It's Spring or so they said on TV.



At least, some flowers have started popping in our garden. My elder daughter has collected a few and put them in a doll's cup with a bit of water. But as you can see, the trees in the background have no leaf yet.

LE COUP DE SANG est le nom du dérèglement climatique brutal et généralisé qui s'est abattu sur la Terre. La planète est totalement désorientée, dévastée, morcelée par des catastrophes naturelles hors normes. En quelques semaines, le Monde a perdu tout semblant de cohérence. La nature a craché sa colère. Plus que jamais, la survie est une affaire individuelle. La recherche d'eau douce potable devient la préoccupation première, chacun pour soi.

Ainsi commence Animal'Z, la nouvelle bande-dessinée d'Enki Bilal. J'attendais avec une certaine impatience matinée de crainte ce nouvel album du sieur Bilal. Ce grand artiste possède une signature au dessin qui lui est unique, et quelle signature ! L'attention portée au détail, le côté buriné des personnages, comme si la vie laissait ses marques à même leur peau, la représentation d'un monde dur et sans concessions, tout cela participe à cette griffe si particulière à Bilal.



J'ai été refroidi par la "tétralogie" du Sommeil du Monstre, commencée en 1998 et terminée en 2007. Les deux premiers tomes de la série fûrent très prometteurs. Malheureusement, le potentiel et le champ des possibles ont été réduits dans le troisième et quasi-achevés dans le quatrième tome qui m'a laissé perplexe et avec un fort sentiment de travail mal lêché, bâclé.



Les qualités de grand dessinateur de Bilal sont indéniables mais le scénario n'est pas toujours au rendez-vous. Mais après avoir lu Animal'Z, je découvre non seulement un sublime dessinateur (certaines planches sont tout simplement époustouflantes, peut-on encore parler de bande-dessinée à ce niveau ?) mais un grand scénariste.



Je vous tire mon chapeau bien bas cher Enki. Votre Animal'Z est de mon point de vue d'humble lecteur un grand coup de maître !

A few months ago, I stumbled upon the video below by Ozcan Tekin while browsing Vimeo. I really love it.


irregular flow from 4khz on Vimeo.

The dark, irregular flows produced every time the girl touches the wall are like the toxins that pollute our bodies and strain them. The girl looks like she has discovered a nice way of getting rid of these pollutants. Well, that’s my interpretation. The music is a tad tiresome though and could have been chosen with greater care. But as Douglas Adams nicely wrote:

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Hurray! I am really grateful that our life as a species is getting easier by the day. What we made thousands of years to acquire and beef up is definitely useless. I'm speaking about intelligence of course! Well, you may disagree here and tell me that I have just to look around to see the sorry state where this supposedly great feature of our species is leading us. But let's not put all the cats in the same bag for a minute here. For the sake of the Truth(tm) that I have just revealed (that intelligence is futile), put your arguments aside and bear with me for a sec.

Yesterday, I was surprised to see a new kind of paper goblet popping up from the coffee machine at my workplace when I ordered said machine to provide me with a hot beverage that looks like coffee, smells like coffee but doesn't taste at all like coffee. However, the machine's maker put a sticker near the button that I pushed telling me that if I pushed that button I will get coffee! But I'm cheerful and optimistic, remember? So whenever I face the dreaded machine, I always look for a button with a "YEAH! Real Coffee!" but until now, there is none to be seen.

Erm, sorry I am getting side-tracked. So the new paper goblet popped up. The hot beverage (the thing they call coffee) poured in. The machine produced a sound telling you that you can go away now and pretend you are drinking coffee. So far so good! But by giving a closer look at the paper goblet, I realized that it actually contained a manual! A manual in very simple English (4 verbs) telling you what you should do and how you should feel! Great! Wow! Amazing! In the era of Web 2.0, this was exactly what I was looking for: an extremely useful how-to that insults my intelligence and invades that little moment I have to trick my mind into drinking coffee-but-no-quite-the-real-thing.

So today, armed with my camera I decided to take pics of the complete manual. Make sure to read the comments, even if your brain is equipped to understand those simple verbs!



Someone really need my cluebat here.

I frequently go to Angers, a nice mid-sized city to the west of Paris, France. Most of my in-laws live in its vicinity. Walking downtown is enjoyable and, if one is wise enough to avoid the shopping areas, relaxing. I met the beauty queen below during one my walks.



While I walked many times on the street where she "lives", I had never noticed her before since I don't usually look upward at the buildings and houses that surround my walking path. Which is kind of a shame. One should really take their time to look everywhere, particularly in places that are supposed to be familiar. Beauty may lie anywhere.



That day, I was waiting for my wife to get out of a small shop. On the other side of the street where I was standing, there was a very nice flower shop and my eyes were attracted by the building where it is located. Looking a bit more into details, I spotted the beauty queen and I was really delighted by her sight.

I took some other shots that you may want to see. They were taken using a Panasonic DMC-FX150 compact camera in program mode. Some pictures were "cropped". Otherwise, no software change has been made.