Dreams aren't what they used to be....

I'm happy to be able to tell you that one of my friends appears to rapidly be becoming something of an internet celebrity. Statue John started "Stand By Your Statue" on January 9th this year, and as of last night has overtaken the number of hits I have received on this blog since about October last year. This is partly due to mentions on places like Yahoo and Metafilter, but is of course mainly down to the fact that it is a brilliant idea: when on holiday, take pictures of yourself and your friends standing next to statues. That's it. Simple, yet brilliant. Already featured on the site are the Statue of Liberty, Rodin's Thinker and a headless statue of Lenin in Parnu in Latvia.



If the fact that it's a great idea isn't enough to get you over there to have a look, you might be interested to learn that his most recent post features a certain SwissToni doing his most ferocious "tiger" in front of a statue in Copenhagen. Frankly, who could resist that?



I'm sure everyone has photos like this, and as it happens, Statue John is looking for submissions.... see blog for details.



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Whilst we're on the subject of friends.... I've mentioned him here before, but get yourself over to The Ultimate Olympian. He's aiming to compete in all of the 136 Olympic events he qualifies for before the start of the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. He's just done some of the clay pigeon shooting events, and I think he now 'only' has 128 events to go, including some of the harder ones like the pole vault, the synchonised diving, the marathon, the madison.... He's not just doing this for his own amusement, he's doing it for an extremely worthy cause - the Sobell House Hospice Charity - and he needs your support.



He's just asked me if I will do the triathlon with him in August. That's a 1500m swim, 40km cycle and 10km run. Sounds like hard work to me, but I'm actually thinking I might do it.... anyone care to sponsor me as part of "Team Ultimate Olympian"?



/plug