Stray Hawkeye

My mom sent me this video, as Grandma Millie is someone she knows:

Aside from being cool just for the “old people who get out and do stuff are cool” factor, it’s also a pretty interesting idea in general. Granted, anyone can volunteer, so it’s not like the option isn’t there, and Grandma Millie obviously isn’t exactly your standard 89 year old, but it does seem like a really good match. Schools are increasingly underfunded and understaffed, and there’s an ever growing retired / elderly population, especially with the baby boomers coming up.

From visits to my own grandmother, I can tell you that a lot of the people at retirement communities really don’t get many visitors, and particularly not young ones, but particularly love visitors, and particularly young one. Kids move away and get busy with their day to day lives (self as case in point on both) and don’t visit much. And loneliness and a certain lack of purpose seem to crop up in older people’s lives, especially if their spouses are gone. And let’s be honest, retirement homes, assisted living communities, etc are not exactly the most inviting places in the world to visit (or I would imagine, live). There’s a certain slow paced, reverently hushed, orderly plodding about them.

But, as a sort of fitting to the concept of second childhood, elementary school classrooms can also have a sort of slow paced, reverently hushed, orderly plodding about them (granted, with many more bursts of disorderliness and energy, but still).

It would seem like a pretty good fit to have retirement communities, the AARP, or other groups for retired people organize a sort of exchange program with elementary schools, where retired people can go to (or perhaps be bused to / shuttled to if the can’t drive) elementary schools to help with tutoring subjects like reading, math, and music. Teachers would get free or cheap teacher’s aids, kids who might otherwise get overlooked get tutors, and lonely older people get youthful companionship, a sense of purpose and involvement, and something to help stay mentally active. It would seem especially important given that a lot of research shows keeping mentally active and involved helps delay the onset of a lot of the mental deterioration that can come with older age.

There’s also the fact that there’s another adult available all the time in the class room, so there’s the added safety for the retiree that if they fall and need help, or whatever situation may arise where they need prompt assistance, there’s someone there to help, and usually a nurse on site at the school.

From the residents of assisted living communities and retirement homes that I’ve met, as well as older people who live at home and don’t get out much, they also seem to get a lot of their views and opinions of the outside world from watching cable news channels, which tend to give less than a rosy outlook on the state of the world (Are terrorists selling fake prescription drugs to your pharmacy? Stay tuned for our full investigative report after the break, but first, see our exclusive video of a mother who threw her infant child in a snow bank and ran off….). Actually getting out and meeting people can help one’s overall attitude (again, self as evidence for times when I’ve worked way too many hours in the corporate world and decided all people are selfish bastard who would chop off your leg if someone offered them $5 for it… until I head out the bar with friends and remember, oh yeah, most people aren’t so bad). Again, a more positive attitude has also been shown to improve health and increase life expectancy.

There may be lots of logistical issues I’m missing here, and I’m making broad, sweeping generalizations about a various groups of people I’m not a part of and don’t have lots of interactions with. So, the exchange program obviously wouldn’t be for everyone, but it would seem like organizing opportunities for matches like this would be something nice to set up.

This time of year, as the mounds, piles, and banks of snow start to melt, I’m always amazed by what they reveal.  Not the grass and bushes and pavement and such, as much as all the various trash that’s gotten frozen into the snow banks and buried over the winter, all to be revealed in a few days as the snow melts away.

This is particularly interesting because I’ve found the one major weather difference between Iowa and Minnesota is how much the snow pack melts during the winter.  In Iowa (at least the parts I lived in) it melts several times throughout the winter.  Maybe not completely, but enough to get down to just a few inches of snow on the ground, and melt everything off the side walks.  In Minneapolis, it’s just those 5 or 10 degrees colder that it takes to keep it almost completely frozen all winter.  Snow we got at the start of December is just melting for the first time now.  The side walks are visible for the first time since Christmas.  The snow and ice here just piles, and piles, and piles up all winter, and then melts all at once over the course of a week or two.

