Daily News from New York, New York • 362

by Owen Moritz CROWD PLEASERS The World's Biggest Overalls And other important human achievements, according to Guinness. In pursuit of soft energy 1 find power fueling the Metropolis II tan Museum of Art? Solar panels putting the heat on prisoners at Rikers Island? Heating water for the Municipal Building? The Koch administration is exploring windmill and solar power known in the trade as soft energy along with other ways to reduce One idea is to have the turbine feed energy into the Not only accurate but functional. He rejects what he calls checkbook records, such as the world's largest T-shirt, recently sent in by a clothing manufacturer. "Anybody with enough money can put a big T-shirt together. But it's not functional.

What was achieved by making the largest T-shirt? Nobody can wear it." The logic seems unassailable, but who can wear the biggest boot (size 141), which is included in the book, hard-energy costs in some 200 public city's old Asphalt Plant, a parabolic landmark familiar to motorists on the FDR Drive at -v buildings, among them the Metropoh- 90th Street that is now being con ran, KiKers isiana, me municipal Building, stationhouses and courthouses. The energy costs A y' for these 200 buildings alone fc came to $37 million last year. With a deadline of Nov. 15, a team of specialists is using infra-ray scanners and other methods to identify energy waste and recommend solutions to reduce energy costs, including the installation of new insulation and double-pane windows as well as tapping soft energy. How applicable is solar and wind power in public buildings here? Well, on Mill Rock Island, a three-acre outcropping in the East River off Manhattan's upper East Side, a wind-driven turbine is being studied.

verted into the Asphalt Green and Arts Center to serve the neighborhood. Energy will also come from co-generation (on-site generation of electricity). Nearby, a city-owned fireboat house is being refitted with, active and passive solar panels active to heat a greenhouse, passive for hot-water and space heating. Because this firehouse resembles a home in structure, it will serve as a center for studying renewable energy. The city hopes to cut the $50,000 utility bill for the asphalt center and firehouse to about $15 ,000.

by JONATHAN MANDELL Pavid Boehm is no pushover. The Guinness Book of World Records, which Boehm introduced to America 23 years ago, does have standards. You can't get into Guinness simply by doing something self-destructive, though a little aberrant behavior doesn't seem to hurt: the consumption of an entire bicycle (in 15 days), for example, or marathon crawling (for 25 miles). If you can't think up something as imaginative as eating 27 chickens in one sitting, your achievement may not be important enough for the exalted status of entryhood. "We get 10,000 letters a year," says the 5-foot-7, 156-pound, 66-year-old publisher (whose personal stats, by the way, are nowhere near the records for height weight 1,069 pounds and age 115 years "You'd be amazed at what people think are records." For every time that lightning strikes (an ex-park ranger has been struck seven times), there are hundreds of people with the largest gum-wrapper chain or the smallest paper airplane.

But such prosaic types are not the only ones who must be weeded out. Each year, the Guinness staff must make some tough decisions. After careful deliberation, they decided to turn down the woman who sent in the world's oldest turkey dressing because, Boehm says, "we hardly ever put in unique events, and nobody else had kept any turkey dressing for any length of time." Boehm is careful to include only the true achievements of mankind, deeds that cannot possibly be sneezed at. (Incidentally, the longest a person has sneezed continuously is 194 days.) The strength of the Guinness, book, Boehm says, is that it "motivates people to try new things." That, along with its strict standards, have helped make the book the fastest bestseller in history (40 million copies since the British brewery first created the book in 1955 to settle disputes among drunken trivialists in the pubs). "From the beginning," says Boehm, "I said I don't want another Ripley's Believe It or Not.

I want a real book. We're doing this to keep authentic records of human achievements. We don't put in anything that we're not certain is accurate." in California since 1975, was introduced Sept. 15 by the Dime Savings Bank. This type carried a 12 annual interest rate, compared to 14 for fixed-rate mortgages.

But that rate could move up or down 1 each year, depending on the inflationary rate or a federal indexing formula. Over the mortgage's 30-year term, the rate can only rise (or drop) a maximum of 5 from the original rate. Earlier this summer, a number of banks and savings and loan associations went big with the renegotiable mortgage. In one bank's case, the rate changes every five years in accordance with local mortgage rates, but the rate cannot drop or increase more than 1 or 5 over the life of the mortgage. One argument for the flexible-rate mortgage is that rates may go down as inflation tails off.

But no one expects that to happen any time soon. Still, the Dime has issued $15 million in RRMs since mid-summer. Another wrinkle in mortgages, likely to be legalized here soon, is the shared-equity mortgage. The investment banking firm of Oppenheimer Company, for example, will underwrite mortgages with interest rates as low as one-third the prevailing interest rates in return for one-third of the profits when the house or condominium is sold. The reason for the new mortgage instruments is simply the reluctance of many banks to lock themselves into the traditional fixed-rate mortgage because of the uncertain outlook of the economy and inflation over the next quarter-century.

Owen Moritz, urban affairs editor for the Daily News, reports on city problems on the fourth Sunday of every month. Guinness' David Boehm: He can wear it but someone eise can. and what's functional about the biggest doll, pizza and yo-yo? Boehm tries to justify each entry, though sometimes he's forced to stretch a bit (but not as much as the woman with the longest human neck 15.75 inches). "The world's biggest pizza 80 feet across helps mankind," Boehm explains, "because the next time you have to build a pizza for the army, you'll know what kind of oven you'll need for it." Ever vigilant, Boehm is not satisfied simply with careful screening of new achievements. (The earliest screening was probably by the Lumiere brothers, in 1895, of their first film.) He is going to eliminate some of the less significant achievements that already have made their way into the book.

"I'm going to take out cow-chip tossing," he says. "Who does that anymore?" Somebody wrote and suggested he switch to buffalo chips. ened, especially older ones and handicapped people," says Bette Dewing, who heads up Citizens for Pedestrian Safety. Dewing's organization has outlined a bill of rights for the walking public, and among the demands she makes of public officials are that bikes be licensed; that all bikes be made "audible" with bells to alert pedestrians that they're coming; and that drunk and reckless cyclists be subject to "meaningful penalties." It galls Dewing that errant cyclists, even those accused of fatal accidents, are often subject only to a simple ticket. 5 SUNOAY NEWS MAGAZINE NEW YORK OCT 26.

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