Easy-to-handle-fishing gear – fishing net, boat hook, and gaff designed as snap-on heads so that you could use them all with a single pole.
By Anthony J Santoro, Farmingdale, N.Y.
May 1963
I couldn’t find multi-use fishing gear on Amazon, but you can purchase a telescopic pole fishing net…
Bug bombs for phone booths that would spray at the drop of a coin. I’d gladly spend a penny to get rid of insects drawn by light at night.
By C.Petzold, Runnemede, N.J.
May 1963
You can purchase your very own bug spray from Amazon…
I had a number of revenge ideas submitted by Faith Stockwell including…
Peter Swann, University of Nottingham
As the Premiership juggernaut rumbles back to centre stage, bringing with it the usual impassioned debate about footballing philosophies and the respective merits of “parking the bus” and possession, spare a thought for innovation policy. Innovation is often defined as the successful application of new ideas to create wealth. But innovation policy is itself in need of innovation – and a footballing analogy goes a long way to explaining why.
Route-one football is especially associated with the traditional English game. The ball is booted directly from defence straight to the forwards, who try to control it and mount an attack on goal. Although it can sometimes lead to exciting surprises, the tactic is not held in high regard. It is considered uninspired, limited and sometimes comical.
Contrast this with tiki-taka – the head-spinning passing game associated with Spanish football and, in particular, with FC Barcelona. Here an attack is made up of a long sequence of passes involving defenders, midfield players, wingers and forwards. Anyone and everyone may be involved. In contrast to route-one, it is highly inventive and offers myriad routes to goal.
Most innovation policies are in the route-one mould. Their rationale is based on the assumption that innovation and wealth creation are business-centred and that the activities of other sectors of society – science, arts, education and so on – can contribute only if they have an impact on business.
Activities that have no such impact may be culturally interesting, the argument goes, but do not contribute to innovation and wealth. Like route-one football, such a view is profoundly unimaginative – and yet it goes almost entirely unchallenged.
In truth, there are many innovative activities that happen outside business, and many of them contribute to the creation of wealth and well-being. I call these common innovation.
Common innovation is the work of ordinary people in everyday life – individuals, households, clubs, communities – with well-being, not profit or revenue or market share, as the principal goal. While business innovation revels in the swirl of Joseph Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction”, common innovation represents a gentle and benign breeze. Rather than destroy what is already there, it creates where there is nothing.
Common innovation is much more akin to tiki-taka, because it involves numerous positive interactions – in this case between different sectors of society and the economy. For example, intelligent consumers can draw on education, arts and sciences to consume wisely; the public and third sectors might draw on science to transform an industrial wasteland into a nature reserve; online health forums routinely draw on the goodwill of contributors to create valuable resources; and so on.
These interactions may take place at some distance from business, but they can still play a part in creating wealth and well-being. They accumulate over time to create wealth from an economy in which different sectors are in harmony with each other.
Yet the route-one view dominates UK policy. While this clearly serves business very well, it is not necessarily best for society as a whole. And it seems that the UK government has become too business-centred to engage with alternative perspectives on innovation.
The route-one approach to innovation policy gives business an undue level of bargaining power. Business has not been slow to take advantage of this. Across the political spectrum there has been a sense of outrage that many of the largest and most profitable companies pay no corporation tax. And then there are the generous subsidies and grants given to companies – even some that pay no corporation tax at all.
The route-one approach can also be used to justify some very controversial policy proposals. Under its aegis, factors such as the natural environment, science, arts, education and health are deemed to create wealth only if they enhance business innovation and productivity.
From this perspective, parts of the country that are underperforming should fear for their future. A release of files in 2011 revealed that senior Conservative ministers sought to persuade Margaret Thatcher to “consider abandoning Liverpool to a fate of ‘managed decline’” after riots in 1981. They argued that spending public money on such “stony ground” would be like “trying to make water flow uphill”. Similar proposals have since been made for other cities, which show that a narrow conception of innovation and investment will only serve the interests of certain parts of the country and economy.
Another major downside of such a narrow view of innovation policy is that we lose sight of the things that common innovation can do and which business innovation does not. A striking recent example has been the transformation of derelict terraced housing in Stoke-on-Trent, where the city council introduced a policy of selling off properties for £1 each and providing loans to local buyers who could commit to restoring them and so make a positive contribution to the community.
William Morris described commerce as “once the servant and now the master of civilisation”. A route-one approach to innovation policy only reinforces this transition. As we face continuing austerity, an ever-more unequal distribution of wealth and grave concerns about sustainability, it is time to give serious consideration to an own-goal in the making.
