One Upping ad Infinitum

You have probably witnessed some one-upmanship, or been the victim of a one-upper, or possibly even one-upped someone yourself, but this one-upping is beyond the pale-- and I recognize the irony of saying that I am in possession the best one-upping anecdote in the history of one-upping: my wife and our friend Connell were sitting on the porch at Sea Isle, drinking and discussing the profound beauty of the night sky (and the travesty of light pollution) and my wife reminisced about the vast array of visible stars in the sky that she witnessed when we stayed inside Mesa Verde National Park, high atop the mesa, far from civilization . . . she said "there was a star in every piece of the sky" and Connell replied to this, without malice or premeditated hyperbole, by describing his trip to New Hampshire,  where from beside a mountain lake he could see "a thousand stars in every spot in the sky" and and we all reflected upon this description for a moment and then realized that Connell had one-upped Catherine, but by a thousandfold, and not a simple thousandfold, he one-upped her by a thousandfold per piece of sky, which is enough one-upping to last a lifetime (or at least inspire a lifetime of ridicule, which we have heaped upon him in the succeeding days).