In doing so, it reveals everything that’s been tossed along the side of the roads and side walks all winter too.  So far this year, just in the past few days, I’ve seen the following melting their way out of the snow banks:

• More beer cans and bottles than I could count
• A baby stroller
• A variety of clothes
• A plastic banana
• A complete toilet, intact
• Several feet of rope
• A complete car bumper
• A couch
• A diaper (used)
• A large headboard
• Rear view mirrors
• A tire, with rim, still fully inflated- not a spare tire, but a normal full sized tire
• Shoes, both men’s and women’s
• Various parts of bikes
• A large (carnival sized) stuffed dog
• A broken cell phone
• A dog collar
• And much, much more generic garbage

Note that each and every one of these was not just something that was on top of a snow bank, or tossed on top lately, but every single one of them was buried in the snow to the point that you couldn’t see them at all a few days ago, and still had some snow of it covering part of it when I saw it.  Yes, even the couch, car bumper, tire – all of it.  I’ve walked past many of these over the past several weeks and months and had no idea they were there.

A lot of these are a little fascinating just for how they got there.  Who tossed a used diaper in a snow bank?  How has a whole couch been hiding under a snow bank all winter.  Who lost a shoe when there was already snow on the ground, but apparently continued without it?  Where did the clothes (underwear included, though never a whole outfit in one pile or in a trail, usually just one piece in a place) come from?

Each of these is interesting, and the randomness is sort of amazing, and I’m sure I’ll see more in the coming days are we get rid of the last of snow we have now (I’m sure we’ll still get more – I don’t trust we’re done with snow here until it hits 90 the first time).

So, my idea for this one is I think someone should gather up all of the stuff that has melted out of the snow along one street, or in more dense neighborhoods even a single block, and make sculptures out of it.

It would be interesting to see what you could structurally assemble out of all of it, and to see what different types of stuff you find in each neighborhood.  It seems like there’s lots of modern art that is made out of found objects and discarded items, but I think this would have a sort of cool local flair to it.  Especially if you played up the hidden vs seen, and clean and pure snow vs what it’s hiding aspects.

You could also just gather up everything from one block, and instead of making a structure or sculpture out of it, just lay it out in a compulsively neat grid of items, to contrast with the random, strewn about nature of where you found it.

Of course, you would definitely want to wear some thick gloves for this one.  And you might pass up the diaper.

If you’ve ever been in downtown Minneapolis, you’ve probably walked around in the Skyways.  And if you’ve walked around in the Skyways, you’ve probably gotten lost in the Skyways.  Each building built their own, with no central planning that I can discern.  If you look at a map of the Skyways, it basically looks like a two year old scribbled on a map of downtown with a crayon.  And the signs and maps in the Skyways are few and far between, and not all that helpful if you don’t know the official names of each building.  Aside from that, I would say more than half of the businesses and restaurants downtown are on the second level instead of the ground level.  So, I would like to see an app for phones that would help navigate the Skyways.  I was all gung-ho on making this myself a while ago, but as I’ve yet to get around to even starting it, I’m passing it on.  Some potential features:

• At the most basic, it would have a map of the Skyways, and a “You are here” dot showing where you are in them based on the gps in your phone.
• Ideally, it would have some sort of description of each Skyway and building’s interior, so if your phone doesn’t have gps you could figure out where you are based on what it looks like (super ideally, you could take a picture of the Skyway in front of you and it would show you where you are).
• Be able to find routes between places.  Include the times that each Skyway is open and find the shortest / fasted route between two points in the Skyway.  Be able to have some parameters like how far you’re willing to walk outside (maybe 5 blocks if it’s nice, 2 if it’s okay, none at all if it’s really cold – maybe even tie this to a weather service so it can decide this automatically).  If you’re going outside, it should show you pictures of where on which building you need to go back in to get to where you’re going.
• Tell you how long it will take to walk from here to there (in case you have a meeting in 10 minutes and need to grab lunch quick).
• Have the locations and, super ideally, menus, prices, specials, and hours of restaurants in the Skyways.  Do this with bars too.
• Have locations of businesses, both retail and corporate.
• Have things around getting to and from downtown.  Have location of parking ramps, their rates, average time they fill up, specials, etc.  Integrate it with the app they have for city buses.  Show bike racks.
• List upcoming events downtown at the Target Center, First Ave, Orchestra Hall, movies, etc.

