Some bad ideas are as obvious as a Nazi sign on your forehead. This Wednesday it is International Learn To Love The Swastika Day. I am not making that up. Tattoo parlours across the globe are offering a free swastika tattoo on the body part of your choice, to embrace the symbol and bring it back to our bosoms, or biceps, or wherever you decide to have one put.
A Canadian artist called ManWoman (I am not making that up either) was covered in swastika tattoos, for purely decorative reasons you understand, and on the anniversary of his/her death there will be a world-wide promotion offering swastika inkings gratis and for free, which is, perhaps, still too high a price to pay.
I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that it was used to represent the sun in ancient civilisations, and you might be right. But I have a feeling we're not in Mesopotamia any more, and no amount of polite explanation about its literal meaning being "it is good" will get you very far in modern day Middlesbrough, or anywhere else come to that, with the possible exception of certain parts of darkest Bavaria.
Another example of a bad idea is smoking crack cocaine on video while also being the mayor of a major metropolitan area of Canada. You probably wouldn't even get away with it if you were the mayor of a city in Italy. Yet that is what Rob Ford, the gargantuan representative of the good people of Toronto, was seen to be doing on film released to a grateful media this week.
Mr Ford initially assured the world that he did no such thing and no film of him doing so existed, because he didn't do it. Not him. No siree. When the inconvenient footage was aired on television he conceded that, ah yes, it was him and that he had in fact done it. It was an understandable lapse of memory because who can recall such things, especially when one's been smoking crack?
At least no further embarrassment was waiting in the wings, apart from another video in which he ranted about killing someone in detail so graphic that the makers of teenagers' video games would hesitate to show it. "It's going to be first degree murder", he helpfully explained, just in case his future legal team might feel like they needed a real challenge. He has decided not to quit, nor even take a leave of absence and is running to be reinstated as the Mayor of Toronto when the voting is held in 2014.
Best of luck. To Toronto, that is, not Rob Ford. Rob Ford should be placed in a secure area away from any temptations or distractions, like Loganville, Georgia, for instance, where barely anything happens at all, except for in the parking lot of the Waffle House, which is a house that sells waffles and waffle related products.
On November the 3rd of this year, two individuals, possessed of a bad idea, were arrested for having sensual interface in the vicinity of that institution in a pick-up truck, which is why they named them pick-up trucks. To save their blushes, I will simply call them Rachel Gossett, 25 and Frank Lucas, 27, who, at 1.30 in the morning were apprehended mid-cavort by passing police persons who noted that - and this may come as a surprise - alcohol may have been involved. Indeed, the truck reeked like the inside of a House of Lord's hip flask.
The officers described a pant-less Ms Gossett sitting on Mr Lucas' personal area and how they requested that the two re-robe. The gentleman seemed to appreciate the gravity of his situation and covered what was left of his modesty but the lady appeared too distracted to understand, by which I mean drunk. Her blood had the approximate alcohol level of a Mai Tai and it needed a considerable degree of coaxing to reacquaint Ms Gossett with her gusset.
Groping for what remained of her composure, she eventually and triumphantly managed to fumble her way back into her clothes but sadly failed on the footwear front as she was witnessed attempting to push her foot into an uneaten cheeseburger, as though it were a sandal.
Rachel's Facebook page states that she has a young daughter, who must be very proud, and that she works as a waitress at a local bar and grill.
My advice - don't order the cheeseburger. That would be a very bad idea indeed.