5 More Remainder Ideas
Last summer, I posted my Top 5 Remainder Ideas, a sample of the many ideas I’d jotted down as potential posts but decided weren’t worth fleshing out for one reason or another. Instead of letting them wallow in obscurity, I purged them in one post. Well, it’s time to do it again. Here are 5 more ideas that didn’t get fleshed out enough to stand on their own.
Remainder Idea #5: TypOs Cerael
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.
Remainder Idea #4: “Dear Juno”
At the end of the movie Juno (spoiler alert), Juno gives her baby up for adoption. I found myself wondering what will happen, fourteen years later, when that little girl decides she wants to know more about her birth mother. Her mom will say, “I guess you’re old enough to know that shortly after you were born, some people made a movie about how you came to be with me. The movie is called Juno, which is your birth mother’s name.” So the kid watches the movie, and then goes through the proper channels to get Juno’s mailing address. She sits down and writes a letter to her birth mother where she says she has so many questions now that she’s seen the movie. Questions like, “If your hamburger phone worked so poorly, why didn’t you just get a normal phone?”
Remainder Idea #3: Unsuccessful Children’s Books
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).
Remainder Idea #2: An Armored Bear Rug
Did you see The Golden Compass? I don’t advocate killing animals to decorate your home, but I couldn’t help imagining that those Armored Bears would make great rugs. Throw a cushion on the big helmeted head and you’ve got a nice seat, too.
Remainder Idea #1: The other Six Degrees of Separation
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.
Bonus Remainder Idea: Blabacus, the Blogging Abacus
I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote down “Blabacus, the Blogging Abacus.” I must have though it was a good enough idea to write it down, but now I just stare at it wondering what I could have possibly been thinking of. Blabacus the Blogging Abacus. Is that an Abacus that has a blog? Is that an Abacus that is used as a tool for blogging? I have no idea.
Comments
Personally, I think Reveverd Horton Heat Hears the Who would be an excellent children’s book. Or maybe one of those books that’s done in the style of a children’s book but is actually for grown-ups.
Posted by: Ben Byrne | August 25, 2008 3:30 PM
I’d watch Juno II: The Reckoning.
Posted by: YLlama | August 25, 2008 7:51 PM
Thanks for spoiling the end of Juno for me. :( :( :(
Posted by: :( | August 25, 2008 8:23 PM
That plot you came up with for “Dear Juno” is similar to the plot for the movie “…Rumor Has It” (except the main character finds out her parents were the basis of “The Graduate”).
It wasn’t bad, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it. Maybe if it came on tv one day.
Posted by: Anonymous | August 25, 2008 10:12 PM
That plot you came up with for “Dear Juno” is similar to the plot for the movie “…Rumor Has It” (except the main character finds out her parents were the basis of “The Graduate”).
It wasn’t bad, but I don’t know if I’d recommend it. Maybe if it came on tv one day.
Posted by: Chad | August 25, 2008 10:13 PM
I’m going to have to second the notion that Reverend Horton Heat Hears the Who is probably the most fantastic children’s book idea ever. Maybe a way to introduce kids to good music?
Posted by: Bob LaRice | August 25, 2008 11:54 PM
NEEDS MORE BLABACUS, THE BLOGGING ABACUS!!!
Posted by: Avi | August 25, 2008 11:55 PM
I have no idea where you could go with Blabacus, but just the name is funny.
Posted by: Steven Fisher | August 26, 2008 1:55 AM
Oh man, I love ironic sans:
You should set up a twitter account to spew the wisdom of Blabacus.
And perhaps Juno’s baby would ask why her father couldn’t bleeker from the muppets instead?
Posted by: Ben Rowe | August 26, 2008 7:08 AM
5. Perhaps you could modify your breakfast cereal idea to center around the LOLCATS meme. There could be kitty pictures on the box, and the cereal-eater would be encouraged to make ungrammatical captions to go along with them.
3. I was going to riff on Unsuccessful Children’s Movies and Reform School Musical, but got to thinking that that would actually have a chance at being an awesomely good film.
Posted by: RichM | August 26, 2008 10:46 AM
I remember thinking that since the hour hand actually moves between the hours, would there be some way to create a clock with only one hand?
Posted by: JohnnyW | August 26, 2008 6:19 PM
First of all, your blog is one of my favorite blogs. Secondly, you can never have too many layers of wordplay.
Also, I found out about yr blog from my typography and design prof, which has almost no revelance to this post, but I thought you’d be tickled by it.
Posted by: Logan | August 26, 2008 7:08 PM
I’ve often wondered whether China has alphabet cereal. And what would you call a mesquite-flavored o’s cereal?
Posted by: Erik | August 27, 2008 5:59 PM
JohnnyW: I have seen a wall clock with just such a single-hand design, but of course I was just now unable to locate it on the dub-dub-dub. But it exists.
Posted by: pannonica | August 28, 2008 4:21 PM
Okay, I managed to find a couple of things, but not what I had seen before:
U.S. Patent no. 5,103,434. Also this from some site called the Green Head.
Posted by: pannonica | August 28, 2008 4:31 PM
type O’s tomato soup brings to mind type O blood. Yet another layer of meaning, and a little creepy
Posted by: anonymous | August 28, 2008 4:57 PM
Your ideas never cease to amaze me. Brilliant. Just brilliant.
Posted by: Ciara | August 31, 2008 2:44 AM
Imagine someone using an abacus on a regular basis, like people selling produce on village markets throughout Russia. Every result calculated with a particular abacus would then be published in Blabacus. Instead of the abacus you could use an ordinary cash register.
There could be different display modes - readers should be able to personalize the blog and have the numbers automatically converted to colours, sounds, or use them to select pictures or songs out of a data base. Or something.
Posted by: gnaddrig | September 1, 2008 7:30 AM
Oh yah. I’m ordering the best of Slyde Rüle from amazon right now.
Posted by: pannonica | September 1, 2008 4:58 PM
There was a watch called the About Time that had only an hour hand. I can’t find it in a google search, though.
I imagine the Blabacus would be the preferred blogging tool of blind mathematicians who want to share their formulas with the world.
Posted by: Mike | September 25, 2008 10:25 AM