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Cosmic Engineering & Your On-The-Hoof Ideas

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Okay, while I’m waiting for the paint to dry on my current inventions and you are sitting in some airport hoping for the fog to lift, let’s chat about how Grand Ideas get brought into the material plane of existence.  I truly believe that it all begins with you and me, who design something fantastic in our creative little brains, but haven’t a prayer towards seeing it into reality…..no money, no connections, no clue as to where to start.  And no…. I don’t think that it is stolen away from us by greedy industrialists.  I’m sure it’s way more complicated than that.

The genesis of this assumption came about during the last years of the 1970’s or the first ones of the eighties.  Maybe thirty years ago, before the world had seen such an object as I saw in my mind’s eye and put into a drawing.  The picture that I drew was of an ordinary white ice-skating boot.  But, instead of a blade, I drew wheels in a line down the center and even decided that the wheels must be more pointed than the flat skate wheels of the day, and that they should be made of a very strong plastic.  I figured that it would be a whole lot of fun to skate freely around on concrete rather than ice but to have the kind of flexibility that moving the wheels away from the four corners would allow.

Now what?  Nothing in my life at the time would have allowed me to promote this new invention.  So, I decided to give it to God….to the Universe……to the Upper Kingdom, if you will, and I mentally slipped the drawing into a file cabinet drawer that I visualized opening in my mind.  “Here!  It’s Yours!  Please help somebody to invent this!  The world needs it!”   A few years later, I woke up and there were inline skaters whizzing all around me.  The thought was, obviously, seeded into a fertile mind of someone who was in a position to do something about it.  At least, that’s what I like to think as I contemplate the sight of people enjoying this sport in many countries of the world.   I seem to remember reading of the man who did get these skates on the market and it took hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money, plus a whole lot of talent and work to bring it about.  But what a result!

The other idea that I drew down and submitted to my File Drawer In The Sky on the very same day must not have had much merit, because I still haven’t seen it in reality.  It’s much more practical and inexpensive and universally useful and I can’t understand what the holdup is.  Hey, if any of you want to invent it, please be my guest.  I would simply like to have the use of it.

I thought it up on the jillionth time that I was trying to smear suntan lotion on my back.  When no one else is around to help you, there’s a spot right at the center, that usually goes unprotected because it’s so hard to get your hands around to smooth on any kind of lotion.  Literally, a Back No-Man’s Land, in my single state, particularly.  Okay, you know those plastic jobbies that you fill with dishwashing liquid that have the sponge on the end for washing dishes?  Well, we need something like that full of suncream that you can squeeze, from the inside of the applicator, onto the attached square sponge and apply with its long neck to your hard-to-reach areas.  Those would include the legs and the tops of the feet, as well, for people who don’t bend so easily.

The dishwashing tool is only a model for this, because it’s too big to fill up, yourself, with the sunscreen.  This needs to be sold, fully loaded with UV-screening lotion or liquid, in a smaller applicator.   Now, why the skates have been around for a long time and this little no-brainer hasn’t shown up, I do not know, but I could still use one, if anyone cares to make one for me.

What bright ideas have you had?  Come on, there’s no need to hold it close to your chest unless you’re really planning to patent it or manufacture it yourself.  If you don’t want to share here, with a comment on this blog, how about slipping it into that Big File Drawer in the World Above and letting it seed a fertile mind down here?  Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about my beloved, travel-born, fantastic idea of Night Flight Hotels, which I have also actually seen gradually coming into being in this World Below.