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| Stretching arms. Stretching legs. Stretching your imagination. |
Penicilin. The
automobile. Stretch Armstrong –
these examples altered the course of humanity toward a more perfect society,
but what is the next big idea that will change everything. Teleportation? The cure for cancer? A truly delicious and nutritious chocolate
bar? Those are all fine ideas currently
in different stages of development, but the ideas that I’m interested in are
the ones that most likely won’t change everyone’s life but could somewhat make
a single person’s day a little more interesting. I made my foray into the arena of big ideas with pizza fries
(the merger of pizza sauce and cheese with French fries), and while I wait for
the Foodmaster General to give his counter offer to my request of lifetime
cinnabons for the rights to pizza fries, I thought I would share my next big
ideas here because it has to be cheaper than a patent.
Music Festival in Space….ok I’m settling for the sky
Sure there are as many music festivals these days as there
are M. Night Shyamalan critics, but we are stuck in the Paul Revere model of
thinking; land and sea. With the
new push of cruise-based festivals (Bruise Cruise, Weezer’s cruise festival,
whatever it is Jimmy Buffett is probably doing to ruin the open sea), I want to
look past this burgeoning trend to where the sky is quite literally the
limit. The idea: for a modest
price (that is really extremely expensive – to keep with the festival model)
you and a group of friends or random strangers can rent a hot air balloon for
the festival weekend. Everything
else is boilerplate music festival, the expensive food and beer prices, the
up-and-coming bands slotted to side stages with scheduling conflicts, the big
name headliners, even the porta-potties, except everything is taking place in
the heavens. The bands will set
sail in their own balloon to their pre-determined locations in the skyway for
all festival-goers to make their way to.
Concession areas will be floating around and even available for delivery
services. I can already envision
the headlines and Guinness World Records for highest concert ever put on, and
if we’re being honest aren’t we all just chasing after one world record…
No Park Zone
If green space in the city were an animal it would be as
endangered as a baby dinosaur being clubbed to death by a strip mall
designer. Clearly, parks are notoriously slow
learners and still haven’t figured out how to evade an oncoming predator
(i.e.
a bulldozer). So my idea is to
take the decision making process out of the unreliable learning capacity
of the
parks out of said park’s hands, and into the capable hands, minds, and
tires of
the increasingly popular food trucks.
Throw some turf on the bed of some open air truck/trailers, put
up a few
trees, maybe add a swing, and drive that baby around town.
Once we find out way into a feature in
a couple hip magazines, and maybe write a few humorous tweets and voila
people
will be hopping on to picnic, swing, and socialize at any opportunity.
Phase 2
would clearly be to put a roller coaster on the back of the truck to
trick the
people into visiting the truck park by tempting death by hurtling
hundreds of
feet into the air at toupee-losing speeds.
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| This was the first google image for the search "sad park." |
Hologram-mys
Music spectacles have been at the forefront of using
holograms to zombiefy deceased artists to great acclaim. But why stop with one-time concert
appearances or messages in the Star Wars franchise? Celebrities should be hocking their holograms like peanuts at
a ballgame. The idea here is to
sell customers an allotment of time with one’s life-like hologram to spend time
however the purchaser sees fit.
Shooting the breeze with Bill Murray’s hologram at happy hour in your
local watering hole: $125 (ed note – for this I would pay a minimum of
$100,000). Taking Scarlett
Johanssen out for paella and salsa dancing: $315 (ed note – I’m not sure how to
dance with air, but you’ll figure it out). Putting off loneliness for a few hours by pretending to be
friends with refracted light beams – priceless (ed note – this is a sad
business model, but depression is big money in this country just ask a pharmaceutical
representative).
Date Night
Dating websites are big money and have been stratifying
their membership to result in more homogenous matches than ever. This hyper-specific data trend has hit the
big-time with sites like farmersonly.com, blackpeoplemeet.com, and
tocatchapredator.com. These sites
are great at finding matches for people in search of very one dimensional mates,
“I only want to date farmers,” “I
only want to date Christians,” and “How often should I be updating my itunes
version” are typical conversation points seen on dating site message boards. The problem is most people build their
dream girl or guy to include more than one main attribute. I believe we can
make these sites even more specific to the point where there are no surprises
or anything to learn from getting to know a person. Brunette-dancers-who-love-MikeMyers-movies-but-didn’t-care-for-Wayne’sWorld-and-are-small-enough-to-fit-in-the-trunk-of-a-HondaCivic-without-any-complaints.com
would be an example of a site that a serial killer would most likely pay a
premium monthly fee to browse. And
as the old business saying goes, once you have one customer, some more might
possibly maybe follow.
