The Real Land Of The Free

America likes to paint itself as the Land of The Free, they even have it in their National Anthem but the Human Freedom Index Report by the Cato Institute doesn’t seem to agree, ranking the United States as 17th most free so who should be singing about being the land of the free instead?
Using a combination of the freedom of an individual to have freedom of opinion and expression, equality before the courts, security of private property, and freedom to come and go as well as economic liberty and the freedom to prosper in a country without intervention from the government or economic authority, the real land of the free is New Zealand then Switzerland, Hong Kong, Australia and Canada.
The United Kingdom is joint 8th with Ireland and oh, i can you see by the dawn’s early light that the USA and Sweden are in joint 17th place so the National Anthem may be due a bit of a rewrite, the land of the just in the Top 20 Free perhaps.
Towards the bottom end of the 160 county Freedom league we find the nations we would expect to see there, Bahrain (75),  Qatar (103), UAE (117), Russia (119), Kuwait (124), China (135), Saudi Arabia (146), Iran (153) and the least free are the citizens in Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Egypt. 

Special Guest Blogger: Freddie Mercury

It was a simpler time, where a man could wear leather S&M gear on stage while bull-whipping another man and still be considered absolutely into girls but not many people could have been that shocked when i stepped out of the closet towards the end of my life although my homeland of Zanzibar cancelled a 60th birthday celebration because of my homosexuality.
I was a real hotchpotch, born in Tanzania, ethnically Asian, raised Zoroastrian, schooled in India and growing up in England.
I met guitarist Brian May in Art School and drummer Roger Taylor and we would sell second hand clothes in a market together and added a bass player, the guy who made Brian's amp, John Deacon, and made a band called Smile but i changed it to Queen, one reason was because it's a strong, regal name and also because of the gay connotations and i was the chief song-writer, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was one of mine, a song about a homicidal dude, some Italian words, repeating the name of a Renaissance astronomer and then ending with a emo style freakout.
It was Queen who made the Sex Pistols famous, pulling out of the Bill Grundy Today programme at the last-minute, which saw our late replacement on the show, the Sex Pistols, give their infamous expletive-strewn interview which catapulted them to fame.
In my career i worked with David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Montserrat Caballe but my best collaboration was with Princess Diana.
She dressed up in an army jacket, leather hat and aviator sunglasses and we went for a night on the town to a gay bar and no-one noticed the most famous woman in the world standing right beside me.
I died of AIDS only hours after even admitting i had the disease and as one of the first major celebrity casualties of the disease, i brought attention to it i was voted number 58 in a poll of the '100 Greatest Britons' which is awesome for someone not even British.

Not Following The Science

The Government have continually told us that they are 'following the science' but the scientists have finally caught on that when the inevitable inquiry comes along regarding just how awful the Government has been and why we have the second highest death toll in the World, it is them who will get the blame so they have come out to explain that whatever science advice it is they are following, it isn't theirs.
Members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) which advises the government, have spent the last few days explaining that their advice was that the reproduction rate of the virus is still only just below one and the infection rate still too high so any easing of the lock-down measures is happening too early and could lead to a rise in infections and should wait until the NHS test and trace system is up and running properly.
The number of infections is currently sitting stubbornly at approximately 8,000 new infections every day in England and John Edmunds, a member of Sage, has been at pains to mention that the easing of measures to allow the reopening of schools and more shops 'was a political decision'.
Too late locking down, causing thousands to needlessly die and now too early opening up, risking thousands more to needlessly die.

Special Guest Blogger: Edgar Allan Poe

It was upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary one turbulent, inky night in Autumn. The silence only occasionally interrupted by the woeful cry of a long-suffering animal in the distance as i stumbled along through a landscape of unremitting bleakness in a drunken stupor, the leaves whirling around my stumbling frame as i fell a final time onto the rain-sodden earth.
I lay on my back, the water soaking into my thin, thread-worn coat and stared up to the heavens, the shimmering stars seeming to mock me in my harrowing fate.
Several travelers in the night hurried past me, a drunken wretch prostrate on the ground but while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping a kindly traveler who came to my aide, and i was taken to seek comfort inside a hospital but before i had chance to ponder the horrible fates that would befall wicked souls, i died, darkness there and nothing more.
To be fair, everyone who knew me saw that coming, i was thought to be permanently on the booze and opium, and lived a tormented existence where i would frequently venture out to wander the streets in the dead of night.
It fits, men who write weird horror stories are surely on drugs but i wasn't, my editor, Rufus Griswold, despised me and he wrote my obituary and all that bullshit but it's more appealing to think of me as a tragic, dark, self-destructive, strange figure.
The Raven is amongst my best known works but 'The Cask Of Amontillado' is one of my most favourites and is based on a fued i had with Thomas Dunn English who would spoof me in his stories, making out i was a crazy drunk so i wrote a charcater for him who was chained to a wall and left to die, gently mock me in fiction would he.
They were unable to find an actual cause of death so put it down to 'cerebral inflammation' but they didn't really know and speculation included severe alcohol withdrawal symptoms, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera and rabies but whatever it was, i shall be lifted nevermore!

Awful, Awful, Awful

Can anybody really be surprised that the nations at the top of the grim Coronavirus death league are run by Donald Trump and Boris Johnson?
If ever there was two people you would least want to be spearheading your country during a killer pandemic, is is these two but being British it is the clown in Downing Street who has the direct effect on me, Trump can do what he likes in the land of the free, they voted for him, we voted for the guy and his team currently taking it in turns to stand behind a Downing Street lectern telling us all to stay at home apart from the occasional 270 mile trips to Durham which seems to be acceptable now.
From the very start Boris has been awful and not one to make the same mistake twice when he can make it four or five times, it is now the testing part that has gone horribly wrong although it wasn't great to start with. 
Worldwide medical opinion agrees that a vital part of dealing with this situation is getting people tested so our guys decided that the most efficient way of testing for a disease is to wait until someone’s at death’s door from it so we could only get tested once we had the Coronavirus symptoms badly enough to be taken to hospital.
Then there is the all important contact tracing app which we was promised would be made available by May 15th but is still 'being tested' today 14 days later and the much vaunted 25,000 contact tracers being unable to log into the NHS system due to 'technical difficulties'.
It would be funny if it wasn't so serious but i'm sure that it will all be smoothed over by whatever wonk takes today's briefing at 5pm, so don’t forget to take your nearest and dearest for a cross country spin beforehand to make sure your eyes are working well enough to watch it.

Murderous Racism In Minneapolis

I get why black Americans are angry and i understand why they are reacting as they have in Minneapolis but the reaction allows the story to move on and the last thing that should be happening is that the story moves on, the white hot spot-light should be on the policeman who knelt on George Floyd's neck and continued to do as he repeated that he couldn't breath.
It happens too much in America, shockingly by the very people whose motto is 'to serve and protect', and i accept that as a white woman living in England, i have no idea what the black's in America go through every single day but i see the blogs posts and comments and hear people speaking and i get an idea and it's horrendous but to live it, no, i never have to face that but that doesn't mean we can't speak out about it.
The policeman, Derek Chauvin, has since been sacked and there is open talk that he may be tried for murder which surely he should be but it seems that American police get away with things like this far too often. 
As i said i understand the protests and i get why parts of Minneapolis are ablaze and with the ridiculous Donald Trump fanning the flames by tweeting about shooting looters, the required leadership won't be coming from the very top just yet but don't give them an excuse to shift the focus away from what disgracefully happened to George Floyd and the real story, murderous racism in America.

Special Guest Blogger: Charles Babbage

It is nice for Alan Turing to give himself the credit for inventing computers, far be it from me to piss on his cyanide laced apple by pointing out that over 100 years earlier i also invented a ludicrously complex machine to tabulate polynomial functions.
I always had a thing about mathematics and ghosts, joining The Ghost Club at Cambridge which was the first of its kind and concerned with investigating supernatural phenomena but with a very select membership which included Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats and eminent scientists among its members.
I founded the Royal Astronomical Society and wondered if i could reduce astronomical calculations which were then done by hand to a more standard form and ran a few trials using a mechanical computation machine and found it corrected some errors in the original calculations.
This led to me being asked to oversee a much larger trial project and the British government, or those officials who stayed awake long enough while i explained the idea, gave me a huge bag of money with a pound sign painted on it and sent me off to work on it.
I called it the Difference Engine and built a prototype but the machine was large, noisy and unwieldy at fifteen tons and 8 ft tall.
If death hadn't come along to interrupt it i would have developed it further but after ten years of receiving government funding and not actually completing the machine, the Treasury lost confidence and withdrew the funding.
I also designed the Analytical Engine with the help from Ada Lovelace who wrote the algorithm to do the calculations which makes her the first computer programmer although less spotty and not a virgin.
The Analytical Engine was a more complex version of the Difference Engine which read programs and data from punch cards and had a memory capable of storing 1,000 numbers with 50 decimal digits each and held a monstrous 675 bytes of memory and run at a dizzying clock speed of 7 Hz.
I died of kidney problems aggravated by cystitis and am in the history bookis for inventing computers (despite what Turing may claim) but i also invented the cow-catcher which goes on the front of trains that clears the tracks of obstacles, just thought i would throw that in as well.

