Special Guest Blogger: Elliot Ness

I was best known for leading a special Chicago task force known as 'The Untouchables' whose mission was to bring down the infamous gangster Al Capone.
Pretty ironic that the first thing i did when Prohibition ended was have a drink or 20 and i ended up a alcoholic but we got Capone for tax evasion although all the later films concentrate on my team, a movie where someone breaks down a graph of the taxpayer income and outgoings wouldn't have been half as exciting.
Capone and i lived on the same street for about five years but that was before i became a cop.
Prohibition wasn’t exactly popular in the US, and possibly the only thing more unpopular were the prohibition agents but we dumped thousands of gallons of beer and alcohol in the sewers.
Chicago had become one of the most crime-ridden cities in the US and the Chicago Crime Commission promised to do something about Al Capone. The Bureau of Internal Revenue was already investigating him for tax fraud, but they were hoping to get him faster on prohibition violation charges.
Capone offered me $2,000 to look the other way, but i refused the bribe despite the fact that it would have been almost as much as i made in a year, untouchable remember.
Trying to take down mobsters is dangerous work, and i wasn’t immune to some of the perils of the job. I had my car stolen three separate times, my office phone line was tapped, my parents watched, and three assassination attempts were made on me as well as one of my friends getting shot in the face four times.
After Capone i got a job as Chicago's safety director tasked with getting the traffic problem under control. Cleveland was the second-worst American city for traffic-related deaths and injuries but that came to a screeching halt which is something my car never did when i drove it into a lamppost while driving drunk.
Not my finest moment and i didn't actually bring down Capone but that's what everyone thinks so let's just go with that.

Special Guest Blogger: Harry Houdini

There is a reason why career advisor's never suggest being tied into a straight-jacketed and lowered into a shark tank wearing trousers made from pork chops but despite coming up with ideas that always began with me thinking 'let's see if this will kill me', i hardly ever injured myself.
I was shackled and buried under six feet of dirt but the earth was too heavy and i couldn't breath so managed to poke my hand through like i was in a zombie flick before passing out and my assistants pulled me out but that was about as close as i came to dying.
I started out performing card tricks and simple illusions but i wasn't very good at it so began escaping from handcuffs and the tricks got more and more elaborate and before i knew it i was upside down in a tank of water but there was no great secret to my escapes, in many cases, i would have access to a key secreted in my hair. What, you thought i wore that weird centre parting as a fashion statement?
For a few years, i used trap doors in my illusions, it was just a stage i was going through. Yeah, i wasn't a very good comedian either.
While i fooled people, i took serious the “spiritualists” who claimed they could put people in contact with their dead loved ones and i had a huge bust-up with Arthur Conan Doyle but my death was a real punch in the gut, mainly because it came about due to a real punch in the guts.
After a show in Montreal, Canada, a punk kid wanted to test the claim that i could take a punch in the stomach unharmed and the snotty kid ran up and punched me in the belly, rupturing my appendix.

The Impressive Doctor

During an uncharacteristic bout of common sense, the Donald Trump team decided that him fronting the Coronavirus daily briefings where he advocated drinking bleach and playing down the hundred of thousands dead Americans was not a vote winner so they stopped them him doing altogether.
Seeing his poll figures dying like a Trump supporter who’s just mainlined a litre bottle of Harpic on the advice of their president, they decided to take a chance and let him infront of the cameras again and two days later he is defending his support for Dr Stella Immanuel who claims that people didn't need to wear masks and advocating the use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Coronavirus amongst her other beliefs that women can be impregnated by witches and demons in their dreams and saying a vaccine is being developed to make people immune to becoming religious.
When questioned he said that: 'she was very impressive' which is more than he has said about the leading US infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci who he accused him of making mistakes in his coronavirus guidance to the American people.
Joe Biden and his team must be looking on and wondering just why they are only 9 points in front of Trump but i would be worried about the 41% of Americans who look and listen to their President and think, yeah, he's doing a decent job.
With 100 days to go, and with Trump getting more and more desperate as he sees his job slipping away, we can expect the fun and craziness to go to a new level, pending the Trump Election team allow him anywhere near a microphone that is.

Special Guest Blogger: Rosa Parks

The most any of us has ever gotten out of a bus ride is covered in pee and chewing gum on the seat of our pants but that famous bus journey i took got the American civil rights movement rolling and all because i refused to relinquish my seat in the coloured section to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled.
Almost certainly i was only one lady in a long line of black women who refused to give up their seats but for that i was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, had my face plastered on a stamp and was named one of the most influential women of the 20th century which is not too shabby for a day's ride home after work.
My arrest for violating segregation laws led to the Montgomery bus boycott, which in turn increased exposure for the Civil Rights Movement and what went in my favour was that i looked like a mousey school-marm and my notoriety made me a target for every racist in America but i was nonthreatening and likable and that's how that's how over the next 65 years we ended racism in America forever. Didn't we?
Yes, i was fired from my job and received death threats for years afterwards but the real guy who kickstarted the whole civil rights movement was actually the racist guy who said to me, 'Get up, that's my seat', kinda backfired on him.
Ironically everyone keeps talking about how i stood up for civil rights but i didn't stand up at all, that was the whole point.

