Have you ever had that experience, either at the office or at home, where an item that you need has gone missing in such a spectacular fashion that you start to question the existence of tiny black holes? If so, you might come close to understanding the absolute chaos that erupted at a Japanese airport earlier this month over a pair of missing scissors.

Staff at a store in the New Chitose Airport reported the scissors as missing on the 17th of August, according to a news release from the airport’s operator, Hokkaido Airports Co. Ltd. As a result, officials at the facility in the northern Hokkaido prefecture decided to temporarily suspend all flights, close security checkpoints and conduct security inspections.

A total of 201 flights - 129 departures and 72 arrivals - were delayed, and a further 36 were cancelled. Passengers who had previously been screened had to be re-screened, and security checks were suspended for approximately two hours in order to assure safety.

As someone who once worked in a call centre for a major airline, our scribe Dominique Olivier can barely fathom what it must be like to tell a passenger that their flight has been cancelled because a pair of scissors went missing.

Fortunately, the scissors were found in the same store they went missing from after an extensive search. The store owners added that they had delayed announcing the return of the scissors until they had verified that they were, indeed, the same pair.

If you think you’re having a bad day at work tomorrow, just remind yourself that at least you’re not the employee who lost a pair of scissors at a Japanese airport.

International travel isn't easy, that's for sure. It's even worse when the destination turns out to be something different to what you expected. If you know the story of the FYRE Festival, you're going to love Dominique's piece below on FYRE Festival 2.0 - yes, another attempt to putting together the party of the century. If you aren't familiar with the first FYRE Festival and the tremendous fraud that it turned out to be, there's a great Netflix documentary (of course) on the topic.

No festival, successful or otherwise, exists these days without influencers and social media. In her opinion piece this week, Dominique has delved into how previously unheard of content creators are driving trends that FMCG brands have little choice but to jump on board with. Long gone are the days of brands driving the narrative. To understand how platforms like TikTok have changed the marketing game, check out this great article.

Aside from the FYRE Festival goodies below, you'll find that this week's Fast Facts are based on the worst nicknames in history. It turns out that "The Slobberer" wasn't an English Mastiff, but rather a member of royalty!

Before we let you go off and enjoy all the great content today, the Money Summit is scheduled for 10 September 2024 at the Sandton Convention Centre. The event promises a vast array of speakers and 100 masterclasses, so you're absolutely spoilt for choice when it comes to finding something that will add value to your life. As a Ghost Mail reader, you also get to attend for free provided you register with the code GHOST. If this sounds like something that will interest you, go register your attendance on their website and remember to use the code!

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

TL;DR: Barely seven years after he defrauded partygoers with promises of the world’s greatest music festival, Billy McFarland is back at it again. Will anybody buy his particular brand of manure this time around? As it turns out, yes they will.

Way back in 2017, there was quite the scandal around a massive music festival that promised concertgoers the world and then underdelivered spectacularly. As in: people paid a small fortune (anywhere from $500 to $12,000 per ticket) to attend an event that never actually occurred.

Instead, ticketholders found themselves stranded at an abandoned resort development in the Bahamas, complete with refugee-style tents, soggy mattresses, porta potties, cheese sandwiches and luggage scattered across an unlit parking lot. Every act that was meant to perform had pulled out of the festival days before, and stages that were meant to house big-name acts were still incomplete by the time the first guests arrived.

It could be that FYRE Festival co-founder Billy McFarland’s vision was more ambitious than achievable - but that didn’t stop him from making massive claims and involving big names like Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid and Hailey Baldwin in his marketing efforts. There are some who think of McFarland as this kind of pioneering visionary whose dreams were simply too big to fulfil. The less-than-sympathetic side calls him something a lot simpler: a scam artist.

Following FYRE's collapse, Billy was convicted of fraud and jailed for six years in October 2018. He agreed to a permanent director-and-officer bar and was also ordered to forfeit $26 million. You’d think that this would be the last man on earth to get involved in the planning of another music festival. Yet, against all logic, you would be wrong.

As unbelievable as it sounds, Billy McFarland is indeed planning FYRE Festival ll. Never one to let an opportunity for controversy go by, McFarland has stuck with an idea and a name that is universally associated with failure and is punting it as if a sequel is a great idea. And for some reason, people are buying into it again.

In August 2023, McFarland announced that tickets for FYRE Festival II were available. Days later, he shared an update on social media, stating that the first batch of tickets had already sold out. FYRE Festival II was originally scheduled to take place “somewhere” in the Caribbean on the 6th of December 2024, with tickets costing $3,500. That date has since been shifted twice (at last check, the festival is now taking place in 2025), and no location details beyond “the Caribbean” have been shared as yet. The festival’s website offers only the sketchiest of details, with references to FYRE lead-up events and FYRE pop-ups. No lineup has been posted. 

Here is an example of a real text message that festival subscribers received a month ago, when another round of ultra-premium VIP tickets was released:

“If you have to ask who the lineup is before dropping a million, don’t read this text. For everyone else, the final 100 FYRE Festival II pre-sale tickets are live.”

Dominique is thinking the same thing that you’re thinking, and we have no answers to give you. If there’s one thing that we are learning about humanity through this story, it’s that no amount of obvious red flags can deter someone from investing their cash in something they are scared to miss out on. Our resident ghost has a litany of similar stock market examples to draw from.

Steinhoff, but make it a music festival.

An assortment of facts that will take you only a minute to read.

• As a result of being born a peasant, Ivaylo, Tsar of Bulgaria was known by his Bulgarian nickname, “The Cabbage”.

• Alfonso IX, the son of King Ferdinand II of Galicia and Leon, earned the nickname “The Slobberer” for his habit of foaming at the corners of the mouth when angry.

• Archibald Douglas, the 4th Earl of Douglas, was commonly referred to as “The Loser” - not for his record of battles lost, but for his apparent habit of ‘losing” bits of himself on the battlefield in the process.

• An early viking king went by the name “Eystein the Fart”, supposedly because the word “fart” means “swift” in old Norse. Whether he moved like the wind or moved lots of wind is up for debate. He sounds a lot like a character from a Terry Pratchett novel. 

• King Eystein the Fart had a son who fared no better in the nickname department. “Halfdan the Bad Entertainer” was so called because he was apparently too stingy with drinks and snacks when receiving guests from foreign courts. It just goes to show: history neither forgets nor forgives an empty snack tray.