Special Guest Blogger: William Mullins

Much is made of the fact that when my family and i left the appropriately named Dorking in Surrey, i stacked 126 pairs of shoes in my pack to travel to the New World. It never occurred to me that a fishing rod would have been a much better idea, as a shoes salesman my mind was firmly on the need for comfortable footwear when we got there.
As we believed England was not Holy enough, a bunch of us Bible bashers got together to sail to the New World so i sold up my shoe business and home for £280 and boarded the Mayflower and put the foot comfort of my family above things such as eating or surviving as i assumed God would provide, but did he heck because my poncing off others quickly got old and i died shortly after landing at New Plymouth, literally going from making clogs to popping them.
As befitting a man who dragged his family across the Atlantic Ocean with no food but many pairs of shoes, my will called for the distribution of my remaining goods so my wife, son and daughters were the proud owners of dozen of pairs of shoes and boots which ensured that they were cursing me and gnawing on leather uppers when my wife and son died a month later although the youngest daughter survived as the less well-shoed Pilgrims took her under their wing. 
As we know the Pilgrim's went on to survive and develop America into the gun toting cheeseburger gorging nation we know today with no thanks whatsoever to my reckless disregard in ensuring that my family survived.

Special Guest Blogger: Ronnie van Zant

When guitarist Allen Collins first saw me he hid up a tree to avoid me, i was only going to ask him to join a band i was getting together but such was my reputation for giving atomic wedgies and chinese burns, that he crapped himself.
Our first band we called My Backyard and then we changed it to The One Percent but after the millionth taunt of '1% talent' we changed it to Lynyrd Skynyrd after our gym teacher Leonard Skinner who kept on at us to get our haircut.
We got our big break as the starting act for the Who but my being an idiot kid carried on to being an idiot adult and i bullied our first drummer so much that he had a nervous breakdown and threw the hotel cat out the fourth floor window of the place we were staying.
I was regularly drunk and getting into brawls but the boys in the rest of the band were just as bad, two of them were in hospital at the same time while we were recording our second album after both having drunken car accidents but it was the plane accident which really got us noted.
I always said i would die before i was 30, i even told the crowd in Scotland that i was 29 and they won't see me again but that wasn't anything to do with my premonition, i just hated Scotland, too bloody cold and they eat Haggis and you don't want to know what goes into that. 
We were promoting our album, Street Survivors at the time, and in a classic piece of timing the album cover was the band standing amidst a massive ball of flames. 
Our plane was carrying us from South Carolina to Louisiana but it ran out of fuel and the pilot told us to brace for a crash because holding your head in your hands when you fall a couple of thousand feet out the sky is really going to help so i took the last few seconds shaking the hands of my bandmates before the plane hit a tree and killed three of the band and both pilots and our manager in a perfect depiction of our album cover.
My brother is now lead singer in what's left of the band, seems most of them are up here with me but i can't find Allen Collins but i bet he wished he stayed up that tree that morning.

Another Bad Week For Trump

American's have enjoyed the antics of their crazy, charismatic, colourful, controversial and morbidly obese President for almost four years now. How they laugh as Donny axes another member of his staff investigating him. See them chortle as he sends tear gas police into peaceful demonstrators so he can have his picture taken outside a church. Hear them bellow a loud guffaw as he defends slave owning Confederates but there are signs the love affair is turning sour as he sits a full 14 points behind his Democrat rival, Joe Biden, with a November election looming on the horizon.
These last few days have been particularly desperate for Trump and his bleach drinking supporters as his comeback rally in Tulsa flopped, outsmarted by a bunch of teenage K-Pop fans half the world away.  
Reeling from that he then faced another scandal relating to Russia, this time that he was not aware that the Russians had been offering bounties to the Taliban to kills American soldiers. This changed from not knowing to not being told it verbally when it was revealed that he had been told about it in March but in Trump's attention span of a gnat world, if nobody actually verbalizes it or puts it in pictures in his intelligence briefing each morning, it can't be true.
As he battles that fire and tried to pretend that the 126,000 Americans are not 126,000 ex-Americans thanks to his mind-numbingly terrible Coronavirus response, he posts a clip of a Trump fan screaming WHITE POWER and then deletes it saying he never heard the old guy shouting it when the camera zooms in on him, it can be hard to miss something when it is as subtle as that.
Finally, Iran have issues arrest warrants for Trump in relation to the death of Qasem Soleimani's in January by a drone attack so he should be on the look-out for any Iranian police waving a pair of handcuffs on the White House lawn in the coming months.
With a tell-all book from his niece soon to hit the streets, it's not been a good couple of days fopr thjer self-confessed sex-fiend but come November, when America gets a grown up in charge, admit it, you will miss the big lug because he may be an inept, incompetent moron and an all round awful human being but he makes things interesting, well for those of us not unlucky enough to have him running
our country anyway.