Special Guest Blogger: Mark Antony

I was one of the most well-known figures in the history of Ancient Rome, rubbing shoulders with Julius Caesar, Pompey and Cleopatra although it was famously various other body parts being rubbed together with Cleopatra.
I hooked up with her after Caesar found seven or eight knives thrust into his back and considering that Cleopatra's ancestors loved them some incest and the offspring were famously ugly mofo's, she was hot especially after a few jugs of some extra strong Roman wine and she had a brain which ancient scientists back then weren't even sure women possessed.
I had a great military career and had a talent for commanding which i certainly never got my from my father, he invaded Crete by mistake but i also had a talent for picking up the wives and girlfriends of my dead friends, my first wife was the widow of my friend Publius Pulcher and i had four other wives before Cleo.
It’s debated that i knew about what was being planned for Caesar and i did know and planned to tell him but i got distracted, distracted by his soon to be single, wealthy hot wife and anyway he had named his 19 year old punk nephew as his successor rather than me so pfft, whatever.
Weirdly, when the Roman Legion came looking for me, as there were no statues or paintings of me, they didn't know what i looked like but my death was a bit of a cock-up all round.  
After a series of battles, i heard a rumor that Cleopatra was dead, so i stabbed myself in despair. In an awkward turn of events, Cleopatra was still alive, but when she heard i had died, she poisoned herself soon after with a snake, she love a bit of drama that one.
My legacy didn't quite end there though, my daughters went on to give birth to three Roman emperors, Claudius, Caligula, and Nero so, one decent emperor and two murderous nutjobs which as it turned out was about right for Ancient Rome.

A Blue Christmas?

Looking out of the window today you would be forgiven for thinking that the British summer isn't that much different to a British winter but the experts are predicting that a second wave of Covid-19 is coming to the Northern Hemisphere and it will probably be in Autumn and winter which scuppers our plans for a pre-Christmas trip to Austria and Germany.
A medical person from London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine this morning explained gloomily that it will hit worse due to the other winter bugs, which will be circulating alongside Coronavirus and viruses survive outside the body better when it is cold and due to less UV light, which inactivates the virus.
We also gather indoors with closed windows more once the weather turns colder but their is a small hope that viruses can stop each other from gaining a foothold it the body due to the immune response to one infection preventing the next one from getting in which is why the UK is trying to immunise a record number of people against flu to triggers an innate immune response and inflammation and this initial response will protect the body from Coronavirus.
Christmas may look very different this year unless we have a vaccine by then which is looking more likely than the UK having a working app.

Trump Not Going Quietly

Although it isn't certain, it is looking more like America will get a grown up in charge following the Novermber Election but there are concerns that the 20 stone Orange lump currently sat in the Oval Office will just refuse to leave, claiming the result is rigged.
That America sits top of the Covid-19 Death League with 145,000 less alive Americans thanks to his decision making, it is hard to think that Trump considers he has done a bang up job but he is obviously deluded enough to think he has but could he just refuse to hand over the keys?
CNN has a scenario where swing states controlled by Republicans, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, all with a vested interest in keeping Trump in office delay the result due to problems with fraudulent mail-in ballots, something Trump is already setting the scene for, so citing irregularities and delays in the counting of the mail-in ballots, they declare Trump victorious in their state and award Trump their states’ electoral college votes.
The Democrats say they refuse to accept it and announce Joe Biden as the winner of these states and a lengthy court case ensues, meanwhile as Inauguration Day nears and the nation had no president-elect, the President declares martial law and the suspension of ordinary law and then all bets are off.
Seems a bit of a stretch but thats exactly what happened in the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876, when three separate states submitted conflicting electoral certificates declaring their side the winner and it was only the announcement that President Grant was weighing up declaring the martial law that a compromise was reached at the last second.
In 2000, the Supreme Court decided Bush was the winner when the 'hanging chad' votes were still being counted in Florida, the court stopping the counting so the Democrat Party are hoping that Trump gets beaten decisively and will indeed go quietly in November, probably to a Russian hotel room with waterproof bed sheets to lick his wounds.

The Pain In Spain

Such was the speed of the Governments change of heart on visiting Spain, that two of the Governments own ministers were holidaying in Spain and will now have to self-isolate for 14 days when they return.
Obviously that is not a bad thing, the less Government Ministers there are messing things up the better, shame the whole lot of them were not on a team bonding session in Barcelona when the call came so we still have Boris Johnson and his fat moon face on our televisions, although his fat face is not quite so chubby nowadays after shedding a stone and a half after he had been advised that being overweight make the consequences of Coronavirus worse, so he has made it his goal to make us all lose weight.
A ban on TV ads of unhealthy food before the 9pm watershed has been confirmed although as with everything this Government seems to do, it is contradicted by their 'Eat Out to Help Out' initiative to help the economy which grants everyone 50% off meals in restaurants, including fast food outlets.
As this is the Government who gave us such advice as masks won't help and then made them mandatory, that large public gatherings will not spread the disease and then banning them days later and our very own Prime Minister boasting how he was shaking hands with Coronavirus victims at the same Press Conference when he had the just told us to not do exactly that, it seems we shouldn't expect anything else really.
At least they haven't suggested a pint of Harpic Bleach as a cure like some other less than competent leaders but if you still have the Waterstone's receipt for that Spanish Translation book, you could do better than to return it and swap if for the Atkins Diet Book.