Several ideas this week, all around efficiency and energy:

• Make an electric powered motorcycle.  Batteries / electric engines can give a lot of torque immediately, which bikers seem to like.  Motorcycles don’t have to carry all the extra weight that cars do for safety mechanisms.  And they generally already tend to be a secondary vehicle for short trips, which seems like it would be an ideal niche to start getting consumers to try electric on a large scale.  Batteries also tend to suffer in cold climates and really cold weather – again, not a problem for motorcycles.
• Use the heat absorbed by roads during the day to generate electricity.  If you can absorb it to use it for energy and keep the roads at a more steady temperature, you’ll have less plowing/scraping wearing on the road, and less buckling and overall less stress on the material.  Use the heat they retain into the evening and the cool they retain into the morning as a sort of geothermal pump or Stirling engine, or something.  This would also help to reduce the heat island effect that city centers have.
• Use the snow on the side of a mountain to reflect the sun onto a specific point as a solar concentrater.  You could potentially put a giant mylar type sheet over the whole area too to reflect more light.  Use a Stirling engine to take advantage of the difference in heat between the heat from the concentrated sun and the cold of the surrounding air.
• Put heat insulators below the burners on stoves so you don’t just heat the air around the coil – force all of the heat up to the surface of the pan, so all of it has to transfer away that way.  Be able to adjust the size of the surface that is being heated so you get full contact with the whole pan, no more no less, and, that way you don’t need several different sized burners / parts.  Make the are area of the surface that is being heated light up so people know right where to put the pan.  Or even better yet, have a sensor that can tell where the pan is and how big it is, and just heat that area.

I came across this post on Swissmiss about a company called Nutcase Helmets (their website seems a little hit or miss for actually coming up) that makes really cool looking hard shell bike helmets.  And with a name like Nutcase, and making hard shelled bike helmets, an idea occurred to me for a bike helmet that I think would be really funny (your sense of humor may vary).

I’d like to see a bike helmet that looks like a giant walnut shell.  You could even make it the sporty kind with vents to have the bumpy texture of an actual walnut shell, and the rounded front and slightly tapered back would be the right shape too.  And then you could look like when a cartoon mouse is riding a motorcycle or a race car and they have buttons for wheels, and match sticks for handle bars, and a walnut shell for a helmet.  For that matter, you could make a whole custom bike to go with the helmet so it would look like the whole thing was made out of over-sized tiny things – button wheels, match stick handle bars, a walnut helmet, a pleasantly ironic hamster wheel for the gears, toothpick pipes, a thumb tack seat (pointy part down!!), clothespin brakes, the whole deal.  Insert your own gag about joining / leaving the rat race here.  In short:

Do the math.

I’ll preface this one by saying I keep going back and forth on if it’s a really good idea, or an absolutely, profoundly terrible one.

While I was at the dentist last week, I noticed that depending on the angle, I could look at the little glasses / visor thing my dentist was wearing (I would assume to keep any splash or bits of scrapped gunk from flying into her eyes) and see a reflection of what she was looking at.  It was sort of cool to see the different perspective on my mouth than I usually see, but especially for being able to actually see exactly what it was she was doing.  Now, I didn’t check to much, because the reflection, being on her glasses thingy, was directly over her eyes, making it sort of a weird making eye contact but not really thing that just seemed awkward.

However, it made me think that since they’re wearing these glasses/visor/headset thing anyway, they could easily put a little camera on there, and a little cheap lcd screen next to the light that they use to shine in your mouth, and you could watch what it was they were doing as they did it.  Dental Cam.

