Idea: Pop Culture Twitter Lists
It’s been five years since Twitter introduced Lists and frankly I never found a use for them. It’s not that I don’t see the value in curated lists, but I never remembered to look at them, preferring to watch my complete stream of tweeters, signal, noise, and all.
But I finally came up with a use for them. So without further ado, here are a bunch of Pop Culture Twitter Lists you can follow, in apparently random order, with notes about what you’ll find there.
(You can also see them with nicer formatting but without the notes, and easily to subscribe to them, here on Twitter).
- Saturday Night Live: 75 cast members, including “featured” players
- Parks & Recreation: 10 cast members
- Community: 8 cast members
- 3rd Rock From the Sun: 5 cast members, mainly Joseph Gordon-Levitt
- SCTV: 5 cast members
- Roseanne: 6 cast members, but mainly Roseanne being weird
- The Breakfast Club: 4 cast members, but mainly Molly Ringwald, who has a brand new advice column and I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about that.
- Doctor Who: 19 cast members, mainly Doctors and companions
- Star Wars IV-VI: 9 cast members from the Original Trilogy
- Night Court: 3 cast members, but mainly Markie Post
- Cheers: 5 cast members, but mainly Kirstie Alley
- Modern Family: 11 cast members
- Married… With Children: 6 cast members, but mainly David Faustino
- Silver Spoons: 5 cast members
- 30 Rock: 9 cast members
- Rocky Horror Picture Show: 3 cast members, but really just Susan Sarandon
- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: 7 cast members
- Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In: sadly just 3 cast members, but what cast members they are: Lily Tomlin, Ruth Buzzi, and Goldie Hawn. I’d watch a movie starring all of them.
- Boy Meets World: 6 cast members
- Friends: 6 cast members
- The Mindy Project: 10 cast members
- Stephen Tobolowsky: This is just Stephen Tobolowsky
- Family Guy: 6 cast members
- The Simpsons: 7 cast members
- Mad Men: 9 cast members
- Orange is the New Black: 21 cast members plus the real Piper and Larry
- Breaking Bad: 15 cast members
- Seinfeld: 9 cast members, including a few memorable guest stars
- Saved by the Bell: 8 cast members
- Beverly Hills 90210: 9 cast members
- The Office (US): 16 cast members
- Family Ties: 5 cast members, and you should be following Justine Bateman’s blog about going back to college and being a Computer Science undergrad as an adult
- Growing Pains: 7 cast members, but mainly Kirk Cameron. You’ve been warned.
- The Brady Bunch: just 2 cast members, and really just Florence Henderson. I’m surprised there aren’t more.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: 4 cast members. Oh my.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: 10 cast members. Make it so.
- Happy Days: 3 cast members
- The Facts Of Life: 8 cast members. After much internal debate, I decided to omit the characters who didn’t make it past Season 1 (although once again I can’t believe nobody’s talking about Molly Ringwald’s advice column).
Am I missing your favorite cast that’s on Twitter? Let me know at @ironicsans and maybe I’ll add it when I get a chance.
(Wow, a bulleted list of links sure highlights how dated my site’s design feels)
Update: I’ve since added…
- Girls: 6 cast members
- Transparent: 8 cast members
- Game of Thrones: 20 cast members
- Orphan Black: 7 cast members, and they’re all Tatiana Maslany
Back in 2008 I launched 
In 2009, Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio of the design firm 
Is there an upper limit to the amount of money you can raise on 
Every device is an eReader these days. Some are dedicated e-ink devices, and some are multipurpose gadgets that have (or will soon have) front-facing cameras. Presumably those cameras are intended for video chat. But as long as the cameras are there, I think eReader software should take advantage of those cameras, too.
You go through your mundane workday without anything exciting happening. But what if you had a chair that was constructed in such a way that every time you sat in it, there was a 1 in 3,000 chance it would break apart, sending you falling to the floor? You’d have a little bit of nervous excitement every time you sat.
I landed on the show while flipping through the channels and it caught my eye because I suddenly realized that the 80s actor I really want to see make a lamp on Martha’s show is Anthony Michael Hall. Martha can show him how to finally make an elephant lamp with a light that turns on when you pull the trunk. Who do I need to talk to for this to happen? Do I need to start a petition? Does it need to coincide with something for him to promote? The eventual Breakfast Club release on Blu-Ray, perhaps (whenever that happens)? What would be a better promotional event than this one?
As the Democrats in Congress are struggling to get the rest of America on board with their proposed health plan, I can’t help but wonder if a better name wouldn’t help. Take a page from the Republican playbook. They give bills names that are loaded with meaning and are difficult to vote against without looking bad. Who would vote no on something called No Child Left Behind? Who wouldn’t support the USA Patriot act?
