RIVER CITY JOURNAL: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A BAD IDEA TO A BUSY INVENTOR

* At least that's what I always thought. Thanks to some magazine, I now know that Thomas Edison and I have a lot in common. Except his inventions worked.

Thomas Edison rarely slept. I read that in a recent magazine article. He didn't sleep because he had so many ideas for new inventions. The great inventor, according to the article, took catnaps.

To me, there are very few things more important than eight hours of sleep every night. That's why I have never seen "The Tonight Show" with Jay Leno. Or "Saturday Night Live." Or midnight on any New Year's Eve since 1973 when our three-week-old younger son didn't care how many hours of sleep his father or mother wanted.

Recently, I've noticed a couple of things about my sleeping habits.

First: I no longer fall asleep and wake up eight hours later. Now I go to sleep and wake up after about four hours. I stay in bed, but I catnap for another four hours until it's time to get up.

Authorities on sleeping say it's not uncommon for humans to need less sleep as they grow older.

Great. Another reminder. Just like the doctor who keeps saying, Well, you know, at your age ... .

Second: Apparently since I no longer sleep straight through for eight hours, my age-advantaged body needs to rest during the day. If I go home for lunch, I catnap. I'm pretty good at catnaps. I can fall asleep easily and wake up 15 minutes later.

So, using the keen logic that I've developed over the years, it appears to me that a catnapping whiz like me also ought to be able to come up with a few nifty inventions.

Alas, I have no inventing skills whatsoever.

I remember when a friend of mine left his job as executive vice president of a good-sized bank to open a video store in suburban Kansas City. I just didn't get it. Why would people rent videos to watch at home when they could go to the movies?

See what I mean?

Of course, there's that story about Microsoft's Bill Gates that I like to spread around. And it's a true story too. About 1980, Gates was quoted in some publication as saying he couldn't see why anyone would want a personal computer at home.

I'll bet Bill Gates never had a catnap in his life.

When I worked at the newspaper in Topeka, the company's internal auditor and I would meet in the cafeteria for lunch and think of great get-rich-quick schemes. With his accounting discipline and my catnapping imagination, we were quite a team.

Like the time we dreamed up painting jack-o'-lantern faces on Hefty garbage bags and selling them to parents who wanted their children to rake leaves in the fall. It was one of those gee-whiz moments when it popped into Gregg's head to make the garbage bags orange instead of green.

Then someone sitting at the next table said that had already been done. We were crushed.

Another time, we thought of making long tin troughs to hang on the eaves of your house to catch rainwater. We even tried to come up with a name for this idea, because we knew a fantastic contraption like this would need some marketing pizzazz. We finally settled on "gutter," because that's what carries most rainwater off city streets.

Again, someone at the next table overheard our conversation and poked a pin in our bubble.

I think one of my best ideas came from all those trips back and forth on the Kansas Turnpike.

Gregg and I noticed that the tires of a car traveling 80 mph on the turnpike (aren't turnpike speed limits grand?) make a high-pitched whine. But if you go over a piece of pavement that has been replaced or repaired, the pitch changes.

So, here's the idea: Why not pave highways so that the whine of the tires, instead of being annoying, actually plays music? For example, you could have waltzes and Mel Torme tunes in the slow lane, and rock-'n'-roll and Bruce Springsteen melodies in the passing lane. If possible, I'd even have a pickup lane featuring country-western.

And state highway departments could show off the music that best represents their states. For example, highways around Kansas City might play jazz. Over in Virginia, highways might hum with bluegrass. If I were in charge of the Minnesota highways, I'd pave them with polkas.

You get the picture.

If you want my opinion, this idea for highway music is even better than the plan Gregg and I came with of selling dirt in paper bags to owners of indoor cats.

In that same magazine article about Edison, I learned the great inventor investigated a variety of bamboo that grows in South America. He thought fibers from this bamboo might make filaments for his newfangled light bulbs.

See. People who catnap have strange thoughts. No question about it.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.