lnr | May. 30th, 2004

This is a rather fabulous book I picked up from http://www.amazon.fr/ . Telling the tale of 3 children who have lost their mother, and who seek the help of their mad scientist neighbour when a thunderstorm erases their computer's disk of all traces of her. With his help they set off on a "voyage extraordinaire au centre d'un ordinateur" in an attempt to find her.

The story itself is charming enough, but it's really brought to life by the fact that the book (in larger than A4 format) is fully illustrated throughout with wonderful montages of photography, modelling and computer drawn images which show the scenes they're experiencing in wonderful techinicolour glory. Odd perspectives abound, as well as mad typography with changes of colour and font for emphasis and atmosphere. The whole is rather reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's films in parts, though obviously rather lighter.

The science is of course nonsense, and doesn't pretend to be more, but as a modern SF fairytale this is utterly delightful.

Another night of broken sleep. My intermittent snoring is keeping rjk awake, and this in turn is keeping me awake, and making us both mildly cross. Resorted to sleeping on the sofa again, at about 6:30am. And the hose I bought mid-week is not yet usable since we don't have any taps which stick out enough for a standard universal adapter, and none of them are threaded either. I have ordered a special adaptor for square/mixer taps though, and we shall see if the solves the problem. Other than that I guess I'm not really grumpy. Had a nice lunch and have made chilli for dinner already so will only have to put some rice on later when we want to eat, and I've managed to get some more of the washing up mount-doom under control too, which is always good, and I've ordered some shopping from tesco which will arrive Tuesday, since they don't seem to be doing deliveries tomorrow - that or they're already fully booked. Very tempted just to go and doze for a while now. Not sure when rjk will be back since they've gone walking.