December 2007
48 posts
Ugliness as a Murder Mystery Clue
A murder mystery where the only clue for the audience to determine the identity of the killer is that the killer is extremely ugly. All the evidence in the movie points a guilty finger at other characters, except that one character is really ugly and all the other suspects are much better looking.
But a savvy audience will figure it out the second they see how ugly this guy is, and won’t...
"There but for the grace of God go I" for atheists...
When atheists and agnostics see someone in a bad situation, they have no cliche for describing how easily they could have met a similar fate if their lives had gone a slightly different route. God-believers have a monopoly on that with “There but for the grace of God go I.”
A non-sectarian version of this could be: “There but for the luck of meaningless coincidence go I.”...
Man Who Can Tell Off Evil Historical Figures
Short story about a man (or woman, for you riot grrls) who goes back in time to confront various evil people in history and tear them a new one, verbally.
Because he goes to the past, which is impossible, his powers are limited while there, and he cannot physically harm the Hitlers, Stalins and FDRs that he ventures across calenders to find. All he can do is stand there and critique them.
...
Short Story About Restaurants Running Out of Food
A few years ago, I thought of a premise for a Twilight Zone-ish short story. I was at a restaurant with a bunch of people and everyone made their order, and I thought, look how arrogant we are, thinking we can order food and it will actually exist and come to us. What if our plans were to go totally awry?
This inspired a short story about a group of people who go to a restaurant and make a large...
World Edge
I always think of life as a Blackjack game where the world has a 1 percent advantage over you. The world, then, has a 51 percent chance of winning any particular game and you have a 49 percent chance of winning. It’s not a crushing advantage, but over time, you can’t help but lose.
You can learn to “count cards” (perfect valuable skills and become wealthy beyond belief),...
Day Without a Hijab
Some states have a sales-tax free day. So why don’t countries run by fundamentalist Muslim governments have a Day Without a Hijab? One day a year, Muslim women could skip the veil and wear the most immodest, skankiest clothes they have, and strut their stuff all over town.
Then the next day, the hijab goes back on for another year minus a day.
Soul-Swapping Personal Trainers
For some people, lifting weights and exercising are annoying and tedious. To get motivated, they turn to personal trainers who tell them what to lift and to keep going.
The problem with personal trainers is that they can’t actually lift the weights for you. If they did, they’d just bulking themselves up even more.
So it would be cool if there was a company with personal trainers who...
Flaws of the Fathers and a Global-Warming Denier
A character who doesn’t want to have kids because he is terrified that his numerous flaws (both physical and psychological) that he has been meticulously suppressing and hiding from the world will be exposed if his children have the same flaws and don’t do as good a job of disguising them.
Thinking of characters reminded me of a character I came up with for “Stuck in...
I Heart Idea Provinces
I have another blog about life in New York City called I (Heart) Not You. I’ve been neglecting it for this blog because lately I just want to write about ideas, but I compromised and posted some New York-related ideas to it today. Also, my earlier posts on that blog - The Great Manhattan Mirror and If I Were the Mayor of Midtown - are idea provinces in disguise.
Strong Coffee
Sometimes when there’s not-too-old coffee left in the pot, it seems like a waste to throw it out, and I wonder if I should use this old coffee as a base for roasting the new coffee, instead of water. This would be as pure as coffee gets. It would also probably be very strong. But I haven’t tried it yet. If anyone does, post a comment to let me know how it is.
Twindar
Twindar is the ability to know someone is a twin just by looking at them, even though their twin isn’t with them at the time.
Horror Film on a Euthanasia Cruise
I know that the “Euthanasia Cruise” - a luxury liner that takes suicidal people out to sea and assists their suicides - was a ridiculous internet-spread urban legend exposed in the 90s, and nobody except complete fools ever believed in it. But I only know that because I recently had an idea involving the Euthanasia Cruise, and so I looked it up, and was dismayed to see it was nothing...
Malcolm McDowell, Grandfather to a Smirking...
Last night I saw an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, guest-starring Malcolm McDowell. He plays a billionaire with two adult kids; one is loyal, the other is trying to stop him from re-writing his trust-fund rules. So basically they were rather ordinary people fighting over money, not the sort of kids I’d expect Malcolm McDowell to have.
This is the first time I’ve seen...
I'm Pro-Crime... and I Vote
One day, many years back, Joseph Weisenthal and I (and a few others, although I’m not sure how much they contributed) sat down and brainstormed a bunch of bumpersticker and T-shirt slogans. Almost two pages worth, single spaced. Today I saw someone wearing a T-shirt about voting, and it reminded me of one of them:
“I’m Pro-Crime and I Vote.”
An inferior alternate of this...
A couple of music video ideas
A music video about someone blasting a song in an apartment building in the middle of the night, waking up everyone in the building. The thing is, they love the song so much, they don’t mind - they jump around and dance on their beds rather than throw their pillows over their heads and try to go back to sleep.
Instead of calling the cops, some of the sleep-deprived noise victims line up at...
