I admit it: growing up, I was a huge science nerd. So Sean Connolly’s The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science and The Book of Potentially Catastrophic Science are high on my list of “Books that are Awesome.”

Our friends at Scholastic Book Clubs recently paid homage to some of the most dangerous scientific discoveries of all time with a demonstration of the Soda Bottle Rocket. If you like suspense, learning, and explosions, this video is for you.

Now if only I could convince the powers that be to let me spend a day channeling my inner mad scientist…

“If people say, ‘He was here on earth to make sure tongue twisters and limericks got together,’ that’s not so bad. I was best man at the wedding.”

So says Lou Brooks, the man responsible for the delightful – and delightfully difficult to say – Twimericks: The Book of Tongue-Twisting Limericks, in a recent interview on one of our favorite blogs, House of Cat.

If you’ve caught the Twimericks bug, head on over to www.twimericks.com for games, puzzles, and so much more mischievous fun.

(Should your tongue become twisted into a Perfect Over-and-Underhand Bavarian Pretzel Knot, however, don’t say you haven’t been warned…)

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!

What could be more fun for kids than to have the kind of rip-roaring good time that harkens back to pre-video game, pre-computer days? Introducing 64 valuable science experiments that snap, crackle, pop, ooze, crash, boom, and stink! From Marshmallows on Steroids to Home-Made Lightning, the Sandwich Bag Bomb to Giant Air Cannon, The Book of Totally Irresponsible Science awakens kids’ curiosity while demonstrating scientific principles like osmosis, air pressure, and Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

Put a nickel in the jukebox, assuming you can locate a jukebox, and that you remember what a nickel is. Here’s legendary Beach Boy Brian Wilson singing lead and 10-part harmonies on “Speed Turtle.” The incomparable Neil Sedaka crooning “Your Nose.” B. B. King brings you a wistful “One Shoe Blues,” Gerry and the Pacemakers offer “Mersey Lullaby,” and relative newcomer (in this seasoned company) Patti LuPone of “Evita” fame sings—what else—the “Rabbit Tango.” And then there’s the hit single from Boynton’s Your Personal Penguin sung by the impossibly cute Davy Jones of The Monkees. I mean jeepers, even Sha Na Na is here.

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DOWNLOAD THE SONG YOUR PERSONAL PENGUIN