Ok, this Friday the same Friday game runs on all three blogs. It’s a relay race of questions and riddles; Lâm starts it on the French blog with his first question and just as soon as the right answer is found the next question will be published on the COMMENTS SECTION of this entry. When we get the right answer Mike publishes the next question on the German blog and… well, you get the point. From the german blog the baton goes back to the French blog and so on. We run the game for 5 laps – total 15 questions. For every right answer we’re handing out 2 t-shirts from our Derby-stocks (so, 30 shirts in total).

The winners will be contacted after the game for their shirt sizes and contact information. Have fun – Lâm, Mike and myself sure will!

QUESTION/WINNER:

1. Lâm/ Question: Who was "Britain's Got Talent" youngest finalist? - Winner: Pillow ("Connie Talbot")

2. Jouni/ Question: One way in and three exits. Comes in various sizes and colors. This object has the name of a letter it resembles. - Winner: Bendev ("T-shirt")

3. Mike: Who is the organiser/founder of the virtuell fight-championship TEKKEN? - Winner: Armand ("Heihashi Mishima")

4. Lâm: The best "less than 15 words joke" wins. - Winner: Jimich ("What Country Makes You Chiver ? Chile")

5. Jouni: Which were the three "small countries" that had their own country sites on laFraise before we launched the EU-site? - Winner: Fredrik ("Norway, Finland, Holland")

6. Mike: How old is Angela Merkel? - Winner: grotesque ("53 years")

7. Lâm: Send me a link to the best Otter Pic possible from the web! - Winner: vso ("http://www.paws.org/pics/video_otter_feeding.jpg")

8. Jouni: Which American talk show host claims he looks just like the finnish president Tarja Halonen? - Winner: lyra  ("Conan O'Brien")

9. Mike: The 30th comment is the winner (spam is allowed ^^) - Winner: Fredrik (Easy game)

10. Lâm: How many contact (total) Jouni, Mike and Lâm have on their flickr acounts? - Winner: Anqqa ("480")

11. Jouni: I do need to take a holiday. Which city in the world would you recommend and why? The best suggestion within 5 minutes wins. - Winner: Graindemoutarde ("my bedroom")

12. Mike: Which female artist has THE booty? - Winner: Barbulle ("Beyonce")

13. Lâm: Let's merge 3 guys (name them) to get the perfect guy - even for Céline Dion - Winner: jimich ("David, ET, Jonathan) et nannig (gates car riche, salvador car vieux, churchill car sourd")

14. Jouni: Tell me a secret about yourself. The most shocking revelation wins. I'll say when I'm satisfied! :) - Winner: Lucille2013 ("I killed my grandma's parrot because I was afraid of it. I gave him things to eat he wasn't supposed to… Then I went to my bedroom and waited for it to die.")

15. Mike: What's the most favorite drink of Jouni? - Winner: bendev ("iced beer")

16. ALL BLOGS/ Question: The user which post 2 consecutively entry in one of the three blog as first is the winner of the final-question! SPAM-ATTACK!!! (The winner get 5 Shirts!!) :D - Winner: Mopiko (all three blogs by 17:34)

I'd like to thank everyone for participating - this was seriously the most fun I've had in quite a while! Also, thanks Lâm and Mike - it was a real pleasure doing this with you. Now I'm exhausted, out of breath and in serious need of that iced beer (don't worry, I opened one already) but really happy. Let's do this again sometime, huh?

…starts in one hour from now. We're running it together with the french and german sites and handing out 20 shirts. Go to the french blog first. :)

Sometimes we like to tease Lâm (our French creative director) about the shirts he orders from the site as he likes to order the female cut for himself. I’m not too sure I can continue doing that considering the fact that I’ve recently noticed many of the shirts I order myself are more popular among the female members of our community than male.

