 km. We don't know how to describe that length in real terms, but if she were to drive a Land Rover Discovery from one end to the other, it would need servicing twice.
Who Ate all the Pies?
At the 2007 World Pie Eating Championship, Patrick Bertoletti got his laughing gear around 9.17lbs of blueberry pie in 8 minutes. At this rate, and again assuming no breaks, he could have spent the last eight years shifting an incredible 2.18 million kilos of pie. To give you a better idea of the scale of this feat, that's approximately the total weight of reindeer meat produced each year in Finland.
Sheepish
On 10 October 1892, at Alice Downs Station in Queensland, Australia, record-breaking sheep-shearer Jack Howe sheared 321 sheep in 7 hours and 40 minutes, using only clippers. His record stood until 1950 when it was only beaten by a man using machine-driven shears. Had Jack decided to continue for eight years without a break, he'd have snipped around 10 million kilos of wool from nearly 3 million sheep - that's about half the number of sheep in the USA.
Dodgy Keeper
In women's football, the goalkeeper of the Burton Brewers team, competing in the West Midland Regional Women's Football League Division One North in season 2000/2001 shipped a total of 234 goals in 11 matches. The team folded shortly afterwards; their last match was a nailbiting 57-0 home defeat. Why mention this? Well, at this rate over eight years, she could have picked the ball out of the net an astonishing 994,542 times - just short of one million goals. She is now coaching the English national men's side1.
So, there you have it. Eight years is an impressive amount of time for a community newspaper to have survived. Here's to the next eight, and to another 2.18 million kilos of blueberry pie. Happy Birthday!
Icy's Quizzes and More Archive
