When I was 5 or so I went to a day summer camp for a couple weeks where one of the culminating events was this guy who ate cars came to do a demo. He ate some pieces of a car in front of all of the assembled campers. His name was - wait for it - Carmine. This is 100% true./1
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However, for a long time when I recalled it it seemed so surreal that I couldn’t believe it had really happened even though I knew it had as I remember it clearly. Recently I told a friend about it who seemed unsurprised and recalled that sort of thing being big in the 80s./2
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My friend remembered reading about such feats in the Guinness Book of World Records, which reminded me I would always get the annual copy of that at a book fair in grade school, and read eagerly about the weird and pointless achievements of people who were otherwise nobodies./3
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It strikes me that growing up in that period my friend and I were exposed to the long-standing American cultural traditions associated with PT Barnum and Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Do these traditions live on in some form in the current media ecosystem or have they waned?/4
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