It’s a weird world
Pillow fighting contest
Pillow fighting is moving out of the bedroom and into the boxing ring when Pillow Fight Championship (PFC) holds its first live, pay-per-view event in Florida on January 29.
Steve Williams, the man with the dream of turning childhood horseplay into a professional combat sport, said PFC delivers all the drama of hand-to-hand combat without the gore of mixed martial arts or boxing.
“It’s not something where you sit there and laugh and feathers are flying,” Williams, CEO of PFC, said. “It’s serious. It’s hardcore swinging with specialised pillows.”
Although the male and female competitors in January’s event mostly hail from the cutthroat worlds of MMA and boxing, children will still sleep soundly after seeing the bouts.
“The only difference between our fights and MMA fights is that nobody gets hurt,” he said.
“The fighters don’t like to get hurt, and there's a lot of people who don’t want to see the blood. They want to see good competition, they just don’t want to see the violence.”
The fact that so many people grew up bashing their siblings, friends and parents with pillows makes the sport relatable, which he hopes will help tap into a new audience.
“You can call it an alternative sport, but we think it’s going to have mainstream appeal,” he said. “Think about how they mixed country music with rap music and brought these diverse audiences together. That’s what we are doing, and we hope it brings in a different kind of viewer.”
The three-round bouts will be available to view on sports streaming platform FITE. — Reuters.
■ Conspiracy theories
One out of 10 Italians think astronauts never set foot on the moon while 5,8% believe the earth is flat, according to a poll published recently, which said conspiracy theories had taken root in Italian society.
The Censis research institute survey, which questioned 1 200 people, also showed that 19,9% of the adult population thought 5G wireless technology was a sophisticated way of controlling people’s minds.
Almost two years after the coronavirus was first discovered in Italy, the poll said 5,9% of respondents did not believe the virus existed, 10,9% said vaccines were useless and 12,7% said science did more harm than good.
“Rationality ... gives way in many cases to an unreasonable readiness to believe in the most improbable fantasies,” Censis said in a statement accompanying the survey.
Although the vaccination campaign has been broadly successful in Italy, with almost 77% of residents fully inoculated, almost one third of those interviewed said they thought the vaccines were experimental drugs.
Some 64,4% of Italians thought big multinationals were “responsible for everything that happens to us”. — Reuters.
■ Shell thieves trap
When thieves stole three tonnes of oysters from French shellfish farmer Christophe Guinot, he came up with a solution: planting secret notes inside oyster shells to help police track down the thieves.
Since Guinot put the method in place in 2016, he says there have been no new oyster thefts on his farm.
“It has had a dissuasive effect,” the
60-year-old, from Leucate in southern
France, said.
Oysters are lucrative: at the celebrated Chez Francoise restaurant in central Paris, a dish of six high-grade oysters costs 24 euros (US$27).
Demand is highest over the festive period, also the busiest time for thieves.
Guinot farms oysters in a coastal lagoon near France’s border with Spain. The shellfish are reared in cages, attached by wires to a metal frame that stops them drifting away. Thieves take a boat out to the cages and pluck them from the water.
Guinot’s solution: take an empty oyster shell, insert a tiny rolled-up note, glue the shell back together and drop it into the cage. The note tells whoever opens the shell that they have won their own weight in oysters, and invites them to call to claim their prize.
Anyone claiming their prize could be asked where they bought the oysters, and if it was not from somewhere that Guinot supplies, he could set the police on the trail of the thieves.
Fellow producers from the area followed his example and also planted notes among their oysters. So far no one has claimed the prize from Guinot himself, though some had been claimed from neighbouring farms, he said. In at least some cases, the prize winners had been sold stolen oysters, and police were alerted.
Word has spread and appears to have created a deterrent effect: after 19 oyster thefts in the area in 2017, there were none in 2020, according to the French Interior Ministry. — Reuters.