Souvenir Lightning Globe
A good variation on a souvenir New York City (or whatever city) Snow Globe would be a souvenir New York City Lightning Globe. It would be the usual miniature skyline inside a glass ball, except instead of shaking it to make fake snow float around, you would touch the globe and lightning would shoot at whatever part of the globe your hand was touching.
Basically, it’s one of those lightning...
Keep Christ in Christmas
Today I saw a bumper sticker from one of the War on Christmas people that said “Keep Christ in Christmas.” This seemed pretty easy to make fun of. Have a cartoon of Jesus on the cross, with Christmas lights strung all over him, ornaments piercing his skin, and an angel on top of his crown of thorns.
I was going to post this to Idea Province, except I was afraid the idea was so...
List of Non-Signatory Production Companies (if...
The Writer’s Guild of America website has a list of struck companies. These are “signatory companies” that have deals with the WGA, and now no WGA member is allowed to write for them.
Non-WGA members can’t exactly write for them either. The companies don’t want to ruin their future dealings with the WGA if the strike ever ends, and so they dare not subvert the strike...
List of non-signatory agencies (if you're...
The Writer’s Guild of America website has a list of struck companies. These are “signatory companies” that have deals with the WGA, and now no WGA member is allowed to write for them.
Non-WGA members can’t exactly write for them either. The companies don’t want to ruin their future dealings with the WGA if the strike ever ends, and so they dare not subvert the strike...
Making The Show
Joseph Weisenthal had an idea for a reality program called “Making the Show.” It would be a reality show about a bunch of contestants auditioning for a reality show. The show they were auditioning for would be unrelated; just like Top Chef, which takes place in a new city every season, this one would cover the try-outs of a new reality program every season.
Some reality shows, like...
An insult to use against annoying men
“Ah, stick it up your manhole.” Seems obvious to turn “manhole” into a lewd euphemism, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen it before.
Instead of Heaven or Hell, Heaven or Non-Existence
Maybe there’s a religion like this already, but if not, someone should come up with a religion where if you’re good, you go to heaven when you die, but if you’re bad, instead of going to hell for eternity, you simply stop existing. Eternal horrendous torture is too extreme a punishment for anything anyone could possibly do on earth. The threat of non-existence, however, is enough...
How to Have Unique Passwords & Remember Them
Michael Bluejay of MichaelBluejay.com came up with a clever way to have unique passwords for every site and remember them.
If you don’t want to follow the link right there, essentially his idea is that you have a standard password, but you alter that password for every site by incorporating the initials of that site into your password.
For instance, if your standard password was...
America-centric globe with country names replaced...
I have an America-centric map in which North and South America are in the middle, Europe and Africa are to our right, and Asia and Oceania are to our left. But I thought it would be nice to take this further and have a globe where all the country names are replaced with names of United States states.
The United States would be “New York.” “Washington State” would be the...
Man Vs. Bed
A short film or scene in a movie about a sleepy guy who needs to wake up for work having a face-off with his bed.
As it starts off, we see him asleep, or we see his dream. Then his alarm goes off, and he jolts up. But his head is heavy with sleep, as are his eyelids. He looks at his pillow, which beckons him. He falls back into sleeping position. But a few seconds later he sits up again,...
Trivia Logica
Some believe that the internet is the demise of trivia. If just about any fact - no matter how obscure - can be looked up in a few seconds on the internet, what’s so great about someone who has a lot of these facts memorized? Pit a trivia genius against a know-nothing with a Wi-Fi enabled cellphone, and the know-nothing will win every time (unless, perhaps, the time limit is a killer).
But...
A conspiracy theory about new currency designs and...
A good conspiracy theory for the ever-changing designs on American currency would be that the government has discovered that time travel is possible, and is worried that if this technology reaches the civilian sector, people will go back to when a penny was worth a hundred dollars and become instant (and undeserving) millionaires just by bringing a few inflated bucks from the future to the...
Guild is Not Great
I was talking to my friend Henry today; he’s an up-and-coming screenwriter who lives in L.A., so he’s been following the writer’s strike. He was offered a job to write a short film that would play before a Disney movie, but he declined, not wanting to be a filthy scab.
Even though he isn’t an established professional screenwriter yet, it was important for Henry not to...
Pre-Alarm Alarm Clock
An alarm clock that wakes you up before the alarm sounds, so you can turn it off before that obnoxious buzz jangles your sleeping eardrums.
Allegory for something
You have two unmarked keys and one of them unlocks the front door. There aren’t any distinguishing marks on either one, but you look at the keys and try to guess which is right anyway. You have trouble choosing, since there is no way to choose, but eventually one feels right, and you go with that one.
Even if it is the correct key, this still took longer than if you had confidently...
Cafe Press for Movies
Joe Weisenthal had an idea for a company kind of like Cafe Press - which makes T-shirts, mugs and lunch boxes based on your design and gives you part of the profit from sales - except it would be called Film Press, and it be a no-fee company that makes a movie based on whatever script you give them and gives you 50 percent of the profits.
