A festival in Nantes has just seen the first appearance of this magnificent marionette and her elephant sidekick. Both are covered in great detail in several posts and comments at jwz’s livejournal. See also flickr nantes images.

The girl and her elephant will be coming to London in September - should be worth a look.

On a lighter note, Jake will shortly be pressed into service in the Kitten War.

May the best kitten win.

Pete’s activism minute: now looks like a good time to throw some late support behind the NO2ID campaign, given that the government’s “Identity Cards Bill” has already been pushed through the House of Commons.

Casting this as an “Identity Cards Bill” is disingenuous - what everybody should really be focusing on is the huge government database that will be built up to support it. If the bill passes into law over the next few years the database will fill up with fingerprints, retina scans and all kinds of data for every citizen in the country. If you live in the UK, this means a comprehensive dossier will be built up on you, you’ll pay for it, and you may not like or trust everybody who can get hold of it.

As far as I’m concerned the complexity, security and cost of a huge IT project like this should be enough to damn it straight to hell without thinking too hard about the civil liberties aspects. The costs vastly outweigh the supposed benefits, which pretty quickly fall apart under examination.

If you have a minute of your own, sign up to the NO2ID petition and have a look at the information on the site.

For the second time this week I found myself standing next to Chris Morris in the coffee queue at Carluccios.

I managed to resist the temptation to say anything stupid.

Waste a minute on the Star Wars personality test. My result was pretty easy to guess.

Sample question:

2. Hairy?

At least it means I’ll hit my blog quota of online polls and cat pictures this week. The union will be pleased.

I like breasts as much as the next guy, but I can’t find much appealing about this sculpture.

I’m not really sure why I think it’s worth writing about - I guess I’m a little perplexed. I spotted it in the window of a shop on Mortimer Street that otherwise sells expensive minimalist furniture. Granted this has ended up in a clearance sale, but how did it get into the shop in the first place? I can’t see why anyone would want to make the dismembered and embalmed carcass of an African tribal matriarch the focal point of their room.

Our redesigned site has launched. Good Technology Is Here.

Now seems like a good time to post a few more pictures from my visit to Klagenfurt. Check out that link by the way, as the Austrian tourist board commissioned a beautiful song to let you know about the charms of the area. Since very few people have heard anything about Klagenfurt this song is the best way to fill in the blanks.

I meant to put these pictures up here a day or too after I posted the pictures of Google. Oops. To recap, Nick and Mara invited a few of us to fly out for a house-warming party in Klagenfurt.

Here are our hosts, Nick:

and Mara:

Nick needs to learn how to work the camara a little better if he’s going to land any modelling contracts. In this particular shot, Mara was caught explaining an informative sign she found in the ladies toilets. I didn’t see the sign, but the basic message is this: Austrian plumbing becomes dangerously explosive if tampons are flushed. You have been warned.

Pictures of the house-warming party itself are best kept behind locked doors, along with a short video of Nick doing star jumps in clown pants. Trust me when I tell you they’re all much worse than the two snaps above.

Klagenfurt is a beautiful city, surrounded by mountains and on the shore of a massive mountain lake called Wörthersee. After arriving on the Friday morning we bumbled around by the lake and sat around drinking beer. We spent a while peering through the hedge of Minimundus, but sadly couldn’t get in as it was still closed for the winter.

On Saturday we walked through some pine forests and climbed a hill to get to an observation tower, which on a clear day would give a fantastic view of the lake and mountains. The view was impressive, but the weather was grim enough that the pictures I took at the top are all pretty disappointing. In the second picture here you can see a couple of fat drops of rain falling from the tower towards me.

That’s the censored highlights of our trip, we flew back on Sunday. Last but not least, here is the photo Ant took of the WANK company headquarters in Klagenfurt:

The Tickle Inkblot Test is doing the rounds. Here are my results:

Pete, your unconscious mind is most driven by Imagination.

You have a deep desire to use ideas to change the world around you. This drive influences you far more than you may realise on a conscious level.

Your psyche is very rich; the more you learn about it, the more you will understand who you really are.

For reference, this seems to be what you get if you pick penises and boobs on about half the questions.