Buying and Selling

Nice day - started out doing some housework then went to Pimlico for the first car boot sale of the year. I got a very basic 35mm f2.8 lens (which I'll be selling straight on) for £3 and a Macbook power supply for a fiver, but won't be able to check that until I get my Macbook Pro back from keyboard replacement. Walked back via Hyde Park, which might use up a few grams of flab from Xmas.

I've just listed the 20" iMac G4 on eBay with quite a lot of accessories and software for £225, but will accept a little less. Also selling some other stuff including some RAM and an old Airport card, and the lens once I've written the listing. As usual everything is here:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/marcusrowland0/m.html

(no subject)

A friend is trying to identify a children's SF novel which I know I read in the late fifties or early sixties:

I have a memory from ooh 40+, maybe nearly 50 years back. YA scifi book. Man ends up in smoky eastern European type café with set of Russians. They are going off to Jupiter or Saturn in their flying saucer which looks like a flying saucer with four twisty vertical arms coming up off the rim with strange blobs attached (book is illustrated, you understand). On arrival (no gravity problems, no temperature problems, no swirling clouds of methane, just land on normal surface) the locals collar them and house them in 3 large glass man-shaped houses. Four scientists get Einstein (or such-like), 3 poets get Pushkin (or such-like), and the misfit lives alone in the glass angry man. Eventually flying saucer 2 – 3 arms (or was it the other way round?) come and rescue them.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Anyone recognize it?