Special Guest Blogger: Montezuma

In 1502 i became the ninth emperor of the Aztec Empire. Ruling the city of Tenochtitlán, i was revered as an intellectual, warrior, and chief priest who had a nasty habit of sacrificing folks on pretty much an hourly basis.
My coronation was one big party, guests were given mescaline which is a powerful psychedelic drug to make the bash seem even more spectacular but i didn't need any stimulation to master the practice of tearing a victim’s heart out and tossing the body down the pyramid steps.
These ritual killings actually became a full-time job for me and I was an equal opportunities executioner and killed the  young, old, virgins, maidens and when you have a theater made out of 135,000 skulls it might sound a bit excessive but we prayed to over 1500 Gods so had many of them to appease so occasionally i would start a war just so we could capture warriors for sacrifice.
I conquered many area tribes and was despised for my looting, taxation, and murder in the name of religious zeal and my empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific but my reign sadly came to an end with the arrival of Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés in 1519.
We mistakenly thought he was a god as Aztec legend, Quetzalcoatl, who was a bearded white deity showing up to bring on the apocalypse and he arrived the exact year the god-king is supposed to show up, and with a white beard, how was we meant to know it wasn't him?
Cortés convinced many tribes to aid in his effort to oust me, and in fairness most of them hated my guts anyway as I kept killing their warriors, and rolled into Tenochtitlán and stormed my Palace.
I was not a great leader for nothing and to make sure it was a God and not someone coming to murder us all, I sent along a look-alike dressed as me but he never came back so assumed he had either been killed or take to Aztec heaven so still thinking it was indeed Quetzalcoatl, I welcomed him with open arms and offered him gifts of gold, jeweled necklaces, and even the highest honour, flowers from my own garden.
Bad idea as the Spanish took me hostage and threatened to kill me unless i went onto the balcony of the palace and told his angry followers to back off.
The crowds became even more furious at me for appearing meek and stoned with rocks and chucking spears. Injured and no longer in charge, I was held captive until my death a few days later and with me gone, so did the Aztec empire.

How Countries Got Their Names

From Britannia to Anglia to Engla Land, our country has had a few names before settling on England, or the 'land of the Angles' which got me thinking that every country had to be named after something or someone and apparently the majority of country names fall into just four categories:  a tribe name or a person, a feature of the land or a description of the country,
France is named for the Franks, Italy for the Vitali tribe, Switzerland for the Schwyz people, Korea after the Han tribes, America is named after either Richard Ameryk or Amerigo Vespucci, Colombia takes its name from Christopher Columbus, St. Kitt’s after Saint Christopher and St. Lucia the only country to be named after a woman, Saint Lucy.
The Philippines are named after Spain’s King Philip II, Bolivia after the Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar, Mauritius after a 16th-century Netherlands magistrate, Belgium after the Belgae tribe, Hungary’s name comes from the On Ogur tribe.
Montenegro’s means 'black mountain', Iceland is self explanatory,  Costa Rica means 'the rich coast' and named by Christopher Columbus as the indigenous people wore a lot of gold,  Honduras means 'deep water' and Sierra Leone is named 'lion mountains' due to explorers hearing thunder there, Singapore means 'lion city' as hunters wrongly thought there was lion there. Ecuador is a reference to the equator running through the country and Jordan after the River Jordan.
Japan means 'land of the rising sun' as it is direction of the Sun rising and Australia is a shortened version of 'Terra Australis Incognita', or Unknown Southern Land.” Ireland means Land in the West' but some names are a bit more silly such as Tobago is named after a pipe, Brazil and Barbados are named after a type of tree, Malta means honey and Venezuela named so because European explorers thought it looked like Venice and Grenada because sailors thought it looked like Granada in Spain.
Mexico means 'in the navel of the moon' and Nauru is named after the indigenous words for 'I go to the beach'.

