The UAE is mad about “Guinness World Records.”

The National reports on one or two per week, it seems. Many of them silly.

I remember when the “Guinness Book”, as it was known decades ago, was fun to read. “Tallest man.” “Fastest train.” “World’s Biggest Waterfall.

Things like that. Fairly common things.

Now, we’ve got people taking silly topics and trying to get recognition as a world record.

Like the five-kilometer-long handmade gold chain we wrote about today. In Dubai. Of course.

And pointless? Not quite. but verging on it.

This golden chain was made by 100 people working “10-hour days for weeks” assembling to make the four million individual segments of the chain.

The chain weighs 256 kilograms, or 563 pounds, all of 22-carat gold.

The National wrote: “The Dubai Celebration Chain … forms the centrepiece of celebrations organised by the Dubai Gold and Jewellery Group to mark the 20th anniversary of Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) this year.”

Well, then. A good cause. Very merchants hoping to peddle some stuff at the Dubai Shopping Festival.

I remember when the Guiness Book seemed to have some boundaries. Silly, made up categories (like longest handmade golden chain) didn’t exist.

Have a look at some of the examples from the current book — which seems to have grown to Enclopedia Brittanica dimensions to keep track of the arcane record. “Biggest macaroon.” Things like that.

“It was a painstaking task but we have completed it and we are very proud to add another world record to Dubai,” Chandu Siroya, managing director of Siroya Jewellers, told The National, and the key words in that sentence were “another world record to Dubai.”

Dubai can never have too many world records. Someone probably is working on one now. “Most sit-ups by a 3-year-old in 24 hours.”

What some world-record zealots in Dubai do not seem to recognize is that Guinness generally needs to have an observer of three at the “world-record attempt” to verify it. Which is where many a “world record fireworks show” calims have gone a’cropper.

So, what do you do with a 5km gold chain? You cut it up and make a few thousand bracelets out of it.

Maybe that could be a world record, too. Someone would be sure to call us.