Some of you noticed the the giant furniture and the odd prominence of plastic lawn chairs in the Fasnacht pictures I took a week or two back; well, today I ran across this Fasnacht 2006 roundup, in English, and all is finally made clear, including the people with leaves on their heads.

You may have seen a lot of cliques carrying around varieties of chairs on their backs or on their floats and wondered what they were going on about. Well, the Stadt Baudepartement, responsible for conserving old buildings and maintaining the “look” of Basel, has issued a decree that all chairs used by pavement cafes and restaurants should be identical and of a standard that would exclude plastic chairs. But this unpopular move doesn’t end there — it gets worse! Where plants are used as decoration outside bars (eg in Steinenvorstadt) all plants must be of the same species. All of them!

How they are going to enforce this is anyone’s guess, but pity the poor bar owner with 40 chairs that go out of production when 4 of them are destroyed by marauding football hooligans from Grasshoppers Zurich. Not only will any injured Baslers have to go to Zurich to have their organs transplanted [see earlier in the article —ed.], but the bar owner will have to replace all 40 chairs, not just the broken ones.