Supper Cooking Club

Get a group of friends or strangers together and once a week, in an industrial kitchen, make one meal that could feed everyone present (or maybe everyone and their families?), like lasagna or enchiladas or whatev.  Then divvy up all the foods and put them in containers you reuse each week.  Take the foods home and have a different meal each night.

This works great if you have trouble making food for fewer than 20 people.

flower pot stacking clamps

I wish it were possible to stack clay pots in a stable way. If little platforms fit between the stacked clay pots and held the bottom pots in place, it would be.

Hopefully I'll figure out how to include a drawing of this idea later. In the meantime I will describe the drawing: Imagine a circle, and in the exact center, two other circles are just touching at one point. This is a drawing of a circular platform for a flower pot to sit on, and the segments of the circles intersecting within it are the clamp on the bottom that fits into the two flower pots below. Ideally this would make it possible to arrange three pots in a triangle and then stack three pots on those three in an offset triangle and so on, so you have a flower pot column. Alternate arrangements of flowerpottery are possible. It's like flower pot legos!

Really it would be better to offset the clamp portion on the bottom to maximize the exposed soil area of the bottom pots. It's just easier to explain the idea starting with clamp in the center.

opensource traffic control

I get ideas that I would put under the theme of "opensource everything." A friend of mine calls this "collective fascism." I'm not sure which makes more sense. Meanwhile, the actual idea:

Everybody gets a remote control when they get their license. Maybe everybody can get a remote control. Then, when you're driving along and you see someone who isn't fit to drive and is swerving around and being reckless, you point your remote control at them and click the "unfit to drive" button. This is logged in that person's car. If three people do this in, say, a month, you get a warning. If three people do this in say, half an hour, your car informs you that you have ten minutes to pull over, at which point it will shut off. Maybe it just informs you that you are an asshole.

My partner says, "There are so many things wrong with this idea it's unbelievable." I still like this idea. I figure if you use the remote any time you would flip someone off, you're already using one hand that could be on the wheel. And how many times have you really flipped someone off while driving?

the same story seven ways

Not that it has to be seven, but the idea is that seven friends write the story of a specific event and then compile the stories intact.

I've wanted to do this for a little while but can't pick a specific enough event involving seven people whom I know would write the story. I was thinking that a singular event might be interesting, but that probably an event that altered the course of the day or week would be preferable.

I used to have dreams where I was multiple people at the same time, doing some relatively mundane thing. Talking on a swingset. Going to the grocery store. Playing a game. There was this one time that I was like six x-men fighting eachother, which was awesome, but mostly it was mundane stuff. I've wanted to write a story that would recreate this sense of being multiple people, but I don't reasonably know how to do it. I think this same story seven ways is probably the closest approximation. It would be interesting if they could be spliced into eachother without the wording being significantly altered. Maybe seven is too many.

As I'm writing this I realize that this kind of plot device is used commonly to spice up a plot or interconnect characters with no natural feeling in all manner of Hollywood film. I want to clarify that I mean, boring story, not like, raining frogs. As in, I'm suggesting seven friends write a relatively ordinary day. The kind of ordinary day with some event that isn't entirely significant that isn't going to have much entertainment value at all for anyone who wasn't there. This idea involves characters with natural feeling for eachother in order for it to work. Don't imagine reading the story of seven people. Imagine writing a story and reading the intersecting stories of six of your friends. And then imagine rereading it in like, eight years.

If I was teaching a writing course, I would just take the class out to coffee and then have them write the story of going out to coffee. In an ideal version of this, the class could read their stories aloud in turns, finding the place in the story where the last writer had just left off, and picking up there in their own words.

I think it would be interesting for a writing class because if told plainly enough, it would be very plot oriented, and would provide perspective on the other characters in class. And it might discourage new writers who compulsively tell huge big stories about death and apocalyptic despair (usually poorly) to write a simple story in a straight-forward way (well).

somebody else's idea

I'm not entirely sure if this was the idea of a human or a sunflower, but I noticed this last growing season that a sunflower was making its way up the "no parking" sign on the adjacent block. I noticed that it was growing closely enough to the sign that the regular lawn-mowing missed it.

This season I'm starting a batch of extra sunflower starts to tie next to "no parking" signs. We'll see how it goes.

A couple years ago a friend and I did some late-night gardening in otherwise institutional gardens, automatically maintained by sprinklers for the most part. Plants that don't require much special attention just blended right in with the mums and kept kicking. We were pseudo-clandestine about this activity at first (partly because we were drinking as well), and then were "caught" multiple times and discovered that most people are just amused by late-night gardening. Some passers-by asked if they could have some of our "clandestine kale" starts for an apartment garden, which we obliged.

At any rate, this idea is not new. I've been trying to find someone to plant plants with me, but thus far have only found a few folks who will wear black and sneak around at night to plant plants. I was rather thinking I would do this in the daytime, wearing jeans. I think it is more likely to catch on if people see me doing it. I will update this blog as to whether or not this goes well, but I am entirely optimistic. Further, if anyone would like to plant plants with me in the daytime, preferably before noon, probably involving coffee, let me know.

"our library"

The idea is this: there is a website where you go and make a virtual library card. On your virtual library card you have a "rating" determined by others and you have "items available for lending" like books you are willing to lend. Perhaps some of your books are really awesome and rare, so you are only willing to lend them to another library member who has at least a 90 percent rating. Maybe you have stipulations on certain items like, "do not dog ear my pages." Maybe you have stipulations like, "I really don't care about this book. You can add it to your library next with the same note on it."

Maybe some of the things in your "items available for lending" are a lawnmower, and a hammer, and gardening tools. The stipulations on these items might be, "clean before returning" or "use at your own risk and return with a full tank."

The things that I think are most important about this idea are this: it is a FREE virtual library of things we don't each need to individually own, but can borrow from folks in our neighborhood who are willing to lend them. What I think is possibly most important about the idea is that its implementation should be very straight-forward, without a lot of hullabaloo about community and whatnot, because focusing on the goods and each individual library member's ability to care for and return them will cause people with integrity from remarkably different communities with differing views to share a common bond: like a book, or a hammer.

The ultimate goal of this is for a person with a really excellent rating, like 99%, to show up at your door to borrow your prized possession, and you think this person looks about as different from you as humanly possible, and you can barely imagine talking to this person, and you give them your prized possession. And then this person brings the possession back. And you go online and you say, yes you can trust this person. Even if that's all you know about them.

city block garden

If I had a bazillion dollars I'd buy a city block (I hear it's cheaper in Detroit) and tear out all the fences in the backyards. I was looking at some maps and realized that if there were no back fences, the block I live on would be houses around a tract of common land, which would make a really awesome garden. And then if you wanted to live in one of the houses, you'd have to be up for the adventure of a shared backyard. And we could all take turns caring for the garden. And we could have a greenhouse with a hot tub in it.