Special Guest Blogger: George Orwell

I got in early on hating the Soviet Union, i was hating on them back when they were ostensibly our allies, i even wrote 1984 and Animal Farm especially to irk them.
It did confuse a few people who thought i was a Communist myself but i was a Socialist and it was fighting in the Spanish Civil War alongside the Communists which turned me against them. 
During my life i did spend a lot of time in hospitals of different nations, i spent time in a couple of Spanish ones, first for a poisoned hand and then again after being shot in the throat by a sniper after i stupidly stood up in a trench parapet.
I was also hospitalised in Burma after contracting Dengue Fever while serving there as a policeman and then spent a few weeks in a Paris hospital for bad bout of influenza and several British ones for a range of reasons, one being suspected Tuberculosis.
Despite many ailments and having a bullet through my neck, my death can be contributed to a motorcycle trip i took while working as a teacher when i got caught in a downpour which soaked me and i caught a chill that developed into pneumonia and my life was in the balance for a while as my already struggling lungs suffered further damage.
I left teaching and became a journalist, writing for the left wing Tribune and Observer before landing a job at the BBC but i was desk bound due to my ill health and it was then i wrote Animal Farm, an attack on Soviet communism with the Pigs a less than subtle characterisation of the Soviet leadership where everything the ruling pigs do is transparently evil and sinister and by the end of the novel the pigs are indistinguishable from the evil humans they supplanted.
It was a blatant don't trust the Communists but many people who just didn't get it or didn't know my other works took it as an attack on all things left wing which missed the point, especially as i previously wrote The Road to Wigan Pier which was an attack on Capitalism but as that didn't get turned into a cartoon, it was bypassed by many people.
I even wrote a huge article about how amusing i found it that i managed to make the capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against capitalism and that the only regime i advocate is Socialism but despite being placed under surveillance by the Special Branch for 12 years for being a Communist sympathiser, the wrong understanding of Animal Farm and then 1984 got me crossed off their list.
My dodgy health finally done for me after a boat i was on sunk and gave me another soaking and caused an artery to burst in my severly weakened lungs, killing me but leaving behind a confusing legacy and a book which seems to have been adopted as a manual for some of the regimes who describe themselves as right wing, go figure.

No Face Related Services

Safe sex always used to mean using a condom or making sure that the bedroom door was locked but in the age of a pandemic it is even more important that the shifty men hanging around outside brothels, those ones 'whose wives doesn't understand them' abide by new rules and the Swiss Sex workers’ Union, ProKoRe, have produced guidelines for sex workers, one job where social distancing may present a bit of a problem.
ProKoRe advise the use of certain sexual positions that keep the client and prostitute’s faces as far apart as possible while other bits as close as possible and a session should not last longer than 15 minutes and sheets and lingerie washed after every visit with disinfectant detergent.
No face touching, cuddling or kissing and strictly off the sex menu is 'face-related services' but most worrying is the men having to pay for a 15 minute session but i guess to get their moneys worth, most men could just spend the final 12 minutes of that time just chatting. Right girls!!

Advice For Pre-Lockdown Me

This is a note to my previous self, today is March 1st so you have 23 days to do the following before the actions of one man in China eating a Pangolin stops the world in it's tracks. I can't say too much due to Space/Time continuum limitations so don't ask, just do the following: 
The first and most important thing is get your hair done, it is going to be at least July until hairdressers are open again and by then your dark roots will be exposing your little white lies that your hair is 'naturally that colour'.
Go to the e-liquid shop and buy as many bottles as you can fit in your bag. The Postmen and Postwomen will still be around but with a skeleton staff it will be at least a week between ordering it online and it coming through our door so doing your usual trick of waiting until you have one bottle left is not an option. 
Buy hand sanitiser, buy masks, buy flour, buy shares in Zoom, buy batteries but most importantly buy toilet Roll, for some reason everyone goes mad for toilet roll so at least a four nine roll packs should last, actually make it 5 packs, there is that mid April night with the dodgy curry and your husbands even dodgier stomach.
Don't plan anything for your birthday, it will be you, a pot noodle and a Cherry Bakewell that the kids found in the back of the cupboard with a candle stuck in it. Happy Birthday btw, oh and don't worry about what you are going to get Connor and Abi for their wedding gift.
Don't pass on that invite to go out to Carluccio’s for dinner arounbf the 14th, make the most of eating something someone else has cooked and before the person who cooked it is working at a supermarket. Then when you get home, sell shares in Carluccio's, Virgin and Shearings.
That's about it for now, keep me safe.

Special Guest Blogger: Charles Dickens

I am dead, there is no doubt whatsoever about that. The register of my burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Old Charlie is as dead as a door nail.
I wrote a bunch of classics, including the most famous Festive story ever told, A Christmas Carol.
I popularised certain Christmas traditions, like carols and eating so much food that the limits of the human body are tested and delivering a timeless, touching message about the importance of goodwill toward your fellow man...even if that's a message that i completely failed to follow in my own life.
I dumped my wife and mother of my ten children for an 18-year-old actress but in 19th Century Britain leaving your wife for a young girl was not a well received thing to do so i hushed it up and set about slandering my wife, saying the marriage was strained as she had grown fat but by then the Scrooge and Marley story helped keep me in the public's good graces so my dickheadery went forgiven and 'A Christmas Carol' became more of a 'Do as I say, not as I do' tale of morality.
As well as girls young enough to be my daughter, i did have a lot of affection for cats as my house was full of them but my favorite was a small deaf cat called Bob and when he died i was so distraught i had Bob's paws removed, stuffed, and turned into a letter opener.
After leaving my wife i only wrote two more stories mainly because i had an lithe 18 year old actress to keep me occupied but i was involved in a train crash when the train's first seven carriages plunged off a bridge with the only carriage to remain on the track was the one i and my mistress was traveling although i never attended the inquiry because it was not good to have been seen with someone who was not my wife.
When i died i died at my mistresses house and her and her maids carried me back to my own home so the public would not know the truth about our relationship.
I was laid to rest in the Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey, my reputation in tact and the only regret is i wasn't around to slap whoever thought letting The Muppet's do a version of A Christmas Carol was a good idea??

Coming Soon

When i began my new job at the end of January i was undecided what to do with this blog as i was unsure if i would be able to continue with it as there was a lot of traveling involved so i persuaded a few dead celebrities to chip in and let them keep things ticking over, which they have done nicely.
The Coronavirus broke and i was told to work locally as the long trips were now prohibited so i have been spending a lot more time in my own area and able to keep the blog going as well as using the dead celebrities still.
As it may be a while yet until i am back on the train heading West, i am able to blog more myself but i have been fielding emails for months from the likes of dead pop stars, Presidents and actors asking why Buddy Holly, Marilyn Monroe and Emperor Nero had the privilege of rattling out 500 words of their life stories and they couldn't.
'Get your people to contact my people' i told an irate Nicolaus Copernicus and 'Of course we'll consider you in future' was enough to placate Keith Moon while Marie Antoinette wanted nothing less than a written guarantee.
Seems my immediate plans for this blog will fall by the wayside as the virus isn't going anywhere soon which means it is unlikely i will be and neither will Sam Cooke, Sigmund Freud, Martin Van Buren or Emmeline Pankhurst who will all be among the many other famous faces appearing here soon.