Special Guest Blogger: Frida Kahlo

They called me Frida Kahlo as my real name, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, took too long to say but despite suffering from polio as a child and a nasty accident on a bus which collided with a trolley car and broke my spinal column, collar bone, ribs, pelvis, and leg which took over 30 operation to fix, i became Mexico's most famous artist.
I specialised in self portraits mostly because finding myself in constant traction with corsets and broken legs and plaster casts, it was pretty much the only thing I could do was to lie there and paint although people did say my art contained a lot of pain and suffering but i would say ever been in a bus when it flips over and crushes most the bones in your body? Comprende?
I always think you should paint what you know and in my case, that was a lot of X-rays and internal organs and I used a special easel with mirrors so I could see myself and do self-portraits.
I also put  a lot of my culture and political ideas on canvas, I was a proud Communist and painted Karl Marx, Mao, Stalin, Engels and Leon Trotsky who i hobnobbed with when he was in Mexico, he lived me with for several years  and i even got arrested on suspicion for his murder.
Leon was a sweetie but not so much my husband, the muralist Diego Rivera who was an abusive bastardo, anger management issues you may say and while i was barely a cripple and he was over six feet tall and three hundred pounds, it was not a good time let me tell you.
I had an exhibition exhibition in Paris in 1938 and The Louvre bought a picture and I met fellow artists such as Picasso, Kandinksy and Duchamp, and they made me feel a part of their Surrealist group which really helped me become something in the art world although i thought their work was cuckoo but i played along because i was now popular.
I had exhibition in Mexico but i was in such bad shape my doctors told me not to attend but i wasn't going to miss that so i arrived in an ambulance, and they carried me in on a stretcher. I had my giant four-poster bed delivered to the gallery, and they put me right in the middle of the action.
Everyone said how brave i was but lots of painkillers and even more tequila helped  ease the pain of my broken body but the pain stopped when i hit 47. Some say i died from one of my many ailments, some say it was suicide from a drink and drugs overdose but as there was no autopsy, nobody knows for certain although the death certificate said: Pulmonary Embolism' so let's go with that.

Out Of Office

'It was on the good ship Venus, by Christ you should have seen us, the figure head was a....' oh hello, you caught me singing from nautical tunes because the Out of Office has been set and very soon I will be bobbing around in the North Sea on my way to the Fjords of Norway and i am equally nervous and excited by the thought of my very first cruise.
Not knowing what to expect i have been asking around more experienced cruisers and on the whole the experience of other people is a good one, we have booked a cabin in the middle of ship to reduce the feeling of movement on the ship and  i have a good supply of sea sickness tablets (it was pretty unanimous that Stugeron 15 is the best apparently)  and sea sickness bands and on advice of other travellers, a decent supply of Ginger biscuits.
I have been obsessively checking the weather on every App and website possible for the week from 14th June to 21st June since we booked the trip in January and it has varied from windy to calm and everything in between but now that we are getting closer, it is settling on warm and a gentle breeze and i have been assured that a ship which weighs 181,541 Tonnes isn't going to be blown around by a gentle breeze which is reassuring.
For the first time ever i will be completely incommunicado so the work phone is going into the drawer and even though everyone at work has my personal number, as i am not paying the extortionate price for the Ships internet if someone does ring to ask me to 'quickly glance over' something  or ask where did i put the teabags, all they will get is the mechanical voice telling them the number they called is unavailable.
I have told the Rev if he fancies posting anything then he can feel free to but otherwise it's me and hubby, the North Sea and if the Sex Pistrols are any guide, the captain of this lugger who was a dirty bugger.

Very Wary Of Netanyahu's Words In Iranian Attack

As hard as it is, we have to separate the ongoing horrific genocide Israel is committing in Gaza to their action today in Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu is taking the line that their action was a pre-emptive strike to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear missile and nobodies wants Iran to develop one, i would rather nobody had them at all, but i do have a problem with believing anything Netanyahu says on anything especially as the Israeli Prime Minister has been warning that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon for decades.
Israel said it had no choice but to attack Iran, saying that Tehran was approaching 'the point of no return in its pursuit of a nuclear weapon' but we have heard this before, in 1992 Netanyahu said Iran was  'three to five years' away from reaching nuclear weapons capability' and in 1995 he repeated the three to five years claim and in 1996 he addressed the American Congress and warned that Iran acquire nuclear weapons was 'extremely close'.
Then in 2009 where Netanyahu informed a visiting Congressional delegation that Iran was 'one or two years away from developing weapons capability' and in 2012 he said that Iran was just 'a few months away from attaining nuclear capabilities' and in 2105 he arrived at the UN with a cartoon bomb and a marker pen warning that Iran was 'weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons'.
In 2015 a deal called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed between Iran and six major world powers (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France, and Germany) where the IAEA kept constant checks on the Iranian Nuclear program which was working until Donald Trump, under pressure from Israel, withdrew the USA from it while calling it the worst deal in history.
If Iran is building a nuclear capability, and there is no proof that they are, it is copying what Israel did back in 60's when they lied that the building in Dimona was a textile factory and refused IAEA inspections, so i would be very, very, VERY wary of what Netanyahu is saying without proof. 

