Records are meant to be broken. Just last month, a guy in Southern Chicago broke the record for eating the most hot dogs in an hour. I don't know if this is true, and it probably didn't happen at all. It just seems every weekend a contest is held to see who can shove more wieners down their throat than the last guy. Who will be crowned the king of gluttons? These kinds of records belong to Ripley's, and should not even be made a public event, in my opinion.

Other records are more legit. Take for example, all the swimming records being shattered at the Beijing Water Cube by Michael Phelps and Team USA. "I believe that boy is part fish," my wife commented after Phelps won his 9th Gold Medal. I added, "He's like the Shaquille O'Neal of the swimming world. He's 6 feet 7 inches tall, for Pete's sake! By the time he jumps in, he's halfway to the other side of the pool. That's like throwing a shark into a living room aquarium!"

It would help to explain that my mom's a kraut. One of her brothers, uncle Horscht (pronounced like Porsche, and ending with a hard ‘T') was a weight lifter in the 1972 Summer Olympics. His event was the Clean and Jerk, where the bar is picked up from the floor and lifted first position to the chest, then thrust high above the head and held with elbows locked for the final position. Unfortunately, Uncle Horscht was out after the first round of the preliminaries. He didn't break any records. He didn't even get close to tying any records, but he did compete in the 1972 Olympics, and according to my mom, "Zat one ist for der record books."

If you say the same thing over and over again, you're what is known to the older generation as a broken record. That phrase is lost on the youth. Not that they don't understand it's meaning, because most of their mothers and fathers had vinyl albums, two turntables and a Mister Microphone. Nowadays, kids simply don't have the opportunity to use that phrase in a sentence, because it's all digital, baby! I actually heard this complaint from a young dude outside of a comedy club, about another person who says the same thing over and over. "Loops, bro. That guy's loopin', yo."

I recently sold my vinyl collection to a used record store. At first the guy offered me diddly. I complained and threatened to take my dealings elsewhere, so he then offered me squat. Reluctantly, I met him somewhere between diddly and squat, and walked away from the counter with a couple of dollars stuffed in my pocket and a hole in my heart. Four hundred LP's, gone to the music orphanage.

Before I exited the store, I took one last look at the torn, tattered boxes containing my life's collection of music. In retrospect, I'm glad I did because I had a revelation. "Wait a minute!" That's all I could come up with, but I felt I deserved the right to go through those boxes one final time, just to see if I would regret this later. After all, I hadn't even left the place, and was already feeling a little sick. "Can I go through these one last time to see what I might want to keep?" The store owner understood completely. "Heck yeah, man. I'd do it if I were you." I thanked him and began digging through the stacks like I'd never seen them before.

Before I knew it, I had regained possession of records I deemed irreplaceable. I began talking with my former collection of albums as I sifted through them. "Now, where would I ever find a Cheech and Chong "Big Bamboo," complete with the giant rolling paper, ever again? Keeper. Richard Pryor, welcome back. And you, who are you? Timothy Leary? When did I ever buy you in the first place? Wait, you've got to be worth more than the entire collection!" I glanced over to the store owner, who hadn't noticed the "LSD" album when he bought the collection. This gave him a change of heart, because in it's current condition (MINT), it could fetch upwards of $200 from a serious collector.

"Yeah, I'll sell that back to ya for a discount price, but ah, it's gonna be more than what I gave ya for tha whole collection!" I let him keep the damn thing, but made a deal with him. "Whatever else I find in here, I get to keep without having to pay you a dime EXTRA, are we square?" "Square," he said. Cool, because I would hate to have parted with all those George Carlin, Steve Martin and Bill Cosby albums. It's been three weeks since I tossed out over 300 pounds of musical memories, and I've recovered since then. Oh, and that Timothy Leary "LSD" album? Let the record show that I originally paid $1 for it at a Goodwill Store ten years ago!

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