Recently in Someone Else's Great Idea Category

Betsy noted the other day that bees are the new chickens -- and soon she'll be getting some bees to join her chickens.

Hurrah! Now I can enjoy my mom's honey, as well as her eggs.

Over here.

Congratulations to Rich over at Heavy Heavy Water for winning recently winning the New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest. Some of the other entries are pretty (un)funny, too, but I think Rich's really gets to the point of the contest.

A friend of a friend of a friend (no, really -- I've met her at parties) was a finalist for the regular caption context once. My brain doesn't think that way.

Shocking but true!! Other people have ideas -- they even have idea blogs!

I haven't often looked for or at other general idea blogs recently. Shame on me! The recent discovery of the local example, Millions of Hundred Dollar Ideas clued me in to this, and then pointed me to Steal My Ideas, Please, and from there, several other nice idea blogs (do some clicking yourself). I've got some reading to do. Plus, I've done the right thing and added a linky area for my colleagues in the idea game in that endless right hand column (maybe I need to get rid of the "archives" section? Do you think?? Or cut down on some of those unused categories?? Where do those even come from?).

The patricarch of idea blogs, in my case, is Half Bakery. It was my slightly intimidating experience there that encouraged me to resort to my own blog (I was teased for my mispellings and impracticality, and you know what a thin skin I have).

It turns out, contrary to my recent boasts, my standing in the "idea blog" wordspace is nowhere near the top, and I don't even appear in the relatively scant "great idea blog" findings. I guess I need to work on my tags. Or maybe get busy having more actual great ideas, rather than stuffing my face with corn dogs.

I lost his own articulation of this idea in the hard drive crash of aught six, but I think I can describe the first one:

Pleasantly-scented keyboard cleaning compressed air.

So that when you clean the dust out of your keyboard, you also get a nice whiff of something or other. I'm all for more pleasant scents. My only concern is, would whatever makes the air smell good stick to your keys?

I'll use Justin's words to describe the second:

"Lots of people can’t whistle, but crave the benefits that come with this skill: having dogs and children respond to you, participation in wolf-whistling at construction sites, etc. Why not have a device that whistles for you?"

But isn't that just a whistle? Or would it be specifically a wolf-whistle?. I'm afraid that's already available -- which just goes to prove it's a good idea, I always say.

Here are some instructions on how to whistle.

This falls under the category of "someone else's great idea" (I've never figured out how to get categories to show next to entries ... someday): tonight my brain is particularly fried and I found myself looking for pictures of Courtney Love. No reason. Anyway, this search lead me to this - a link just for Melissa and Dave and Pete and Susan! Really, it almost makes you feel sorry for celebrities -- all their post-partum (sp?) depression, desperate longings for children, etc. on such public display -- I don't just mean the blog, but all the material the blog draws from. I guess it serves them right for being famous.

So, I was reading the comments on Halle Barry's interest in artificial insemination and was curious about a link to a WoW goldfarm among the comments. That is, the word, "Wow!" in the sentence, "Wow. I can't wait until we hear an announcement. I wonder how she will look pregnant?" is linked to a site selling World of Warcraft gold. Huh? Well, where have I been. It turns out that's something called, "Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT technology" which is pretty interesting. I wonder if that's really working for them? I mean, how much overlap is there between people interested in Halle Berry's ovaries and World of Warcraft? It almost makes me want to try it on my blog. -- the IntelliTXXXT, I mean. That's what I'd call it, if I made it, and I'd sex it up so that every possible innuendo was linked to some vaguely associated porn site.

So then, continuing the completely random and exhausted clicking, I actually clicked on one of the ads which brought me to this -- possibly the ugliest coat I have seen and, were I pregnant and wearing it, guaranteed to make me look like a mastodon. It reminds me of how when I first got my leopard printed mouton coat I felt all sexy and stuff until I realized that while the pattern was that of a sleek jungle cat, the outline was that of a bowling ball.

So that's enough random crap for one night.

There's a skunk in our neighborhood. Wow. That's a stinky skunk, as they say at the Olive Garden (and don't I wish I had IntelliTXXXT going right now?). I'll describe more of what's been going on at Chez Vector soon. It's not all good.

Spine has a new improved blog!

Alexa, Nat, Pete and T'chaka have a Band!

