Ideas

A friend and I are planning to drive to Alaska and spend a month fishing and exploring. Any ideas of what to see and do in Canada and Alaska? Your likely driving route through British Columbia and the Yukon Territory will take you through such Canadian towns as Vancouver, Prince George, Whitehorse and Dawson City. Each city has its own charm and interesting sights, but you won't want to linger too long if you intend to reach Anchorage in a few days. For ideas, check out the North to Alaska Web site (northtoalaska.

WASHINGTON -- John Mankins' government career can be traced through the drawings on his office wall: a rocket whizzing from an Earth-based slingshot into outer space, a glittering moon colony, a giant bug-like contraption fueling a spacecraft in interstellar darkness.Crazy ideas? Not to Mankins. In his job at NASA, he is paid to come up with concepts so far-out they sometimes only get laughed at. Consider him one of NASA's sci-fi guys."I try to be reasonably conservative with my ideas," Mankins says, looking as though he hasjust come through a brainstorm, with his rumpled hair and government ID dangling askew.

Robert "Nino" Trower, a U.S. Postal Service executive who helped design and manage computer systems to analyze and collect information on mail carrier routes nationwide, died Sunday of cancer at Anne Arundel Medical Center.Mr. Trower, 51, of Chester in Queen Anne's County, worked for the postal service for 25 years and was responsible for implementing its National Directory Support System.That system is used to manage all address information for automated processing throughout the country.

"I have an idea," Henry's mother said.Henry opened his eyes.Henry's father sat up.But Mudge kept on sleeping.He didn't care much about ideas.Not until the ideas smelled like something."Let's make a castle," said Henry's mother."A castle?" said Henry and Henry's father."We still have the box the new refrigerator came in, and the box the new stove came in."Henry was getting the idea."And that paint set Uncle Arthur gave me," said Henry."Let's do it!"They headed for the basement.Mudge was still trying to sleep.

A man who described himself as a proud relative of Frank Scarpola, convicted last week in the child abuse murder of 9-year-old Rita Fisher, wrote a letter to The Sun last summer to defend Scarpola as a "kind, friendly, somewhat naive gentleman" who moved into the Fisher home in Baltimore County and took on the duties of "man of the house." And that, the relative wrote, took guts.Especially given the state of the Fisher household at the time:A mother, Mary Utley, who seemed either to be irresponsible or maladjusted; Scarpola's girlfriend, Rose, often severely depressed; and two younger sisters, Georgia and Rita, with emotional and learning disabilities.

SO YOU'RE planning to renovate. Do you know what you want?That's not as stupid a question as it might seem. Knowing what you want is about putting your ideas together in a way that can be clearly communicated to someone else.When Ron goes to see a prospective client for the first time, he encounters every stage of "knowing what you want," from "I have no idea" to "Here are the architect's blueprints."Although good contractors can deal with those who don't know what they want, you're likely to have a much better experience with a contractor if you do a little homework before calling.

What's the value of a literary idea? To anyone with more than a casual interest in literature, the value of an idea, on its own, is exactly zero. But in the film industry, which now rules American culture, ideas are all that matters. It has happened again and again: Hollywood makes it possible for today's nobody, armed with a clever gimmick or two at a pitch meeting, to become tomorrow's celebrity millionaire. With its good old get-rich-quick optimism, this may seem an unobjectionable, even rather a positive aspect of life in America today.

Mr. Potato Head on the back of a quarter? Or the Nike swoosh? Or the Golden Gate Bridge?These are a few of the ideas -- silly and serious -- being batted around as Congress completes a proposal to let every state put its own artwork on the reverse side of America's most used coin.Starting in 1999, George Washington and his silver pigtail would head a series of redesigned tails. Five new coins would be minted each year for nationwide use, honoring states in the order they were admitted to the union.

HOWARD COUNTY officials should rescue a good idea mired in a bad one.The good move was the proposal of a "gainsharing" program to reward employees who come up with money-saving ideas that would make government operate more efficiently. The bad move, by the administration of County Executive Charles I. Ecker, was attaching the plan to a controversial personnel classification scheme that the County Council needs to decode and drastically amend before adopting it.For now, gainsharing is a jewel in the mouth of an active volcano.

WASHINGTON -- Conservatives in this summer of their discontent are suffering political hypochondria. They have a real problem, of which their hypochondria is symptomatic. They are not thinking clearly.And their somewhat surly bewilderment reveals conservative variants of two sins of this era -- self-pity, expressed in a sense of victimhood, and the entitlement mentality.Some conservatives feel victimized by various villains (the media, conservatives in office, etc.) and entitled to an unresisted sweep for their ideas.