Those of you who follow tech news know that there’s been quite a dust-up recently over Google Voice apps on the iPhone. First they were allowed, but now they’re banned. So until they work things out, or Google comes up with a more elegant web-based solution, placing a call using Google Voice on the iPhone is a long and drawn-out process.
The Associated Press has an ongoing problem with misappropriation of AP articles. Facts are not copyrightable, but 
The movie begins in the middle of a chase. Our hero, Buttons, a scrappy little dog, is running as fast as he can through dark and scary woods. A pack of slobbering wolves are hot on his heels. We hear Button’s cute voice saying lines like, “Oh, no! I’ve got to outrun these guys!” His lips don’t move when he talks. We just hear his voice, like in the Talking Dog Movies of the 1980s.
Grocery stores should sell progressively packed produce. Instead of buying a bunch of bananas picked at the same time, you get a packaged bundle of bananas (or other quick-to-ripen food), each at a different stage in ripeness, with stickers on them telling you in which order you should eat them. Sure, there would be a premium attached to progressively packed produce to account for the back-end difficulties, but just think of the savings in wasted food.
Time-lapse portraits of a face may be the most obvious and compelling subject matter, but I think science and curiosity might benefit from time lapse portraits of other body parts, too. What if Noah had been taking a second picture all this time, of, say, his left hand? It would be interesting to see how his hand ages along with his face. There probably wouldn’t be much change now, but as he ages it would get more dramatic.
, it can be awkward to turn the pages. Plus, you have to carry all that around with you when you’re done running but still want to work out. It looks like a pain.
I currently have 4 episodes of the TV show “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” on my DVR waiting to be watched, but I think I’m just going to delete them. I can’t imagine wasting 4 hours catching up on that show. It’s boring. Each episode is just like the last one.
There are a lot of “O”s cereal names out there: Cheerios, Toasty-Os, etc. I had this idea that there should be a Typos Cereal. It would be made of all the letters of the alphabet, like Alpha Bits cereal, but you wouldn’t spell anything correctly with it. I only got as far as this rough illustration before I remembered that “O”s cereals don’t use the whole alphabet. They only use the letter O. Then I considered a soup called “Type O” Soup. It’s tomato soup with alphabet noodles. But that’s just too many layers of wordplay.
I once doodled a drawing of Clifford the Big Red Log. I figured that must be the most dull children’s book ever. Then I began imagining other unsuccessful children’s books like Charlie and the Chalk Factory, Reverend Horton Heat Hears The Who, and The Berenstein Bears (about a family of burly gay men).
We’ve all heard the theory that every person on this planet is separated by every other person by six degrees. But one day I realized that something else is separated by six degrees. Every minute on a clock face is separated from the previous and next minute by six degrees. I think there might be something interesting that an be done with that concept. I tried coming up with a clock design incorporating the idea, playing with the six on the bottom of the clock in the designs, but I wasn’t crazy about anything I came up with.
Let’s start with some text so we have something to work with:
Holding your finger on a word currently brings up a Magnifying Glass that helps you place a cursor where you want it. My suggestion: Whenever you go into Magnify mode, the bottom row of the keyboard is replaced by one large “Hold to Select” button.
If you only move the cursor without pressing the “Hold to Select” button, the bottom row returns to normal when you let go. But if you do select text, then the “Hold to Select” button is replaced by four new buttons: Cut, Copy, Paste, and Cancel.
After you make your choice, the action is carried out and the bottom row returns to normal. I’ve selected “Cut” in this example.
When I’m ready to paste, I once again use the Magnifying Glass to place the cursor. The “Hold to Select” button comes up again but I’m not going to press it this time (although if you want to replace text, you can select a whole block of words to paste over).
If I I had nothing in my clipboard, then the bottom row would go back to normal when I release the Magnifying Glass since I didn’t select any text. But I do have something in the clipboard, so I my options are shown again.
I select “Paste” and the word in my clipboard is inserted at the cursor. The keyboard bottom row returns to normal.
In the preferences, I can decide when I want the clipboard to be cleared out. I think it makes sense to empty your clipboard every time you paste, but other options are useful in case you need to paste the same text multiple times.
I don’t advocate taking performance enhancing drugs, but if I were a company making a sports video game, I would be tempted to include a hidden “Steroid Mode” where the players can enhance themselves by taking drugs which make them stronger players. It could add an interesting layer of complexity to the gameplay, reflect a real life issue, and create a buzz of controversy that could help sell the video game.
for power strips. But that’s backwards thinking because it just accepts that we have to deal with these bricks and puts a bandage on the problem. We can do better.