Special Guest Blogger: Kim Jong Il

Of all the Korea's in the world, North Korea is the best but you don't have to take my word for it, the ever-reliable North Korean state media has it all documented.
When i was born there was a number of miraculous events, a double rainbow appeared in the sky and a new star was formed but so is the nature of the imperialist west and people who were not otherwise required by law to believe it, they dispute much of what we said.
I can confirm that as the Supreme Leader and practically a God, i did not defecate and the real-life unicorn lair we found inside a cave was true, as was the world-record golf score of 34 across 18 holes including eleven holes-in-one but i don't like to boast, that's such an American thing.
The 1,500 books i wrote are all available in the state library but my son would say to me "Why doesn't everyone on Earth love our glorious state? and i deduced it was because of jealousy because i was so damned great.
Unfortunately, even god like supreme leaders have to make way eventually and as befits a god like supreme leader, when i died ice which had formed over a famous lake allegedly cracked, mysterious lights were seen on top of a sacred mountain, and snowstorms hit parts of the country but not before i installed my youngest son, Kim Jong Un as my successor.
The Kim family talent pool is getting rather shallow and my eldest son Kim Jong Nam had fallen out of favor when he accidentally got nerve agent all over his face then there's Kim Pyong-il but he was off enjoying himself and then Kim Jong-chul who makes Dale Winton look butch and finally my daughter Kim Yo-Jong, but she unfortunately has a vagina so is not eligible.
I am sure that my Kim Jong-Un will do well, he has a real toughness about him from the problem that he has always had with his weight, it's always tough being the fat kid in school but its even tougher when you are the only fat kid in your entire country.

Special Guest Blogger: Rodrigo Borgia

I didn't let being Jewish, having an impressive man-boob cleavage that a supermodel would be proud of and sweating too much stop me from amassing a huge fortune, slaughtering my enemies, and getting busy with the ladies, i was the original dodgy Pope with an equally dodgy family.
My story begins in Renaissance Spain where it's leaders were a shower so i ran out of patience and splashed my cash to all the Papal Cardinals in hope that they’d be bought, which being Catholic's they obviously were, and i became the Pope and i appointed my son Cesare as Archbishop and tomfoolery and hijinks ensued, and by hijinks i mean gluttonous feasting, drunkenness, gambling and massive orgies.
I started wars, poisoned cardinals and took their money but the Catholic Church was a little bit less friendly in those days, popes and cardinals back then almost all had to murder their way into the Vatican or be murdered themselves. It was a good day if you didn't have to whack a religious person on your way to holy communion.
I invented something called the Banquet of Chestnuts which sounds nice enough until you learn that the chestnuts were merely a pretext to have a pack of naked women crawling around the ground on all fours collecting them.
Another nut-related activity followed and i would keep track of the total number and quality of the party-goers' ejaculations and hand out prizes, they sure don't make religious celebrations like they used to.
My children were a chip off the old block, Cesare was a lovely piece of work, he was the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince, many people fell onto his knife that he happened to be holding towards them, such careless people.
When i died my family lost power but my successors described me as one of the most outstanding popes ever, but that was probably because  i saw them at the Chestnut Parties standing out themselves, yes, standing out very proud you could say.

Special Guest Blogger: Glenn Miller

Elvis is called the King but in just four years i scored 16 number one records and had 69 top ten hits, Elvis Presley only had 38 top 10's so if anyone is the King, it's me, not him.
Everyone knows my story, big band leader, disappeared flying from England to France and all that but i don't want to waste my 500 words here rattling off my life story when there is a much more pressing issue, bands promoting bad spelling amongst our nations students.
Everytime one of the Beetles (I refuse to misspell it as they do) hits comes on the radio i turn it off, it just demonstrates how willfully hateful against proper spelling our radio stations are.
Same goes for Lynyrd Skynyrd who took their name from a tight-ass PE teacher which only makes a case for its members’ need for further schooling and as for U2, if you’re going to name your band after an iconic military plane, at least get it spelled right and stick the damned hyphen in, the B-52's got it right.
Cocaine-fuelled cheeseball guitar solos is not enough to excuse Guns N' Roses. If you’re going to shorten the word 'And' to the letter N you need two freaking apostrophes because you are removing two letters, and thus need to replace each with an apostrophe. C'mon people, it's basics.
As the band's lead singer can’t even spell his own name correctly, Axl?? makes it all the more nauseating.
N.W.A? No full stop after the A? They may have gone Straight out of Compton but they never went straight into an English class obviously.
Where to start with the Rap Metal bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park? Virtually everything about these bands seem to scream awfulness along with the dumb misspelling of their stupid names.
Finally Led Zeppelin, even allowing that they were off their tits the majority of the time, how can you spell the easy English word 'Lead' wrong but get the more complex German word 'Zeppelin' right?
Honestly, until the leader of these band of miscreants are educated to the correct level, the English language is not be safe.

Special Guest Blogger: Anna I of Russia

Move over Catherine, Anna is in town. History books are full of rulers who abused their power in hilariously insane ways and i may not have 'Great' in my name in the history books, but i was one of the best laughs in those dusty old books.
The British compared Russia during my time as 'a storm-threatened ship, manned by a pilot and crew who are all drunk or asleep' but at least it was fun. Well, for me it was anyway
For example, one of my courtiers wanted to marry a Catholic woman and it was a bit of a slow day, it was Russia in mid-winter after-all, so i forced him to instead marry the oldest, wartiest old hag i could muster up, dressed them both up as clowns and made them walk through the streets with farm animals, stripped them naked and made them sleep in a palace made of ice with icy beds, steps, chairs, windows and even logs of ice in a fireplace of ice.
Everyone said it was my greatest prank yet, well they had to else they be my next victim.
One asshat who didn't seem to laugh as long or as loud at my pranks had his tounge removed, another who burnt my dinner was hung and occasionally i would randomly command a person to stand in a corner and impersonate a pig or a cow, as i said, there wasn't much to do in 18th Century Russia and my husband had died after getting into a drinking contest during our wedding and died whilst on the way to our honeymoon so i had to find something to do.
I died at the age of 47 from a terrible kidney stone that made for a slow and painful death but it seems like i am remembered because i heard there was a Disney film of a ruler called Anna who creates an Ice Palace, the only Disney character i could find for the oh-so great Catherine was the name of a Gargoyle, which sounds about right.