Someone from Allegany County wrote in with a detailed suggestion for reducing the number of trips corrections employees take to transfer files from one prison to another. "It may not save much, but every little bit helps," the person wrote. Someone in Harford County advocated going to a four-day workweek for all state employees. Someone in Baltimore pitched an early retirement plan for state workers. And, not to traffic in regional stereotypes, but someone from Montgomery County insisted on higher income tax rates before the state cuts a penny from the social safety net. Those are a handful of the nearly 600 pages of responses Gov. Martin O'Malley had received in his suggestion box for ways to save the state government money as of late last week.

In the 1976 movie Network, anchorman Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, famously bellowed, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Today, rather than stick his head out a window and scream, he might have created a Web site instead, like Mike Vallerie, a businessman in Baltimore, just did. Vallerie, who owns a trailer rental and storage business in South Baltimore, has, by his estimate and to little avail, written more than a hundred letters to members of Congress and to newspaper editors, who typically want him to trim his loquaciousness to 800 words or less.

Bad ideas abound these days. It's not so much that the people advancing them are stupid, but rather that they can't find many good ones under the circumstances we now face. In the matter of the world's seriously ill economy, for example, virtually all the "experts" - that is, those people whose previous policies and prescriptions resulted in this illness - are joining the chorus singing the Keynesian hymn, "We Must Spend Ourselves Out of Trouble, Dear Lord." OK, I made that up - the hymn part, that is - but what the mock title pronounces is the plan most economists and virtually all politicians are touting as a remedy for the ailing economy.

Mayor Sheila Dixon is turning the old-fashioned employee suggestion box into something resembling a slot machine. Municipal workers who come up with ideas that help the city save or make money will get a big payoff: a 1 percent cut of the savings or increased revenue, up to $5,000. Workers who come up with ideas to improve city services are eligible for a $500 prize. Only city employees may participate in the "Innovation Bank" program announced last week. (Supervisors who have the authority to implement their ideas aren't eligible.

In Focus: Paul West, the Blog and Public Editor columns will not appear in this holiday edition of IDEAS.

Madison Smartt Bell does not consider himself a Baltimorean. Not yet. Maybe not ever. "I feel like that would be an extravagant claim," the acclaimed novelist says, his Tennessee roots evident in his accent. "I've been here 20 years and that's not that long," Bell says. "In terms of people I consider Baltimoreans, that would be people who were born here and whose parents were born here, too. I'm a Tennessean in that sense." But Bell has become quite fond of Baltimore since moving here in the mid-1980s to join his wife, Elizabeth Spires, a poet.

As 19 dancers bent their torsos, swung their arms and flexed their feet in a Howard Community College dance studio, Sarah Nachbauer of the MOMIX dance troupe encouraged them to throw themselves into the movements. "If you don't almost fall, you aren't doing it right," she said. Her fellow instructor for the master class, Rob Laqui, told them that when dancers test the control of their bodies, "It's infinitely more watchable. I'd rather fall than be safe." Nachbauer and Laqui performed with their company Wednesday night as part of the Columbia Festival of the Arts and led the workshop that morning.

This time of year, corporate offices swell with college interns. The extra help helps employers, and students gain coveted work experience. Because an internship is a critical steppingstone to employment, students who are prepared to make the most of a summer job will come out way ahead. Be ready to work. During his days as an intern, Jamie Fedorko said, some companions always complained about their tasks or felt as though they were owed something. Others were too eager and "incredibly ingratiating."

Amid a recent spate of violence in Baltimore, City Councilman and mayoral candidate Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. yesterday proposed hiring at least 140 more police officers, conducting weekly press conferences to update the public and spending more money on witness protection. Though he offered few specifics for how many of his ideas would be funded, Mitchell blasted his opponent, Mayor Sheila Dixon, for her handling of crime over the past four months and suggested that the recent increase in homicides is due to a lack of direction from City Hall.

I'm not sure whether America is ready yet for a black president, but I do know this much: If a Barack Obama fundraiser last week in Washington is any indication, Americans under 40 sure seem amenable to the idea. At H2O nightclub along the Potomac waterfront, more than 1,000 people shelled out $100 each to hear the 45-year-old Illinois senator give a short speech. The crowd was predominantly young, professional, racially mixed and full of what Mr. Obama might call audacious hope. "Everywhere we've gone, we have not just big crowds but diverse crowds - crowds that span the gamut of races, of religions, of regions, of age groups and gender," said Mr. Obama.