A new press, or an imprint of an existing press, formed to publish only first books written by people with last names that are already famous. The title list could very quickly include Hemingway, Whitman, Clancy, Atwood, Morrison, and Olds. It's just be Steve Hemingway, Judy Whitman, Carol Clancy, Bob Atwood, Durwood Morrison, and Betty Olds.

Tollroads could be subsidized by selling advertising space on the center concrete barriers if the advertisements were optimized for 65mph peripheral vision either: by being streeeeetched to the proper distortion amount or it might work to make flip book style animation frames Not that I want more advertising in my peripheral vision, but, hey, the ideas come and the genie can't be put back in the bottle.

I read once that Einstein was a napper, and that he had an interesting method of napping. He'd put his keys in his hand and his hand over the side of his chair, and when he'd fallen asleep deeply enough that he'd let the keys drop, the noise of the keys hitting the floor would wake him up. A kind of a mechanically timed nap that can't get into too deep a sleep. I don't think my keys hitting the floor would wake me up, though. So how about a device that would go on a keychain and could be...

Standing waiting for a table at a restaurant recently and listening to the hostesses repeating the mantra "10 to 20 minutes" to everyone who walked in the door while watching servers enter orders into the restaurant's POS system I realized those systems are not currently integrated at all. But there's some huge scheduling benefits to integrating them. When servers key in orders to the POS system they put in a table number. So the system could know not just what tables were "in use" but...

Last night I thought of a cool book form that would be perfect for a long manscript of poems that ranged from the very short to the very long (gee, think I'm reading a mansuscript like that right now?). The book would have a custom trim such that the cover and beginning pages were small, even tiny, and it would gradually flare out (a diagonal cut rather than a vertical cut) until reaching full-size. Side view of a normal book looks like this: |_| Side vie of this book would look like...

You know those gel packs you can get that go in the freezer to get cold but they never actually freeze hard but say softish so you can mold them to the sore spot? I'd love to see gel pack gloves that I could slip my hands into so that I could get soothing relief on my fingers, hands, and wrists all at once.

The bARTer system would allow artists to exchange their art for products or services offered by individuals or businesses who are willing to barter for their goods or services. The web has faciliated many barter sites, this one would model itself on those, but limit itself to those able to offer art and those willing to accept art as barter. Trade a painting for some plumbing work. Water plants for a week and be paid with a watercolor. You need a root canal... a dentist in your area needs...

Describing how a fish tastes is notoriously difficult. Having dinner at a nice place last weekend, and listening to the server do a pretty standard (thus highly ineffective) job of describing the fish we'd never heard of, I thought that it would be a smart thing for an upscale restaurant to do to cook off a couple of pieces of the exotic fish special for that evening and offer a scant forkful to anyone interested in giving it a taste before they ordered. The dish wouldn't have to be hot, it...

A chain of restaurants that attempt to be as authentic as possible, not just in the food and the decor, but down to every possible detail. It should be, for the diner, like stepping into another country. The wait staff should speak only the native language, the menus in the native language, even change the money at the door if that can be done legally into the native country's currency. All menu items and ingredients should be as authentic to the native country the restaurant is representing...

A black t-shirt with white printing, in that all too familiar font from the ridiculously regularly ripped-off slogan Got Milk that reads simply: Got It.