Special Guest Blogger: John Belushi

Despite what you may hear, making movies is generally pretty tame with most of the actors staying sober while at work and then going back home before drinking hard and snorting cocaine off other peoples genitals but the lines were a bit blurred for me.
As a general rule, i was as wasted on set as any other time, my films were basically three month parties and someone would occasionally turn a camera to film me doing something.
Animal House was me method acting, a film about drunken students abusing substances with me cast as a raucous, hard-partying slob which wasn't exactly a stretch.
Once shooting had wrapped at the end of each day, my trailer became the hub of recreational self-destruction, complete with loud music and strange smelling tobacco smoke emanating at all hours. The loud music, by the way, came from a hotel piano that i had liberated from a hotel lobby.
What they called acting was me just having a normal evening, they could have gotten all the footage they needed just by following me around for a day.
Dan Akroyd had me down to play Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters but a combined cocaine and heroin speedball put paid to that, my death was put down to a drug-related accident, like no shit sherlock, me dying from a drug related accident is as surprising as walking into the sea and finding out it's wet.
Slimer in Ghostbusters is in honour of me so whether its a fat shaped ghost, overweight men in a toga chugging beer or even finding yourself guiding a horse into your principles office, that's me because fat, drunk and stupid may be no way to go through life, but it certainly takes the edge off while it lasts.

Special Guest Blogger: Al Capone

I was probably the most famous Mafia boss of all time, rising to the top of the Chicago Mob during the Prohibition era, a time when youse couldn't swing a tommy gun without hitting another chubby, Italian looking guy in a pin-stripe suit and fedora.
I didn't let man-boobs and tendency to sweat too much stop me from amassing a huge fortune while slaughtering my enemies and getting sweatily busy with the ladies while all the time supplying sober Americans with alcohol.
Illinois was both a great and terrible place to be a beer fan during Prohibition. Sure, thanks to me there was no real shortage of booze, but there was a decent chance youse get shot in the kneecaps while drinking it.
I was the very essence of the badass bad guy and was even an early adopter of masks which seem all the rage nowadays but despite shooting up most of Chicago and being directly linked to the murder of 33 people, most famously seven on Valentines Day, they got me on tax evasion.
I broke a lot of hearts dat Febuary 14th, mostly with bullets and baseball bats but despite a large pile of bodies, dose FEDs couldn't finger me so they got me on 22 counts of tax evasion, because apparently even us murderous bootlegging outlaws are supposed to pay our taxes and i owed $150,000 so despite three years of wiretapping and brewery raids, dat chump Ness had nothing he could use to put me behind bars but we later found out he was a massive alcoholic so he could also easily have been one of my best customers.
I died of complications from syphilis and the only thing my time proves is the truth in the saying about the only thing we can be certain of are death and taxes, a legacy of other peoples deaths and my taxes.

From Russia With Love

The most damning line from this mornings Intelligence and Security Committee's release of the Russia Report into inerference in the 2016 EU Referendum came from the head of the Committee who, when asked if the Government had lied to the country, replied 'I can't say the Government lied, but they didn't tell the truth'.
Another line was around the Government line that: 'they were correct in saying that they did not see any Russian Interference but they didn't see anything because they didn't look, actively avoiding investigating it'.
The Russia Report calls out David Cameron, Theresa May & Boris Johnson for turning a blind eye to Russian interference from 2014 onwards, a total failure of leadership from three successive Tory Prime Ministers but the unvarnished truth is that they dared not look to see because the results went their way and if they found something dodgy going on, it would mean cancelling Brexit and a rerun of the election so obviously the Conservatives have no interest in finding out if a foreign government influenced our democratic process.
Russia gives millions to Tory party , Tory government doesn’t investigate Russian interference and possibly outcome of Brexit..nothing to see here, move on.

Meanwhile Mike Pompeo is in UK for trade meetings and MPs have voted against New Clause 17, with 340 votes to 251, The New Clause intended to protect the NHS and publicly funded health and care services in the UK from any form of control from outside the UK.
Those MP's must really enjoy their chlorinated chicken, hormone injected beef and bankruptcy bringing US style healthcare.

Special Guest Blogger: Derek Acorah

If i got a pound for every 'he never saw that coming' joke was said when i died i could have paid for a Platinum headstone but there were many psychic frauds around at the time when i was doing my thing, people like Uri Geller and Mystic Meg.
The gypsy with a ball thing is seriously overplayed, and there's only so much mileage you can get out of bending silverware and 0800 hotlines.
If you want to have any hope of convincing grieving individuals that their grandmother's dying wish was for them to transfer £££'s into your offshore bank account, you're going to need to be creative.
I was a regular on the TV show Most Haunted, stumbling around in abandoned asylums/old mansions/warehouses/castles with infrared video cameras looking for ghosts, during which i would inevitably communicate with spirits passing on ectoplasmic gossip, including one where i spoke to Mary who wanted to pass on the message that she loved her husband who unfortunately was named Dick, before i realised i was telling everyone Mary wants it known that she loves Dick.
A personal low was having my driving license taken away for drink driving and ploughing head-on into another persons car, one time that i literally didn't see what was coming.
There are few people left who consider TV spiritualism to be anything more than the second most wasteful use of a TV camera behind anything starring Piers Morgan but in my day it was popular and there was an untapped market of people wanting to see us shouting at each other through night vision cameras and me telling an angry male (always male) to leave and a trapped little ghost girl being told to walk into the light.
The good news is that i won't be staying off your screens for long though, i am delighted to announce i will be taking part in the next series of Most Haunted.