Inappropriately contextualized t-shirts from around the third world really must have been a great idea, because here's another version of it, this one a book now being shilled by NPR. It's funny, because when I first heard the story tonight I thought it was "travels of a teacher," which could also be kind of interesting, I guess. Anyway, this follows on the heels of a documentary broadcast on PBS on the same topic, and a NY Times article. What I don't understand is how these other people can do an idea that someone else has obviously already done -- maybe they're connected somehow, because they have the same name, more or less ("T-Shirt Travels" and "Travels of a T-Shirt"). Kind of shameless, I think. I mean, if the filmmaker and writer aren't best friends or something.

Anyhoo. I'm not bitter or anything, because I never would have followed through. Wait, is that reason to be more bitter? Well, whatever. I'm not. I'm really not. My version would have been funnier, that's all I'm saying.

I've been sick the last couple of days. Maybe I'd be feeling better if I had some time travel pills. It's a prescription a historian can love.

(I love David Reese.)

Yeah, I know, I haven't had too many great ideas lately. Tell me about it. The truth is, I've been kind of depressed and what little creative energy I have goes towards work and TiVo. In the good old days, being busy at work got me energized and gave me ideas to blog about. Now I'm happy to come home and drink beer on the giant couch and watch the giant TV. I know, I know, I should get rid of the TV.

Anyway, Tim had a great idea to help me out, which would be a Great Idea Generator, like a Mad-Lib. And it should work! Why not, if there are Julius Caesar and love poem and lawn madlib froggy Madlibs (be sure to check out the Froggy Madlib stories, too), why not a Great Idea generator?

It looks like the people with the Caesar madlib are offering the javascript code. I'm going to see if I can modify it to make it into a Great Idea generator. As Tim pointed out, all we need is ""Wouldn't it be great if they invented a (noun) that (task) (adverb) so that (target audience) could (benefit)?"

OK -- so, I've figured out some of it, but not the pay off. The window with your answer doesn't pop up. Why o' why not, o' gods of the internet?? is it because I pasted it into

1. The Better Driver, Inc.
They need to have a driver education company that
caters to couples. both are evaluated independently
and the reviewers determine who the better driver is.
phase two would consist of additional education, and
in the end you'd try to make the relationship stronger
by getting the two to admit their weaknesses and
recognize the other persons strengths. give the
weaker driver "good navigator" techniques. actually,
now that i think about it, they should develop a "how
to get along in the car" curriculum.

2. Online Copy Editor
somebody needs to have a business editing rough drafts
of email messages, word docs, and garauntee a 1 hour
turnaround time. charge by the word. pay once a
month or slightly more for a one-time use deal.

I've been enjoying clicking around this site with misheard lyrics, particularly, for some reason, the Def Leppard entries. "I've got to feel it in my butt" -- Whoa,oh! indeed!

Melissa submits these ideas, which she calls "semi-OK" but I think are just fine, although the flexible umbrella idea might take some engineering:

a u-turn signal. so for those of us whose cars aren't so tiny that we
can just whip around in the middle of the block, there's a signal to
show people behind us what's going on, instead of the usual problem of
putting on the left-turn signal and then pulling way over to the right.

an umbrella that you could open inside your car, and then it would just
bend when you got out, so you wouldn't have to stand there getting wet
while you opened your umbrella.

I hate to move Otto from first listing here, since he probably accounts for most of the traffic I've received in the last couple of weeks, but last night at Terry's birthday party, where we had chicken legs (not really chicken legs, but beef that has been cut up, put on skewers, dipped in egg, rolled cracker crumbs, browned in butter, and baked -- also known as "city chicken," says Cathy), cheese bread, and scalloped potatoes, among other delicacies (including birthday cake, of course), I thought I'd come up with a new great idea, which is an inflatable cell phone, and I felt like maybe I'd gotten my groove back. Sadly for me, it is not a new idea -- someone's already entered it at half-bakery. My reception there was rude the first time around, so I refuse to comment on his idea there. But I will say that one difference between his idea and mine is that I'd like to have the inflated version be really ridiculously big, and I'd give it a pocket in the botton that you could fill with water for ballast.

I was inspired by those Pokia phones -- I really want one.

I don't usually link to things that have already been mentioned places like memepool.com, because I generally assume we're all reading the same things, but I like this site, women and dogs a lot, so I will.