Next Tuesday the new President will take his first drive in his new limousine down Pennsylvania Ave. The recently unveiled custom built Cadillac is described as a luxury tank. It’s not as elegant as the Mercedes-Benz popular with European heads of state, but those cars probably could not withstand a direct asteroid hit either. Here are a few of the more bizarre features of “Cadillac One.”

-Armored doors weigh as much as a cabin door on a Boeing 757.

-Tires are shred and puncture resistant and can still run when flat.

-Night vision cameras.

-Bottles of the President’s blood are kept in the car for emergency transfusions.

-Only the driver’s window can open, and only three inches, to communicate with Secret Service agents outside.

-Armour plated fuel tank…

Remember Kramer’s coffee table book about celebrity coffee tables? When presenting the book to Regis, Kramer demonstrated how the book could spout legs to become a coffee table.

Well, these bookshelves share that same Cosmo Kramer brilliance. These two additions to the “Really Cool Bookshelves” library are different takes on the book as bookshelf.

In this first example, it appears the books (in this case J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series) have sacrificed their lives to become an immortal shelf. There’s nothing particularly strange about the design…your standard brackets and horizontal shelf. But it’s fun nonetheless.

The second shelf is more interesting, in my opinion. The simple metal bracket is used to hold a single book to the wall. Other books are then stacked on top to give the…

Arriving in the US in 2009 is the Nissan Cube. It’s been a big hit in Japan, and with Toyota’s Scion brand proving boxy can be popular, they’ve decided to import the Cube to our shores. The current Cube is powered by a 95-hp, 1.4 liter engine. As far as size, the Cube is about one inch longer than the Mini Cooper but 10 inches taller.

From Automobile Magazine:

“The first time you see a Nissan Cube, it’s hard to keep your mouth shut. A hundred lame (or is that square?) box-it-came-in jokes pop into your head, and resisting the urge to spit them out rapid-fire, like some coked-up Catskills comic, takes a will of steel. Especially if you find, as do most people, that the mere sight…

An email went out today announcing that the vast library of books belonging to Christian History & Biography, part of the Christianity Today International family, was up for grabs. We rushed over to the other building to find people already hauling away the goods. I took a stack of works on American church architecture and African slave religion–two of my interests since studying comparative religion at Miami University years ago.

Carrying the books back to my office, I recalled another really cool bookshelf I’d seen. This bookshelf was designed by Bruno Petronzi. It features a metal stick figure with a light fixture for a head. On his back the figure carries a large bookshelf. Apart from the integration of bookshelf and scupture, one is amazed at how the…