Cummings But Not Going's

I'm not sure it comes with the endorsement of Specsavers but Dominic Cummings has come up with  great new way to test your eyesight if you are unsure if you are fit to drive, pack your wife and 4 year-old child into a car and take a 70 mile round trip, if you make it back alive you are deemed fit, wrap your car around a tree or take out several pedestrians and you can assume you are not quite ready to get behind the wheel.  
Boris Johnson said that Coronavirus does make your eyes 'go weird' and revealed that he has begun wearing glasses for the 'first time in years' since recovering from the virus, but it must do weird things to the memory also because he previously that he needs glasses but tries not to wear them as a 'point of machismo'.
If driving 270 miles while ill and then an additional 40 miles to a local beauty spot on your wife's birthday in the middle of a lock-down is a tad too risky for you could always go old school and visit an optician, most of them have remained open or there are online tests and most buildings now come with things called Windows which enable a person inside to look out of at things at various distances to judge if they are blurry or out of focus.
I guess Cummings is now kicking himself that he went through the whole problem of driving all that way when he could have just found out if his eyesight was failing that didn't involve Barnard Castle or driving a tonne of metal at least 30mph through streets for 70 miles with his loved ones lives depending on him being able to see properly or not.
Some people have suggested another reason why his eyesight is so bad and although i have heard that this can have an effect on men's eyesight, we will never find out and can only hope that he will know next time.

Special Guest Blogger: Deng Xiaoping

I achieved much in my time as leader but i am most famous for the Tiannaman Square protests.
Even the most biased westerner could see that the students attacked a defenseless tank regiment armed with bicycles and many of these bicycles were fitted with powerful compaction tyres and vicious wicker baskets capable of scratching the paint work of the tank beyond repair.
In one particularly violent incident an entire peace-loving convoy of Tanks were surrounded by at least one student carrying a bag and wearing a loud and dangerous shirt so what else could we do but declare martial law and kill 300 of them, we had no choice.
We had international support for our actions with Cuba, Czechoslovakia and East Germany supported the Chinese government in denouncing the protests
As the Communist party's Secretary-general i presided over the Anti-Rightist Campaign launched by Mao which persecuted anyone who favoured Capitalism over Communism or held right wing views and they were easy to spot, you just followed the trail of dribble they left behind and i introduced the family planning policy to cope with China's overpopulation crisis, allowing each couple to only have two children and began the economic reconstruction which would make China into an economic superpower.
My master stroke was to send my advisors to all parts of the World and to come back with ideas of what made these countries great and using their ideas, began opening up China to the rest of the World and downgraded China from a Communist run country to a Market Socialist one, taking the idea from Vladimir Lenin's idea for the Soviet Union before that lunatic Stalin took over.
I made Mao's Great Leap Forward look like a tip toe, it was i and the guys in front of the tanks in Tiannaman Square who did the leaping, me forward, them more sideways.

Special Guest Blogger: Flavius Aetius

I was the Guy who saved Western Europe from Attilla and his marauding Huns but i am unknown to most, including many history buffs, but my valiant efforts were thanked by being murdered by the very people i saved.
I was the last General of the Western Roman Empire and Attila invaded Persia, terrorized the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire, plundered the Balkans, and extorted vast sums of gold from the Romans but in 440, he crossed the Danube, plundered the Balkans, and destroyed two Roman armies.
The Roman emperor admitted defeat, and Attila extorted from him a treaty that paid 2000 kilograms of gold up front, plus an annual tribute of 700 kilograms of gold each year.
My sister sought to escape a betrothal to an decrepit old aristocrat begged Attila’s help and sent him her engagement ring with a letter explaining her dilemma, only she wrote it in Latin and Attila's Latin was not as great as it could be and interpreted that she was proposing marraige with him so he accepted and celebrated in that time honored Hun tradition of invading.
As the leader of Western Europe, i lacked the military means to stand up to the Huns on its own so formed an alliance with the barbarian Visigoths, promising them a homeland of their own in southwestern France in exchange for fighting off the Huns alongside the Romans and the Visigoths were absolute nutters but they defeated Attila and stopped his devastating invasion of Western Europe.
I thought they were going to laud me and give me as much gold as i could carry as thanks when i was summoned to Rome but the Western Roman Emperor Valentinian III felt intimidated by me and accused me of drunken depravities and hacked me to death with a sword right there and then.
Should have just let the Huns invade his skinny arse.

Who The Government Borrows From

We hear a lot Government borrowing and how the Government are looking to borrow £62bn this year but i have never understood who exactly we borrow it from.
Someone, somewhere must be lending out all this money because where else are we getting it from but it isn't the World's other richest countries as they are all in massive debt themselves so who are we trying to tap up to lend us £62bn?
The answer is no-one as the government borrows from financial institutions, like pension funds, investment funds, banks, insurance companies and also private savers by selling bonds, or gilts, which is a IOU to guarantee that you will pay them back later at an agreed date which could run from anywhere to a year or the next 55 years.
Makes sense but then my next question is how can the UK be the 5th richest nation in the World when it needs to borrow £62bn to run it and the latest ONS figures show we have a national debt of £1,798.5bn?
Economics, go figure.

More Reasons To Stop Destroying Our Planet

A few occasions the Climate Deniers, ignoring the mountains of evidence and agreement of 99% of climate scientists, say to me about green measures what if you are wrong and we do all this for nothing and my standard reply is that we end up with a cleaner healthier Planet and the 10 weeks of lock-down has shown that with the lack of humans messing up the place with their cars and industrial fumes, the planet is a healthier and cleaner place.
Rivers are cleaner, air pollution is decreasing significantly and the damaging CO2 emissions this year could be the lowest for decades from reduced airline flights, car and truck journeys and industrial activity falling.
As well as a cleaner, healthier planet, studies show that air pollution is linked to impaired judgement, mental health problems, poorer performance in school and higher levels of crime and worringly, the World Health Organization says nine out of 10 of us frequently breathe in polluted air and air pollution kills an estimated seven million people per year.  
One study by London School of Economics looked at students taking exams on different days and measured how much pollution was in the air on those given days and found that the most polluted days correlated with the worst test scores. On days where the air quality was cleanest, students performed better.
Another LSE study analysed two years of crime data from over London’s districts and found that more petty crimes occurred on the most polluted days, in both rich and poor areas.
This was backed up by US studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology who examined nine years of data covering 9,000 US cities and discovered that the cities that had the highest crime rates for manslaughter, rape, robbery, car theft and assault also had the highest pollution levels and the same results were found in a study by the University of Southern California who cross-checked the pollution levels in US cities with truancy, stealing, vandalism and substance abuse.
The research is ongoing but the initial thoughts are that breathing in polluted air affects the amount of oxygen you have in your body resulting in reduced 'good air' going to your brain and irritates the nose, throat, cause headaches which lowers our concentration levels.
Exposure to various pollutants also causes inflammation in the brain which affects the pre-frontal lobe which is the area important for controlling our impulses, our executive function and self-control.
King’s College London found that teenagers exposed to polluted air are at a higher risk of psychotic episodes, such as hearing voices or paranoia so plenty more reasons for our World leaders to do something more about what we are doing to our planet if seven million deaths a year was not already enough of an incentive.

Special Guest Blogger: Jayne Mansfield

Buxom blondes was a thing back in 50s and 60s Hollywood and i was known as the Working Man's Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s second-most famous blonde bombshell but whereas Marilyn really was a dumb blonde, i had an IQ of 149, spoke five languages and played the violin and piano so i was a really smart kind of dumb blonde.
I was married at 17 and got my break as a Playboy Centerfold before going on to be a star of stage and screen, making 17 movies and making personal appearances for everything from supermarket promotions to drug store openings at $10,000 a pop but my love life was really complicated and at age 34 i was on my third husband and dating my married attorney Sam Brody when i met Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey and things took a very strange twist.
I turned down his romantic advances, the weirdo wore plastic devil horns and a red cape so wouldn't anyone with a working pair of eyes turn him down but he and Brody got into a heated argument and LaVey put a curse on him, saying he would die in a car crash and a series of misfortunes beset us both.
My son Zoltan got mauled by a lion and Brody was in a string of car accidents in the next twelve months, surviving seven car crashes before an eighth eventually killed us both.
We were traveling to New Orleans to appear on television show when our convertible car hit a truck spraying a thick fog of insect repellent across the road head on.
Speaking of head on, or rather head off, it is rumoured that i was decapitated in the accident which would have made a mess of my pretty face but even that doesn't excuse casting the drag queen and actor Divine to play me in a film.

