ISSUE 149
HOW LONG WOULD IT TAKE…
To go blind looking at the sun?
Mum always warned you against it - but how could you take her seriously when she also insisted your face would set funny if you grimaced in the wind? She was right on this one though - mere moments could fuck you up for good. “Looking unprotected at the sun for even a second or two can cause blurring, pain behind the eyes and possibly partial blindness,” warns FHM’s resident health expert, Dr Alisdair Wright. “The sun produces very intense radiation which causes an equivalent to sunburn on your retina.” Repeated exposure will leave you with a permanent blind spot in the centre of your vision, although you may retain some peripheral sight. “Don’t do it,” warns Dr Wright, helpfully - pointing out that no fool has yet sat down with a stopwatch to test this rubbish out.
TOTAL TIME: mere seconds
To be picked clean by a tank of piranha?
The cow may be universally acknowledged as the unit of measurement for piranha frenzy, but reports tell of a ravenous shoal stripping a 500lb pig bare in just 60 seconds, and a toothy ‘gator in just five minutes. “Piranhas have an ill-deserved reputation,” said a London Aquarium Education Centre spokeswoman, defensively. “Most of the time they only eat other fish.” That aside, the time needed for 100 hungry piranhas to strip a ten stone human to the bone? About a minute-and-a-half.
TOTAL TIME: 90 seconds
To tattoo your entire body blue?
The average male body consists of 18,000cm2 of skin - although a woman has a more miserly 16,000cm2 (despite her joybags and fat arse). “The time it takes to tattoo flesh can vary enormously,” says tattoo expert Ian Frost (020 8665 1778). “With the eyelids you have to be very careful, but it would take an average of about five minutes to cover 1cm2 in blue ink. Working every day in two hour sessions (any more is too painful) will take just over two years to completely cover yourself - unless you’re Phil Jupitus in which case you’re looking at a decade or two.
TOTAL TIME: 750 days.
To swim around the world?
To try and swim the 24,000-mile journey taken by cuddly yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur last year - swimming a punishing 12 hours a day at a solid two miles an hour - will take you the best part of three years. It would, however, be suicidal. “You’d get torn to pieces even if you were wearing a protective suit and, without one, you wouldn’t last longer than ten hours in the Atlantic,” says cheery Sam Greetham, Secretary of the European Swimming Federation. This could drop to minutes in the 30-foot swell of the icy South Pacific. “It would be survival, not a swim in cold waters,” adds Sam, sagely. “And where it’s warmer - like Hawaii and Australia - you’ve got sharks and jellyfish to worry about. No-one could survive.”
TOTAL TIME: Cheat nature, and you’ll be done in roughly 1,000 days.
To be a kung fu master?
Gogen Yamaguchi is widely regarded as one of the world’s top talents in any martial art: he practises goju ryu (a special style of karate that he created himself) and has the honorific title of hanshi tenth Dan. So not someone you want to spill your pint of Boddington’s over. “Training every day,it took me about five years to get my black belt - whichi s your first Dan,” boasts ex-UK National nunchaku champion Steve Gostling. And to get as good as your martial arts guru Yamaguchi-san? “A tenth Dan grade has to be awarded by your peers,” explains Steve. “To get to the same level as Master Yamaguchi would take about another 60 years.”
TOTAL TIME: 65 years
To impregnate every slapper in the UK?
According to the latest information from The Office of National Statistics, there are 149,893 Sharons and 182,641 poor cows called Tracy, Tracey or Traci resident in the UK. Not all are native to Basildon. “Most people couldn’t manage more than six ejaculations a day,” says FHM sex dad Dr Andrew Stanway, with authority. “But a typical fit, young man might be able to spunk up to 12 times.” This means it would take a lusty young buck a knob-shattering 27,711 days to work his way through them all. And if his goo was the most potent ever and none of the ladies’ insides were all wrong, he’d be done.
TOTAL TIME: 76 years
To kill every spider in England?
According to the Web of Life boffins at London Zoo (and their bespectacled creepy crawly lovers should know), the spider population per acre of rough grassland - apparently our arachnid chums’ favourite stomping ground - can reach up to 2.25 million in the autumn. This means that the 32 million acres of green and pleasant land that make up England could, at its, peak, contain as many as 724,757,920,000,000 of the multi-legged horrors. So, if you took it upon yourself to stamp out one hapless fly chomper with your trusty Doc Marten’s every second - and that’s pretty good going - it would take 8,388,401,852 days to wipe them out. Your time, contestant, starts now.
TOTAL TIME: 23 million years
To fill in the Grand Canyon with cement?
Arizona’s 277-mile-long natural wonder has a volume of 570,833,650,000,000 cubit feet. “Your average cement mixer has a capacity of about four-and-a-half cubic feet,” points out landscape gardener Dominic French (07960 465 091), “and it takes about ten minutes to properly mix a load of cement.” So it would take one plucky Irish navvy a mere 5,430,304,889.7 years - and 126,831,922,222,222 mixer loads of cement - to fill it in.
TOTAL TIME: 5.4 billion years