× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011, by
Sarah Firshein 
If Tom Clancy's possible building of an indoor gun range tells us anything, it's that the world's most successful pop authors have funny ways of spending their smokin'-hot piles of royalties. Here's the latest rumor to swirl out of the U.K.: the Daily Mail has reported that Harry Potter empress J.K. Rowling has just submitted plans to build garden house similar to Hagrid's hut on the Renaissance-style grounds of her Edinburgh, Scotland, manse, complete with a conical roof, spire, chimney, and stone steps. However, as Potter blog The Leaky Cauldron points out, just because the new outbuilding will have a conical roof doesn't necessarily mean Rowling is trying to make life imitate art—"there isn't any intent to make it match Hagrid's hut (which is actually wooden as per the books, not stone as in the films)." Sharp eyes!
· Harry Potter author JK Rowling plans to build Hagrid's hut in her back garden [Daily Mail]
· Press Peeks into J.K. Rowling's Back Yard, Sees Hagrid, Gets It Wrong [The Leaky Cauldron]
· Is Tom Clancy Building an Indoor Gun Range in His Penthouse? [Curbed National]
View the original article here
In San Fran, plans are in the works to replace an aging commercial building with the hip Hotel SoMa. That's all well and good but some commenters are concerned about the glass-bottomed swimming pool, set some seven stories up overlooking the street, in the earthquake-prone Bay Area. One had a vision of "an old 1970s disaster movie with an earthquake and a pin-up swimmer: close-up to her horrified eyes looking at the crack in the glass becoming longer and longer. Focus on the ground 50 feet lowers. Zing! Splash!" [SocketSite]