Special Guest Blogger: Hedy Lemarr

With only 500 words it is hard to know where to start as i crammed lots of things into my life. 
I began as an actress and made a film, Ecstasy, which was so erotic it was immediately got banned, then married an evil arms dealer and helped invent the technology you're probably using to read this now.
My acting ability bought me to the attention of a wealthy arms dealer who was selling arms to the Nazi Party who i married but he was an idiot and banned me from acting and tried to destroy all the prints of Ecstasy saying what i did was wrong, he was selling arms to the freaking Nazi's. 
I did get to meet Hitler and Mussolini though and heard about the use of torpedoes and radio-waves but how they were too easy to jam, i suggested possibly a constantly changing and moving frequency would be hard to jam but they smiled politely and told me not to worry my pretty little head over such things.
By then my husband bored me so i ran off to Paris to restart my acting career but most importantly i met a scientist and while explaining about my lunches with Hitler, told him about the problem with the Nazi torpedoes frequencies being jammed and how by simply using frequency hopping, the problem could be fixed.
Between us we patented the technology and approached the U.S. Navy with it, with the intention of helping them blow up Nazis but they also just smiled politely and suggested instead my services would be better used just looking pretty as a pin-up girl to support the troops overseas.
I went back to work in films and had a successful career and now have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame wedged between two actors who absolutely did not invent that thing that makes your WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth devices possible.
So the next time Katie Price or Kylie Jenner is talking on TV, pay close attention as they just might be inventing the cure for cancer, they probably aren't but you never know.

Special Guest Blogger: Captain William Bligh

My crew did have some sore misgivings about my poop-deck on the HMS Bounty but i just told them to put some talc on it and off we went but anyone who has read the book or seen one of the several films made about that trip will know, it didn't go particularly well for me.
I have been painted as some sort of bully but i just did what all ship captains did back then, work the crew half to death and have them flogged if they didn't do what i said but to be fair flogging the crew is pretty much page one on the 18th Century British navy guide to being a Captain.
The simple truth is that i was considerably less flog-happy than my peers but sailing a ship around the World is miserable, it took months to sail to Tahiti and once we got there, it was a sunny paradise with beautiful beaches and even more beautiful women and we had to stay there for five months waiting for some banana plants to grow.
So the crew had plenty of time lazing in the sun, getting wasted and getting it on with the natives and then i come along and go okay crew, put down the luscious women and fruit and back on the ship for a 6 month sailing back to Blighty and scrubbing decks and getting flogged and trying to not die of scurvy and they went 'F*** that' and dumped me overboard, and went steaming back for more sweet Tahitian tushy.
They probably didn't expect me to survuve let alone navigate the crappy raft they set me adrift on 4,000 miles back to civilization but somehow after all that, i become known as the bad guy.

Criticize Israel, Not Jews

At some time this week, Wednesday seems to be the day penciled in, Israel are planning to annex 30% of the occupied West Bank, an action which is being widely condemned everywhere except America where the Donald Trump Government are perfectly okay with it.
I have been boycotting all things Israel for many years now, going out of my way to check the country of origin sticker and if it says Israel, i put it back but some people on the left have a problem with separating Israel and Jews.
On the same side of the coin, Israel and supporters of Israel deliberately conflate the two and equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism in an attempt to shut down criticism of the Israeli Government's actions when it goes about it evil business against the Palestinians.
If the Netanyahu Government do go ahead with their illegal annexation, going on previous reactions, attacks on Jew's and Jewish property will increase due to the wrongheaded assumption that Israel and being Jewish are the same thing.
Being Jewish does not make you an Israeli as being Roman Catholic does not make you Italian so it disappoints me that some people are incapable of engaging the few brain-cells that they possess and cause mindless violence against an innocent population just because of their religion.
It is much the same ignorance that sees Muslims targeted after Al Queada or Islamic State attacks so be angry, protest, boycott and condemn Israeli actions to anyone who will listen but don't take out your anger on innocent people who are probably as disgusted at Israel as you are if you only bothered to ask.
Let the Israeli supporters shout antisemitism at those of us appalled at Israeli actions towards Palestinians for the past 70 years, criticizing Israel’s aggressive policies, the Palestinian deaths and military occupation does not make anyone antisemitic and supporters of the Palestinians shouldn't be shut down.
It is those defending the repulsive and loathsome Israeli government who are on the wrong side, not us.