About Time Piers Morgan Did Some Good

During the current Coronavirus pandemic, Piers Morgan is on the end of a lot of admiration for actually been doing his job well and holding the Government feet to the fire but he has a long way to go to be forgiven for all of the awful stuff he has done in the past.
While editor of the News of the World, he was sacked by Rupert Mrdoch for publishing photographs of Earl Charles Spencer's wife leaving an addictive disorders clinic and moved to the Daily Mirror where he was warned for a breach of the Code of Conduct and using insider information when he purchased £67,000 worth of Viglen shares in his first wife's name the day before the Daily Mirror's City Slickers column tipped Viglen as a good buy, sending the shares soaring, his first wife soon becoming his former wife after his affair with a fellow journalist.
He was then sacked by the Mirror in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, authorising the newspaper's publication of photographs allegedly showing Iraqi prisoners being abused by British Army soldiers and after discovering they were fakes, refused to apologise, stating that the abuse shown in the photographs is similar to the sort of abuse which was happening in the British Army in Iraq at the time.
He is also currently under police investigation for his role in phone hacking allegations during his time as Mirror editor and don't expect Jeremy Clarkson to appear on any of his shows anytime soon, the former Top Gear presenter has vowed to punch him on sight.
The Clarkson row started after the Mirror obtained printed paparazzi photographs of Clarkson kissing a woman who wasn't his wife and Clarkson then punched him at the 2004 Press Awards to cheers from the watching journalists.
Piers Moron as Ian Hislop calls him, may finally be doing a bit of good but that's finally after a career of being a massive, massive idiot.

Jesus To Protect Church Goers?

Despite a death toll fast approaching 100,000, Donald Trump has labeled churches and other houses of worship as 'essential' and demanded that they reopen which will delight the two-thirds of Americans who believe that the Covid-19 outbreak is a message from God according to a poll by the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
As posted here, one US pastor who defied social-distancing rules to host large congregations and said that: 'God is larger than this dreaded virus', died after contracting Coronavirus but obviously the threat of many of their flock dying painfully is less important than an empty collection plate and anyway, as one Pastor explained this morning 'Jesus will Protect Us'.
I put this to Jesus himself on Zoom who stroked his beard thoughtfully and replied that he used to be quite handy with a hammer and nails and could 'maybe knock up a few partition screens' but otherwise he wasn't sure what he could do.
When i explained that it was more spiritual help the religious folk were after he looked off into the middle distance and said that was more his dad's field and he was more the water into wine and doing stuff with bread type of guy.
I then asked if God would then be helping to keep his supporters safe from the Covid-19 virus he shrugged and said: 'to be honest, if he didn't save me from crucifixion, and i'm his only son, i don't hold out much hope for a bunch of people he don't know and anyway, he once killed almost every person on Earth with a flood so i don't think he is that fussed'.
I thanked his for his time and asked if before he went, did he have any advice for those religious American people who will be flocking to the churches this weekend to read passages from the Bible?
After a few seconds of thought he said: 'Probably don't read the Bible, hold it over your mouth and nose until you go home' and with that he disconnected.

Dim Dom Cummings

The Government can twist and turn in all sorts of circles to try and justify their advisor Dominic Cummings driving 260 miles to self isolate along with his wife and 4 year old child in his parents house while everyone else was told, not requested, but instructed to stay at home, save the NHS and save lives.
The Government made it clear it wasn't up for debate, on 18 March the PM said: 'Everyone - everyone - must follow the advice to protect themselves and their families so stay at home for seven days if you think you have the symptoms' and 'Children should not be left with older grandparents'.
They doubled down on the advice four days later saying: 'People must remain in their primary residence. Leaving your home, the place you live, to stay at another home is not allowed' which pretty much covers everything Dominic Cummings didn't do.
As his wife had Covid-19 symptoms, he packed her and his 4 year old into the car and drove to the other end of England to stay with his parents which contravenes everything the Government said a week before.
The Government say that the Police never spoke to Cummings or his family in Durham about his travels although the Police spokesman have said: 'On Tuesday, March 31, our officers were made aware of reports that an individual had traveled from London to Durham and was present at an address in the city. Officers made contact with the owners of that address who confirmed that the individual in question was present and was self-isolating in part of the house. In line with national policing guidance, officers explained to the family the arrangements around self-isolation guidelines and reiterated the appropriate advice around essential travel'.
We can expect Boris Johnson to now self-isolate for the next four years in case anyone asks him an awkward question but in every conceivable way Dominic Cummings broke the lock-down rules and it is not only outrageous for the Government to try and defend him but just when you think they can’t sink any lower in their mismanagement of the crisis, they manage it yet again.

Special Guest Blogger: Paul Gaugin

Before becoming a painter i was a successful, and rich, stockbroker but after my marriage fell apart i was a poor tarpaulin salesman so began painting full time and ended up the Caribbean island of Martinique but it was so hot i returned to France and my paintings were displayed with van Gogh's brother buying 3 of them and that was when i was introduced to Vincent and he asked me to stay at his home.
Van Gogh and i were polar opposites, i was sane but he was mental and so damn high maintenance. He was increasingly prone to extreme mood swings and becoming clingier by the day, more than once i would sometimes awaken to find the nut standing over my bed, just staring at me. He even once threw a glass at my head, which is why i threatened to strangle him in his sleep and he never did it again.
Afraid of being left alone he had the brainwave of inviting more artists to our house and making it a sort of commune, which i politely declined and said i was off to Tahiti and van Gogh lost it, attacking me with a straight razor.
I stormed out of the house, so van Gogh chopped off his own ear and gave it to his favorite prostitute, because everyone grieves in their own way.
Not wanting to be around the sort of guy who attacks you with a razor when you announce you are going on a vacation, i headed off to a tropical paradise and left him alone with his tears and the cat sniffing around the slab of bloody ear meat on the floor.
I stayed in Tahiti for for a couple of years but after running out of funds and being diagnosed with cardiovascular syphilis, i returned to France, had my ankle shattered in a drunken brawl and my syphilis was causing me problems so returned to Tahiti and then Marquesas and died a couple of years later found by my neighbour who in the traditional Marquesan way, chewed on my head in an attempt to revive me.

Special Guest Blogger: Amy Winehouse

In the music industry, there's no such thing as a drug scandal because everyone expects us musicians to be on drugs anyway and they would be a little disappointed if they found out we weren't, so no disappointment from me then because i was on drugs big time.
The drugs and drink never really affected my performances that much, i sometimes forgot what city i was in, the lyrics of my songs or when trying to introduce them, the names of the members of my band but otherwise, no real effect.
I had such a determination that even with a body full of heroin i would just carry on knowing that it was a constant game of Russian Roulette which i would lose in the end but nobody could have been surprised when it ended like it did.
It takes some cojones for an alcoholic junkie to write a hit song about refusing to go to rehab but i was no tragic figure, i refused to exorcise my booze and drug demons, and my death made sense that was always destined to happen, eventually succumbing and became a member of the afterlife's rowdiest super band, the 27 Club.
When i died my blood alcohol level was five times the legal driving limit as befits a wild party monster and the last thing i remember was being watched over by my imaginary friend. I didn't really, im joking. We fell out after he stole my imaginary handbag.
I was so full of chemicals that the coroners needed a periodic table to perform the autopsy and i did hear a joke that after i was cremated the ashes had a street value of £500,000 but that's fair, i dropped dead at age 27 which was about three years after my dignity did.
With hindsight, i probably really should have gone to rehab.

Special Guest Blogger: Alexander Fleming

TIME Magazine called me a short, gentle, retiring Scot with somewhat dreamy blue eyes, fierce white hair and a mind with the thrust of a cobra, you could say they broke the mould when i discovered Penicillin (see what i did there) which was all down to me being a bit of a slob.
While serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a bacteriologist studying wound infections, i discovered that the antiseptics the Army was using to treat wounds were doing more harm than good and more soldiers were dying from antiseptic treatment than from the infections so i set up some experiments to see what would kill the bacteria.
I messed around a bit with a few experiments but i was getting nowhere so i left my London lab for a two-week holiday to Scotland without bothering to clean up first.
When i returned, i found the stack of dirty dishes i'd left in the sink and petri dishes smeared with mould and upon closer inspection i noticed an unusual mould growing on one of the dishes which had inhibited the growth of bacteria and wrote a paper about it but didn't think it could actually be used to help anyone, so i ignored it and moved on, firstly cleaning up my work bench not realising that what i had discovered was penicillin.
Meanwhile, over the next decade a few other scientists read my report and started working on isolating the active component of the mould that i had described and reproduced the antibiotic properties of penicillin as well as figuring out a way to mass produce it.
It felt a bit of a cheek to accept the Nobel Prize alongside the scientists who actually did all the work when my true role was literally forgetting to clean up before i went on holiday but i accepted it anyway.
I may have accidentally saved countless lives, spawned a massive pharmaceutical industry, and earned myself a knighthood and the Nobel Prize but most importantly i gave messy people everywhere a reason to take pride in their untidiness and the reason for Mrs. Fleming to hire a cleaner.