This could damage your gadget, so there is a feature in the Outlet 2.0 standard that prevents this from happening. It is not shown in the plug renderings above because I haven’t worked out the details yet. It will probably take the form of an extra prong that doesn’t carry electricity, placed off center so as not to be confused with the grounding prong already present on current “three-prong” plugs. At right is a rendering of how it may appear. This not only prevents you from sticking a 2.0 plug in a 1.0 outlet, but makes the different outlets easy to recognize by sight.
There are a handful of artists out there making incredibly detailed 
Each company could pick one artist each year whose work exemplifies the company’s brand or ethos, provide financing for a year during which the artist develops a body of work, and then offer a performance or exhibition space — perhaps in a flagship store or corporate headquarters — to showcase the result.
Someone who manufactures pots and pans should make a matching set of measuring cups that look just like the pots they make but smaller. And with some creative design tweaks, teaspoons and tablespoons could be made that look like tiny frying pans.
If you’re the sort of person who prefers to pin your Polaroid pictures to your cork board in your cubicle, you can take advantage of this innovative feature: The stand on the back of the frame can rotate to an upward position, sticking up above the top of the frame and revealing a hole for you to stick a pushpin through. The rechargeable internal battery allows you to showcase your photos that way even if you don’t want a wire dangling down from your cork board.
You may have already heard about 
But that still seems like an awful lot of work to get a human. Why doesn’t someone create an application that does all the work for me? Let me select what company I need to call, and then use my modem to call them and do all that number-pressing automatically. At the last step, play a sound so I know to pick up my phone. Or just turn up the speaker on my computer so I can hear when a human picks up. Of course, not everyone has a modem any more, so the program could also come as a Skype plug-in and in cell phone versions for different mobile operating systems.
In this version of Tetris, which I call “Montris,” there are no falling tetrominoes (the shapes made up of 4 bricks that you’re familiar with in Tetris), and there is nothing to rotate. The shapes just drop one brick at a time, and it’s up to you to create tetrominoes when they land. When you create a tetromino, it disappears. Your goal isn’t to clear entire rows of bricks. You just clear tetrominoes. When you clear one and the bricks above it fall, this may create other tetrominoes that clear creating a chain-reaction. So thinking ahead is important.
Yesterday, I 
I think a kitchy home accessories designer should license historic photos of celebrities giving the middle finger and turn them into 3-dimensional coat hooks. At right is an artist’s rendition of how such a coat hook might look using a famous photo of Johnny Cash. 
Walt Disney should add a new division of scientists (biological imagineers) to its company with the goal of breeding “Mickey” mice — real mice, selectively bred for their big round ears and black facial coloring which makes them resemble a certain famous cartoon mouse. Then they can sell them as pets in pet stores.
You know how hot dogs come in packs of 10, but hot dog buns come in packs of 8? This pretty much assures that there will be leftovers of one or the other at the end of the day. Hamburgers on the other hand can be spread out a little more evenly because you can control the size of the patties you make with your ground beef. But one year I ended up with too much ground beef, and too many hot dog buns.
FOX should make a spinoff of “24” for kids. They should call it “12” and the main character should be twelve years old. Each of the 24 half-hour episodes covers 30 minutes in the life of Brad Bauer (or whoever). The first season could start at 7:00 a.m. on his twelfth birthday as he prepares to head to school, and end at 7:00 PM when he gets home. In between, Brad gets wound up in some crazy adventure and manages to save the day, while he tries to keep up with his classes, celebrate his birthday, and impress that girl he likes in algebra class.
There’s an article on-line from Money Magazine called “
So how about making a Digital Jewel Box? Here’s how it would work: The DJB sits next to your stereo or computer in its charging dock. Similar to a digital picture frame, it syncs wirelessly to your home network via WiFi, syncing itself with iTunes or whatever digital player you use. When a new song comes on, the DJB’s screen shows the album cover art for that song.
With that in mind, I think that if I were an evil dictator in a country developing a nuclear weapon, I would name my new weapon “The F-Bomb.” Then I’d get a little giggle every time it was reported in the news that my country is threatening to drop the F-Bomb. As in, “Ironicsansistan tested a long-range missile today, heightening fears that it will follow through on its threats to drop the F-Bomb on South Ironicsansistan.”
Nearly every episode of the 1970s sitcom 
I’ve been participating in the beta test of a hotly anticipated new program called Joost. It’s essentially a video-on-demand service from the people who brought you Kazaa and Skype, which uses proprietary technology to make high quality video over the internet as instant as your TV. Unlike video sharing sites such as YouTube, you won’t get to upload your own videos to Joost. They will provide the content through contracts with various TV and movie companies, and show the programs in appropriate Channels. For example, they might have an NBC Channel where you can catch up on episodes of Heroes. Or you might go to the Warner Brothers Movie Channel to watch the movie Batman.
