So, yes, I’m not going to bother changing my avatar, but I will stick the results here for your amusement. No, it doesn’t look anything like me (and I wasn’t the worst off), but still, fun. Clicky for bigness:

Unlike previous designs, this time, I’ve actually bothered to make the t-shirt available from CafePress, on the off chance that it’ll please someone who really likes obscure t-shirt slogans that reference minor internet in-jokes whose topicality has a lifespan of about four days.

Geekier alternatives that I considered were “Jonathan Ross is my OpenID provider” and (thanks to Chris) “Jonathan Ross signs my PGP key”.

“If you are a pervert, turn to page 34. If you are not a pervert, turn to page 127.”

However, I know people are crying: “But Tom, we want to see what you would look like as a crudely patched together caricature that doesn’t really look much like a manga character at all!” Uh huh. I hear you. To sate that thirst, here you go:

Of course, as anybody who knows me on Flickr is aware, for many years I’ve been using a far more manga-like – and far more terrifying – avatar, based on a real photo that was manipulated with this amusing little tool. It looks like this:

You see? I was so ahead of the curve on the whole mangatars thing. All you other losers are just trailing in my wake. Yeah.

(Bigger version on Flickr)

Now: what the holy hell were they thinking when they signed off on that? This is an event they’re selling to Londoners, right? Londoners who presumably know that Canary Wharf really, really isn’t in between St. Paul’s Cathedral and Tower Bridge. And who also know that The Dome doesn’t sit on that side of Canary Wharf even if St. Paul’s and Tower Bridge aren’t anywhere in the vicinity (as you can see in this picture, which is suspiciously similar to their source image for Canary Wharf, given that it’s the first image on a Google search for “canary wharf dome“.)

And this isn’t even taking into account the weird thing that the plane appears to be doing, where its tail and even its wings are clearly behind and to the right of the inflatable marker thingy, but its smoke trail has mysteriously passed around the marker to the left side…

I don’t get why they decided that they needed the sheer visual impact of setting their race in a twisted other-universe London with its crazed Escher-nightmare geography and baffling aerodynamic physics. Unless they’re planning something really special for the event, involving twelve-dimensional hyperspace and a carefully placed black hole, I don’t think that poster really sells it to me.

Update: Hello, StumbleUponers! Thanks for stumbling by.

If you want to know what it says, read on after the jump.

It’s a QR code, which when decoded reads “If you cared enough to decode this, I want you to marry me”.

(Original QR code generated by Kaywa, who also do a very nice QR code reader.)

The thread in which this all gets shouted about includes this wonderful comment from somebody called “mikeossur”:

This is the new America,

Health care for the rich – only.

Shite software by MS$

1000 year war.

George Bush thinks he is king.

Flickr is a photo site.

As Speak You’re Branes would say: you are a gibbon’s minge.

To that end, I have constructed an easy-to-follow flowchart that presents all the key principles of truly exceptional cooking, in a simple and comprehensible format that can be easily understood and utilised in your home: