DAVID ADAMS reports on the odder side of life…
A screen shot of the live streaming service showing Paolo Longo.
• Clergy across the world are coming to grips with how to use streaming technologies as church doors close but things haven’t quite gone to plan for all. In the Italian city of Salerno, Catholic priest Paolo Longo, parish priest at Church of San Pietro and San Benedetto di Polla, accidentially left on filters on his Facebook livestream which saw him appear in various cartoon disguises including one in which he wore space helmet, another in which he lifted weights and a disguise featuring hat and sunglasses, similar to those worn by The Blues Brothers (good-humoured about the error, he said later on social media that having a laugh was good). Meanwhile English vicar Simon Beach, of St Budeaux’s in Plymouth, lent a little close to a candle and told watchers his sleeve had caught alight. He was unharmed and had used the attention to advertise further services.
• Meanwhile, as hundreds of millions of people are getting use to life in lockdown, one French athlete decided it wasn’t going to stop him running a marathon. Elisha Nochomovitz, a 32-year-old who lives in Balma near Toulouse, had been planning to run in the Barcelona Marathon on 15th March. But after it was cancelled, he instead reportedly ran his own marathon on his apartment’s seven metre long balcony. He made the marathon in a personal record of six hours and 48 minutes (about 3,000 laps of the balcony) and described it as “challenging” given the constraints of the makeshift track’s size.
• Amid all the panic over toilet paper, London-based student software developer Ben Sassoon and artist Sam Harris have come up with a website – How much toilet paper? – designed to calculate just how much a family needs to ride out the coronavirus outbreak. People simply input how many rolls they have and the average number of daily visits to the toilet in the household and are presented with a figure estimating how many days their supply will last. They’ve said it was hoped the website would help people to overcome their need to hoarde supplies.
