Dooth somme goode dedes, that the deuel, which is oure enemy, ne fynde yow nat vnocupied.
In his Melibeus, Chaucer was echoing what St. Jerome wrote in one of his letters a millenium earlier: Fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum. Roughly translated, it says, "Do something, so that the devil may always find you busy."
Those sentiments have come to us in the proverb, "The devil finds work for idle hands."
Now, what some might call the work the devil finds for idle hands, others might call creativity or ingenuity--or just fun.
An example is something a man in Perth, Australia did on 30 November. He used an electric bike, not to make a delivery or get to work, but to create something that's art, graffiti or pornography, depending on your point of view.
He was caught, on tape, spinning the e-bike's wheels on a Murray Street sidewalk to make an image of male genitalia.
The police are looking for him. Maybe they don't want to be caught idle by the devil--or they just don't have a lot of crime in their precinct.
