Man, am I fried. My first meeting was at 7:30 this morning.. and my last meeting just ended around 10:30 PM.. I just hosted one of those weird virtual events that I generally don’t like.. but this one was pretty fun.. Having worked my tail off all day, I don’t have anything fun to report.. Instead I’ll pass on a vicarious point of pride. My good buddy Jim form work found a listing of himself in Wikipedia and sent it on. It seems Jim, an MIT trained Physicist, senior IBM technical genius and one of the nicest guys I know had a past before IBM (gasp). He held the world record for the tallest unsupported house of cards ..

Wikipedia records it thus i

The first known record for card stacking was made by Miss Victoria Maitland, of England. A photograph of her work was published in The Strand Magazine on September 1901. It was a fifteen story structure.[4] Following the publication of this record a second was submitted in April 1902, by Miss Rosie Farner, of England with a picture of a twenty storied tower.[5] A third record was submitted by Miss F. M. Hollams, of England, with a tower of twenty-five stories, in February 1903.[6]

Berg has since kept the record and created many sub-records since then, he has been known to have broken “seven or eight” world records for cardstacking. He currently holds the world record for tallest house of cards, a 25 foot 9 7/16 inch (≈7.87m) tall “skyscraper” completed at the State Fair of Texas on October 14, 2007.[3] He also holds the record for the largest house of cards, a category Guinness invented for the event, for a replica of Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World.[11] On March 10, 2010, Berg broke his own record by building a replica of the Venetian Macau resort hotel. He completed it in 44 days, using 218,792 cards (more than 4000 decks). The structure measured 10.5 meters (34 feet) long, three meters (10 feet) tall and weighed more than 272 kilograms (600 pounds).
Guinness Book of World Records” American 1982 Edition, page 477.

Other record holders (without bending or altering the cards) include:

* Joe Whitlam, of England with twenty seven stories, on February 28, 1972.[7]
* James Warnock, of Canada with sixty-one stories, on September 8, 1978.[8]
* John Slain, of The United States with sixty-eight stories, on August 3, 1983.[9]
* Bryan Berg with seventy-five stories, on April 21, 1992.[10]

Jim’s feat is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records” American 1982 Edition, page 477.:

Jim, I’m proud to know you !

nite folks, nite sam

-me