Maybe They Did Follow The Science Afterall

As the UK Government have been making a point of clearly saying that all their decisions were based on the science, it was only a matter of time until they blamed their mistakes on the scientists and it began yesterday with a Minister saying 'if the science was wrong, advice at the time was wrong. I'm not surprised people think we made the wrong decisons' and normally i would take it as a pathetic excuse to deflect the blame but then you need to consider what the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr Jenny Harris was saying at the time.
She has been part of the Governments 5pm broadcasts for months and wow has she been giving out some duff advice on it.
She said cancelling outdoor events wasn’t necessary as: 'the virus doesn't last very long outdoors' therefore allowing the 250,000 racing fans to attend the Cheltenham Festival and announcing that other large sporting events: 'are not seen to be something which is going to have a big effect'. Ouch.
She also said that she supported the government decision to keep schools open while schools across Europe they were closing their doors and in response to criticism that NHS staff needed more Personal Protection Equipment, Dr Harris said that: 'the country has a perfectly adequate supply of PPE'. Ooof.
Ultimately the Politicians have the final say and the decisions have been ponderously awful but if they were getting advice like that, then i have some sympathy with them as afterall the Medical Team are the Experts and the one's who should be guiding them and as yet the scientists are not saying much.
Perhaps if they released the advice that they gave to the Politicians, and it is is shown that Boris Johnson's Government ignored or didn't actually 'follow the science' as they suggested it may clear them but recalling the words of Dr Harris, they may deservedly be the fall guys here.

Plump Trump

Nancy Pelosi has said that Donald Trump is morbidly obese and at 243lb (17.3 stone, 110.2kg) he is the third weightiest President ever to haul his wide load into the Oval Office after William Taft followed by Grover Cleveland but at 6ft 3in, Trump’s BMI would be 34 which the NHS would class as obese and you would need to have a BMI above 40 to be morbidly obese so Nancy got it wrong, he is just obese.
Plump Trump is not the most overweight World leader though, North Korea's well upholstered Kim Jung Un breaks the scales at 290 lb (20.7 stone, 130kg, ) which takes some doing in a country where most are starving and Nicolas 'Meaty' Maduro, the President of Venezuela, Baron 'Wide-load' Waqa of Nauru and Samoa's beefy Tuilaepa Malielegaoi are all in the same sturdily built league and you wouldn't want to be in their way when the buffet opened.
Our very own Boris 'jelly belly' Johnson weighed in at 17 stone 7 lbs when he was admitted at St Thomas' with Coronavirus and with the way his Government is coming under increasing pressure over their mishandling of the crisis, he has a lot on his plate in both ways.
In response to Pelosi's observations that Trump may have a bit of a weight problem, he called her: 'a sick woman' with 'a lot of mental problems' to which the proper response should be 'She's mental? You suggested people drink bleach you orange dingbat'.
As it is he admitted to taking a malaria drug that is not recommended by his own medical staff and actually led to more deaths when tested in hospital so the race is on whether it is his obesity or the drugs which will do for him first, i'm no paramedic but my money is on the arteries rebelling because judging by the pictures, the only way he would be 17.3 stone is if like his head, his legs were also hollow.

Special Guest Blogger: Douglas Engelbart

I absolutely guarantee that when you saw my name up there, squeezed between van Gogh and Alexander Fleming you thought who the bloody hell is that but i invented the one thing that you're probably touching right now, the Computer Mouse.
Beside creating that thing that we all use every single goddamn day, my role in the personal-computing revolution was huge, contributing to technologies like hypertext, networked computers, and the graphical user interface but it was early on when i was pondering a better way to interact with my computer monitor and using my experience of being a radar operator in the Navy during World War II and used their setup which featured a stylus to move a cursor around the screen.
On our patent i called it 'An X-Y position indicator for a display system' but we needed a more snappier name and i have seen that it is called a Mouse which is an acronym for 'Manually Operated User Select Equipment' but sorry to piss on that particular campfire but i called it a mouse because it's cord looked like a tail or something but thought if it ever became popular then someone would give it a proper name but nobody ever did.
I never received any royalties for the invention, my employer SRI patented the mouse and licensed it to Apple Computer for something like $40,000.
I died of kidney failure peacefully in my sleep but i don't know if anyone tried to revive me by jiggling me, banging me down a few times and repeatedly pressing the space bar.

Special Guest Blogger: Vincent van Gogh

So lets get this ear thing out the way first, my pal and fellow painter Paul Gauguin says he wants to leave our home and we argued. I failed to convince him with words, so i tried violence and attacked him but Gauguin was a lot better at violence them me and kicked the living crap out of me.
I idolised Gauguin, and was ecstatic when he agreed to move in with me in France. What i didn't know was that Gauguin was a colossal dick.
At first, everything was fine. We merged our finances and even shared household chores with me buying the groceries and Gauguin cooked but hated Arles where we lived, saying he didn't find the women attractive enough.
He announced out of the blue one day that he was buggering off to Tahiti and that was the last straw, i screamed at him, he went out slamming the door so to spite him i cut off my ear which with hindsight is more spiting myself than spiting him but i had a few mental issues not helped by the litres of Absinthe liquor i consumed daily.
After a trip to the hospital, i was put into a mental asylum which is where i put the finishing touches on my most famous masterpiece, Starry Night, and tried to repeatedly kill myself by ingesting my paint and paraffin.
I spent my last few months between hospital and gave the doctor who treated me a painting as thanks which he used to repair the floor of his chicken coop.
My depression grew worse and one day i had enough and walked to a wheat field and shot myself in the chest but unbelievably the bullet missed all my vital organs and i walked back to town and got treated by a doctor but died two days later from an untreated infection resulting from the bullet wound.
The irony is that in my life i sold 1 painting for about £9 but the gun i used to sort of kill myself with sold for £144,000 and my painting Laboureur Dans Un Champ sold for £100m. Too late, far too late.

Special Guest Blogger: Walt Disney

Straight off, my body is not cryogenically frozen to preserve it in the hope that one day in the future, technology would be able to bring me back to life because if it is then who the hell was that they cremated?
I don't know where the rumor started, i may have been rich and a bit crazy and it probably sounds like something i would do, but i never.
My story begins with a pet mouse i had as a kid but my first cartoon was of a rabbit i called Oswald and sold to Universal who stitched me up so i made up my own company and replaced Oswald the Lucky Rabbit with Mortimer Mouse who looked suspiciously identical to Oswald but with mouse ears instead of rabbit ears.
My wife said Mortimer was a sucky name so we changed it to Mickey but failed to find a distributor for the first couple of cartoons but Steamboat Willie hit a chord for some reason and was snort-milk-out-of-your-nose hilarious for most in those simpler times and we were off and running but not all my cartoons were success and the critics seemed to hate most things i did.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs almost bankrupt me straight away (review: badly drawn) but it was a roaring success with the public and i followed it up with Pinocchio (review: superior to Snow White) and Fantasia (review: Vulgar) but both films sunk at the box-office and we were once again facing bankruptcy.
Dumbo was the turning point and did well which was lucky because Bambi (review: the worst insult) bombed and we were back in hock so it was lucky i was getting paid by the FBI for grassing up 'Communists agitators'. 
Cinderella (review: nostalgically lovely charmer), Alice in Wonderland (review: Will drive lovers of Lewis Carroll to frenzy) and Peter Pan (review: Slaughtered Barrie's book) pulled us back to profit and then i hit upon the idea of a amusement park full of the films characters and Disneyland was born.
Such was the success that i began planning for a city fit for the future of the world to inhabit but before it got off the drawing board the chain smoking caught up with me and i died of lung cancer and was cremated two days later, not cryogenically frozen, CREMATED!

Governments Changing Message

Since the UK Government began the daily briefings, they have been showed a chart comparing the UK to other nations but it obviously got a bit uncomfortable as we moved towards the top of the chart because they suddenly stopped showing it and explained that it was unreliable because: 'We now publish data that includes all deaths in all settings and not all countries do that so I’m not sure that the international comparison works'.
Luckily the Worldometers website has continued collecting the international figures and the UK is not looking good no matter what search query we pick.
The UK sits 4th for Total Cases with 243,303, 4th for New Cases (3,142), 2nd for Total Deaths (34,636), 6th for Deaths per 1 million population (511), and 38th for tests per 1m of population. Population size and nations being at different stages of the outbreak makes it hard to compare nations like for like but to use the figures for seven weeks and then quietly stop showing them because we have broken out of the pack is cynical but not as much as the use of the much mentioned Reproduction or R number which suddenly, the government isn't so sure is quite so important.
Boris Johnson told the nation that: 'keeping the R rate down is absolutely vital to our recovery' and 'Whatever we do, we must take care that the R does not exceed one' and the easing of any lock-down measures will be conditional to that factor, and with a R number last week between 0.6 and 0.9, it was precariously close before the light easing of this week.
The government's scientific advisory committee SAGE announced that the R rate had gone up and is now between 0.7 and 1 and it went from being absolutely vital to being important but the real outcome that we're looking for is a reduction in the number of cases and 'That is the focus, not R. and 'one of the tests is that it isn't above one…the data confirms that test'.
Support for Boris Johnson's handling of the crisis stood at 72% on 23 March when he announced the lock-down, the same poll this weekend found only 47% still thought the same.

