Weird Life

In recent years, scientists have hypothesized life-forms that can only be called "weird": organisms that live off acid rather than water, microbes that thrive at temperatures and pressure levels so extreme that their cellular structures should break down, perhaps even organisms that reproduce without DNA. Some of these strange life-forms, unrelated to all life we know, might be nearby: on rock surfaces in the American southwest, hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, or even in our own bodies. Some, stranger still, might live in Martian permafrost, swim in the dark oceans of Jupiter's moons, or survive in the exotic ices on comets.

Disaster reigns when A.J. participates in the school's holiday pageant celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.

The Do family has a messy new house to clean up! Weir, Bella and Henry decide to do some extra work to earn pocket money. But can they handle wild lawns, dirty dishes and a vacuum cleaner explosion? It won’t be easy...but it will be funny!

Award-winning author Dan Gutman delivers the fourth amusing tale from his popular My Weird School series. Even for an art teacher, Ms. Hannah is pretty strange. She wears dresses made out of potholders and collects garbage instead of throwing it out—so her students can use it in their artwork. And now, she’s making A.J. be partners with smelly Andrea. This is going to be the worst art class ever!

Miss Lazar, the janitor, likes to dance around the school with a mop. She has a secret room in the basement where she keeps the bad kids, and she's the weirdest custodian in the world.

Something weird is going on! Miss Suki is a famous children's book author - and she's coming to A.J.'s school! She lives in the rainforest and writes about endangered animals. But when her pet raptor gets loose in the classroom, it's the kids who are going to be endangered! Yikes!

Forget Thanksgiving. The biggest turkey of all is running around Ella Mentry School - Dr. Carbles, the president of the school board. He is grumpier than ever and wants to fire Mr. Klutz. Will A.J. and his friends be able to save their principals job?

Something weird is going on! A.J. and his friends are afraid that Ms. Todd, their substitute teacher, has killed their regular teacher and is trying to take over her job. They’re going to have to do the detective work to get the goods on her. But it won’t be easy! Ms. Todd is the weirdest substitute teacher in the history of the world!

Emma Mcgraw is slowly making friends at her new school. but when Cynthia calls her weird, Emma is shocked. They are supposed to be best friends! in response, Emma decides that Cynthia’s new name should be bossy pants, and she tells everyone in the class.

The winner of numerous awards for children’s fiction, Dan Gutman presents the third tale from his delightfully silly My Weird School series. Second-grader A.J. thinks Mrs. Roopy, the librarian, might be the strangest teacher at his school. The students believe she keeps appearing fully dressed as characters from books, like Johnny Appleseed and Little Miss Muffet. But every time a new character surfaces, Mrs. Roopy insists she was home sick that day!

Jake Wind is trying to stay under the radar. Whose radar? Anyone who might be too interested in the fact that he has shape-shifting abilities he can’t control. Or that his parents found him as a ball of goo when he was a baby. Keeping his powers in check is crucial, though, if he wants to live a normal life and go to middle school instead of being homeschooled (and if he wants to avoid being kidnapped and experimented on, of course).

Woody wants to get un-weird - and fast! And he'll find help in the most unlikely of places. Woody is forever worried about being different. He thinks himself weird and a bit of a wuss, and two bullies, Della and Casey, make sure he doesn't forget that. It doesn't help that his mum is slightly bonkers. She dresses up as a sheep for a living - mostly for her job as a children's entertainer. And not to mention the fact that she forces Woody to wear old granny jumpers that she finds down the local charity shop.

Mum’s got a cool new job at the animal hospital...but now Weir’s house is like a zoo! How can Bella and Weir help look after all the animals and finish their school project?! It won’t be easy...but it will be funny!

Mary Katherine Backstrom shares heartbreaking and hilarious stories of how God uses each "mess" in our lives to bring us closer to him. She shows us that it's okay to celebrate exactly where we are right now - holy hot mess and all.

Consider Jason your spirit guide, offering strategies for honing in on what makes you weird, recognizing when feedback is just another form of procrastination, and how to stop with social media already. There's a specific set of strategies and exercises that can help you prioritize your life over your business, by identifying your MMM (Minimum Monthly Magic) number. He also offers examples from his own life (how he got out of $124K worth of debt, escaped the pressure to have a big wedding, and has thrived on social media by primarily ignoring it).

Sam has retreated to her late father’s rental house, a safe place to commune with the animals in the greenbelt out back, tend to her garden, and keep her secrets. Her sense of security slowly returns - until an aggressive neighbor from the other side of the ravine fells a tree on her property. How little he regards nature. Or understands its darkness. How little he knows Sam.

Growing up, Dr Camilla Pang loved patterns and ordering things. She was obsessed with Disney, infatuated by Stephen Hawking and the language she only really understood was science. Diagnosed with autism age eight, Camilla felt like an outsider - and kids often like nothing better than to gang up on outsiders. This is the story of how Camilla used science as her sidekick for navigating the world - allowing her to translate ideas she could understand (like gravity and light waves) onto things she couldn't (like people, how long to smile for and when someone needed a hug).

It's all too easy to get caught up in the often monotonous nature of our day to day—moving from one rote task to the next, only to rinse and repeat the next day. Weirdness, however, is an easily accessible antidote to these feelings of languishing. The quirky, eccentric, and peculiar can take us out of our normal habits of thought and perception, surprising us by breaking up our routines and reminding us that there's more to life than the everyday.

Briarcliff Mansion and the land it occupies are owned by Emory University, which refers to it as its "Briarcliff Campus." Fortune and Folly, in part, illuminates the largely lost story of how the mansion, and the entire surrounding neighborhood, got its name. But in order to understand the mansion, we have to understand the man who built it. Briarcliff Mansion once belonged to a man named Asa Candler, Jr.—also known as Buddie. The second son and namesake of Coca-Cola founder Asa Griggs Candler, Buddie was a wealthy real estate developer of great successes and greater failures.

Mat Devine, lead singer of the band Kill Hannah, inadvertently began his own popular advice column after Fuse TV asked him to blog about his life on tour. Mat's humorous and touching column, aptly titled "The Raccoon Society", gained a lot of traction as his fans sought advice on serious issues such as alcoholism, bullying, and self-mutilation, while also touching upon lighter subjects like dealing with siblings, fashion, and going to prom.