Curse of Colonel Sanders on baseball team may be over
This is a statue of KFC's Colonel Sanders that has been at the bottom of the Dotombori River in Osaka, Japan for more than two decades. Fans of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team toss him in the river after a big win for the team. Apparently, they decided that the Colonel looks like one of the players on the team, Randy Bass. So they grabbed the statue and were throwing it into the air in honor of Bass when it accidentally went over a rail into the river. From Mainichi Daily News:
"Tigers fans hope discovery of long-lost fast-food icon will lift 'Curse of Colonel Sanders'"
The Hanshin Tigers have not won the Japan Series since 1985, a fact attributed by some to the "Curse of Colonel Sanders."
The upper body of the statue was discovered at around 4 p.m. about 200 meters away from where it plunged into the water in 1985. When the figure was being pulled up by the crane on a salvage barge, construction workers could be heard to say, "It looks like a corpse." However, when Tigers fans such as the riverside project foreman saw the statue, they exclaimed, "It's the Colonel!"
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Is this why the spirit/entity in Murakami's Kafka on the Shore appears as Colonel Sanders? I know he was into baseball. Wow wow I never knew.
Having seen the Dotonbori river (actually more of a canal) in the Ebisu-bashi area, my sympathies go out to the diver who found the statue (or perhaps his widow). That being said, Go Tigers! Fighto!
Let's go Tigers!!!
He's been frozen in carbonite!
I love that in Japan there are actually statues of Colonel Sanders.
The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. Venerable because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. Inscrutable because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices.
- Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age
#2 Brotherclone that was my first thought too - in fact I thought I commented on it in the other post!
To Brotherclone and Keir...
The Kafka on the Shore link didn't occur to me (funny now that you mention it), but I did think of a Ringu/Ring connection...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_(Suzuki_novel)
Do a search for the bit about the statue.
Is it strange that I knew exactly which team from the headline?
My question is, what happened with Lew Ford? I don't see him on their roster anymore.
I recently caught the Osaka episode of No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain, and he mentions the strong similarities between the Tokyo Giants / Tigers rivalry and the Red Sox / Yankees rivalry.
I love how there's even a parallel curse, attached to the need to dig up some bizarre buried item.
"All white people look alike..."
24 years without a pennant is a curse?
Cubs fans would love to have *that* curse.
Yes, but the Cubs will never win the World Series. Never, never, never...
Back when it was Kentucky fried Chicken and not KFC all the franchises had a life size statue of the colonel. In his final years he traveled as a PR figure and frankly didn't think much of their chicken.
I was working in news radio at the time and we got a wire story about a customer that had a suspect piece of something breaded and fried that turned out to be rodent. Given the black humor of newsies we soon came up with the slogan, "Tail Licking Good"
Holy shit! That's what all the news crews were doing by the river the other morning! It seems odd that I get even my local news from Boing Boing these days...
People talk about the Tigers not having won the Japan Series since the statue was dumped in the canal.
The overlooked detail is that they had never won the Series BEFORE this event either. Who's to blame for that?
I would say that, post 1985, they just reverted back to their proud tradition of not winning the Series.