Peter Swann, Emeritus Professor of Industrial Economics, University of Nottingham
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The game of bingo has been around a very, very long time — dating back to the 1500s and a community lottery game that was played regularly in parts of Italy. That may not make bingo as old as some other popular games like chess or checkers. But to give some perspective, bingo is older than some modern forms of poker. And to compare it to another game that’s evolved from an in-person experience to a renowned video game, bingo is also old than table tennis! According to a brief history on LiveAbout, modern table tennis really only dates back to the 1880s (though it does have roots in a 12th-century game).
Any way you cut it, it’s something of an ancient game. And yet in the last few years, its most popular versions have become almost shockingly modern. Video game poker, in one form or another, has been around for decades. But today’s casino and gaming platforms are presenting almost a different kind of game entirely. Foxy Bingo’s game offerings exhibit the evolution with total clarity, showcasing all of the best of modern internet bingo. There are live community games, digital bingo rooms packed with vibrant graphics, and games based on popular content such as the American TV sitcom Friends. This particular platform even presents a different spin on bingo altogether: “Slingo,” a game which combine arcade slots and bingo cards.
Compare these offerings to traditional bingo — in which a wheel is turned, numbers are called, and people fill in simple cards with small chips or markers — and you really notice the remarkable innovation that has gone into modernizing the experience. The interesting question though is whether this innovation should strike us as surprising or inevitable.
On the one hand, such an abrupt change to a game after hundreds of years is surprising. From those early Italian iterations in the 1500s through the 1990s, there were few if any noteworthy overhauls of how bingo was played, or what it looked like. The game lasted more than 400 years, in other words, without changing all that much. And then in the span of just a few decades, bingo became a popular digital game. Then, even more suddenly, it reached a point at which online players are guided by an animated fox into multiplayer, pop culture-themed bingo rooms augmented with visual graphics. It’s safe to say those 16th-century Italians, at least, would be rather shocked at the state of the game.
On the other hand, when we look at modern bingo innovation specifically through the lens of the video game era, it is arguably far less surprising. We covered ‘The Invention of Video Games’ in another article, noting the earliest computer game in 1958, but focusing primarily on the emergence of games like Pong, Space Invaders, and Tetris in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
These particular games are beloved, and still exist in something close to their classic form today. But they also laid the groundwork for the incredibly rapid advancement of video games that has continued to this day. Look to the latest industry updates by GameSpot, and you’ll see eye-popping images of massive modern video games that would stop the original Tetris and Pong programmers in their tracks. If bingo took 400-plus years to truly evolve, gaming has transformed into something well beyond its earliest examples in just 50 years’ time.
In the end, it’s essentially a matter of perspective! If you look at the entire history of bingo, there is something surprising and remarkable about how suddenly it made the leap to become something drastically changed, and far more modern. On the other hand, if you look at bingo in the video game era, and consider that there were some fairly early examples of digital bingo, the evolution seems natural and obvious.
Whichever way you look at it though, one thing remains clear: Modern online bingo has become a whole new game, and one that at its best is thoroughly engaging and entertaining.
Post written by Harvey Hobbs
Put chocolate bars, crayons, AND other sugary candies (gummy bears ?) in the dryer with the victim’s clothes.
Also Melted Candy all over Carpets. Crayons. LOTS OF THEM in victims microwave set the microwave to the highest setting for at least a half-hour or so, then leave the area immediately. Rubber bands in the microwave, Durian Fruit?
By Tom Bosley
Take a box of something your victim likes (Candy, pokemon cards, etc..)
Pierce small air holes and fill it with bugs.
Leave it, on their Birthday, on the doormat, with a happy Birthday card.
Ring, then leave so they don’t know it’s you…
Then, when they take it inside to open it and they open the box, bugs will pour out, and it will take months to get rid of all of them!
Revenge Idea from Abigail
This is an idea for a chemical hardener for an earth fill. You could pour it into a double-walled blow-up mold and make an adobelike shelter.
By F.M.Scott, Leonia, N.J.
May 1962
Windproof cigarette holders for convertible owners. This idea for a funnel-shaped holder with side vents and a lid might slow the combustion when driving along with the roof down to that of a normal smoke.
By G.Nattboy, Brooklyn.
May 1962
You can buy cigarette holders from Amazon, pretty sure that they’re not wind proof though…
Road maps could be placed on microfilm with a tiny viewfinder built into the dashboard of the car. Only a small area of the map would need to be viewable on the screen.
By G.A.Mayerchak, Brooklyn Park, Minn.
May 1962
These days, you would no doubt use a GPS system instead, such as these available from Amazon…
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