Can You Ace The Very Hard Trump Test?

Passing tests is something to be very proud of, but you might want to take care when boasting about it when the test is made deliberately easy to check for mild cognitive dysfunction or a decline of normal aging and the more serious decline of dementia.
The test Trump took as part of his White House pohysical is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) and Trump said he 'aced it' but the the final five questions 'get very hard'.

The test involves investigating problems with memory, language, thinking and judgment that are greater than normal age-related changes.

As the MoCA screening test is online here we can see just how hard the last five questions are:

Read a list of letters. The subject must ap with is hand at each letter A. FBACMNAAJKLBAFAKDEAAAJAMOFAAB

Serial 7 Subtraction starting from 100

Language - Repeat : I only know that John is the one to help today
The cat always hid under the couch when dogs were in the room

Abstraction - Similarity between eg banana - orange = Fruit. Train - Bicycle, Watch - Ruler

Orientation - State Date Month, Year, Day, Place, City
 
Hmmm... you can see why Trump may have found them very hard, he isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Click on the image above to take the full test yourself and see if you can 'ace' it also.

Advice From 1999

I can't remember what i was doing in 1999 and that's normally a good sign that it must have been something good but i do recall a spoken word song called 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' which i pretty much ignored in favour of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Blink 182 but i heard it today on the radio and it had some good advice in it which 30 year old Lucy poo-pooed but 51 year old Lucy nodded along to sagely.

Wear Sunscreen - Yep, sunburn hurts but skin cancer hurts even more.
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth - true, because before you know it you are 51 and listening to songs you ignored 20 years ago 
Don't worry about the future - The future will come regardless and it is never as scary as you imagine it to be
Do one thing everyday that scares you - Feel free to ignore this one
Sing - I sound like a donkey wearing a bucket over it's head but i still sing when i can, my being so bad is other a problem for other peoples ears.
Don't be reckless with other people's hearts - Spot on, apart from trapping your fingers in a car door, having your heart broken in love is one of the most painful experiences in life. 
Floss - Whatever, American stuff, just make sure you brush
Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults - Good point, insults say more about the person who makes them, and it says they are a jerk so why worry what a jerk thinks?
Keep your old love letters - Tricky one, keeping love letters if they are not from your spouse could lead to some awkward conversations
Stretch - Throw in a yawn and you are set for the morning.
Get plenty of calcium - i guess
Be kind to your knees - You don't know how much you use them until one of them starts creaking
Read the directions, even if you don't follow them - obviously aimed at men who do seem to love the excuse that 'it's a spare screw' until the thing they spent 3 hours putting together falls down.
Understand that friends come and go - like knickers, they change frequently and some are more comfortable than others, some chaffe and some you hope nobody ever sees but in five years time you will forget the ones you have now as you will have new ones.
Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle - Not even sure what this means
Travel - As much as possible to places you never imagined.
Don't mess too much with your hair - Ignore. Dye it, cut it, perm it, grow it, shave it and abuse it in every way possible, it grows back.
Be careful whose advice you buy - Best advice on the record. You wouldn't ask a car mechanic for advice on the best home insurance policy to buy as much as you wouldn't ask a hairdresser for advice on whether to buy an Android or Apple phone. If you want advice, ask an expert.

Special Guest Blogger: Boris Karloff

Being six foot tall and a face so ugly that i spent most of my teenage years with bruises from all the ten foot poles being poked at me, there was only one role for me and as famous as that is, everyone still gets it wrong.
Everybody knows the monster in the Frankenstein movies, that classic story of a man stitched together from human body parts who gets the hump with humanity, probably because people kept confusing him with his creator Dr Frankenstein and although we milked that to death, it's still got wrong.
When horror movies first hit the scene, Frankenstein quickly became a crowd favorite, the most famous movie being shot all the way back in 1931 but we churned out Frankenstein movies with abandon. And churn them out we did, including giving me a wife in the Bride of Frankenstein and a son in the Son of Frankenstein and made a comedy with Abbot and Costello and then we went all futuristic with a Frankenstein 1970, crazy days!
The make up was incredible, i had to wear green paint which was highly toxic but the movies were all shot in black and white, so audiences had no goddamned idea i was even wearing it.
Us horror actors were huge back in the day when horror films were made properly with proper scripts and professional actresses, now it's just a bunch of maniacs chasing around beautiful, big boobed bikini-clad teenagers with chainsaws.
The only boobs i saw were Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi, how is that fair??

