Dumping bad luck

The Japanese are diehard baseball fans, much like Filipinos, who are basketball fanatics. In fact, there is a Japanese version of the US Major League Baseball championship series called the Japan Series.

When the Hanshin Tigers team from Osaka won the pennant just before the 1985 Japan Series, crazy fans celebrated on the Ebisu Bridge. Each player was honored by a look-alike fan jumping into the Dotonbori River.

For the team’s American import Randy Bass, the most valuable player of the season, chosen to represent the Caucasians was a statue of the iconic Colonel Sanders seized from a local Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant. The plastic likeness was tossed off the bridge.

The team went on to win the 1985 Series but did not win a title since, and superstitious Hanshin fans attributed the bad luck to a curse by the colonel. They believed the KFC founder was angry about being dumped into the river.

Attempts to recover the statue from the dirty river failed. Agence France-Presse reports that the bearded statue was finally found during construction work in 2009 and salvaged. It was covered in sludge and missing his glasses and left hand. It was cleaned up, blessed by a priest, returned to KFC, and put on display.

However, the supposed jinx took some time to exorcise. Only last year, the Tigers won the Japan Series again after a 38-year drought, prompting wild celebrations and more jumping into the river.

KFC found the statue “too dilapidated to maintain” and disposed of it. A thanksgiving ritual was held at a temple attended by KFC’s Japan president Takayuki Hanji, who offered Japanese sake and the chain’s signature fried chicken.

In Italy, a resident of Romano di Lombardia near Bergamo was seen on surveillance camera dumping two old, dilapidated couches in a field by the side of a road at night.

Police then released a tongue-in-cheek video as a public service message against illegal garbage dumping. It showed the two couches tumbling out of a dump truck onto the lawn of its owner the next morning.

The man, who was identified via the surveillance cameras, risks a maximum 10,000-euro ($10,900) fine to be determined by a court, police said.

“Home delivery is a striking but also highly symbolic gesture to explain we’re not backing off on garbage dumping,” Romano Mayor Sebastian Nicoli told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.