Most people would like to sell their script to a studio...
The two extremes of human behavior
The other night I was talking to Esme Rilke about how Reform Jewish parents would feel about their kids marrying an Orthodox Jew or becoming Orthodox.
“Well, any time you go to extremes, it’s never good,” Esme said.
“So would you say that being an Orthodox Jew is one extreme, and being a non-Jew is the other extreme?” I asked.
I like imagining a chart with a...
Bitchy clothing diss
“Oooh, is that a new outfit?” “Yeah, you like it?” “I don’t know. Is ‘Puppet of Fate’ what you’re going for?”
Criticism Boycott
A hyper-critical character goes out of his way to harshly lambaste any work of art he finds, particularly if it was created by any of his friends. But when one of his own pieces of work is mocked, he sees how bad it hurts, and he decides to boycott criticism. Instead, he goes out of his way to praise and encourage any artist he finds, especially his friends. He endures the worst most mediocre art...
Horrorscope Horror
A woman doing research on a murder that happened in her small town 40 years ago is looking at archives of her local newspaper from that time. She reads her horoscope from one of these old papers, and is horrified to see that it predicts financial ruin, utter loss of control in her life, and no emotional satisfaction for that month. Even though the paper is 40 years old, all these dire predictions...
Needy Girl
“It’s not enough to get a hug from one person. I need a group hug from the entire world.”
Thomas Aquinas and the Seven Deadly Sins
Kind of a Shakespeare in Love knock-off, Aquinas gets the idea for the seven deadly sins from his friends, all of whom represent - in a humorous way - one of the sins. He scolds them lovingly, but ultimately is amused, and his seven deadly sins are more of an homage to his buddies than a criticism of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy or pride.
Fantasy betrayal
A man is fantasizing about another woman while having sex. The woman he’s sleeping with knows he is fantasizing, because she sees the other woman in the reflection of the man’s eyes.
Opening for a pretentious film about various...
I wrote this opening to a movie a while back. Hopefully I was joking.
Narrator: “The moment a child enters the world, two are parents born. The child, automatically a sinner, bears his parents : two hypocrites.”
Cut to a scene of a woman trying to look behind a cold-faced poker player’s sunglasses. “Who are you behind those sunglasses, you mystery man?”
Cut to a scene of natural eye...
Misdiagnosed
Man who starts to have memory problems is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But eventually he starts to remember every single thing - things from his past and present, impossible to memorize details, things that didn’t happen to him but did happen to other people - but people see this as further evidence of his mental disintegration; they think he’s making stuff up. Eventually he becomes a conduit...
Malicious Editor
In the preface to a book, the editor makes fun of the writer of the book for so readily agreeing with all of his suggestions, saying that her original ideas were better, but now it’s too late for her to fight for her creative rights, because the book is already published.
Classical music as time management
Someone who thinks classical music is really boring plays classical music whenever he has a lot to do and needs to slow down time.
If The French Discovered America
A French guy who hates America invents a time machine to go back in time to kill Christopher Columbus because “America should never have been discovered.” But after he goes to the Spain of the past and brutally tortures and murders Christopher Columbus just before his first voyage West, this modern French guy encounters an especially ignorant 15th Century French Guy visiting Spain. When the modern...
Mt. Fuji Creation Myth
If I lived in Japan, my belief for how the world was created would be that in in the beginning, there was nothing but Mt. Fuji. Then a little bird flew into the top of Mt. Fuji and ticked its insides. Mt. Fuji couldn’t hold back any more and it spewed out all this lava and minerals into the oceans, which then congealed and drifted apart. Humans (who began as sea creatures), curious what all...
Bear-Caught Salmon
My dad Ron Southan has an idea for a company that sells Bear-Caught Salmon. Instead of humans trying to capture every salmon they see - many of them miserable wretches of a fish that were born to be inedible - first a bear knocks it out of the water, and then humans take it and package it and sell it to upper-crust salmon consumers. The company that does this is called Bear Caught Salmon...
Prescription windsheilds
For people who need glasses to see in focus, there should be prescription windshields and windows so that - while they are driving, at least - they don’t have to wear those pesky, cumbersome glasses. Of course, any passenger in the car without the same prescription is screwed. However, by distorting their vision, this could provide those with perfect sight some insight into what it’s...
Losing Weight Through Charitable Deeds... with a...
From Debra Blake comes this delicious variety pack of ideas:
1. One idea I’ve always cherished is this: that I could lose weight through the doing of good deeds. In other words, that via the act of charitableness or giving or helping, one would acquire merit and that could be traded in for such things as losing weight or increasing health, losing cholesterol points, gaining bone strength,...
The Hold A Mirror Up To Humanity Club
A federation of people who carry 8”X11” mirrors with them at all times. When members of The Hold A Mirror Up To Humanity Club encounter someone who has totally lost it - someone with road rage, someone yelling absurd things at their kids or at powerless workers - they hold a mirror up to this person, forcing them to see how ridiculous they look. A few mirrors will get smashed by some...