In Writer Mode, whenever I pause the program I’m watching, a window pops up that I can type in. Joost uses a time stamp to remember where I was in the program when I wrote this comment, and also remembers where on the screen I’ve put the window. Then I can type in any comment I want. Preferably, it’s either informative about the particular scene (e.g. “This scene was filmed at Maine North High School in Chicago”), or it’s a funny comment on the scene. I can tag it appropriately as “funny” or “informative” so Joost knows how it’s intended.
In Voter Mode, I watch the movie with a window overlaid in which all the comments people left scroll up automatically. I get to vote every comment up or down based on whether I agree that it’s funny or informative or neither of the above. In my illustration, all the comments are white, but perhaps they would be different colors to specify funny or informative. If there are too many comments to reasonably vote on so quickly, I can tell Joost to not show me every comment so that it’s more manageable. I can set the pace myself. Or I can just vote on the ones that jump out at me, ignoring the others.
In Viewer Mode, I can watch a program or movie with comments turned on. They will show up where and when the commenter specified, and then disappear after a few seconds. Because people read at different paces, I can control how many pop-ups I want per minute. If I say I want 12 per minute, only the 12 highest rated pop-ups will be shown in each minute of the program. I can specify if I want to see just the funny comments, or just the informative comments, or both. I can choose to read the highest-rated comments of all time, or just of the last month or week or day. I could watch the same program week after week and experience it with a whole new set of commentary. And at any time, I can switch to a different mode if I think of a new comment to add or if I want to vote down a lame comment I just read.
You sit down and watch the movie, each of you with your glasses on. A few minutes into the movie, there’s a scene with a couple sitting on their couch watching TV. As you watch, you hear the sounds of the TV show they’re watching. It’s a nature program. They make some comments to each other about the show. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, two aliens jump in and attack, killing the humans.
Hi hi hi there, droogs. This weekend, oh my brothers, I, your humble blogger and narrator, had a thought in my rasoodock to create this orange clockwork. Viddy well this malenky clock which you can hang in your domy for just a little pretty polly. Perhaps your pee and em, or some other veck or soomka you know would find this clock real horrorshow.
But maybe that could have been ameliorated if the technology had been used for entertainment purposes. What if the cameras scanned the crowds at the Superbowl and built a new database as it went, instead of using a database of known criminals, to find the two people in the audience who looked the most alike? It would be interesting to see, in a crowd of 100,000 people, how close a match can be found among strangers. Then, at halftime or during breaks in the action, the Jumbotron could showcase the closest matches in a series of “Separated at Birth?” moments.
It would probably be weird to have them as part of a font set, but maybe it would look neat used for a pull quote in an article about comic books. It seems like every three years or so there’s another article about how graphic novels are finally getting respect as literature, so maybe the next time one of those pieces runs they can try out my idea.
The news lately has been full of 
Dictionary definition of apparent: “manifest as true on the basis of evidence that may or may not be factually valid.”
So I’m thinking: Someone should come up with a game that uses a dumbbell accessory allowing you to attach the controller to your dumbbell. The game could have several component. There could be a section that’s just a normal workout, that just gives you training advice and lets you workout along with an on-screen trainer, and it tracks your progress because it knows how many reps and sets you’re doing by tracking your movement. And there could be actual games that incorporate your workout with the game. Maybe every time you raise the dumbbell over your head, you shoot an alien. Or punch an alien. Or pick an apple. Or something like that. I’m not a game designer, but I think it’s got potential.
Since Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002, candidates for federal office must state their approval of campaign ads. Most frequently, we hear the phrase, “I’m [candidate’s name] and I approve this message.” Sometimes, to make it less awkward, the statement is lengthened along the lines of, “I’m [candidate’s name] and I approve this message because it’s time to stop playing around in Congress, and time to start getting things done.”
I was recently shopping for paper at Staples when I had this thought: NBC should really license the “Dunder Mifflin” name to some paper company, and put it on real reams of paper. I don’t have brand loyalty when it comes to 8.5” x 11” paper, so it’s not like I can’t be persuaded to buy one ream over another. If I were buying paper at Staples and I saw the Dunder Mifflin brand name on a ream of paper, I’d totally get it. Just because it’s funny. Even if it cost a few cents more than the other brands.
