Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Idea Guy

I like to think of myself as a pretty creative person. I haven't actually created much so far, not for lack inspiration, but more because I lack follow-through. What I'd really like, is to get paid to sit in a room, brainstorming with other creative types. A think-tank. I wanna be part of a think-tank. Get paid a shit-load of dough to think. Think up stuff. Cool stuff. Let somebody else worry about actually making the stuff. That's not my skill-set. We've all got our roles to play. Mine is coming up with ideers. Like these:

1. There should be a health-food restaurant in Hell's Kitchen, which cheekily calls itself "Health Kitchen." Give it a moment...

2. When Governor's Island is eventually developed, there should be a pedestrian- and bicycle-only bridge, akin to London's Millennium Bridge, connecting it with Red Hook Brooklyn. Other than a fire engine and an ambulance, there should be no automobiles allowed on Governor's island at all, ever.

3. There should be infrastructure in place to make it easy to cycle around the entire perimeter of Manhattan Island. The west side bike path takes care of almost half of that already, but the east side and northernmost and southernmost ends are all weird and discontinuous. This should be rectified.

4. NYC is a really windy place for the harsher months of the year. Thousands of little wind-turbine electric generators should be hanging off the sides of every freakin' building in town. Even better would be hundreds of thousands of these.

5. There should also be flywheel electric generators attached to every single door, whether revolving or swing-open, in every single building in America, and similar flywheel generators attached to every piece of exercise equipment in every gym. Put those fitness junkies to some good use.

6. People think that gigantic solar panel arrays could take up too much prime real estate. But the best places to put them are also where nobody wants to live -- in deserts (BRC notwithstanding). Also build solar arrays on supergigantic floating platforms in the oceans. Those could even navigate under their own power to avoid cloud cover, while still generating an enormous surplus of electricity that could be sent back to the mainland.

7. Every major city in America should be connected by a network of high speed electric mag-lev monorail trains. Flying might be a little faster, but depending on how far you're going, the total trip time might be comparable because the monorail won't have any lengthy security hassles since you'll be getting onto a vehicle which can't be intentionally crashed into anything. And you can see much more interesting views of the countryside from the window of a superfast train than from an airplane.

8. Somebody already invented the iPhone.

9. But, when you call someone from your iPhone, you should have the option to play any of your stored MP3's as background music which both you and the person you called can hear softly underneath your conversation. Steve Jobs was a stoner -- I can't believe I thought of this before he did.

10. To attract younger generations of people to classical music concerts, the music should be accompanied by cool trippy video projections and lasers.


That's all for now. I'll write more as they occur to me. Improve upon these or add ideas of your own in the comments!

Peace y'all!

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