For instance, I don't think any (or very few) roads should be built without a bike path or decent sidewalk. (by decent, I mean, not within 2 inches of traffic) People should be able to walk or pedal their way to work or the local store.

And speaking of work. You really should have mandatory nap time allotted or some creative stress relief written into law. Mandatory siesta means the competition can't legally take advantage and everyone is forced to stop and smell the flowers.

-- Anonymous, April 09, 2000

Answers

Monster Blankets for kids. In other words, a regular old blanket with a 1X1 thin nylon mesh window in it. You know, so you don't suffocate when you pull the blanket over your head to protect yourself from monsters.

-- Anonymous, April 09, 2000

Pez dispensers built big enough to accommodate a sleeve of Fig Newtons.

-- Anonymous, April 09, 2000

a small version of a tennis ball machine. Just big enough to shoot the balls one by one, not load an entire bucket of balls into it at once. If this product existed, I could train my dog to just drop it back into the machine to shoot it back out. It would save me a lot of pain from the Fetching Arm that I am now suffering; all my dog wants to do is fetch until he falls from exhaustion. Unfortunately, I am usually already dead from repeatedly throwing the tennis ball.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Public dogs.

Just dogs that would run around cities and you could pat them and play with them. Instead of dogcatchers we would have public dog caretakers who left out food and water and made sure each dog got to the vet.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Or better yet (for the dogs' sake, I think), a dog library! Then they could stay inside until you came to check them out, although that might be kind of sad for the dogs who were like Moby Dick, just waiting on some lonely shelf for someone to check them out.

But you could keep the dog for two weeks, and if you were late, you'd just get a warning, not a fine, as long as you were taking really good care of the dog.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

A dog library! Public dogs!

How about a dog library where you don't check them out,but just play with them there? Then there would be no sad, uncheckedout dogs left on the shelf all the time.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

DOG LIBRARY! I love it. How about for the single folk and men or women library? What an interesting card catalog THAT would be.

-- Anonymous, April 10, 2000

Geez, this is getting scary. I'm pretty much convinced I'd end up on that shelf in the back where the smartasses are gathering dust.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

I love the dog library idea!

My idea's: Waterproof books to read in the bath. They could be made along the lines of those squishy plastic baby books -admittedly they wouldn't hold many pages but there would be enough room to fit a few watery theme-d poems in them!

Let's see what else... bags that sound an alarm if opened by anyone other than the keyholder - i'm sick of feeling vunerable to pick pockets when I go on the metro.

and finally ... Ive always thought a lemon juicer fashioned in the shape of St Paul's Cathedral would make a delightfully kitsch addition to any kitchen! http://stpauls.london.anglican.org/home.htm

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

A feature in Office 2001 that forces you to stop and do RSI prevention exercises every so often. (Stock options will be fine, thanks, Bill.)

Cups and glasses (real ones) that have a white label on them, like the one on Pyrex, so you can write your name and find your cup at parties. Much greener than disposable cups. The writing is automatically erased in the heat of the dishwasher.

MP3 players in mobile phones, so you can make people listen to your personalized hold music. (Nokia, you really should have let me do something more than technical writing.)

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

Dog library! Awesome. Maybe I wouldn't have so many damn dogs in my house if that existed.

The shelter where I got Mack, my first dog, used to let people come and walk the dogs and play with them during adoption hours. There were always old men there playing with the dogs and I thought it was great. That was a really great dog shelter though, and I send them a donation every year.

How about some kind of grass that just makes dog poop dissolve? Three dogs sure do produce a lot of poop to pick up!

Colleen

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

The SPCA (in my area, at least) is similar to the dog library idea- you can foster a dog or cat until adoption, and you probably won't have it for a long period of time. Ok, so it isn't two weeks, but a few months isn't bad either. I did an article on our local SPCA foster parents, and the longest time mentioned to me was 11 months for a dog (dogs have longer fostering periods than cats, since they're harder to find homes for in this town). Though my roommate's adopting two handicapped cats (siblings, one with one blind eye and one with a messed-up but working eye), and they've been available since last summer.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

OK, here's what I want. I want a URL you can go to and it turns your monitor into a mirror so you can check yourself in a big mirror without walking all the way down the hall and back. Somewhere in the RGB matrix there must be some color combination that equals shiny.

-- Anonymous, May 12, 2000

Dog libraries! Love it!

Separate bus roads work really well - they have it in Ottawa and the buses take no time at all to do what would be a half hour in traffic.

Okay, how about bowling restaurants in the downtown area? So you can have, say, filet mignon or angel hair pasta with your string.

Transparents bubbles that are only permeable to air (but not to water or anything else) which you can walk around inside, the bubbles rolling along, when it rains or snows. Better yet, bubbles with temperature control so you don't have to ever wear winter coats again. You could get customized ones with neat designs - dibs on the steel cage design that looks like a hamster wheel.

Joanne (Parietal Pericardium)

-- Anonymous, May 12, 2000