Aren't there anymore original ideas? Now "The Simpsons" is a movie. Soon Hollywood will be making "Oceans 21" and Spiderman will be using a walker. One "CSI" turned into three. One reality show turned into an unreal number of them. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but on television the words are repeated.



"Good Morning America" has become "Good Morning Iowa City". If a baby girl was named Iowa City that would be unusual. I thought Madison was an unusual name, but now it's the third most popular name for girls.

I used to think McDonald's was different from Carl's Jr. and Carl's Jr. was different from Wendy's, but now they all sell salads. What happened to the so-called salad days when burgers joints sold burgers?

Fashion sells, but it's a revolving door of fads. Mini skirts, bell bottoms and peasant blouses - in and out, in and out; but as long as they're in my closet, they're in.

Mini skirts, pet rocks and bottled water - fads take the originality out of an original idea. Tang, Teflon and Velcro aren't original. They're worldly versions of spacey ideas.

I remember when I could tell the difference between a Ford and a Buick. Because cars are expensive purchases, buyers don't shift automatically to something new. I understand that making a new car can be an expensive mistake. I've seen an Edsel.

If politicians had new ideas, they'd lose votes. Republicans are spending more money. Democrats are more conservative. The elephant is forgetting and the donkey is waiting for someone to pin on its tail.

Using sexy women with little on to sell products isn't new. Fig-leaf-wearing Eve sold Adam on the idea of eating an apple. Today's billboards are yesterday's cave drawings. Television is a radio with a picture. A radio is a two-way radio that goes only one way. The town crier went one way before radio did. A CD is a digitized record and a record is a flat version of Thomas Edison's cylinder.

I tried to think of something new. I Googled giraffe plus clothes, then trees plus games, then desk plus moon; but I got multiples entries for all of them. Even Google isn't an original idea. It took the Ya out of Yahoo. Instead of rehashing old ideas, maybe we should try to perfect some of them. We could try to piece peace back together.