Idea-logy

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.

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.