Libyan Fallout Continues

Awful news that yet more people have been stabbed and killed in Glasgow following the attack in Reading, both awful events perpetrated by Libyan Asylum seekers.      
Quite rightly both men are being condemned for abhorrent actions but nobody is asking the question why were Libyan's here claiming asylum in the first place?
Simply, and in no way to excuse the evil killers, if Britain under David Cameron, France under Nicolas Sarkozy and America under Barack Obama had not launched the war to carry out regime change in Libya in 2011, it is unlikely that refugees like these two would have come to Britain at all, what they did here was a direct consequence of what we did over there.
It was the Western intervention debacles in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and the ongoing chaos we created that produced a wave of refugees across the World, a point which is never mentioned conveniently for the British government and therefore many miss the link between the terrorist butchery in our streets with wars fought in far away places.
I can't repeat enough that the actions of these two men, one who was shot dead by police, is their responsibility and should be condemned as such but to wash our hands or not even acknowledge the reasons they were here in the first place is highly disingenuous.

Liverpool Not The Spirit Of Shankly

There seems to be a disproportionate number of Liverpool fans who are around my age but that's because when we were growing up in the 70's, Liverpool were winning everything.
With my colours already firmly attached to the mast of Arsenal, seeing Liverpool continually win things and having boys who had picked Liverpool as their team wind me up for being a football loving girl and an Arsenal fan while their lot picked up pot after pot did grate and i spent many years hoping that Liverpool would fall from grace, and took a great deal of satisfaction when they did.
Over time Manchester United have replaced Liverpool in my affections of the team to make me chuckle when it falls flat on it's face but now after threatening for a few seasons, Liverpool are back on top and out of the woodworm have come all the Liverpool fans, the ones who sneered at me in my homemade Arsenal top with a wonky number 7 on the back which my mum made me for PE in the 70s.
So grudging congratulations to Liverpool, even through my blatant bias i can see you were the greatest team this year and it would have been harsh to deny you the big prize through the pandemic so you deserve all the praise and plaudits you are getting.
That said, as one scouser was saying today, don't try and pass it off as a triumph of the Shankly principles, a famous Socialist, because if you were to ask Shankly what he would do in a global pandemic that threatens to bring the economy to its knees, the answer would not be to piggyback on a government scheme to stop mass unemployment when you are the world’s seventh-richest club. Liverpool, along with Tottenham and Newcastle were only one of three Premiership teams to furlough their non-playing staff to save £1m when they had an annual wage bill of £310m.
So not the team of the people or a team forged in the image of Bill Shankly, a team who kicked a ball around the best and hit the opponents net more times than their own got hit over the course of a season so shut up, dance around singing for a while and try not to draw attention to the fact that your club was one of the few happy to get the taxpayers of the country to pay the wages of the little guys at your club while still paying the millionaires their full whack.

Special Guest Blogger: Whitney Houston

I didn't know until later on that Osama bin Laden was supposedly obsessed with me and fantasized about marrying me and Saddam Hussein was also a fan and used a cover of my version of 'I Will Always Love You' as his campaign song during his 2002 re-election.
I would like to think that people really responded to Saddam's choice of campaign song and turned out in massive numbers because the dictator playing that song from The Bodyguard but that's not as insane as Bobby Brown being the adult voice of reason in my household.
The Bodyguard was made at a time in my life when people thought that Kevin Costner was cool and that Bobby Brown was the only person in our marriage doing drugs but i did say that i didn't do crack but wow did i sniff, smoke and inject everything else.
I did so much coke that my nose hairs would have been worth more on the black market than almost anything else but up until i lost it completely, i had hit after hit and then when i lost it, i still had hit after hit but of a different kind. 
The bit in 'I Will Always Love You' still sends shivers down peoples spines and people still say wow, Whitney sure did have some great pipes on her and i did, that was how i died although my death was officially classed as an accident caused by drowning in the bath and the drowning bit was a mistake but the cocktail of drugs i took before i got in the tub, i certainly meant.

Grab The Hammer And Chisel

Just a thought as America is looking at putting some terrible wrongs right from its past and yanking down statues and monuments to slave owners and in a previous post i noted that on some of the American money, the $1, $2, $20 and $50 dollar bills, the faces of slave holding Presidents were gurning back at Americans as they paid for their canned cheese or chlorinated chicken.   
Just as some inappropriately named Forts are facing an overhaul, i see an even bigger problem in South Dakota that may need to be addressed, bigger as in 60ft high and staring down from the side of a mountain.
Looking out from Mount Rushmore are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln and while the last guy is certainly not on anyones radar as being involved in slave trading, Lincoln actually did everything to free the slaves, when it comes to Washington and Jefferson, oh dear.
George Washington, the first President, was a major slaveholder with 317 under his control and Thomas Jefferson owned over 600 and although Theodore Roosevelt never directly owned any slaves, he purposely did nothing to create political and social equality for blacks as he considered them 'altogether inferior to whites'.
Looking at pictures of Mount Rushmore, the three offenders are on the right with Lincoln seemingly on his own on the right hand side of the monument so it wouldn't be that much of a burden to remove the three and leave Honest Abe up there or with a bit of creative licence and a very sharp hammer and chisel, transform them into more deserving examples of American heroes.