Bizarre Buildings by Paul Cattermole with Ian Westwell

Bizarre Buildings by Paul Cattermole with Ian Westwell is a collection of pictures of unusual architecture around the world. As artists in the 20th century broke the boundaries of convention, this book seems to show how architects are not only breaking the rules, but defying the laws of gravity in the 21st century. Some of the designs you'll see in this book seem to hover, fly, and even burst out of the vertical and horizontal dimensions that we are used to seeing.

Here are some of my favorites from the book:

The Twisting Torso High-Rise Apartment Tower in Malmo Sweden. The tower is 623 feet high. It has nine five story blocks. The blocks twist as they rise.

BurJ Al Arab Hotel in Dubai. This is the tallest hotel in the world. It is designed to look like a sailing ship. It claims to be the world's only 7-star luxury hotel. Its 590 foot atrium is largely covered in 22-carat gold leaf. I wonder how much it costs to stay there for a couple nights.

Selfriges Department Store in Birmingham England. The author descibes the exterior of the store like a reptile's skin. "Its reptilian skin is a glittering array of more than 15,000 anodized aluminum disks bolted to an undulating facade of sprayed concrete rendered over contoured layers of expanded steel mesh."

The Great Race by Gary Blackwood

The Great Race: The Amazing Round-The-World Auto Race of 1908 is a non-fiction book by Gary Blackwood, the author of the well-known books, The Shakespeare Stealer and The Year of the Hangman.

Imagine Spring Break is approaching but your parents have taken you out of school a few days early. Yes! You've taken an airplane to New York City and now you're taking in the sights when all of a sudden they interupt everything for a surprise announcement. They have decided that for the rest of the vacation they're taking you on a non-stop coast to coast trip in a SUV from New York City to San Francisco.

It will be a tough trip, but it's doable. But let me change a few of the conditions. Let's imagine it is 1908 instead of 2008. (Before the Model T was even developed.)The car is about the same weight, but everything else is much different. Instead of a 300 horse-power engine you only have a 30. Instead of a windshield you only have a leather screen that comes up to your chin. Instead of getting 20mpg you will be lucky to get 8mpg. I suppose the price of gas will be cheaper, but not when you factor in that there aren't any gas stations on your route-you will have to pay the price of shipping all your gas ahead of you by railroad in order to refuel. What if I take away the repair shops and parts suppliers? How about if I said none of the roads are paved and sometimes railroad tracks will be taken because the roads are in such awful shape? (Can you imagine the shaking?) One more- instead of 3,000 miles coast to coast, you will travel 22,000 miles, from New York to Paris.

In 1907 some newspapers offered a challenge to car racers around the world: a long distance automobile race from New York to Paris (22,000 miles). There was a lot of interest. Some would do it for the money. Some would do it for the fame. Some would do it because no one else had dared to before.

(Public challenges are still sometimes announced even today. For example, John McCain, who is running for President against Barak Obama proposed this summer a $300 million dollar prize be given to the winner of the Clean Car Challenge. He wants to give this prize to anyone who can develop a battery that a car can run on better than any that current technology has to offer.)

Well, news of the 1908 challenge also sparked interest in some of the leading automobile makers at the time. Many of those interested in the race-around-the-world were not as concerned about the prize money as as much as they desired the glory and attention they would receive by winning such a race. Some of the racers didn't think of themselves as heroes or pioneers-just crazy adventurers who wanted to see if they could do it. Some of these adventurers actually thought they could cross the frozen Bering Strait (the body of water that separates Alaska from Russia) by car.

Did they actually cross the Pacific Ocean via the Bering Stait by car? How many racers and cars would actually finish the race? How often did the cars break down, and if they did would the racers help each other? Get the details about the personalities, the drivers, and the mishaps from Gary Blackwood's fascinating re-telling of this true story.

You can also find out more at:

The Greatest Auto Race on Earth

The Great Auto Race

2008 re-enactment (postponed to 2009)

On a similar note, the year 1909, the year after the Great Race, would mark another important year for automobile adventures. Alice Ramsey would become the first woman to cross the continent of North America by car. Learn about her car and the route she took at: aliceramsey.org.

Schooled by Gordon Korman

You know how some kids who move and start a new school in the middle of the year will probably get a student council member or someone the office thinks is responsible to escort the new kid around and help them get situated. In Schooled, by Gordon Korman, Cap Anderson is being shown around Claverage Middle School by Zach Powers, the last person that should have been showing Cap Anderson how things work at C Average Middle School.

C Average, that's what the students call it (just take the L out of Claverage and you get C Average). Zach figures since he is in 8th grade now he's earned the right to be on top of the food chain at C Average. And the new arrival appears to be fresh meat.

It didn't help that when Cap was being shown his locker, he didn't know what a combo was. It didn't help that he didn't know that he was supposed to turn those numbers left-right-left. Zach probably thought he had died and gone to heaven when Cap looked inside it and said, "It's empty."

Astonished, Zach responded, "Of course it's empty. It's your locker. It's empty until you put something in it."

Cap didn't know what to do with a locker. He asked, "What do I have to put in there?"

"How should I know? It's your stuff."

Then Cap did his thing. He said something he may have been taught to say. He said something he truly believed and maybe if it had been the 1960's it might have made sense even to Zach. He said something no other C Average Middle School student would have said in a million years:

"When we lock things away we're really imprisoning ourselves."

Zach's eyes probably popped out. This was too good to be true. He asked Cap what school he'd been to before. Like a sheep to a wolf . . . Cap said he had been homeschooled.

Immediately Zach knew what he had to do. He was going to nominate this dude for 8th grade president without telling him, make his life miserable, and have a whole lot of fun doing it. This was his year!

Or was it? Maybe there was a whole lot more to Capricorn Anderson than Zach or anyone else thought at C Average. Like Cap would say later: "When we judge others, we're really judging ourselves."