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I live in NYC and I love roasted chestnuts. In fact, many people
love roasted chestnuts in NYC. There's nothing better than
walking along the crowded streets on a cold, wintery day
holding a hot bag of chestnuts and plunging your teeth into
naturally sweetened and soft chestnuts. The only problem
is
they're sold only in midtown Manhattan by those street
vendors who sell hot dogs too. More specifically, on 5th
avenue and 53rd street. That's the only place in Manhattan
you can get these goodies. It's a shame more New Yorkers
can't enjoy roasted chestnuts more frequently. My idea would
be to somehow coax these street vendors, either through a
street-vendor tax break or simply by passing a new law
prohibiting the amount of roasted chestnut vendors allowed
on any one given New York city street corner, downtown, in
the Soho area or the Noho area, which is really the NYU area
but the people who live in the shadows of NYU thought it'd
sound better to out-of-towners or relatives to say, 'Oh yeah, I
live in Noho,' jerks, or even in the West Village. My point is is
roasted chestnuts are a blessing and should be shared. That's
it.
The ConvAIRCAR
http://www.retrofuture.com/flyingcar.html
From 1947. [StarChaser, Feb 08 2001, last modified Oct 17 2004]
And the Curtiss Autoplane, from 1917.
http://www.howstuff...s.com/curt-auto.jpg
Rather neat, actually. [StarChaser, Feb 08 2001, last modified Oct 17 2004]
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Annotation:
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I don't even like the chestnuts themselves, but I agree that there is something special about the vendors with their smoking carts in Manhattan. And the charm does seem to be specific to Manhattan, though I could imagine an entirely different kind of charm in the Basque country. |
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street vendors - good
chestnuts - i dont like |
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now cashews on the other hand, roasted cashews, mmm... |
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I'm not really into chestnuts, but you can find them all over the place here in Japan. On every city street, though? No, not even close. |
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[mfd] = marked for deletion. He's misremembering, though. |
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[dgeiser13], to me, a WIBNI is something that is unrealistic yet unoriginal, and the author doesn't make a credible attempt at inventing a way of accomplishing their goal. For example, "flying cars" would be a WIBNI. |
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"Self-adjusting clothes" is not a WIBNI, even though it's unrealistic and the author doesn't have a clue how it works because it's original; they're not a staple of science fiction yet, although you can find some of them. |
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This idea is also not a WIBNI, because its implementation is outlined by the author. It suggests fairly realistic measures to accomplish something minor and specific. Whether you think that's original or just kind of lame probably depends on how much you like roasted chestnuts. |
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Self-adjusting clothes wouldn't be incredibly difficult, anyway. The way the stuff in Back to the Future 2 worked could probably be done, although maybe not as well. |
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This idea is a little silly, but there's nothing wrong with that, and he did come up with at least the outline of a way to do it.... |
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There are flying cars, actually...and were in the late '50s. And according to the page in the link, there was another in 1917. Impractical, but possible. |
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Chestnut sellers in flying cars zooming all over NY dropping little bundles of chestnuts attached to little parachutes. Ah, possibly not too popular near skyscrapers. |
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One of my strongest memories of winter in Beijing is
the smells from sweet potato and chestnut vendors on
the streets. I really miss that. Since supply and
demand wouldn't support enough vendors to cover much
land area in a place like NYC, and since flying cars in
the city are dangerous, what we need is a combination
UAV and chestnut (or sweet potato) roaster. As it flies
overhead, it could take payments via a cellphone app
and then drop little parachuted bags of chestnuts to
the customer. |
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No posh English waiter type's getting his hands on my
nuts... |
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Now it's the $@!#% frogs... grrr... goddamn European
conspiracy... |
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<wanders away muttering vague epithets concerning
Belgians> |
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This sounds the classic vendor effect. It's in the interests of the vendors to be near the middle of their target market, so they end up clustered together. It's in the interest of the customers that the vendors be evenly distributed, but the customers don't usually get to decide. |
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(This has been used as a parable to explain why political parties are basically all the same.) |
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