World's Tallest
The Source
The argument rages on about who owns title to the world’s tallest building. Dubai seems to have the firmest hold on the crown with the HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai" \o "Burj Dubai" Burj Dubai at 2,684 feet. This leaves the dinky Willis Tower (formerly Sears) in Chicago waving in gamely at 1,450 although when it was built in 1973 in took the world title beating out the towers of the World Trade Center. The controversy continues because few authorities can agree whether or not you should count the towers atop some of the world’s tallest manmade structures. Of course God still holds the record for all heights with Mount Everest sitting stop the globe at 29,035 ft. No one has consulted me and that’s a shame because I know the location of the world’s tallest building. It’s the Farmers State Bank building on the Jacksonville Square. When you’re five years old, raised on a farm, and you’re making your first trip to the city to see a dentist, the Farmers Building is a goliath. When you place a dentist on the 100th floor, the goliath becomes an ogre. (Okay, Dr. Herr was only on the 2nd floor, but the Farmers Buildings’ 8 floors seems a like a hundred when you’re just over three feet tall.) An elevator! Yes, I’d heard such things rumored in Perry and I saw Cary Grant board one in a movie, but this one was real! You went in. The doors closed without your asking. You went up, and when the steel jaws opened you were someplace other than where you started. It was by-golly amazing. Dr. Bob Herr’s office was precariously balanced somewhere atop Mr. French’s towering structure and the only good thing about this terrifying height is that my fear of going to the dentist was completely erased by my terror of being ______ floors in the air. What if we had an earthquake struck right in the middle of my cavity extraction? What if someone slammed the door of the Farmers Bank safe just as Dr. Herr was approaching my exposed nerve with his little pain-pick? I’ve never liked going to the dentist, but to visit one who lived miles and miles up in the air was more than this little Pike Country heart could bear. Singapore claims to have the world’s loftiest Ferris wheel, taking its terrified tourists to a height of 541.3 feet. The London Eye is 135 meters and although I have no idea how tall that is, it’s tall. But again, the record-keepers missed it by a mile. I know for a fact that the world’s tallest amusement ride is the Ferris wheel at the Griggsville Fair. When you’re ten, you have a dollar to spend and you’ve already blown the first 75 cents on a corndog and drink, the Ferris wheel remains your only option for high adventure and bragging rights when you return to school Monday morning. I can tell you from nerve-jangling experience that the Griggsville Ferris Wheel stretched over six miles into the Central Illinois night sky. You could even see the hog barns from the wheel’s apex. So there! (Note to future riders of the Griggsville wheel-of-terror: eat your corndog after you ride the ride.) The Food Network has a new show called “The Best Thing I Ever Ate,” where celebrity chefs extol the virtues of their favorite meal. The delicacies run the gamut from shrimp heads on the Gulf Coast to a sloppy barbecue in somewhere in the middle of Kansas. As grandma would say… “Pshhaw!” None of these citified gourmets have held hogs all morning, bucked bales through a scorching afternoon, then sat down to a meal of my mom’s T-bone steak, salad and French fries. ….with iced tea and watermelon … and Pillsbury rolls… and creamed corn… (Sorry, I was interrupted. I had a sudden craving to go eat lunch.) As Einstein would say, it’s all relative isn’t it? Rough economic times are only tough compared to last year, not 1930. It really does get as hot as it used to but who really feels it when they’re surrounded in air-conditioned cocoons? Kids may seem dumber and lazier but that’s simply because we were so dumb we didn’t realize we were lazy. And of course the nice thing about growing older is that you have an excuse to avoid the extremes in life. I live in Arenzville so the eight stories of the Farmers Building still looks tall, but just to be safe, my present dentist is Kurt Heller whose office just off Walnut…in an underground cave.