Special Guest Blogger: Paddy Ashdown

I was the leader of the Liberal Democrats and at the 1997 election we won 46 seats which was our best performance since the 1920s and it was all down to a strategy of not really having an opinion on anything and staying firmly somewhere between the other two parties.
When the left wing Labour and the right wing Conservatives argued over something, i put us in the middle so we were netheir left nor right and it worked, people obviously liked me being neither one thing or the other but somewhere in between.
It may have been a successful political strategy but it didn't work quite so well when i was accused of an affair with my secretary, my defence that i neither touched her left leg nor her right leg but somewhere inbetween... well, you may see the fault in my argument there.
I did have an image of being a bit smug and boring so when the affair earned me the tabloid nickname of 'Paddy Pantsdown', it did my image and career no harm especially as the Liberal Democrats standing in the polls went up and they had looked around and saw that my only viable replacement was an alcoholic Scotsman so decided to stick with me after all.
Apart from that, us Lib Dems were not taken that seriously, we had 21% of the vote yet comedians hardly took the piss out of us at all and i often asked why they refused to make us look ridiculous and a laughing stock in front of millions of potential voters, but they just said that we will never be the laughing stock of British politics all the time John Mayor and his shower are in power and they had a point, nothing we did was going to top a Government Cabinet that had Edwina Curry in it.

Special Guest Blogger: Lord Byron

The phase mad, bad and dangerous to know was actually coined for me and there are many weird and wacky things attributed to me and fortunately most are true. While at Cambridge, when i was told i couldn't keep a dog i did go out and get a bear which stayed with me in my dorm room. I also kept in my house ten horses, eight dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, five peacocks, two guinea hens and an Egyptian Crane, turning my house into Noah's Ark meant the smell was atrocious but it was worth it.
My daughter was Ada Lovelace, i did have a club foot, i did eat only bread and potatoes in vinegar, i was a collector of my lovers pubic hair  and i would have sex with literally anything and anyone, including my half sister. I lived the rock 'n' roll lifestyle well before the damned thing had even been invented.
If you partied with me for an hour you either ended up drunk and/or pregnant, but you would think my legacy would be as being considered one of the greatest English poets, second only to Shakespeare but as hardly anybody reads poetry now, my real legacy is much wider known.
Picture a vampire, thin, pale, dark clothes right? Well every modern vampire you see is based on me and all that comes from the same summer 'who can write the best horror story' night at Lake Geneva, the one where Percy Shelley's wife wrote her book.
My story was a tale of vampyres that i had heard but instead of the short, furry animals who sucked blood, i put myself in their place and my doctor, Dr. John William Polidori, wrote it down and using my image and traits of a mysterious aristocrat who charms his victims before feasting on them, published it, complete with my description in the vampyre role and 80 years later Bram Stoker rewrote my doctor's story complete with the description of me , called it Dracula and the image has been used for every vampire since.
Having lived at the turn of the 19th century, i of course died terribly at the ripe old age of thirty six but all the poetry is okay, but i'd rather be known for giving the World Buffy!

CNN New Day With John Berman And Alisyn Camerota

I haven't seem much of the American News broadcasts lately but they haven't had a very good reputation for asking the tough questions and were rightly pilloried for such regarding George W Bush in the build up to his Iraq War debacle.
Fox News is banned in the UK because of its blatant bias but we get CNN and whilst i am still currently working local for now, i have seen a few of the New Day shows recently with Alisyn Camerota and John Berman and i have to say things have certainly changed for the better there.
You would have thought that having Donald Trump in charge and his cringe-worthy views and sheer awfulness during the pandemic, it would be an open goal for broadcast journalists and i don't know about the rest of the CNN output but Alisyn and John are doing a great job of holding the failing President and his sycophants feet to the fire.
With America sitting top of the nations death list with 140,000 deaths and a seemingly endless list of failures and embarrassing quotes at their disposal, it should be a no-brainer that the people who try and defend the President and his administration get a hard time and i quite enjoyed Poppy Harlow on CNN Newsroom last night giving a Trump Campaigner a right grilling and using the tried and tested strategy of using direct quotes from the President to undercut her, to be brutal, outright lies. 
CNN had vastly improved since the last time i saw it, which admittedly was a while ago but the presenter Richard Quest is a bit of an enigma, obviously British judging by his accent which seems to be a generic English accent, like the accent someone would do to impersonate an English speaker but he does slip into the occasional 'northern English accent', probably unnoticed by American ears.
His Wikipedia page says he was born in Liverpool and educated in Leeds which makes sense why he flattened his speaking style out, if he spoke with a scouse or leeds accent in America nobody would understand him, even us British struggle with those accents, but i see he was originally trained at the BBC...so say no more, carry on.

All Over By Christmas

Boris Johnson had a briefs joke about his opponent, former lawyer Keir Starmer during the week, and he had six question from Keir to shoehorn it in and as each question passed you could almost see the part of Johnson's brain saying 'don’t do the joke now' as he waited to pick the right time to unleash it and as Keir's last question was did Johnson have a message to the families of the 45,000 bereaved, i was the last chance to launch it and powerless to resist, his mouth said 'The leader of the opposition needed to decide which brief he was going to take...', his brain warned 'Don’t do it now. Don’t do it now. Don’t do it now' but his mouth continued '...because at the moment...' Brain now screaming 'please please please don’t do it now', mouth '...he’s got more briefs than Calvin Klein'.
With Starmer slowly shaking his head in dismay, the tumbleweed sailed through the chamber, a lone church bell sounded somewhere and Boris, looking very pleased with himself before going on to make up some stuff about budgets and announcing the Government is to spend £5 billion on something which was already accounted for in the £30 billion they announced last week but said in such a way that it sounded like an additional £5 billion but is actually the same money being produced with a flourish.   
Then there was the question regarding an inquiry into the Governments handling of the Covid-19 crisis but was brushed away as 'the middle of a pandemic is not a correct use of Parliamentary time for inquires' before announcing an urgent inquiry into Public Health England significantly overestimating Covid-19 death statistics by including former sufferers who could have subsequently died of other causes.
While other European leaders were taking action, Boris was attending rugby matches, encouraging mass gatherings to continue and shaking hands with as many sick people as he could find, he doesn't exactly inspire confidence and today he said it will be all over by Christmas, unfortunately with him leading us, for many of us it will, permanently.