I ordered “Zen” (which I’m actually wearing as I write this) without any hesitation, “White Alice” was the first shirt from our selection I felt an urge to order and now ”Geisha” really does it for me too. It’s a really cool design with sweet colors and details – it’s a shame I can’t really get it for myself without looking absolutely ridiculous (as it’s from our new Mademoiselle-line).

Well, anyway… It’s now available for all of you girls out there. Love it for me, because my love for the design is the tainted kind! It’s Lou’s first entry to our competition and I’m already waiting for a chance to see more stuff from her.

Working as a freelancer is pretty exotic sometimes. Yesterday one of the tasks I did for a client involved painting two volleyballs black.

It’s a funny world we live in!

Being a beer-drinking cigarette-smoking junkfood-eating non-exercising geek can be a tough task – mentally and most definitely physically. When you’re not 20 anymore it’s not like you can just eat pizza all day long and have a huge list of deadly habbits without feeling the consequences. Eating fatty foods will actually make you fat, smoking will make you cough, drinking will get you terrible hangovers that get worse all the time and most of all not doing any physical exercise on a regular basis will make your body feel like a car from the era you were born in that hasn’t been taken care of ever since it hit the roads from the production line – it has all the capacity in the world to be the handsomest devil around but in it’s current state it’s a sorry looking rusty wreck that creaks and bitches every time you try to steer it even at reasonably low speeds. It’s just not something you’d like to show around cruising up and down the main street.

This is something I started thinking about last night; I was invited to play a game of Finnish baseball (our national game, by the way – it’s a lot like the American version except that the pitcher pitches the ball up in the air over a plate and not towards the batter from a distance) with some friends and I was glad to join them. I like Finnish baseball. It’s the only sport I was ever good at when I was growing up and for a kid it’s important that you’re not the last dude that gets picked to a team on the gym class. It was nice to notice that I was still one of the best batters of the bunch but running from one base to another was a total pain in the ass.

It didn’t really help too much that I was holding a beer on my hand when I was running and I really needed to hit the ball pretty hard to make sure I had the time to grab the beer from the ground on my way to the first base. It really didn’t help too much either that when I actually made it to a base (…and yeah, I did even make one homerun!) my lungs pretty much gave up on me and I needed to smoke a cigarette just to feel somewhat normal again. When did this happen to me? I haven’t noticed a major change in the shape I’m in so it must’ve been a process that has happened over the years.

This shit has got to stop. I want to be a shiny new polished Pontiac Firebird ’78 again with the eagle on the hood and all that! I want to be able to run more than 20 meters without getting absolute exhausted and without feeling like I actually weight as much as a Firebird. For that to happen I have to give up smoking before it gets the best of me and take it easy on the beer-drinking too.

I was told that the same bunch of friends and buddies actually exercise twice a week – on every Tuesday and Thursday they gather up to play soccer, baseball or whatever. I never knew until know. Even if I felt like crap yesterday night I’m going again tomorrow. It was a great deal of fun after all. One thing will change for tomorrow though; I’m going to be drinking Gatorade.

The general idea is to announce French winners on each Thursday and Mad’-winners each Tuesdays but this week we’ll make an exception – 2 new French winners today and the Mad’-stuff on Thursday. ;)

As these are the French winners it doesn’t propably come as a surprise that the first winning design is pretty French indeed – it’s called ”Fayot de Service” .

The other winner is more international and I’m getting one as soon as it becomes available. ”Camp de Consommation” is the hot stuff in many ways. The shape and size of the print will be quite interesting to see in reality.

500 of each will be made – the usual arrangement.

The production is on fire and “Zen” is here!

”Zen” is our first print in quite while with just one color in it and this delicious design by Pagan truly shows that you don’t need more than that to completely rock it! There are more details than in most of the recent stuff that we’ve had and to be honest I didn’t even have the patience to blog about this shirt before ordering it for myself.

To make it even cooler we’re offering the shirt in two colors, raspberry and asphalt – 250 pieces each. Even though I’m a dude I so went for the raspberry one and can hardly wait it to arrive!