It would be especially handy for showing you which spots you really need to focus on brushing more, and why.  Or what happens when you don’t floss.  Or if there is some spot that they say they’re keeping an eye on, they could show you why.  And just for the general interest of seeing what exactly it is they’ve been doing in there all these years.

Now for if this is a really good or a really bad idea I think would depend in large part on how good or bad both your teeth and your dentist are.  If your teeth and dentist are good, I think it would be utterly fascinating, and make what’s generally a fairly dull half hour of laying around an educational experience that makes you feel more in control of and connected to your own health and care, and let you actually see first hand the results of the health choices you make.

On the other hand, I could also see where if you had some seriously bad dental issues and a dentist that was less than gentle, it could also turn into your own personally customized horror film.

Continuing the driving theme I seem to have established over the past couple of days, the free idea this week is a Pothole Spotter website.

As bits of pavement are thawing here on the frozen tundra, the potholes seem notably worse than in past years.  Now, I’m no stranger to potholes, having lived in the upper Midwest my whole life, but some of the ones this year seem pretty exceptional.  Perhaps it’s the particular combination of weather this winter, or maybe it’s the result of reduced preventive maintenance on roads with budget cut back, I don’t know.  And mind you, I’m not talking about a little bit of pockmarked road acne here, I’m talking about the tire swallowing, axle breaking caverns.

I’ve got a few on my way to work that are so substantial that I’ve modified my usual route by a few blocks to get around them, because I’m worried I’ll end up with a flat tire one of these days if I don’t (again, these are no “just swerve around them” sized pot holes).

From what I’ve seen in past years here in Minneapolis, the city’s way of patching these is to methodically drive up and down every single street on the warm days, starting when it gets up to the 40′s or 50′s, and patch every single divot on a given street, from fist sized hiccup to black hole of death, all at once.  Which sort of makes sense in a “it’s the government” kind of way.  After all, how would they know where the really bad ones are?  Or the ones that the most people drive over in a given day?  And really, what are you going to do about it anyway?

Make a Pothole Spotter website.  That’s what.

The people who are going to know best where the really bad potholes are are the people who drive through them (or swerve around them) every day.  The commuters.  So, this week’s idea is to make website where users can submit their favorite / most hated potholes.  Ideally, you would set it up so they can send in picture messages of the potholes from their phones, so you can actually see how big / bad they are.  The users should also include a description of the location (for example, 31st Street E, about 10 feet west of Stevens Ave, all of the right lane), or maybe a Google Street View link (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Minneapolis,+Hennepin,+Minnesota&ll=44.946643,-93.275565&spn=0,359.997299&t=h&z=19&layer=c&cbll=44.946644,-93.2757&panoid=dtMqU1RZFncbKp_RddLBew&cbp=12,30.94,,0,1.07 – those two close parallel cracks at the end of the white stripe have each opened into tire sized gaps in the pavement).

The commuters would have incentives to use the site, because it could potentially help them get the worst of the potholes they have to deal with fixed quickly.  Additionally, you could offer a weekly prize for worst pothole, and let users vote on it.  The worst pothole each week would be displayed at the top of the home page. It would strike me that you could get a tire company or an auto shop (especially one that does alignments and tire balancing) or a tow truck company to sponsor the thing, and give related / amusing prizes each week.

Additionally, it would basically publicly shame the cities / street maintenance crews that are in charge of the areas where the potholes reside into fixing them.  Or, more positively, help the cities and crews to identify where they can have the greatest effect improving drivers’ experience with the least amount of manpower and resources.

You could also pit cities against each other to introduce a bit of competition to it for both the government officials and the users, and maybe get a bit of press for it in the mean time.  “Will Minneapolis or New York have the worst pothole this week?”  “Hey, did you see Miami beat us this week?!?  They don’t even have winter!  We gotta get out and find some big ones!”

Additionally, this would also give the cities a good resource for concrete data (pardon the pun) about which streets have the most issues, which could drive the choices  on which ones get priority in replacement, as well as better analysis of layouts / materials that lead to the most / worst potholes.  It could also give the ability to track which spots have potholes that reoccur each year, which could lead to analyzing the effectiveness of patches done at different temperatures, at different times, or by different crews.  In that way, you even potentially charge the cities a small fee to mine the data, or sell some consulting to analyze the data for them.