Special Guest Blogger: J. Edgar Hoover

I directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until i bit the dust in 1972 and in those five wiretapping decades, I served under eight presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon, and became one of the most powerful men in Washington.
I earned a reputation of being a ruthless, lawless strongman, using illegal break-ins and hidden microphones to collect damaging info and blackmailing anyone in my path but I always held back the most seedy bits though, i intended to use them for my own personal use and i kept copious files on the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon and Frank Sinatra not to mention each and every sitting president, just in case someone had the idea to try and bin me.
My first job at the FBI was as a special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who was responsible for removing undesirable elements after World War I, rounding up and deporting suspected Communists and liberals, of course. We deported 556 innocent people, and Palmer resigned after his methods came to light but i got made the top banana at the FBI and organised it into one of the best law enforcement units the world has ever seen.
President Franklin Roosevelt gave me the directive to investigate both foreign espionage and perform surveillance of Communist and leftwing activists within our great country’s borders and to do that I turned a ragtag organization into a top-notch unit. I started the FBI National Academy, rebuilding from the ground up, stripping lousy officers of their jobs and any political appointees and anyone too fat to be a Special Agent and hired rookies only after extensive tests and interviews.
I was a controversial, hit-or-miss kinda guy who was always one to shoot-first and hide the bodies later although supporting Prohibition helped as it led to the largest development of organized crime in our history.
While harassing black activists and suspected Commies left, right and center, i created the G-men who were the very best became Government Men (or G-Men for the hard of spelling) handpicked, highly educated, and abstained from booze, relations with women, and other amoral behavior.
Eleanor Roosevelt called them the American Gestapo but I never liked her. In fact, she was on my Custodial Detention list, along with other Communists who might be questioned for their liberal activities.  Un-American activities, are un-American regardless of who you are like Charlie Chaplin, JFK, Einstein, Marilyn Monroe or Martin Luther King.
Martin Luther King Jr was a dissenter. A left-wing activist who may well have been a Communist with his anti-American 'civil rights' and truth be told, I was a huge racist and i tried many times to bring him down, even mailing tapes of his sexual affairs to King’s wife and encouraging him to commit suicide but I had many secret files and dossiers on innocent people, many of them the Presidents i served under.
Later on evidence of my secretive abuses of power began to surface and I was found to have routinely violated both the FBI's own policies and the very laws which the FBI was charged with enforcing so I made damned sure my files were shredded the day I died, croaking at age 77, having served as the FBI’s chief for forty-eight years.

Spending Review Is The Easy Part

It's the spending review, where the government set out the budget which the Government Departments will receive over the next three years and the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, has announced that Government spending will increase by 2.3% and will go some way to undoing the  'destructive legacy of austerity' which to be fair, was a steaming pile of ideological right wing crap and actually did nothing to cut the deficit apart from hollow out most institutions.
So what can we look forward to?
The Ministry of Defence would have got sweet FA if i was dishing out the money but Reeves saw fit to shove a further £11bn to it so that's lots of shiny new missiles and tanks in service next time we have to 'defend ourselves'.   
The National Health Service will find an extra 3% or £29bn a year in their piggy bank and the Schools budget has risen by £4.6bn a year and a further £1.2bn a year for  training and upskilling young people. Government funding of social and affordable housing has been allocated £39bn over the next 10 years and Energy has been handed £30bn with half of that going to the building of the Sizewell C nuclear power station.
Research and development funding will go to a record high of £22bn a year and £2bn to build 'home-grown AI' and £15bn is being set aside for for new rail, tram and bus networks.
£7bn is being invested in new prisons and £2bn is allocatd to the police in England and Wales to fill them up while asylum and border security get an increase of £280m more per year.
On the nations of the UK, the chancellor announced Scotland has been allocated £52bn, Northern Ireland £20bn and Wales £23bn.
All sounds very good but that's the easy part done, now to tell us how she will raise the additional money to pay for it all which should be interesting as she has ruled out increasing income tax.