Darwin's Law For Covid-19 Protesters

Part of me thinks that the people that are protesting against the lock-down should be left to get on with it, call it Darwin's Law of natural selection, if you are stupid enough to protest against your Government trying to keep you alive then the Gene Pool will benefit from you not being around to pass on your genes to the next generation.
Fortunately the protests were very small but just like those waving banners about lack of freedom in America, it does detract from your message somewhat if you turn up in masks and keep to social distancing measures, especially if you are branding the whole virus thing a hoax.
The other part of me worries that they are going to turn up for an hour, wave their banners and look like idiots for an hour and then take the virus back home to their families and it isn't their fault they have such an idiot parent or sibling.
One day we will have a vaccine for Coronavirus but unfortunately no vaccination will be available for stupid.

Special Guest Blogger: Sun Tzu

War, i wrote, is not won by superior might, but by subversion, deceit and trickery and considering i wrote a book called 'The Art of War', i am generally considered a reliable source on good War ideas and it has influenced military strategy ever since.
Even over 2 millennia later, it is still being studied with even the American General Norman Schwarzkopf employing principles during the Gulf War and Afghan although i'm not sure about the bit about shooting your own side and bombing wedding parties, that was pure American philosophy, nothing to do with me.
My work focuses much more on alternatives to battle, such as strategy and alternatives to war itself, the usefulness of making allies and the use of subversion, deceit and trickery to overcome more powerful foes.
My skills of making anyone into a soldier was tested by the King of Wu who told me to train a harem of 360 of his concubines so i appointing his two favourite concubines into commanders and gave them a simple order infront of the other 358, to spin around.
When they stood there giggling i executed them and told the rest that if a soldiers understood their commands but did not obey, they were of no use to me and it worked because after that they were prefect, a tactic copied by the Roman Legion later to great effect. 
Napoleon apparently studied my works in his campaigns and Ho Chi Minh translated the work for his Vietnamese officers to study and they kicked arse in their wars against France and America but though i handed out advice like sweeties, it wasn't always about winning, i said that a decent general will know when to fight and when not to fight and the truly wise warrior avoids the battle and if a battle cannot be won, don't fight it.
I also said if you find yourself fighting a war in a cold climate, pee in your pants and stay warm but that one doesn't get so much attention.

A Decade of Tory Rule

Today is the official 10th Birthday of the Conservative Party being handed the keys to 10 Downing Street and we have been through a decade of Conservative rule under David Cameron, Theresa May and now Boris Johnson although the general rule of 'are we better off today then we were when they took over' is not easy to consider under the current climate but they must have done some things right, mustn't they? 
One of the the very first actions of the Government in 2010 was to announce drastic cuts to public services ushering in a decade of austerity while dropping the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45% and raised tuition fees to £9,000 a year.
Any savings were quickly negated by the £1bn spent bombing Libya and then there was more austerity and cuts to the NHS with the loss of 44 hospital and tens of thousands of nurses with the Health Minister picking a fight with junior doctors over a new contract which extended their working hours.
Then there was Brexit with David Cameron's decision for a referendum which has split the country ever since and then Theresa May took over from Cameron and swiftly cut disability benefits and continued with her policy of deporting British citizens as part of her 'hostile environment policy'.
More austerity followed, the number of food banks and homeless sky-rocketed as she said 'she didn't have a magic money tree' but Boris Johnson replaced her after she failed to get her Brexit deal through Parliament and he unlawfully prorogued parliament, hid in a fridge to avoid an interview and after a scandalous first few months on the job, made awful decisions over the Coronavirus outbreak.
Allowing sport to continue and the Cheltenham Festival attended by 250,000 at the same time as everybody else was locking-down their citizens, Britain now has the second highest death toll from Coronavirus in the world behind the USA.
So there we have it, a decade of the Conservatives in Downing Street and with Brexit around the corner, a recession to overcome and a response to Covid-19 led by a man who boasted about shaking hands with Coronavirus and then almost dying of it himself.
Still, stay alert because we have at least another five years of this to come.

Special Guest Blogger: William McKinley

I was proud to become the 25th president of the United States and not so proud to become the third to become assassinated but i was a man of peace or at least during my campaign trail, within six months of become President i was declaring war with the Spanish in a war over Cuba.
I also promised to help the Blacks but after i got my hands on the White House keys, i ended up doing very little for them but mostly i was a man of faith who avoided alcohol, never swore or smoked and avoided all sin including sex.
I believed that the government had a duty to spread Christianity to all those heathen nations and if the chance came along, maybe Democracy as well but mainly religion as i believed that America was not as religious as it should be.
I always thought that abstinence should be taught at school, the younger generation are very ignorant about sex because it's not just about rubbing your belly buttons together and then waiting for the stork to leave the baby behind a bush.
My legacy was suddenly cut short when Leon Czolgosz, a Polish-American with anarchist leanings walked up to me and shot me twice with a pistol hidden in his handkerchief.
Luckily the pistols back then were rubbish but unluckily so where the doctors and although the bullets never killed me straight away, the medical teams were only able to find one of the bullets and the other one gave me gangrene and it was the infection which killed me.
As i lay on my deathbed, i used my last few breaths to sing my favourite hymn, 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' but one verse in i was a lot nearer then i wanted to be and as i died my life flashed before me and my dying thought was, i really should have had more sex.

The Boris Roadmap

The penny seems to have dropped with someone in the Trump team that he is not to be trusted in company without saying something racist, stupid or stupidly racist so he is being kept away from the cameras which is the same tactic the UK Government is taking with Boris Johnson especially after his car crash of a speech on Sunday when he told us, well, nobody is sure what he told us but STAY ALERT anyway.
He waffled about following the science but didn't explain why our science is different to everybody else's science but if he had followed the science of South Korea or Hong Kong things may not be so bad that he had to stop comparing us to other nations at the Daily briefings, only the USA is now above us at the top of the grim League Table and they have a certified moron running their show.
The promised 100k daily tests target has been reached just twice and both times that was by fudging the results to count tests posted out so not actual tests and the NHS app is proving to be as reliable as a Tory pledge to save the NHS.
At least we have Boris's roadmap to get us out of lock-down which judging by everything he has done, hopefully takes in some ICU's of Hospitals on the route because this is far from over.

Special Guest Blogger: Spencer Perceval

Anthony Eden may be top of most lists of worst Prime Minister's ever but my name usually crops up somewhere towards the top of these lists also but to be fair my greatest claim to fame is being the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated.
My three years as leader was dominated by being surrounded by a bunch of nutters in my cabinet, after one meeting two of them went outside to fight a duel and another one was sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower of London for writing inappropriate letters to people.
While all that was going on we had Napoleon rampaging across Europe, the industrial revolution leading to riots by oppressed workers, King George being declared as nutty as a fruitcake and his son who hated me, running things and then as if that isn't enough, the bloody Luddites began smashing up looms.
At home i had a wife and thirteen children so the last thing i needed whilst knee deep in crying infants and poopy nappies is to be told that a bunch of textile workers have gone rogue on top of everything else.  
Surprisingly in my short time i managed to get quite a bit done, i stopped Catholic emancipation and an attempt to reform Parliament, successfully conducted the war against Napoleon and pushed for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
I also banned hunting, gambling and adultery and was on my way into Parliament to see which of my cabinet had been locked up or shot that day when John Bellingham stepped forward in the lobby of the House of Commons, drew a pistol and shot me in the chest.
He was a merchant who believed he had been unjustly imprisoned in Russia and was entitled to compensation which i had denied so in revenge he made sure i would have an asterisk beside my name in future history books.

