Fred’s false teeth fell five hundred feet,
From the fifty-fourth floor onto 45th street,
Fred flagged a fleet florist,
With five ferns from the florist,
Who said, “Fred, now how will you eat?”

Can you say that five times fast? How about just once? The limerick tongue-twisters of Twimericks: The Book of Tongue-Twisting Limericks will have you flubbing words and switching syllables in nutty, poetic prose.

For games, puzzles, and a look behind the creation of Twimericks, visit Twimericks.com!

I pride myself on being on top of all of the latest things. I read four newspapers a day, multiple magazines a month and watch a lot of TV (probably far too much…). Bottom line: I try to be as informed as possible on everything possible.

Yet I only recently discovered the phenomenon that is Bananagrams! The creators call it “an anagram game that is so fast it will drive you bananas.”

All I can say is that this innocent appearing amusement – which consists of 144 letter tiles in a banana-shaped bag – is one of the most addictive games I have ever played.

And I’ve learned that I’m not alone. I started telling friends and colleagues about this amazing “new” game I’d found and they all laughed and said “Don’t you love it? I’m a huge fan.”

Well, now I finally have some news to break to them: there’s a new version of this ridiculously addictive past-time. Bananagrams! The Official Book has just arrived at a store near you.

The book has 575 word challenges to drive you … wait for it … bananas. They range from one banana (easy) to four bananas (hard). I have to admit even some of the one banana puzzles stumped me at first. But the more I did them the better I got. Now I even manage to get through some of the most challenging ones without taking a sneak peek at the answer key!

My advice: don’t come late to this new trend. Get a copy of Bananagrams! now.  Trust me. You’re sure to find it a–peel–ing. (Sorry – I couldn’t resist!)

Kristin Matthews
Director of Publicity

Ever watch an old re-run of your favorite childhood sitcom and wonder what happened to the lead star? Did they plunge into obscurity or are they no longer with us? What about the authors, royalty, sports figures or criminals that have invaded our consciousness at some point?  Look no further than Tod Benoit’s Where Are They Buried? How Did They Die? This encyclopedic book has all the information you’ll need with brief biographies highlighting each entry’s career highlights (or lowlights) and directions to the cemetery and gravesite.

If you have a hankering for pop-culture and history, check out Front Page Photo Puzzles by Hal Buell. It’s all the iconic (collapse of the Berlin Wall) or infamous (J. Lo’s low-cut Versace dress at the Grammy Awards) photos you could want—with a slight twist. Each image has been slightly altered, and it’s up to the viewer to locate all the changes, but not to worry, solutions are included for the ones that elude you.

Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing with these two experiments from The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science by Sean Connolly. Send a homemade rocket zooming off a kitchen launching pad with the Film Canister Rocket experiment, or have way too much fun with physics with the Tennis Ball Moon Bounce. Scroll down for instructions.

Want more Totally Irresponsible Science? Click here to watch the video.

Workman designer Mike Vago spent middle school study-hall periods mapping out elaborate miniature golf courses, thus giving birth years later to The Miniature Book of Miniature Golf. Here’s a brief interview with Mr. Vago.

Q: What’s the most difficult hole in the book?
A: Hole 6 is a hedge maze, so it’s intended to be done in 7 to 10 shots. It’s not a tricky shot in the classic sense, it’s just long and there’s no way to drive straight to the hole.

Q: Say a bookseller decides to take a copy of your book off the shelf and play it instead of doing returns. What’s a notable score?
A: As a former bookseller, I can say I’d never do such a thing, mostly because it would cut into my time spent reading X-Men comics on the job. But if one were to. . . Par for the course is 29, and if you can shoot under par, you may want to consider a career on the professional book-sized mini golf circuit.

Q: Any problems with gophers eating the book?
A: Nothing a little dynamite can’t solve.

Q: I understand that Tiger Woods requested that your book be included on the PGA Tour.
A: It is! Who would believe it? And to think I totally made that up.

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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Written by charismatic young magician Joshua Jay, Magic combines expertise, photographs, step-by-step directions showing how to perform 100 tricks, and a DVD that demonstrates 35 of them.