People would have smoother commutes, the city would have a greater affect of peoples daily lives with fewer resources, we gather more data to prevent future problems and promote accountability, and have some potential to make some cash on the side.  Make it so.

So I’ve been batting this one around in my head for a while, and then I read this article (very, very hyperbolic and one sided,  but still fairly informative none the less), which set me off a bit to finally write this up.  The idea (really sort of 2 ideas together) still definitely has issues, but it’s at least something to think about.  This one’s admittedly equal parts idea and rant, and parts are half joking, though also half not.

Now, in an ideal world, politicians would actually care about representing the views of the people who they are supposed to represent. No US Senator from Minnesota would vote for a bill unless he thought that the people of Minnesota would support it. No Minnesota State Congressman would vote for a piece of legislation unless he thought that the people in his specific district would support it. They would do frequent opinion polls among the people they represent (not national polls) on relevant issues.

However, I think we all know that not how things work. If a drug company promises some money to a campaign in exchange for slightly stricter intellectual property laws, it will probably go through. If the head of the TSA has a side business that has clients that sell body scanners, we’re told we need body scanners in every airport to stay safe. If the steel industry wants higher tariffs to make higher profits to have more money to donate to politicians, the circle of political life goes on.

While there are many, many groups I can give money to as an individual in order to try to elect a given politician, there’s not much I can do to influence him/her after the election until they start making campaign promises the next time around. In short, while companies and interest groups can influence politicians while in office, the average citizen only really comes into discussion around election time.

So, here’s my idea – political bounties (for clarity, so I don’t have the FBI knocking at my door, I’m referring to bounties on laws getting passed/repealed, not on politicians’ heads). Now you may be saying, wait, you want to just buy laws? Well, yes. It basically works that way now for companies, I just want to be more blunt about the government representing the money rather than representing the people. Aside from that, as it stands, companies don’t just have the same rights as individuals, they have more rights.  While an actual person can only donate up to a specific amount of money, corporations basically can spend whatever they want.  I’m just proposing equal rights here.  However, the real key to this idea is that the bounties are only awarded to a politician (or more specifically their reelection fund) AFTER they accomplish what the bounty is for, and that they will be for very, very specific changes.

For instance, I think it’s stupid that I can’t buy beer on Sunday in Minnesota, and I’d like to see that changed. I don’t care which politician introduces the legislation, or what party they’re from. I just want to be able to go grab a bottle of wine for diner on Sunday. So, if this were all set up, I would start a political bounty for legalizing the sale of alcohol on Sunday in Minnesota, and I would contribute a few dollars. And anyone else who thought it was a good idea could also contribute a few bucks. The key here is that the bounty continues to sit and grow until someone introduces a piece of legislation that passes to change the law. No one gets the money until the law is changed.  Basically, we shift the focus for individual campaign contributions from campaign promises to realized results. This would also work for non-incumbents, they could take out loans to campaign on, and pay them back when they got some results and got bounties (or not get elected and go bankrupt I suppose).

Another sort of complimentary idea for this would be that we shut down all direct campaign contributions. Instead, each citizen is allocated $100 (arbitrary number, adjust as you see fit). The $100 comes from tax money, so actually the rich are contributing way more, and the poor way less, but they all get equal say, thus leveling the field some across economic groups that way. Also, I say allocated rather than given because you don’t actually get this money, this money is held by the government and you instruct them (probably via a form on some website) on which campaign to contribute it to and how. This could have a short list of options, such as making the contribution conditional on specific campaign promise being fulfilled. For instance, $50 to Person X unconditionally, and $50 split equally among all politicians who vote to repeal the Patriot Act, if the repeal succeeds. You could also contribute it an interest group, who could then use it to advertise about a specific issue rather than for a specific politician. The key here is that this would be the only money they would be allowed to use. This would help to make it so the government represent (or at least plays to) the people instead of corporations, and it would give all citizen equal say in their government (or again, equal influence over the election).  Politicians would be strictly banned from using any other funds in their campaigns.