Special Guest Blogger: Vladimir Lenin

Trotsky, Stalin and i were the main protagonists behind the Communist Revolution but mad Joe was very much the brawn and it was Trotsky and i who were the brains but Stalin outlived us both, mostly due to Trotsky finding an ice pick stuck in his head and me having a series of strokes and dying six years after taking power. 
I did feel what Communism needed was a massive building so designed the tallest building in the World shaped like a cube, topped by a pyramid with a cylinder shape leaning over it surrounded by rotating steel helices and outfitted with a giant projector to project propaganda onto clouds on overcast days.
Due to it being barking mad it obviously didn't happen but like all good leaders there was an assassination attempt on my life, this one by a woman called Fanny Kaplan who was ticked at us banning her Socialist party and thinking the best way to get her party back on track was to take me out.
So she fired three shots at me but i survived and showed her and her pals by having them all assassinated to prove that i could and promised that i would kill the crap out of anyone who opposed us but our Revolution could have faltered there if she had succeeded and Joseph Stalin wouldn't have been around to drag Russia kicking and screaming into whatever he dragged them into, i was too busy having a series of strokes to notice. 
After i died the peasantry took up my building weird buildings thread and went nutso for monuments to their fallen hero, displaying my corpse in a glass case wasn't good enough for these people who demanded something grand so Stalin blew up a beautiful church that was on the site for a 100-floor, 1,392-foot tower topped by a 260-foot-tall statue of me but the Nazis ruined things by starting a war for which materials were needed for railroads and military fortifications.
Unfortunately it never happened but ironically, they did build a replica of the church that was there in the first place.

Paying The Coronavirus Bill

Once the Coronavirus threat is over, the UK Government will have to decide how it pays the bill which is expected to be as much as £337 billion and with even my limited knowledge of economics, when a countries economy starts to shrink they have two options to keep the coffers full, to raise tax to bring in more money or make cutbacks to reduce the amount they pay out.
The last time the British economy tanked this badly in 2008, the Government went for the cuts route and slashed at everything that was remotely slashable ushering in a decade of misery and despondency including in the NHS which was cut to the bone for which the repercussions are obvious now, the time when we really need it the most.
With very little left to cut, the tax raise option is the only one they really have open to them but the British tax system is so complicated with it's rate bands and personal allowance that it is not as easy as just putting a few pence on income tax.
As things stand if you earn under £12,500 then you don't pay any income tax at all, above that you pay tax at 20%, then 40% and then 45% depending on your income so there is some wiggle room there to increase the rate bands or tinker with the personal allowance so you start paying tax at a lower rate but that will hit the lower paid more than the higher earners.
Taxpayers who earn more and pay tax at the 40% and 45% rate are eligible for Charitable Donations Relief which reduces their tax bill if they make charitable donations although Charities would be concerned that scrapping this would hit the donations they receive.  
History show that dead people catching a killer virus don't bounce back but we have had enough recessions to know that the economy always does so the best option would seem to be keep things as they are and just live with the debt and rather than try and bring it back in a few years, swallow it for a decade or more because after emerging from a long bout of austerity, whatever the Government does to pay the bill, it will hurt.

Special Guest Blogger: Sid Vicious

Comparisons have been made with me and Nancy and Kurt Cobain and his wife Courtney Love but apart from a rampaging heroin addiction, there is no comparison.
Sure my relationship with Nancy was spent with the two of us beating the shit out of each other and doing heroin and so was Kurt and Courtney's but i stabbed Nancy to death and died of an overdose and last time i looked Kurt had blown his head off and Courtney Love is still alive doing something, not sure what but to be fair but then nobody really knew what her skill was when she was doing it.
I first met Johnny Rotten, or John Lydon as he was then, at Hackney Technical College in 1973 which was when Lydon nicknamed me 'Sid Vicious' after his skanky hamster Sid bit me and i said Sid's Vicious and that became my nickname.
I began hanging around Malcolm McLaren's and Vivienne Westwood's clothing store, SEX, with the likes of Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sue before she formed her group, The Banshees, who i played drums for a few times.
I  was considered for the position of lead singer for the Damned, but the bastards deliberately gave me the wrong address for the audition and Dave Vanian got the job, i did lob a glass at him at a Damned gig afterwards but i missed and accidentally blinded a girl instead. Oops.
After Glen Matlock fell out with the Sex Pistols, McLaren bought me in as the Sex Pistols Bass player, not for my bass playing skills because i couldn't play for shit, but because i had the image he wanted although due to a dirty heroin needle, i was hospitalised with hepatitis during the recording of our only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, and only played bass on one song – 'Bodies' although Steve Jones even overdubbed that later.
Our last gig in England was a private Christmas Day gig for the children of striking firefighters where we gave out presents, food, and even played some of our songs, tastefully rewritten for the young audiences and Johnny dressed up as Santa.
After an unsuccessful tour of America, the band split and i went sort of solo, playing gigs with the original supergroup of Mick Jones of the Clash, original Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, Rat Scabies of the Damned and the New York Dolls' Arthur Kane, Jerry Nolan, and Johnny Thunders.
Obviously i was always going to die of a massive drug overdose and i did but no funeral home was willing to hold a funeral or cremation for me but someone must have done because my ashes are sprinkled over Nancy's grave in Pennsylvania.

Feeling Hungry?

It is said that you learn something new everyday and today i learnt that all ingredients used for pet food have to be fit for human consumption according to EU requirements.
It doesn't seem to be the case elsewhere in the World where standards are different but in the European Union, pet food is regulated and requires that pet food which uses bits and pieces that a human cannot eat is clearly labelled 'Pet Food Only'.
As most pet foods is made from the scraps left on the bone after he best bits have been removed and then blasted off, this is the same process used for sausages and chicken nugget type foods and most people people seem to manage to eat those okay, or feed them to their children at any rate then it makes sense.
If you have found yourself looking at that can of Rover's Pedigree Chum jealously, dig in but after a few days of tucking into Chicken in a nourishing marrowbone jelly you find you have the urge to get close to a lamp-post, it may be time to cut back a bit.

Special Guest Blogger: King Edward VIII

My brother George was always my fathers favourite, he disapproved of my playboy lifestyle and once said that my affairs with married women and reckless behaviour would see me ruined within 12 months when i became King, sorry daddy dearest but you got that wrong, it was 11 months. 
While Prince of Wales, waiting for Daddy to die, i was packed off on a tour of Australia and when asked about the indigenous Australians the revolting journalists tried to embarrass me and paint me as a racist. What i actually said about the Aborigines was that they were 'the most revolting form of living creatures I've ever seen and the lowest known form of human beings and the nearest thing to monkeys' and what do the press do? They take it completely out of context and make me look a complete arse.
I was introduced to my future wife, Wallis Simpson, by a peer whose wife i was having an affair with but as she was a two time divorced American, i had to hide our affair from my family but then my father went and died and i became King and i announced that Wallis and I were to marry and that was when the smelly brown stuff really hit the fan, and by smelly brown stuff i don't mean an Indigenous Australian.
The problem was as King i was head of the Church of England and one of the silly rules the CoE has is that remarriage after divorce is not allowed so when the Prime Minister said that the British public would deem the marriage morally unacceptable, i called their bluff and said in that case i would have to abdicate.
They called my bluff straight back and basically said 'feck off then' and after just 326 days as King, i handed over the throne to my brother George and went to live in Austria.
I did meet with Adolf Hitler and his gang and they promised to reinstate me as King and while it is true that i did have sympathies towards the Fascists, those bloody journalists tried to make me look bad again by twisting my words, i simply that Hitler was a nice chap and that countries should be guided by the policies of Nazi Germany but they tried to make me sound like i was Seig Heiling and giving Nazi Salutes all over the place which i was but still, don't believe everything what you read in the papers people.

Bernie Sanders And The $17m

As i mentioned a few times before, i somehow found myself on Bernie Sanders election email list and i would receive daily updates of how it was going and on the bottom of each email was a big CONTRIBUTE button requesting a donation of $2.70.
Not being American i of course never donated a bean to him but many people must have done because according to the the New York Times, the 2020 Sanders campaign raised an impressive $214 million.
I say impressive, it is dwarfed by the $750 Barack Obama spent in 2008 White House bid and the $985 in 2012 and the $957M Donald Trump spent to win in 2016 but you have to feel for Hillary Clinton who spent an amazing $1.4 billion who then went and inexplicably lost to him.
As i never topped up Bernies coffers with my $2.70, approximately £2.20 in British money, despite him (possibly) getting a long-time missing light-bulb installed above my garage door , when he pulled out of the election in January to leave the floor to Joe Biden, it meant little to me although it did give me a chance to air my little joke that the biggest threat to both men left in the race, both being 70 plus, was Coronavirus and i went on about my business feeling proud of myself.
I did see the other day that Sanders campaign spent $197 million and even with my bad grasp of Mathematics and using the fingers on both hands and borrowing a few from a colleague, that $214 minus $197 means that he left the campaign $17m up.
Hey, what happens to...started an email to the New York Times who have come up with the answer and it's not they keep it as i half expected, they have to abide by Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules by either putting it towards their next race, use it to 'close' their campaign whatever that means or return it to the giver although as that option came with a little smiley emoji, i'm guessing that the option of just giving it back isn't the first choice.
I don't know what he has done with the spare $17m, i just hope that nobody checks his expenses sheet and sees 'light bulb acquisition $17m' on it because if it has, i'm glad i never asked him to chase up the missing recyling bin as well, especially as i never coughed up the $2.70 in the first place.

