An Idea, If Ever There Was One

Steven Johnson writes about an idea he’s had, how to do a movie about nanotechnology right. Turns out Michael Crichton had wondered the same thing, and wrote a book about it. Turns out that book, at least the good parts, are similar to ideas Johnson has been mulling over (and writing and publishing on) for a while, too.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, “how’d that be as a movie?” is a question I’m always asking myself, too. Tonight on Dublog, was this sentence which captured one idea I’ve been wrestling with lately. From Jennifer 8. Lee’s NY Times article about Google’s Live Query display:

people who shouldn’t marry
“she smoked a cigar”
mr. potatoheads in long island
pickup lines to get women
auto theft fraud how to.
Stare at Live Query long enough, and you feel that you are watching the collective consciousness of the world stream by.

You want to come up with some movie ideas, too? See how many movies you can make from this: The Weekly Standard‘s engrossing report from a Christian retailers’ convention. There’s a lot more to Church Merch than just the Prayer of Jabez brand family, after all. (You thought it was just the best-selling book of 2001? You need to repent, brother.)

The enlarge-my-territory prayer [of Jabez] also appears on wristwatches, bumper stickers, pens, candy bars, Jabez: A Novel, and much else. “It’s from the Bible, so I guess they couldn’t copyright it,” muses one CBA exhibitor. Several others tell me that editors are scouring the Bible in search of another nobody with star quality.