Ideas are everywhere. Sometimes all they need is a little dusting off, a little feeding up. Here are some for free. You can take any of the below ideas and develop them how you want. You don't have to pay me (though it won't be refused if you do) and you don't even have to acknowledge me. I suspect that if you have an idea you need to get it out there. Patents and other such stuff just clogs it all up. And if you sit on it too long then it blocks the ideas pipeline that connects way up there into the ether with the global ideas bank we all have access to- now and again.
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 4:27PM Agatha Christie wrote a seldom performed play about Akhnaton, Nefertiti and Tutankhamun. It has eleven scene changes and twenty speaking parts- too big and unwieldy for the modern theatre (it's never played in London) but perfect for a musical. Someone should do it: call it Akhnaton!
Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 1:41PM Burning man was a great idea when it attracted a 100 people- can the same be said for a desert bash with 25,000 folk looking for a good time? Glastonbury? Even those new festivals that combine music and talk? The problem is that too many people creates an all too familiar sensation: people processing people. This should be the antithesis of a festival. I've found the green room and the organiser's hang out to be the best place at a festival- places ordinary goers are banned from. SO. The micro-festival has a maximum of 150 people. Everyone has to do something- either help or perform in some way. One and only one (alright maybe two) celebrity is in attendance- its nice to meet a celeb but too many is sickening to the soul. One is enough. The entry is governed informally- either you know it's on or you don't. No money changes hands but the land owner gets a gift from each participant- food or something nice or useful. The proto-micro festival is the garden festival. Have one this summer- fill your back garden with tents and a campfire and a bare minimum of perfomances or readings. It's the start of something big.
Monday, March 7, 2011 at 11:24AM Celebrities are loved...and hated. I'll never forget when at school Chris Tarrant showed up to do some filming in Abingdon. We were on a school trip to a local farm and he was parked in the car park we had to pass through. Kids mobbed his car and started rocking it and chanting 'swapshop....'- the competitor to his program Tiswas. Eventually he roared off in a fit of rage. Celebrities are useless and we know it. They are famous for being famous. And yet when you meet one and they are nice to you it is as if the sun just came out...kind of.
Freecelebrity.com is a service where celebrities offer themselves free to people who feel they need a bit of celebrity oomph. Celebrities are notorious for being self serving in their choice of 'good deed'- getting as much publicity for themselves as the cause. In freecelebrity.com they get nothing back as the event will not be publicised. It is merely for local gratification. For example, your garden club wants a bit of a lift- so Alan Titchmarsh comes along for free but no one is told until it happens. I see it as a kind of voluntary community service for celebrities. By signing up they lose control over what event they will be celeb-rating. This way punters know they are for real. Everyone wins.
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 11:22AM The Ramblers association is OK, if you like that sort of thing, but many people yearn for higher adventure, even if it is just around the block. Extreme rambling is taking the old country walk and stretching it above and beyond its normal shape and colour. Take night hikes without a torch using only moonlight to show the way. Walk up streams in waders or a wet suit. Hike across other people's land- observing the age old right to roam especially on old common land that has been appropriated. Go anywhere in the Highlands. Do not observe the country code. Walk on water by using floats attached to your feet and waling poles. See how far you can walk from Didcot power station and still be able to see it. Walk along the pillbox lines that crisscross southern England. Walk along tidal river beaches dodging the tides, also beaches similarly hemmed in. The association could be started with a simple site and membership list, a quarterly magazine and a forum for members to post their own extreme rmbles.
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 9:58AM The idea behind this is to start a website where it is incredibly easy to post your free idea for a new product or service. Once posted anyone can take the idea and do whatever they like with it. The point is to void yourself of ideas that are clogging you up, stopping even better ones from appearing. We live in an abundant world and ideas are not in short supply- it's just the world that sometimes gets in the way of stopping the ideas from reaching any sort of audience. There would be an idea monitor who would vet the idea so that it wasn't completely inappropriate and then post it up. The site would be financed through ads for patent lawyers! Maybe not, perhaps venture capital firms.
Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 5:06AM You have this great pal who just has to smoke as you drive. But you don't want your clean ashtray filled with butts plus the mess etc.
Answer the car cigarette friend. This is a small hard plastic device that clips into the crack of the window on the passenger side. With the window down about a centimetre it holds the 'friend' tight. The device is basically a tube with a flared end. The wind rushing past this creates a vacuum (Bernoulli's principle) which means air is being sucked through the pipe and out of the window. The car-side part of the pipe has a flat pan with grid marks for grubbing ash off the cig. This is then sucked at high speed, kind of like an aeroplane lavatory, out the window. When cig-fiend-friend has finished the butt it is shoved into the tube to be blown clear onto the highway. The tube is so designed that anything egressing hits the slip stream of the car and is carried away. OK, I know, not very eco- but have you ever had a cig butt blown back into the car through the rear window and have it set fire to the back seat- I have.
So- ash and butt are kept clear of pristine car interior. You have the smoke to inhale- but hell- as an ex-smoker it'll be like a trip down memory lane.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:18AM Slugs are a great pest in the garden- but how to get rid of them? You don't want to be dousing your plants with pesticide on the other hand you don't want them eaten. Beer is a good answer- small dishes of beer laid around the perimeter both attract and kill any inquistive slugs. Problem is, once a slug or two has died the others learn to avoid the trap. So you need to move them daily- but how do you police your patch when you're away? The answer could be the slug bot. Very cheaply made from a simple electric motor connected to two large wheels, say three inches in diameter, with a solar cell and a large capacitor to store charge for about 45 seconds movement. That's all the bot needs to wind up and go. The bot, being two wheeled, has a random directional aim, which is what you want. It has a sensor switch at the front so that when it hits an object it goes into reverse. The killing part of the bot is a non-spill canister filled with beer which allows slug ingress but not egress. The idea is to have four or forty randomly patrolling your garden.