Employment Risks From Covid-19

A day after Boris Johnson fumbled his way through an announcement that he wants to get people back to work, The Office of National Statistics has released some intriguing figures about which professions are most at risk, and surprisingly it is not the Health Sector.
We already know that men are more at risk than women, for males of working age the rate is 9.9 deaths per 100,000 with 5.2 deaths per 100,000 females, and that compared to white people, the black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) communities are disproportionately affected with black African descent 3·5 times higher of catching the disease, black Caribbean 1.7 higher and Pakistani descent 2.7 times.
Security guards, chefs and taxi drivers are among those most likely to die from COVID-19 according to the new figures and then plant processing workers, construction workers, prison officers, opticians and bus and coach drivers are also among those with the highest Coronavirus death rates but surprisingly healthcare workers like doctors and nurses are not in the most dangerous professions although all Healthcare roles including dental nurses, paramedics, nurses and doctors dominate the list of occupations most exposed to the virus.
The ONS said its analysis: 'does not prove conclusively that the observed rates of death involving COVID-19 are necessarily caused by differences in occupational exposure' but it does confirm that some jobs have higher death rates from COVID-19 than others.
It should, but won't, cause pause for thought for employers, especially as many of the occupations most at risk at at the lower end of the pay-scale and dismissed by the Home Secretary recently, as low skilled with regards to her post-Brexit immigration policy.

Special Guest Blogger: Rock Hudson

Something which dogged my whole career was the rumour that i was gay but i don't know how many times i had to say i wasn't but nobody ever believed me.
I was the epitome of the straight, masculine movie star of the '50s and '60s and when i went out it i said it was to pick up girlies, shirts stayed unlifted when i was around but i understood why some men stayed in the closet, it would have been career suicide to have come out in that day and age.
Unfortunately for me i was really bad at lying as my bisexuality was well known in Hollywood but i maintained the public lie until my AIDS diagnosis brought public attention to the disease and my sexual orientation.
I had to keep my gay life a secret because in the 1950s, being gay was like being a Communist, only with more lube and less vodka but when you look like me, it's not easy to go too long without a penis or vagina finding you.
I married my secretary Phyllis Gates but it was just a publicity stunt to stop all the gay rumors although i think the vicar was trying to give the game away at the wedding service. 
When he asked me if i took Phyllis to be my unlawfully wedded wife for as long as it kept me out the gossip columns i almost choked but it was the line about you may now kiss the Best Man which almost blew it.
I starred with some of the best actors of the time Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Doris Day and James Dean and on the set of the film Giant, we argued constantly and Dean called me a fairy but it turned out he was playing the pink oboe as much as i was.
As i become the first major U.S. celebrity to die of AIDS, my death did raise public awareness of the epidemic and the use of condoms which back then were thick and insensitive but unfortunately for me the only thick insensitive thing i found was my Giant co-star.

How To Win A Burping Competition

You have down the monopoly, droughts has lost its attraction and there are only so many games of connect 4 that you can play so the natural progression is to have a burping competition, although that may just be my son and husband.
As with most things, there is a science behind the art of the perfect belch so i cheated and asked a real life scientist what is the best thing to induce a real, winning belch.
First the sceince bit, swallowing air is the most common cause of burping, this excess gas will always find an exit route somewhere downwards or upwards and as generations of small babies have discovered, some gentle manipulation  of the stomach and a back rub helps maneuver the wind in the right direction.
Using a scoring scale of peak for volume, earthiness and length of emission, the usualy weapon of choice is drinking lots of fizzy drinks through a straw and if you giving it a teeny weenie hole halfway up, the mix of the extra oxygen and carbon dioxide can be a winner but the gas gets released quickly and the winning stategy is to hold down several separate belches and then stringing them together in one long satisfying release.
Eating sherbert and sucking lustilyon fizzy sweets is another good policy as they also contain carbon dioxide and continue to expel gas all the way down to the stomach producing a violent time bomb just waiting to happen but again short lived.
The scientific advice, if you are holding a burping competition is to go for the long game and eat a big meal very quickly, the action of the air being forced down your esophagus and pushed into the stomach and is sat on by the dinner you've just shoveled on top when the food shifts to one side the wind passes up again and the resulting velocity, volume and earthiness is unbeatable as the resulting belch erupts between the stomach and the esophagus whereas in the other methods, it occurs higher up in the esophagus.
So if you find yourself at home with teenage relatives who thinks a burping competition will be fun, stuff your face really fast and earn the respect of your younger relatives.

Insane in The Methane

Scientists estimate that it's believed that people emit wind in both of its forms around 10 to 15 times a day and as many people are spending as much as 23 hours locked in a confined environment with others, it is scientifically prudent to understand the trouser trumpet and which foodstuff produces the loudest and which smells the worst.
If anybody will know it is medical scientists at the Technological University Dublin and they have narrowed it down to four basics to produce the best (or worst) butt bongos.
Beans are renown for their gas inducing properties and the resulting heinie hiccup is distinctive in both noise and volume and fizzy drinks are particularly good for range and propulsion after all there's no point in creating an air biscuit if no one's going to smell it.
Sprouts are full of fiber and hard to digest so they ferment longer in the stomach and have a strong smell and eggs don't provide much in the way of a trouser trumpet but are certainly silent but deadly and what they lack in anal audio, they make up for in longevity.
As any Yoga teacher will attest to, movement and relaxing will get the gases moving and the mix of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane and hydrogen sulfide are highly inflammable as every schoolboy with a lighter and will agree.
So if you find yourself in a house full of people during lock-down with a cupboard full of beans, eggs, sprouts and fizzy drinks, which should be left to last? 
The bean booty bomb is not particularly loud but the smell is quite potent while the fecal fumes from eggs are rancid although the untraceable silent but violent nature makes it an excellent choice for one to blame on the dog.
The sprouts sphincter siren rivals eggs for smell and the resulting rump ripper will easily drown out the television while fizzy drinks will cause more botty coughs but they will be smaller, smell less and fade quicker.
The expert opinion then is in terms of quality of sound, the Back-end blowout from sprouts take the award but eggs are safer for slipping out those anonymous bung blasts. 
As for smell, the backside bazooka resulting from either eggs or sprouts will see windows being flung open but for a really impressive combination trouser cough, sprouts is the food to be left to the very end followed by an evening alone in the garden or the food of choice if you plan to sit on your annoying little brothers head at some point.

Special Guest Blogger: Herbert Hoover

I am probably most remembered for overseeing The Great Depression and for saying in my inauguration that i would rid America of the poor house, just months before the stock market crashed and sent America into the Great Depression along with skyrocketing unemployment, breadlines and towns of cardboard houses.
The irony is that up until the unfortunate worst financial disaster of all time depression business, i was best known for trying to ban radio stations but nobody seems to remember that, in the 1930s it was all big bands and swing music and i was sick to death of hearing Duke Ellington and that damn Glenn Miller 'In The Mood' song.
As the economy tanked and unemployment stood at 23% i had the brainwave that if i rolled back tax reductions and then increased it by 30% things would be put right but unfathomably that just seemed to make the poor even worse off, turns out the reverse Robin Hood where we take from the poor and give to the rich wasn't a winning strategy especially with the poor, so i next tried taking from the poor and giving back to the poor in benefits which again had no effect except a lot of protests and near riots.
I addressed my people and said let's not fight amongst ourselves and we should be targeting the idiot who keep the peasants in misery and they all agreed which is why my train and motorcades were pelted with eggs and rotten fruit, i was heckled while speaking, and on several occasions the Secret Service halted attempts to kill me by disgruntled citizens, including capturing one man carrying a stick of dynamite.
How he could afford dynamite after my economic cock-ups is a mystery but the voters decided the best thing to do was kick my butt out of office which they did.
I died of internal bleeding following an operation to have a growth on my intestine removed, turned out the surgeon was as inept at operations as i was at economics.