We’re getting really tired of people who say that their skill is mechanics or songwriting or saving lives with the aid of medical science.

Those skills are naught compared to the mighty skill held by Mr Joey Chestnut, a man who we wish to emulate in every single way possible. Why? Because Joey Chestnut – our favourite competitive eater – has just eaten 45 slices of pizza in 10 minutes during an event in New York, smashing the previous world record.

By doing so, Joey Chestnut instantly won a place in our heart. How big? Easily as big as the impacted chuck of bone-dense cholesterol that we presume is lodged in his ascending aorta and will zap him off to an early grave before too long. Hooray for Joey Chestnut!

To train for his impressive eight gold medal haul in the Olympics this summer, Michael Phelps worked his way through 12,000 calories a day – 10,000 more than the recommended average. In short, Michael Phelps is a pussy.

That’s because competitive eater extraordinaire Joey Chestnut yesterday smashed the world record for eating slices of pizza, blasting through 45 in the space of 10 minutes. That’s 11,700 calories. And 450 grams of fat. In 10 minutes. We love Joey Chestnut.

We love Joey Chestnut so much that we’d hug him, but we’re scared that the embrace would trigger some sort of retroactive gag reflex inside him, leading to him belching up endless wads of mashed-up dribble-covered pizza into our faces. Just getting the melted cheese out of our hair would be a nightmare.

Joey Chestnut first came to our attention last year, when he bravely stole the competitive eating crown away from Japan by forcing reigning hotdog-eating champion Takeru Kobayashi into gruesome fits of convulsive puking while putting away 66 hotdogs in 12 minutes at a Coney Island eating competition. Kobayashi didn’t go down without a fight, though – so determined was he to maintain his title that he even started eating his own vomit at one point. Honestly, it’s on video. But not even a majestic act like that could stop Joey Chestnut from taking his rightful crown, and a star was born.

Joey Chestnut was won competitive eating titles since then, but yesterday saw his legend take another leap skywards – for that was when Joey Chestnut broke his pizza-eating world record during the Famous Famiglia pizza-eating contest in Times Square yesterday. Here’s a snatch of The New York Daily News‘ report on the event, but we’d like to prepare any male readers first – you’ll never feel more impotent than you will during these next few lines:

He folded the slices – very quickly – and shoved them into his mouth. He jumped around some, to help them go down the hatch, or knocked back water from paper cups. He never appeared to chew… The morning of the pizza matchup, he had coffee for breakfast – and a gallon of water to stretch his stomach muscles. He hadn’t had anything but protein supplements for two days before that.

Honest to God, Joey Chestnut is the David Blaine of eating until everyone watching starts sobbing and dry-heaving everywhere. Men want to be Joey Chestnut. Women want to be with Joey Chestnut. Doctors want to slap Joey Chestnut around the face while screaming “Look what you’re doing to yourself!” He’s a hero, and we should all be proud of him.

You might think that a man eating 45 slices of pizza for sport while the world is on the brink of economic collapse falls into a category somewhere between ‘frivolous’ and ‘offensive’ but you’re wrong. We want Joey Chestnut to be our adopted father. Even though we’re older than him. You wouldn’t think it though – seriously, he looks like he’s going to die any minute.

To watch the skin-crawling Tom Cruise: Scientologist video you'd think that there was literally nothing that Tom Cruise couldn't do, apart from make sense and laugh normally.

However, Katie Holmes has bravely pushed her head above the parapet and spoken out about something that Tom Cruise isn't able to do.

Tom Cruise, you see, can't keep pizzas warm with magic.

Katie Holmes must be absolutely furious at the moment, provided that someone's fitted a fury chip into her circuitboard. Ever since hooking up with Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes' film career has taken a battering. She had all her brilliant-sounding sex scenes mysteriously removed from Thank You For Smoking, then she was the worst thing about Batman Begins and after that acting had to take a back seat to speculation about whether Tom Cruise kept her in a metal cage or a bamboo one in private.

And this was supposed to be the time that Katie Holmes broke out for herself thanks to her – admittedly terrible-looking – new movie Mad Money. And what happens as Mad Money's release date approaches? Has everyone been giving a reasoned assessment of Katie's performance? No, they've been watching a creepy Scientologist video of Tom Cruise being weird and wondering how much of L Ron's sperm it took to get her pregnant. 

So Katie Holmes has had enough, and now she's decided to defend her husband to get the Mad Money promotion back on track. You see, even though Tom Cruise knows that only Scientologists are able to really help car-crash victims, he'd make a shit pizza delivery boy – and that's thanks to his vast inability to use magic to keep pizzas warm.

When Tom Cruise visited Katie Holmes and the other Mad Money cast members on set in Louisiana during filming once, he brought a pizza with him. From Giordanos in – get this – Chicago. And – get this – it was warm. Apparently the Mad Money cast and crew all thought that Tom Cruise had somehow harnessed his inner Thetan to keep the pizza warm for the entire 906-mile journey, but that's probably because they all sound like they're as thick as pigshit.

But, sadly, Katie Holmes has hilariously revealed that it wasn't magic at all – it was dry-ice:

"Giordanos send dry ice which keeps the pizza hot."

See? What Katie Holmes is trying to say is that Tom Cruise is just like us! And he is, except that we don't aggressively push our confusing religion onto people by claiming that we're eminently more qualified to cure car crash victims than paramedics because we believe that a crazy alien once dropped a hydrogen bomb into a volcano.

Plus Tom Cruise was also in a film about cocktails and we weren't. That's another way he's not like us. But mainly the creepy alien volcano bomb thing.

Read more:

HOLMES REVEALS CRUISE'S PIZZA MAGIC - PR Inside