The New Look Zodiac

I’m a typical Aries, passionate, motivated, confident and of the opinion that astrology is total horse hockey or at least i was until it was discovered that the ancient Babylonians were a bunch of slackers and left off one of the star signs which means now everyone has to shuffle around to accommodate a 13th sign, some snake handling oddball named Ophiuchus.
I have now gone overnight from an Aries Ram full of fire, passion, brashness and passion to a empathetic, mystical, romantic and trustworthy Pisces Fish. Oh God! It's all true!
We could completely rethink the entire zodiac system in order to produce accurate horoscopes or we could just ignore it because astrology is nonsense but then i would say that, i'm a typical skeptical Aries which i aim to stay because i don't really fancy being a Pisces, they seem a bit wet which kinda makes sense as they are depicted by a fish.
I would say if your birthday falls between 29 November and 17 December and are one of the new Ophicuchus types, your horoscope will be to avoid handling snakes today, and tomorrow, and for the forseeable future.

New Zodiac:

Capricorn:20 Jan to 15 Feb
Aquarius: 16 Feb to 11 Mar
Pisces: 11 Mar to 18 Apr
Aries: 18 Apr to 13 May
Taurus: 13 May to 21 Jun
Gemini: 21 Jun to 20 Jul
Cancer: 20 Jul to 10 Aug
Leo: 10 Aug to 16 Sept
Virgo: 16 Sept to 30 Oct
Libra: 30 Oct to 23 Nov
Scorpio: 23 Nov to 29 Nov
Ophiuchus: 29 Nov to 17 Dec
Sagittarius: 17 Dec to 20 Jan

Special Guest Blogger: Steve Jobs

Cheap was never Apple's thing, in much the same way that healthy has never really been Chips thing but that didn't stop people who love waiting in lines buying new, marginally improved products every single year, one which you are probably reading this on now.
My pal and i started out making computers with a Graphical User Interface and during the computer phase of my career Bill Gates and i had a complicated relationship, i said he was an unimaginative hack who shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas but then i was a bit bitter that Microsoft stole Apple's big idea which we had 'borrowed' from Xerox, although 'borrowed' might not be exactly the right word for what we did but let’s not quibble about word choice, my greatest accomplishment was taking everyday items, sticking an i in front of their names and selling them for an extortionate price.
We had the imac, iphone, itunes, ipod, ipad, we are not talking about inventing historical things here. I don't even know much history because i dropped out of college after one semester, and during that semester all I did was attend a calligraphy class, so if you have questions about typefaces i'm your guy, but as for history, not so much.
My whole business strategy was to sit back and wait for other companies to invent new products, then figure out what the coolest version of that product would look like for example the mobile phone, i took a clunky brick sized thing and turned it into a weird black rectangle which men could use to watch porn on public transport.
I solved the problem of phones being cheap and unreliable, well i solved the cheap bit anyway.
At one point i was even sacked by my own company but that inability to listen or follow basic common sense came back in a nasty way for me when i tried in vain to cure my own cancer with acupuncture sessions, drinking special fruit juices, visiting spiritualists and using other treatments i found on the internet.
Sadly, i went the same was as the Nokia Lumia Windows Phone but i'm quite happy with where i have ended up, there are no walls or fences here but best of all definitely no Windows or Gates.

Special Guest Blogger: Bouidicca

I didn't really see myself as a feminist icon, more a really, really pissed off woman.
The Roman Empire never really had a reputation for women's rights so when my husband died and left his Essex kingdom to me and our two daughters,
Rome had other plans which included invading our region, enslaving us and raping me and my daughters but unfortunately for Rome, they didn't understand who they were messing with, probably the most terrifying female in the history of the world.
As much as they loved an aqueduct, straight roads and plumbing, the toga-botherers were not into female equality but clearly i didn’t get that memo.
With my army, and after quietly counting to 10 under my breath to compose myself, i climbed upon my chariot and plowed a swathe of destruction through one of the greatest empires the world had ever known, first target was their outpost in nearby Colchester but not content with just taking it out, i torched the whole goddamn city to the ground, then obliterated three more on the way to Roman Londinium, massacring 80,000 Roman soldiers in a manner that only fans of Kill Bill could appreciate, there's nothing like the sense of accomplishment that comes from killing tens of thousands of Italians.
The Romans even sent a legion of 4,000 men to stop me but they were soon a collection of various bloody body parts strewn across the street but all good things must come to an end and i was cornered in a forest but rather than be captured, i drank poison and apparently the spot where i was buried is beneath platform 8 of Kings Cross Station but the famous Roman Army were beaten by a woman, arsonist and very, very feisty Essex Girl.