Special Guest Blogger: Claude Rouget de Lisle

The French National anthem, La Marseillaise, was not written in Marseilles but in Strasbourg which is half German and far from being inspired by the Revolution, the words were written by a Royalist who dedicated it to a German and lifted the music from an Italian.
It was originally called ‘Battle Hymn for the Army of the Rhine’ which is the longest river in Germany and La Marseillaise was commissioned as a marching song to inspire the French army.
I was an amateur composer and artillery officer and at a lavish banquet thrown to mark France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792, the mayor of Strasbourg asked me to write a song that will rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland.
After drinking a little too much champagne, I returned to my quarters, where i fell asleep at my harpsichord, to wake with both the words and music of La Marseillaise fully formed.
To be honest the music was at least certainly fully formed as the tune had been written eight years earlier by the Italian Giovanni Battista Viotti who worked as court musician to Marie Antoinette.
I dedicated the song to the Bavarian-born Count Nikolaus Graf von Luckner, the commander of the French Army on the Rhine. My reward was to be  arrested shortly afterwards during the Terror where i only escaped being guillotined because i was the revered author of La Marseillaise.
On Bastille Day, 1795, 'The Marseilles Song' was adopted as the Republic’s national anthem although Napoleon always disliked it and had it banned. In fact, it was banned and unbanned several times in my lifetime.
I later published my  memoirs which no one bought and died penniless in 1836 but i live on through the song and thanks goes to Tchaikovsky used it as a theme in his 1812 Overture who used the first bit, not so much the bit about the French coming to tear the throats of your sons and your wives.

Call Me Nobel Prize Committee

The problem with nuclear technology has always been its waste,  the low level less dangerous stuff, remains deadly to humans for thousands of years while the high level waste is hazardous for a million years so it has to be stored somewhere safe away from humans.
There are over 500 operational nuclear stations dotted around the globe and in the UK we store our nuclear waste in secure containers at sites across Britain but successive governments have been desperate to find somewhere to dump the lot and they have tried bribing local councils to take it and dig a big hole and forget about it but unsurprisingly the local population have refused and the Government return to square one and the problem of what to do with all this growing mountain of toxic waste.  
So here we are stuck with tonnes and tonnes of the glowing stuff but nowhere to store it and I thought i had come up with with a great idea, dump it all into a volcano. Problem solved now the only problem is where to hang all the Environmental awards that will be winging  there way to me or so i thought because those spoilsport volcano geophysicists came along and ruined it all.
Apparently the problem is that in order to melt the uranium waste a required heat of  5,189˚F is needed and the hottest volcano we have is only a piddly 2,400˚F and also, if the volcano ever erupted, ash, gas and radioactive fuel rods would be spewed for miles around along with radioactive lava which is apparently not a good thing.
Not to be put off (and because i had ordered a gold frame for my Nobel Certificate), i have been pondering on this thorny issue and the required 5,189˚F limit and the obvious solution is fire it into the 10,000˚F Sun but the very real danger of the rocket exploding and the subsequent raining of nuclear waste over a large area made that a no go so if we cant go up, why not go down.
The Earth's core is 9,392° Fahrenheit, well above the heat we need and the hole would need to be 3,000 miles or 4,828,032 metres deep and we currently have a hole in China which is 7.6 miles or 12,231 metres into the crust.
Ok, we are 2,992.4 miles short and how you would manage a 3,000 mile drill bit and what it would have to be made of to not just melt is a head scratcher but that's for the boffins to work out, i'm just the person with the idea's and the currently empty gold frame.  

Brits Love Einstein, Canada and NATO

I do love a popularity contest and the YouGov website has a broad array of polls measures the popularity and fame of anything and everything, based on millions of responses from the British public and is the go-to place for British media outlets due to the accuracy and large sample size.
I could make a post a day for a year with this information but it was the three popularity contests that caught my eye which were most popular person, most popular country and the most popular International Orgainisation.
As the contributors are British it gives a real insight into what us Brits think and we think that the all time person who we have a positive opinion of is Albert Einstien with 85%.
National Institution that is David Attenborough pushed him hard as did Steven Spielberg, Rowan Atkinson and Robin Williams who made up the top five.
Dame Judi Dench at 6th is the highest placed female, Freddie Mercury at 9th the highest ranked musician and Usain Bolt 54th the highest ranked sports star.
The most popular countries for 81% of Brits is Canada and then a tie in second for Australia and the Netherlands and then it is Italy and New Zealand.
Surprisingly considering it was a poll of Brits, the United Kingdom is the 7th most popular with ourselves which says something about us and i expected Ukraine to be higher than 23rd, USA at 32rd is kind of expected considering what is going on there.    
The most popular International organization is NATO with 58% and close behind is the World Health Organization, United Nations, European Union and UNESCO.