Idea Province

It’s a Wonderful Drug Decriminalization Carol, Barack Obama

From Greg Newburn:

Short film: Obama is visited by three ghosts who show him his life and the lives of his loved ones had he been incarcerated for drug use.

Why do the world’s best greens (beet greens) go in the trash?

Joseph Weisenthal is looking to devise a business model for beet greens:

But I’m still not crazy about buying beets and throwing the beets away, cause I know some people like them. It feels a bit, ahem, wasteful. On the other hand, most people who buy beets eat the beats, throw the greens away and probably don’t even think that their might be someone out there that gets a lot of utiility from the greens.

This is economically problematic. It might even be a market failure.

So tonight I’ve been spending some time trying to think of what kind of business you could create just be arbing the fact that what’s worthless to some people — the greens of beets — is a treasure to other people.

I have a couple ideas, but not totally sure if they’d scale. Suggestions HUGELY appreciated!

A Political Twist to the Beverly Hillbillies

From ColeDavis:

Comedy about Obama’s Kenyan family coming to stay at the White House. Like a political Beverly Hillbillies.

For Master Comics

A good stand-up comic gimmick would be to pull a Babe Ruth: just before you tell a joke, point at the person who will crack up at it.

Crying Wolf Based on False Memories

From longtime Idea Province reader Miles Southan comes this idea:

A film about a woman who, when she was younger, discovered through therapy repressed memories that she had been raped by her father. Then, after publicly accusing her father and taking him to court, it was determined that the memories were false. Now that she’s thoroughly discredited, she lives in constant fear of being raped because no one would believe her. Or else she actually is raped and no one believes her.

Mr. Passive Aggressive Man

From Davis Freeberg:

I want to see a web series or SNL skit that features a character who is super passive aggressive.  He’d never actually come out and ask for anything, but everyone would complain about his ability to weasel anything out of someone.  I’m thinking that potential scenarios could have him on a date squirming out of the bill, or at an office sticking a colleague with extra work. Or you could even have him lose his home in the mortgage crisis, and become the ultimate passive aggressive panhandler.  You could also have a normal alpha male as his nemesis, and have face offs between the two to see who gets their way.  Given that we all know someone who tends to use the passive aggressive technique in life, I think someone could take the series a long way before the joke would get too old.  Anyway, I’ve been kicking this idea around for a month or two, and since I enjoy your site so much I wanted to share it.  I hope you enjoy.

Besides being a good idea, Mr. Passive Aggressive Man is also an incredibly bizarre coincidence, because just a few hours before Davis sent it, I had decided to face the fact that I have passive aggressive tendencies sometimes. I even did a couple hours worth of research about the symptoms and how to be more assertive (tip: if you don’t want to do something, just say you don’t want to do it. Don’t agree to it, and then do it grudgingly, resenting the person who made you do it the whole time.)

I mean, just look at this site. It’s basically a museum to passiveness. But now that I’m finally on the road to being the Typical Alpha Male, Mr. Passive Aggressive Man seems hilarious to me. I especially like the idea of a passive aggressive panhandler. Davis is right that it wouldn’t get old for a long time; the passive aggressive is a vexing, fascinating creature. It would be funny to follow this miserable stooge through all his various self-imposed travails.

I hope someone makes this so that I can sit around and watch it. Of course, it wouldn’t be as good as it would be if I made it, but I don’t have the time to spare, and who is going to give me the money to film a skit anyway?

Wait, screw that. I hope that *I* make this. I have a few other skit ideas on here, and some of them are even my own. I could go through this blog, cull ideas that would make for good skits, come up with a few new skit ideas, put together a pilot, and then sell it to HBO or Showtime. That would be a cool way to end to this blog, wouldn’t it?

Subvert the Meter Maid

Esme Rilke had the idea to follow a meter maid with a big stack of quarters. When you see a meter flashing expired, run to it before the narc gets to it and throw in a quarter. If enough people do this, it could spell the end to meter-related parking tickets.

Belgium Slogan

Belgium: Beer for the Men, Chocolate for the Ladies, and Waffles for the Kids.

College Tomatoes

A version of Rotten Tomatoes that only aggregates reviews from college papers. It wouldn’t be as consistent or useful as Rotten Tomatoes, because university papers rarely review every movie, much less on time. Still, if professional critics are supposedly losing their importance, maybe college students would put more stock in aggregated opinions from their peers.

Recyclers on Strike

A movie in the spirit of Brassed Off! about workers at recycling plants across the United States getting fed up with low wages and bad working conditions and going on strike. As they heroically agitate for what’s rightfully theirs, Americans are forced to re-live a time when everything - even plastic and glass and cardboard - went thoughtlessly into the garbage. Of course, the people normally in favor of strikes are torn about this.

This reminds of of when I was at a blogging party (not a blogger party, this was a party where you blog) in a relatively new office in Brooklyn. There were free beers there, and one kid (a blogger who was visiting for the day) who had finished his beer asked where the recycling container was. One of the people who worked at the office said there was none. He was shocked. He asked if they were sure. They were. But he couldn’t accept this, so rather than throw his bottle out in the garbage, he set it on the floor next to the garbage! He either was so conditioned against throwing out glass that he couldn’t physically put it in a garbage can, or he thought that by putting it next to the trash, he was removing his culpability for the eventual trashing of the bottle. Or maybe he reasoned that if he put it in the trash, it definitely would never be recycled, but if he didn’t put it in the trash, there was at least a slim chance.

What would people conditioned like this do if recyclers were to go on strike?

Moses joke

I didn’t think I could write schoolyard style jokes, but I bet this one could catch on with kids, especially in church camp.

“What does Moses say when he is constipated?”

“What?”

“Let my poopie go!”

Cold Spot Coffee Shop

An underground coffee shop with no wi-fi that also has thick concrete walls to keep any other potential wi-fi signals out. For people who want to write and not be distracted by the internet. It could also be called Dead Zone Tea.

A Modest Proposal to Improve the Tour De France

From Ron Southan:

Have the Tour de France riders carry small napalm packets on them so if they crash and fall they also burst into flames! This should help make the race popular with NASCAR fans.

A Case for World Government

It would be nice to have a canal cutting through the entire United States, approximately in the middle. This way cargo ships wouldn’t have to go all the way down to Panama and back up again to get from one half of the U.S. to the other. Plus, it would create a safety buffer between the North and the South in case things go sour again.

I guess Panama was chosen originally because it’s such a tiny country. A canal crossing the entire USA would, admittedly, be a much bigger and more costly (in lives and money) endeavor. But that just means it would be even more satisfying to accomplish. We could really just sit back and look at that thing, and be like, “Wow. We did it.”

Even better would be a second canal lined up with the United States one through the Mediterranean and Eurasia. It would be a path around the entire world and once a ship was in it, it would never have to steer again.

This isn’t going to happen, though, until all countries are controlled by a single benevolent world government.

Lotto Shirt

From Ron Southan comes this T-shirt slogan which implies that buying a winning lottery ticket is only a matter of having a good memory:

“Remind Me to Buy the Winning Lottery Ticket”

If someone makes this shirt and it becomes popular, rip-offs will no doubt proliferate: “Remind Me to Buy the Winning Lottery Ticket (and be sure to tell me what the numbers will be, in case I forgot)” and, of course, “Ask Me About Reminding Me to Buy the Winning Lottery Ticket”.