The obvious problem with this part, is that you basically have to limit free speech in order to keep companies and rich people from buying their own advertising. And it sort of presupposes that elections are decided by how much advertising you can do, rather than what people actually think, which gets a bit to the heart of the issue that most people know almost nothing about politics, but are still responsible for choosing politicians. In order to make it manageable, you would also have to limit the list of conditions that you could apply to your contribution. Maybe you could make it so the $100 can be payed out at your will throughout the elected politician’s term?

There’s also the elephant in the room that any change like this would have to be put in place by, you guessed it, politician.  And we’ve already covered where they currently get incentives from.

Ugh.  Politics makes my head hurt, and make me nauseous. This is why I haven’t had much on here about it for a while, and will probably continue that way for a while.

I heard a while back (about a year ago, because, yes, I am about that far behind on some of the things I’ve been meaning to blog about) that Intermedia Arts, a local arts group/space/organization, was closing it’s gallery and laying off all of it’s full time staff because they, and the arts in general, were being hit particularly hard by the recession, and it was the only way to stay afloat.  From their website, it looks like they’re back in their space and hosting things again (admittedly I haven’t followed it all that closely), but I would tend to imagine selling art and managing galleries still isn’t exactly a booming enterprise as the moment, and that both artists and galleries are probably still squeezed pretty tightly.

Another fairly visible symptom of the recession that I’ve noticed is that there are lots more empty store fronts than usual.  Businesses close, and they leave their spaces empty, and it takes a bit longer for property owners to find someone else to rent the space.

So, putting two and two together, there are empty store fronts that look vacant and depressing, seem to be magnets for graffiti, and which are drawing no rent, and you have galleries closing and artists with no places (or less visible places at least) to sell their work or get it in front of people.  So, the free idea for this week is to set up some sort of organization / program to connect property owners and artist to display works in the front windows of empty store fronts until the space gets rented again.

Here’s a few reasons why I think this particular match up would work well for everyone.  First from the artists’ perspective:

• Your work is put in a place people are used to looking at to buy things and it gets it in front of people who may not generally go to galleries.  It’s not only a sales outlet, it’s advertising.
• In this idea, there wouldn’t be any active curator working at the store, just a locked store front with art in the windows and number to call if you wanted to buy something, or an email address, so the fees/commissions would be notably less than you would usually pay to galleries.  Also with the cheaper space and more of, there would be potential for many more artists to get exposure than usual.

From the property owner’s perspective:

• Though the rent may be notably less than if you had an actual tenant / business, it’s some income.  If the group that organizes this is set up as a charitable organization, you may be able to write off some of the difference for reduced rent (not sure about that part, but I would imagine).
• It keeps people looking at your space, noticing it, and thinking of it as a place where people sell stuff.  Again, basically free advertising.
• Reduced graffiti.  This one takes slightly more explaining.  From what I’ve seen, totally empty / basically abandoned store fronts get tagged pretty quickly.  Ones with “For Rent” signs get it slightly more slowly, but not much.  Murals almost never get tagged.  My guess is that this is because most people who tag and do graffiti on other people’s property think of themselves as artists (I think of them as jackasses, but that’s a topic for another day), and/or they have some resentment against corporations and/or they see it as much more justifiable to tag something that’s just a blank space than something that’s already decorated in some artful way.  So, my guess is that while abandoned looking store fronts get tagged in a hurry (making the property look worse, incurring costs for clean up, and making it harder to find a new tenant, because who wants to rent a place that looks like it gets tagged all the time / is in a rough neighborhood), ones that have art in the front of them, especially art from local, community artists, would get tagged much, much less.

