Steal My Ideas, Please

Imagine every day your newspaper had on its front page a little box labeled “Know News.” In that box, you’d find a single timely word, term or name with a simple definition. Could be old: Arraignment. Concerto. Insurgency. Or relatively new: Stem cells. Keylogging. Podcast.
Finish with a quick teaser or page number to a story […]

They give out tickets — lottery tickets? — for good deeds.

Ever notice how bags of chips or popcorn or cheese curls resemble puffy balloons and weigh almost nothing? Why not take that concept a step or two further? Fill bags with helium for a truly “light” snack. Better yet, figure out how to make snacks that float in mid-air. Maybe whip helium into the mix […]

Present a weekly whirlwind tour of all sorts of newspaper cartoons, from both comics and editorial pages. Shows inspired by a single strip pull a narrow audience. But delivering a variety of toons at a rapid-fire rate could appeal to almost everybody, young and old alike, in an easy, breezy, short-attention-span kind of way. DO […]

Junk mail drives me crazy! Don’t you wish there was a way to stop it from coming? Best would be a National Do Not Send Unsolicited Mail List. But, failing that, how about a Return to Sender Stamp? You slap one on an unwanted envelope not only to have it sent back, but to deliver […]

Going to have to post a drawing soon, but until then a description will have to do. Imagine a dome made of a clear semi-flexible plastic. Now curl the bottom edges inside to create an inner trough. If you floated this plastic hemi-bubble on a body of water out in the sun, evaporation and condensation […]

Dear Yahoogle: I wish I could search for two things at once, so I could see at a glance which term shows up more often. Or just find something faster. Say I’m not sure if the country is Furkino Baso or Burkina Faso. I plug one into Google A, the other into Google B. Boom, […]

OK, this is basically a packaging concept based on a pun. Megatrends was a fascinating bestseller that forecast the future and spawned a set of sequels. Being more of a pessimist than is healthy (and always a prankster), I thought: Why not Negatrends, a gathering of gloom-and-doom scenarios into one book? Global warming. Emergent diseases. […]

Par 3. Par 4. Par 5. Hmm. There are other options. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a golf course where you tee off from a mountain and watch the ball soar and bounce and bounce toward the hole a mile away? You hop in your Jeep and zoom after it. Maybe the hole’s par […]

Are some ideas ruined by being publicized? That’s a worry of mine. Take ideas for novels or movies. Here’s one idea: a futuristic geo-political legal thriller in which the world sues America for — take your pick — military adventures, resource monopolizing, global warming, bad taste, government destabilization, dastardly business practices, or all of the […]

Hic. How wry I am. Anybody could brew a batch of wild possibilities. In fact, each episode could be a takeoff on some other reality show. Extreme Makeover: Beer Edition. Survivor: Beer Island. Beer Apprentice. Beer Swap. Weakest Clink. Who Wants to Chug Like a Millionaire. America’s Top Beer-Ad Model. Or maybe this whole premise […]

Remember the movie Big starring Tom Hanks? In it, he hops on a giant musical keyboard, stomping out a tune. Typing on a regular keyboard may exercise the brain, but it can almost atrophy the body. So why not have a workout workstation, where the keys are clicked with your feet? Depending on the design, […]

In the movie Armageddon, Bruce Willis saves the world by planting a nuke on an Earthbound asteroid. Such a strategy is unlikely to work, however, because asteroids are aggregates of rubble whose bits would absorb the blast, a report concluded a few years ago. Hmm. How about this idea: Don’t wait until it’s almost too […]

Back when the ratings of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? were falling, I offered an explanation and a solution in a newspaper article. Diagnosis (besides overexposure and foolishly butting heads with other strong shows): Viewers like to think they could win. Questions seemed fairly easy (making it fun to watch with your kids), and […]

We’ve all seen wraps, those round tortilla-like flatbreads handy for holding all sorts of tasty ingredients. But they’re often so oversized, the carbs and calories add up. Got me to thinking: How about making them smaller, just big enough to fold over a veggie burger, or sideways over a hot dog? Call ‘em Flaps instead […]