Don't let yourself be the dolphin in someone else's tuna net
I can never remember which to run from and which to stay still around
I think it'd be a pretty fun prank to put a bunch of bear noises into a background track on a popular podcast. You'd have people commuting to work on a train or maybe going out for a nice walk, and they'd be listening to your podcast, and then all of sudden -- groooooowl! There are certain noises that are either sudden or loud or of a particular quality that people cannot help but be alarmed by them, and I feel like a bear growling noise is probably one of those things. You could definitely startle some people.
The real tragedy would be when someone listened to your podcast enough that they became somewhat desensitized to bear noises, and then one day when they were out walking around in the woods listening to your show they actually got attacked by a bear, and just ignored the warning sign of the approaching growls.
Ruffle your feathers and wet your beak
When a man or group of men is out trying to pick up some ladies and you want to use an old-timey terminology to describe what they are doing, you might say they are out "chasing skirts". This is probably sort of dated as an expression because fewer ladies are wearing skirts, and because there is a sort of predatory implication to "chasing", but I think people generally still understand the phrase.
I bet there's some skirt factory somewhere that has like a big open shipping door or a bunch of indoor fans to move the air around, and they occasionally have a pile of skirts get blown over and scattered around their workshop floor, and then someone has to be the person who tracks them all down and picks them up. It's gotta be pretty cool for that person to describe their job as "chasing skirts" to all their buddies.
The permitting alone will pay for this
I'd like to see some city put in place a maximum age limit on buildings. The rule would be that no building could be older than 50 years or something. So if you were building a new building you'd have to keep this rule in mind, and there'd probably be some sort of grandfathering in of old buildings. Maybe any building sold within 10 years would be exempt, but then after that you'd be obligated to knock down older buildings any time they were sold. Maybe there would also be a hard limit on how long very old buildings could stick around ... so if you had a 150+ year old building, you'd be forced to knock it down and rebuild within 25 years even if it didn't change hands.
This is a bad idea for a lot of reasons, the most obvious of which is that if the things are in perfectly good shape it's sort of stupid to knock them down. But on the flip side, you'd get to update all your structures with newer building codes, you'd put a lot of people to work both in knocking down and building things, more of your city would have that new city smell and appearance to it more of the time, and you'd avoid having that one weird stone church right in the middle of a bunch of glass skyscrapers.
After this, we can build our own furniture!
I get a kick out of watching the people who work in large commercial buildings and forget to take off their lanyard/badge things when they leave work. These are the passes which usually have the person's name and picture and maybe company name and maybe some sort of code which can be scanned or chip which can be read as they enter and exit the building.
Some buildings require these not just to get into the building in the first place, but within each floor of the building or even within an office, to get in and out of bathrooms or other limited access areas. This is all good and well from a security perspective, I suppose.
Anyway, I like when someone leaves their office for the day, and then goes out for dinner and drinks, or maybe an industry networking event, and leaves their damn badge on their neck. Come on buddy, we get it! - you work in an office!
I'd like to see more people who work in home offices and do not encounter any locked doors whatsoever in a given day start wearing these. It'd be kind of fun while you were on a video call with someone else for them to see your name badge around your neck and wonder what you were up to in your own house.
Everyone go buy up land in the sun belt
I'm not sure that anyone actually cared about or was offended by the original name, but in many pre-schools and elementary schools these days what used to be called "sitting indian style" (legs crossed in front, butt on ground) has been renamed "criss cross apple sauce". I don't want to look this up for fear that there's a good reason, but my guess here is that no one did research discovering that native americans never actually sat that way -- but instead that someone decided that they were offending someone else, without actually asking that person.
I think it'd be a really strong power move by a student of legitimate native american ancestry to speak up in their first grade class when their teacher asked everyone to sit criss cross applesauce, and asked the teacher why they were taking away their culture's proud contribution to classroom sitting styles, and asking if the teacher please restore the previous Indian Style terminology.
If done with the appropriate confidence and somber tone I think you could really throw a new teacher for a loop here. They'd realize that they had previously been instructed to call it criss cross applesauce precisely as to not offend or appropriate from the culture of the very person asking them to not call it that, and I think their mind would start reeling and they wouldn't know what to do.
A similar tactic here would be for someone who came from a long line of apple harvesters to insist that the "criss cross" technique actually leads to a ton of spoilage and inefficiency and environmental harm when producing applesauce, and ask that the teacher call the style "criss cross peat moss" instead. Then if they actually did that you'd want to have some other kid from a prominent landscaping family in place ready to object, and so on...