Communism is like prohibition, it's a good idea but it won't work. - Will Rogers

Ideas that don't work. Clearly, prohibition didn't last and communism cannot account for ambition and greed - the cornerstones of the American Dream.

I have some personal experience with ideas that don't work.

In high school I wore boxer shorts under spandex from time to time. Maybe I liked the loose fit of the boxers paired with the lowered wind resistance of the spandex. Maybe I just had a really dumb idea.

I tried to fry a banana once. I was slightly familiar with the delectable treat that is fried plantain. But I didn't have a plantain. A plantain is a type of banana, I thought. So I can just fry a banana and it will do pretty much the same thing, right? Wrong. I did not enjoy cleaning up the banana mush soaked in very hot oil.

While water skiing I tried to put the handle of the pull line in my teeth and be a skiing showman. Only, I was never taught how to do that. So when I leaned slightly forward to bite the handle, the end of my skis dipped and I bit a great deal more. I gave the water a great deal of punishment with my face and, as I recall, I only had the minor inconvenience of my nostrils slapping my cheeks, my eyelids folded up my forehead and a burning sensation somewhere near the back of my eye sockets.

I took a slow test run over a bike ramp I built. That was actually a nice lesson in physics. The ramp was only about a foot high, but when you go slowly off a one foot ledge there is no momentum to carry you forward while the back tire comes off the ledge. So what happens is this: the front tire drops to the ground quickly, your legs fly forward off the pedal while you slide forward off the seat. You would land nicely on your feet if the bike wasn't so nicely centered between your legs. So the point is, you should wear a very sturdy cup if you want to take up biking slowly over small ramps. I got to learn that the painful way.

But the idea that tops this list has to be night basketball. It seemed like a good idea at the time. How many tragically comical stories have you heard begin that way? We lived in the Cinco Hermanos subdivision of the city of Manila. Cinco Hermanos means "five brothers" but it only took two brothers to turn a bad idea into an emergency room visit.

So it was night, maybe 9 pm, I don't recall exactly. The house across the street from us had a high fence with barb wire on top. It also had a floodlight that was just high enough so as to throw a little light over onto the neighborhood basketball court. The conventional play style on that court was "no-blood-no-foul" but we took that to a new level.

It was a close game. Normally, Jeff would beat me pretty easily. He was taller and his favorite move in any sport was to throw the ball over my head, run around me and catch the ball. It worked in football - well enough to drive me to plead my case before the court of common father to get Jeff to stop "cheating." By cheating I think I meant winning. So, Jeff's over-my-head self pass was working as always, but I had developed a crossover that allowed me to drive past him and score at will. So, there we were, deadlocked in a fierce and dim titanic struggle for fraternal supremacy.

Then Jeff adjusted. He realized that my move to the right was always a fake and that I would end up going left. His mental math was good and he shrugged off the fake right and easily stopped my next move. Now I was the underdog again, but now for long. If the fake worked so well for the first half of the game, I might be able to bring it home with a new double-fake move. Fake right, crossover, fake left, crossover again, and drive past him on the right. It was sheer genius and it worked like a charm. Almost.

When I did my new double-fake move, Jeff thought it was the original single-fake move and bit. So he was moving left as I faked the second time and moved right. To be precise, at that moment the only thing that mattered was that Jeff's forearm was moving right and my nose was moving left.

I called foul. Well, I wanted to call foul. What I actually did was say something like, "Uughh!" in response to the crunching noise my nose made as it move a quarter inch to the left and stayed there. I didn't cry, buy I won't be able to prove it because a sharp blow to the nose always results in tears even in the hardiest man.

Then I was running, then I was in Mom and Dad's bedroom, then I was pulling my hand away from my face saying, "I think I broke my nose." Mom had a doctor friend on speed dial (the nose wasn't an isolated incident for me). The doctor asked if I heard it break.
"Oh, yeah, it went crckch." Mom relayed the message.
"If he heard it, he broke it." That message from the friendly doctor set the rest of the evening's plan for us.

A broken nose is not the end of the world. It does require medical attention. And I'm pretty sure it qualifies as a foul, but we'll never know on that one.

So, I don't drink and I'm not a communist, but I do understand that some ideas should not be pursued. Maybe their purpose is just to make the other ideas look better. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. Playing basketball at night, taking an alcoholic's beer away, and telling people to give their money to other people could all result in broken noses.