a trip to Monticello

Maira Kalman writes - and draws - of her experience in visiting the home of a remarkable man, the second President of the United States. I've been to his home only once, on a trip to Washington with my parents and grandmother years ago. I remember the bed, though, that separated his dressing room and his study.

Mann's Chapel

Mann's Chapel, the oldest church in Vermilion County of Illinois, was built in 1857. It's famous enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry.

You may ask, what's so special about Mann's Chapel?

Let's take a closer look at the steeple, shall we?


And now, a peek inside the church:

lusting

Let's be honest: is a little lusting necessarily a bad thing, especially when this is the object of your affections? Okay, it actually is a bad thing, but it's hard to resist the temptation, no? If I had a staircase like that, it would be hard for me to ever climb the stairs. I'd probably place my favorite books under the first step, and I'd be stuck every time.

I looked around apartment therapy, the site where you can find the pictures of that staircase. Lots of decorating ideas, and not just for apartments. Many inspirational shots of other people's apartments, bugalows, and whatevers.

Are there Nazis in the U.S. Navy?

Look.

"The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air," Tony Perry reports in Monday's edition of the LA Times. "The four L-shaped buildings, constructed in the late 1960s, are part of the amphibious base at Coronado and serve as barracks for Seabees."

The article continues, "But once people began looking at satellite images from Google Earth, they started commenting about on blogs and websites about how much the buildings resembled the symbol used by the Nazis."

Leaning Tower of Pisa

The Leaning Tower doesn't lean so much anymore. It now leans like it did in 1838.

"It has straightened a little bit more than we expected, but every little helps," said Prof John Burland, an expert in soil mechanics at Imperial College London, who was the only British member of the 14-strong rescue committee.

He said the tower was still "very slightly moving" towards being upright, but that it had stabilised.

The tower, which has been leaning almost since building work first began in 1173, was closed to the public in 1990 because of safety fears. The 183-foot tower was nearly 15 feet off vertical and its structure was found to have been weakened by centuries of strain.

America's favorite architectural structures

Here they are - all 150 of them. They're mostly buildings, but the Golden Gate Bridge and Vietnam Veterans Memorial are in there.

I've been to Orlando several times in the past few years, so I've seen Michael Graves' Swan and Dolphin. It's Disney, of course, but most everything in Orlando seems to be. I've stayed at Miami's Fontainebleau twice, and the first time was the better one - a heavenly Art Deco inspired room with a balcony and magnificent view of the hotel grounds below and the Atlantic beyond.

Chicago had several buildings represented, including this one:

tall
Originally uploaded by Good Brownie.