There was a nod to civilian life in Pakistan with a series of floats, including one bearing a pair of roaring electronic dinosaurs and others for each of country's different regions – the mountainous north was represented by men dressed as mountaineers pretending to scale a model of K2.
"You can get DNA from their excreta, their poo, which floats to the surface," he said.
So Orsini floats dreamily past Venice – not a matte painting, but actual Venice, complete with the Campanile, the Doge's Palace and the Biblioteca, which was built between 37 and 91 years after Prince of Foxes is set.
So while in Japan you can easily stumble across a remote-control tissue box or a battery-operated planetarium for your bathroom (by which I mean a waterproof Saturn-shaped orb that floats in the bath and projects the entire visible universe onto the ceiling), the sense of surrounding novelty has diminished.
The first thing that strikes you as you arrive is the overwhelmingly Christmassy smell of clove, mace and cinnamon - a disconcerting experience when the temperature is 33C backed up by a drenching 90 per cent humidity; the second is that while Grenada floats in the blue Caribbean like a small square of rumpled green baize, it also seems to be adrift somewhere about the early Fifties.
The Chumby seems a peculiar poster child for this new way of doing things, but hey — whatever floats Sony's boat.
The traditional parade of floats wound its way through the centre of Manchester: lots of nuns, men in silver jockstraps, line dancers, safe sex squaddies in combat gear and Mr Gay UK draped over the back of silver BMW.
Sandra Bullock's character, Ryan Stone, floats from one mishap to another, always escaping disaster at the last possible moment.
A pensioner who floats off in a house tied to thousands of multi-coloured balloons in search of adventure?
Instead, John Wizards is an album that floats through time, eluding concrete meaning.
AS THE neatly-taken header of Hamid Estili floats past the despairing grasp of America's goalkeeper, Iran's soccer fans erupt in celebration.
