Travis Skinner, whose 400-square-foot small home was featured in our book Small Homes (pp. 52–53), has written a book about his unique wood-fired sauna on wheels. The book is called AnglerFish Sauna: Material Based Design & Deep-Sea Sculpture, and is available at:

amazon.com/dp/1737637502

In his introduction, Travis says: “What inspired us to make a 17-foot model of a female Anglerfish that is a wood-fired sauna on wheels? These pages will lead you on a multimedia journey through the conceptual design, the process of construction, and meaning within the sculpture.”

The sauna is beautiful, exceptional, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s also built with meticulous craftsmanship.

I discovered a homemade book called Stretching in 1979. It was aimed at athletes, with stretching routines for some 20 sports.

I wrote the author, Bob Anderson, and suggested he add stretches for builders, waitresses, truck drivers, kids, and older people. We started talking. I found out that he and his wife Jean (who did the drawings) had sold 35,000 copies from a garage in Southern California. End result: Bob and Jean rented a house on the beach here in Spring, 1980, and in three months, we did a complete revision of the book.

We did a first run of 50,000 copies, and the book took off, with Random House as distributor, and has been selling ever since; it’s now sold over 3¾ million copies worldwide, and is in 23 languages. As far as I can tell, it’s the best-selling fitness book in the world.

Tech Neck  An important (and timely) addition to this new edition will be stretches to combat the bad posture caused by (1) cell phone usage and (2) working on computers.

Take a look at how bent-over people are when talking on their phones. It’s called “tech neck.”

The point is, we all spend too much time at screens of various sizes, and it’s not healthy. Not good for the body.

Seeking Editorial Advice: What should we call this section? Stretches (or Stretching) for the Digital World? Technological Era? Digital Era? Tech World? Information Age? Computer Age? Technological Age? Digital Age?

How do we describe our world which is now filled with hours spent on screens?

Want to stretch right now? shltr.net/stretch

Last night I went to an event at Capgemini Applied Innovation Exchange in San Francisco, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Whole Earth Catalog. It was a 3-hour tribute to and lovefest for Stewart Brand, and the role he has played in shaping so many trends and affecting and inspiring so many people’s lives. I got invited because I was the shelter editor of the WEC back in the day. About a dozen people gave 3-minute speeches, including Kevin Kelly, Orville Schell, Peter Calthorpe, Tim O’Reilly and astronaut Rusty Schweikart on Stewart’s impact on their lives. Not to mention that Steve Jobs (now famously) said that in high school he was reading the WEC and it had a lot to do with inspiring him to get into building computers Wow!

This was a private event, but a prequel to a big celebration, open to the public, coming up on October 13th, 2018, at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco: https://www.wholeearth50th.com/

I’m going to write a bit about my experiences with Stewart next week.

I’ve been struggling with my 9-year-old MacPro for months. Continually hanging up, getting the spinning globe in Mail, Chrome, Photoshop, etc. Rick tried just about everything, but we just couldn’t figure it out. Finally, rather than wait around for the new MacPro, we decided to go with this machine. Oh man, what a delight! Such elegant design, wireless keyboard and mouse, sparkling monitor. Rick’s got it rolling, now tuning up before he takes off for Hawaii.

Just today started working on my book on the ’60s (which is looking more and more like a book) on it.

27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display

With the following configuration:

• 3.4GHz quad-core 7th-generation Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.8GHz

• 8GB 2400MHz DDR4

• 512GB SSD • Radeon Pro 570 with 4GB video memory

• Magic Mouse 2

• Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad – US English

For years I’ve had a persistent problem with hitting the “m” or “n” keys when hitting the space bar, so that words ran togethermlikenthis. I glued this piece of cutout bone to the space bar and voila! Problem solved.