“War is like a big machine that no one really knows how to run and when it gets out of control it ends up destroying the things you thought you were fighting for.” –”The War”(1994)

I am not a morning person – never have been and never will be. Luckily the same cannot be said for Ramit Sethi, author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich.

Ramit, who is based in San Francisco, came to NYC earlier this week to begin his book tour. His days have been packed with meetings and interviews – including one yesterday on the aptly named Early Show on CBS.

The arrival time was 7:20am. Maybe it was the caffeine, maybe it was the adrenaline rush from his book already hitting the bestseller lists for both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, but in any case Ramit showed up wide awake and raring to go – with a smile on his face. He did a great interview with anchor Maggie Rodriguez and then was out the door to do yet more media.

After New York Ramit heads off to Los Angeles and then hits 12 more cities. I’m exhausted just thinking about it, but I have no doubt that he’ll rise to the occasion in every location!

Consider this the DVD bonus feature you didn’t get with the book: an illustrated tour of all of the rough ideas that were refined into the finished book.

When I had the idea for a miniature golf book, the first thing I thought of was hitting the ball into the hole, and having it drop down to the next page.  That part seemed pretty easy to do – just cut a hole in the page.  More of a challenge was coming up with walls.  The miniature golf courses of my childhood tended to have walls made of spraypainted bricks – solid enough that the ball bounced off, but usually just a little askew from years of being stepped on and banged into with clubs.  As bricks aren’t a great material to make a book out of, the first thing I did was to try and find a material that would work instead.  The image at the top of the page was my very first experiment with making pages that A) had walls attached to them, and B) could still close like a book.  It’s made out of foamcore, which they also don’t make books out of, but at that point I figured I’d work out the mechanics first, then figure out the materials.

The next step was making a golf course.  I wanted the course to go over the whole page spread (ie. the left and right pages).  So my first challenge was to build up each page with walls, but for the book to still be foldable.  Here’s what I came up with, the very first prototype for the book.

The first course was far simpler and more geometric than the courses in the finished book.  Again, I was still working out the mechanics; the course designs would come later.  Notice the wall that runs vertically through the middle of the page – if the book folded in two, with a split down the middle, there’d be no room for the walls, and it wouldn’t close properly.
So it actually folds in three – there’s a 1/4″ strip in the middle of the page (including that wall), that’s part of the spine of the book.  To the left is an outside view. The course is designed in such a way that, when you fold it up, the walls don’t run into each other. They fit together like a puzzle.

However, as I did a few of these, I realized that I was really limited in how I could design the courses,if I couldn’t make walls that intersected when the book folded up. So, I came up with a way to make that work. In the overhead view of the course, you can see that two of the walls have a space in the middle with an X. When you fold the book shut, the X’s line up. One half of the X is filled in, to keep the wall solid. The other half is open, so that the opposite page’s X fits in when you close the book. Here’s a model I made to test the concept.

So, I had worked out my miniature golf book, and discovered I could design some pretty interesting courses. I even started to experiment in 3 dimensions.

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The 2010 Dog and Cat Page-A-Day Contest is officially over! All entries have been chosen and I now have a moment to reflect on this year’s contest.

This photo is a snapshot of just one of two deliveries that I receive every week during the peak time of our Dog/Cat Page-A-Day contest! This year alone I received over 300,000 Cat photos and over 200,000 Dog photos.

Everyone on our Page-A-Day Team agrees this is our best Dog and Cat Page-A-Day Calendar ever! Look for them in stores later this year.

John, Dog/Cat Page-A-Day Photo Editor

My daughter, Maddie, and I spent the first weekend of spring in the woods behind our house pretending to be entomologists. I equipped Maddie with both the Bugs Fandex and The Bug Bottle , and together we turned over stones, pulled bark off of dead trees, and combed through rotting leaves unearthing a wide assortment of creepy-crawlies. We even searched our garage, where we previously found Black Widow and Wolf spiders lurking.

Maddie used the Fandex to identify some of her discoveries, and used the Bug Bottle to house them in. With the exception of the couple of ticks that got on us, Maddie has pet names for her adopted critters, and they now reside in the bottle next to her bed.