Back in the winter of 2002, while I was cocooning in my home after 9/11 like so many Americans, I conceived of a cartoon series all about grade-school versions of the various Clinton Administration characters. I called it “
Well it’s bittersweet to see that someone else has done it. Did Donick Cary see my Li’l Bill website? It’s possible. It got a fair amount of publicity, mentions on talk radio, that sort of thing. And it’s linked to on the right side of the main page on this site, which has also gotten enough publicity that it’s concievable he’s seen it. But it’s probably not such a novel idea that I could prove he stole it from me. I think the law would say that he could have come up with it on his own. Which he may have. And you can’t copyright an idea, anyway, just the execution of the idea, and I guess his execution is different enough from mine except for in the obvious ways (setting it at the White House, etc). But still, I can’t help but feel like I’ve been ripped off a little bit, even though it’s nice to see Cary’s version has come to fruition. Great minds and all that.
Have you seen 
How does it work? It begins with a thick layer of glass or clear plastic. This protects you from the ants, and protects the ants from you. Below the glass is an open space with a thick layer of dirt, allowing the ants to crawl in, out, and around their tunnels, caves, and hills. This all rests on top of a sturdy base layer, which doubles as the bottom of the desktop. Small holes around the sides of the desk provide air, while being too small for the ants to escape.
Recently announced in partnership with CafePress.com, New Line Cinema is encouraging anyone and everyone to become an official licensee of merchandise for the upcoming movie Snakes on a Plane (which, if you haven’t heard by now, promises to be exactly the sort of movie you think it will be based on that title). Most of the movie’s buzz has already come from 
The other day I thought I saw someone wearing a shirt with a DNA pattern. When I got closer, I realized that the shirt just had little drawings of trees all over it. But then I got to thinking, why not? These days it’s not too expensive to get your “DNA fingerprint” made, right? Several companies, like 
First, the state paid $260,000 to a consulting firm to come up with a slogan. They came up with, “New Jersey. We’ll win you over.” It was quickly rejected. Then the state held a contest to come up with a new slogan. The big winner was “New Jersey. Come see for yourself” submitted by Jeffrey Antman of Passaic, New Jersey. Well, a couple months ago they scrapped that one too after realizing that 
I’ve heard “Margaritaville” about 500 times too many on jukeboxes in bars. It might be worth five bucks to me to be able to skip that song the next time someone plays it. Someone should make a jukebox that features a big “SKIP” button and charge five bucks to use it. I think five dollars is just the right amount. It’s high enough that someone won’t keep skipping songs just to be a jerk, but low enough that I can afford to skip that one song that I really just can’t stand to hear one more time.
Many people are already familiar with the disorder known as Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. This is a form of mistreatment where a caregiver, usually a mother, pretends that a child has an illness, and the child is subjected to all sorts of unnecessary testing and treatments, just so the mother can get some attention.
Why doesn’t someone make a compass to help you find your car in the parking lot? This should be an optional accessory for every GPS-enabled car. You should be able to get a keychain or purse-sized device that will point to your car so you can find it when you come out of the mall, grocery store, etc.
It seems these days that Hollywood scrapes the bottom of the barrel for movie material. Of the movies opening this summer, 7 are sequels and 17 are remakes or adaptations.
The woman goes about her day. She’s making breakfast while she talks. “Yes.” Pause. “Yes.” Pause.
People will think of the ad when they’re meeting new people. They’ll swap information. They’ll ask for your phone number and your AIM Name. 
In January, I heard an 
I don’t watch much Reality TV, but I’ve seen enough of it to notice an on-going phenomenon: Someone wears a garment with a trademarked logo or artwork on it, and the producers have to pixelate it beyond recognition in post-production. Of course no Reality TV star wants their shirt, which displays their well-chosen article of self-expression, senselessly pixelated so nobody can see it. But no Reality TV producer wants to deal with the headache of removing said article of self-expression to avoid trademark violations. The pixelation process seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for something that could have been avoided with a little pre-planning.
So I’d like to introduce my new line of pre-pixelated clothing for Reality TV shows. If you’re going to be on a Reality TV show, you can buy one of these fine products and save someone a lot of headaches later. In fact, if you live in an area where a reality TV show is taping, you should think about getting one of these shirts in case you get caught in the background of a shot. And if you’re heading to audition for a Reality TV show, maybe you should wear one of these shirts to the audition so they know that you’re really serious about Reality TV.
There should be a convention for Bob Balaban fans called Balabananza. Imagine:
Ione Skye is upstairs sleeping in her bedroom. Outside, John Cusack stands below her window with a boombox held up high over his head. He’s blasting “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. Ione wakes up. “…the light, the heat (your eyes), I am complete (your eyes)…” Where’s that music coming from?