Besides the “Zen”-shirts I’m sure you noticed that we also have handmade laFraise-buttons available. They’re pretty exclusive – only 200 were made for your pleasure by Silberfischer.

I've been thinking about making my own design(s) for our competition for quite some time now. At first I decided that I'd make my first design as soon as I have the time. As more and more time passed I realised it's not about that - if I just took the time I'd have it. Then I decided I'd make my first design just as soon as I have the new Adobe Illustrator CS3. Well, even if I'm not accustomed to using the Illustrator (I'm still a Macromedia Freehand guy myself) I also realised that this is merely an excuse. Finally I decided that I'd make my first laFraise competition entry just as soon as our new european competition takes off. That's really only an excuse also - things may still be a bit slow with the competition as we haven't even started properly promoting yet, but having said this there really isn't a better time to participate than right now (not too much competition and we still choose a winner at least once a month from the EU-site too).

It seems that losing one's laFraise virginity can be a scary thing. I'm not sure what I'm afraid of because after all I'm as comfortable with our site as I'm with hanging out in my own livingroom and believe me; I'm pretty comfortable with that. So, now I've decided that I'm making my first design during this week and it will propably be open for voting before friday. Just to get even more comfortable with the idea of getting feedback (…and I know all of it won't be positive) about my designs from someone else than my customers I decided that goofing off is the thing I want to start with.

For one reason or another my older cat has been a bit sick over the past three days. Vintiö (finnish for a "rascal") has been puking all over the place (don't worry, she's just fine) and a couple days ago she puked on my pillow. Yes, on my pillow - right in the middle. I can be quite lazy when it comes to doing the necessary household chores and the pillow has been on my bathroom for the past two days. Today I was about to wash it when I noticed that the shape of the puke stain looks pretty much like a surfer riding a wave and got an idea.

My first design here will be "surfing on cat puke." No, I don't really expect it to win; I'm just doing it for the fun of it. I hope this encourages some of the readers of the blog to participate more (maybe for their first time). It's not so serious really. Don't be afraid - If I can do it I'm sure you can too!

I'm really eating way too much ice cream these days - at least one cone every single day and usually more. At this rate I'll gain 5 kilos before the summer is over but it's just so delicious…

I was fortunate enough not to know anything about Ben & Jerry's before but it won't take long before I've tasted every flavor they have to offer. I've already had "Cookie Dough", "Phish Food" and "Peace of Cake" since they arrived to Finland little over a month ago. I don't have a favourite among the flavors yet and that's because they're all just awesome… and loaded with sugar & fat too!

There's also a finnish brand called "Aino" I'm quite fond of. They offer a full line of weird flavors like "gingerbread cookies and glögi (a ginger flavored bewerage we drink during the Christmas season)." My absolute favourite has to be "blueberry pie" though. I'm just obsessed with it! Mmmmmmpie. Blueberrypiee…

Well, I guess my addiction to ice cream is fairly harmless. It’s not like I’m smoking crack, I just have a sweet tooth!

I learned an important lesson on blogging today; whenever we get new shirts I have to take the time to blog about them whether I really have it or not. Especially during the summer season our shirts are selling like crazy and if I don’t blog about them instantly it just might be too late. After all, I don’t want to end up getting crucified by all of you out there and I do want you to get as many of the shirts we have to offer as possible.

Well, I suppose it’s not an actual catashtrophe yet – most of you propably check out the new products even without the blog entries and even if ”Free Hugs” has sold over 300 pieces in 2 days there are little under 200 still left. Let’s give a big hand to Béji for making this print!

It actually reminds me of a poem by Kirsi Kunnas even though the poem is about a hedgehog, not a cactus. I’ll try to translate it here, but remember that the translation is very rough.

The other new shirt, ”35h” by Cib is selling quite fast too – over 200 pieces sold in 2 days. Even though the birdie is taking a vacation I hope you are not on one in case you want to have this shirt. It won’t take long until it’s sold out, that’s for sure.

…and finally, the 2 shirts together.