Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...as in my perigrinations around Town this morning I seem to have found a proof copy of Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer's The Grand Tour (Being a Revelation of Matters of High Confidentiality and Greatest Importance, Including Extracts from the Intimate Diary of a Noblewoman and the Sworn Testimony of a Lady of Quality), the long awaited sequel to Sorcery and Cecilia.

As the publisher's site puts it:

Kate and Cecy and their new husbands, Thomas and James, are off on a Grand Tour. Their plans? To leisurely travel about the Continent, take in a few antiquities, and--of course--purchase fabulous Parisian wardrobes.

But once they arrive in France, mysterious things start to happen. Cecy receives a package containing a lost coronation treasure, Thomas's valet is assaulted, and Kate loses a glove. Soon it becomes clear that they have stumbled upon a dastardly, magical plot to take over Europe.

Now the four newlyweds must embark on a daring chase to thwart the evil conspiracy. And there's no telling the trouble they'll get into along the way. For when you mix Kate and Cecy and magic, you never know what's going to happen next!

Rar! I think I shall enjoy this one (before I loan it to tamaranth)...

But I shall finish reading about vampire queens with prada shoe fetishes first...

Anyone with paleontological leanings and an urge for a little one-on-one basket action is going to be drawn to the Toronto Raptors, with their velociraptor footprint logo, and their cute basketball-playing dinosaur memorabila.

It wasn't difficult to be tempted into bringing a cuddly raptor toy back from Toronto (especially as large chuunks of the conference we were attending were being held in the Air Canada Centre)...

This morning I found my self walking outside the Economist's London offices. They're in an attractive square with a dynamic water feature, just off Piccadily near Green Park. What's more, the buildings and the steps are constructed using Portland stone.

This means they're also full of fossils - including some quite impressive death assemblages.

( So it's time for a quick round of camera phone shots... )

The BBC is currently showcasing restored Apollo 11 images. These are digitally scanned and restored, and available on the Apollo Archive site. Film rolls are unfrozen, scanned and then processed before being formatted for the web.

You'll find hi-res images (more than 5 Mpixels at 800KB or so), as well as browser-sized images in the gallery.