Today is Holy Innocents' Day, and it's got me thinking: those Wise Men who visited King Herod weren't actually that wise, were they?
Okay they spotted the star and decided it heralded the birth of a child who would wield great power in the world; but then they went and assumed that this child would have been born in the King's palace.
And then, having made this massive blunder, when the King went baby? What baby? Instead of saying, oh dear, whoops, we must have got our sums wrong and backing out nervously, they only went and told King Herod all about a child born locally who looked as if he was going to grow up and throw Herod off the throne.
I mean, hadn't those so-called Wise Men watched any spy films?
To be fair, though, it's not always so easy to spot a baddy. As Duncan tells us in Macbeth, there's no art to find the mind's construction in the face. It's true you can often tell if someone has spent his life being aggressive and nasty because of the way his wrinkles fall; but if they've gone through life causing misery and mayhem with a sunny heart then you're in trouble.
There are, however, several traditional ways to spot a baddy, including:
The white cat he's stroking.
A habit of saying and tomorrow the world!
A black hat (only if on a horse) (not the hat).
A smile that stops at the nostrils.
Too much cologne.
Shifty eyes too close together.
But of course the only really reliable way of spotting a baddy is spotting him doing something, well, bad.
I hope you don't witness anything criminal, today, but it probably won't take you long to witness a bad driver, or bad mask-wearer. Or someone helping themselves from the biscuit tin.
Who's the baddest baddy you can spot today?
Spot the Frippet: baddy. The word bad...oh dear, I've only just looked this up, and I'm in trouble, here. It seems as though it's probably from the Old English bæddel, which means someone neither fully male nor female.
I'm afraid there is nothing at all I can do about this.
Sorry.
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