Additional benefits / reasons these groups should love each other:

• Artist looking for a place to show their work will probably be much more flexible in lease dates.  If the property finds a tenant while there’s art in the windows, the art can be moved out and the new tenant in on basically no notice at all, especially if one art organization manages this for lots of artists and lots of spaces.  In effect the property owners don’t have to worry about losing any potential tenants.
• Without anyone being at the storefront on a regular basis, you might think theft would be a problem. However, I would have a hard time imagining it being too big of a problem, because unlike commodities such as TVs or cell phones or whatever, art’s pretty unique, and it would be hard to get any money out of reselling it without being detected.  Which means theft isn’t very profitable.  A good chunk of the worth of art is identifying who made it, and doing so is basically turning yourself in. And again, you have the fact that I would think most thieves would think it’s more justifiable to steal from a large corporation / store / chain than from a local artist who may well be just as financially hard up as they are.  Plus, if you rotate things through fairly often (once a week maybe, which would still be practically no labor cost), the space will still seem active.  Plus, if people get used to looking at it to see what’s new, people will look more, and probably report a broken window or other damage pretty quickly (another bonus for the property owner – casual strangers watching out for your store).  You could also have a very simple / cheap (maybe even fake for the deterrent factor) security camera pointed at the front window.
• The other obvious use along these lines would be advertising, but there’s lots of reasons this is better.  Basically this part ties back to the graffiti argument.  The only things that get vandalized faster than abandoned store fronts are Bebe ads.  Put some ads in an empty store front and it will look like a 3 year old playing with MS Paint in about 5 minutes.  The property owner might make a couple of bucks off the ads, but they’ll have a much higher liability for having to clean up graffiti later.  Beyond that, who wants to advertise their product in an empty store front?  Doesn’t really give the impression that most advertisers  want to get across about their product.  And, again, people tend to (at least consciously) tune out ads and/or purposely ignore them, where as art that’s new on a weekly basis would draw attention (I think).

Really, all you would need to get this going would be one or two people with a phone and the numbers of some local artists (or galleries that have artists they’re turning down) and some local property owners (and those number are already in lots of the store fronts).  The artists get exposure and potential sales, the landlords get at least some rent they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten and get it on a very flexible basis.  I would think there could be very low overhead / middleman costs, especially if a group like Intermedia Arts, or the Walker, or MIA (would seem to fit perfectly with their “Foot in the Door 4” exhibit), or MNartists.org, or Artspace were the ones to set it up, with a relatively low commission being charged on each work sold.

There could definitely be things I’m missing here as I’m neither a property owner nor involved in the business of selling art, but it seems like a win-win for everyone involved to me.  And really, it could be done any time, it just seems like there’s a lot more opportunity and need on both sides of the deal when the economy’s down.

Not to be confused with previous Free Idea Friday Cold Beer, this would be a website that lists bars, and their beer prices, only.  No pictures, no reviews or editorials.  No descriptions of the crowd that gathers there and how cool/trendy/hipster/tattooed/townie/gay bar/dance club/meat market/dive/etc it is.  Just a list of what beers the bar serves.  It would also need to note which are on tap, in bottles, and in cans, and the price of each.  It should also list if the bar ever charges a cover charge.

I’m a little up in the air still on if specials should be noted, or if it should just be the maximum price you will ever pay for a given beer at a given bar.  I’m also a little up in the air on if it should include other types of drinks they have (cider, wine, cocktails, shots), and if so, do you limit it to what’s on the menu, or whatever they’ll make.  I would lean towards including all alcohol that’s listed on the menu (if there is one), and noting specials but not real prominently.

The website should also allow you to search by distance from a given location, by which bars have a particular beer (for instance, Guinness on tap, PBR in a 20 oz can, Fat Tire in a bottle, etc), price for a given beer, and any combination of the above (for instance, find a bar within a mile that has Guinness on tap for $5 or less, doesn’t serve 20oz’s of PBR, and has some kind of hard cider).

I think this would be interesting not only as a great way to find a cheap place to drink with your friends and a handy way to find place that serve any obscure beers you may like, but also for how much you could tell about a place by what beers they have there and the price of each.