Let The Mask Defying Idiots Stay At Home

Now that masks are becoming compulsory indoors, i guess will have to become used to wearing one again which i did to start with but it pretty quickly got left on the dashboard of my car and then lost and that's where it has stayed ever since.
One of the problems i have while wearing my mask for any length of time is my reading glasses fogging up and the nose pads becoming slippery and i ended up just taking the mask off anyway which defeats the purpose and i haven't really got a solution for that.
Another problem was talking to people through several layers of material which once again, i ended up pulling down to speak clearly and then pulling it back up again which again, misses the whole point of wearing masks.
Confusingly the official Government guidance states that evidence around wearing a face covering suggests that it doesn't protect you from Coronavirus and the evidence of coverings preventing the spread of infection from one person to another is 'marginal' but a scientific study showed that all face coverings were found to reduce the forward distance traveled by an exhaled breath by at least 90% so that has to be a good thing.
If nothing else it will be a constant reminder that there's a deadly disease going around and misted up reading glasses are only a minor inconvenience and there will be idiots from one side (the stoopid side) of the political spectrum, mirroring the (equally stoopid) one in the US, which will fume about having to wear a small piece of cloth over their mouths and noses but hopefully they will stay at home and not bother us, if we are lucky.

Special Guest Blogger: Pablo Picasso

I was easily the most famous painter to have never given his name to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle but i don't care because i created art so filthy it would make a sailor blush, assuming they could make out what was going on because some of it was a bit vague.
When i was born i wasn't breathing and the nurses declared me dead on arrival and in the way of 19th Century medicine, the remedy was for the doctor to shrug and tell my parents try again in nine months but the very fact that doctors were tragically incompetent back in those days is exactly what saved my life, the doctor was puffing away on a cigar right there in the delivery room and as he leaned over the seemingly dead child, he breathed a cloud of smoke right into the baby's face, i started coughing, and one of the greatest artists of the 20th century was granted a second chance at life and the chance to go on to revolutionize art in the way that only someone whose first breath was full of addictive chemicals could.
I was a young prodigy who ironically, when i matured largely took to drawing child-like pictures and was the founder of cubism and my lover, Dora Maar, featured in dozens of my paintings right up until she had a nervous breakdown which happened quite a lot with my muses, one burnt her beautiful face on my burning lighter, another mistress hung herself, my estranged son committed suicide by drinking bleach.
In one picture i painted a portrait of my 22-year-old mistress not only to capture her beauty to show off that i was 50 and nailing a 22-year-old and to make sure everyone knew it, i drew my own semi-erect penis on her head because nothing says 'I'm doing her' than painting your own genitals draped across the head of your girlfriend.

Inept Government Or More Nefarious Reason?

It was early March, after watching the Covid-19 Virus tear through Asia and mainland Europe, that the British Government began planning for what was obviously coming our way and one strategy mentioned was 'herd immunity', where enough of the community become infected and develop a resistance to it, therefore slowing the spread.
The Government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, defended the approach and said that building up some form of herd immunity, by having potentially 60% of the population contract Covid-19, was one of the 'key things we need to do', it was only when other science and medical personnel did the maths and came to a shocking death toll of 250,000, that the Government changed tack and denied that it was ever a real policy. 
When we look at the tack the Government changed to, they seem to have been behind the curve every step of the way, being one of the last nations in Europe to lock down and close schools, continuing to allow large gatherings and then reopening too soon without a reliable app or a working track and trace system in place and we have just put it down to the actions of a very inept Government but there could be a much more nefarious reason.
Boris Johnson warned the country that, as a result of Covid-19: 'families are going to lose loved ones before their time' yet he took very little immediate action to stop the virus spreading, it was weeks later that he began introducing measures, once the virus had truly gained a foothold in Britain.
The aim, we were told continually, was to flatten the curve and slow the virus’s spread so that fewer people need treatment at any given time so that the NHS could cope, it was never said they were looking to eradicate the disease, just control how many people had it at any given time which brings us spinning back to the idea of herd immunity, allowing most of the population to ultimately become infected but instead of an immediate massive spike and death toll, the curve is flattened out to spread the spike out across the next 12 months.
We are currently standing somewhere between the Government grim death toll figure of 44,830 and the Office of Natioanal Statistics number of 55,873 and now the Government have announced masks are to be made mandatory, again many weeks after everyone else and not for another 10 days rather than immediatly.
Taking it all into account, i do find myself wondering if the Government have not been as slow and inept as we first thought and despite the strong denial of herd immunity, they are allowing the disease to systematically rip through the community in some cold-blooded experiment in social engineering and rather than protect it's citizens, it's just stringing out the 250,000 figure and the herd immunity over a more acceptable time.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Fiacre

God's busy, alright? He is either saving the British Queen, blessing America or directing all those holy wars in his name so he doesn't have time to sift through every prayer asking for help so to help out, over the centuries, the Catholic Church has recruited patron saints to act as sort of receptionists to sort through your requests.
The problem is that the big guy is the one who designates what each saint is in charge of and we don't get a say in it but my initial reaction when i was told was 'I'm the patron saint of WHAT???"
See, i was especially famed for my gift of healing by the placing on of hands but when you hear i was given the job of being the patron Saint against haemorrhoids, you may not want to think too long about that, i try not to.
My path to sainthood began in France when i was looking for somewhere to hang my crook and found a woods and was told by the owner that i could have as much land as i could clear in one day so found a large clearing, stood in the middle and said look at this then and everyone said it's a miracle and it was, a miracle that i found land owners so fecking stoopid.
As a knew a bit about medicine, being 7th Century France i was put in charge of miraculous healing to cure anyone in need just that in 7th Century France, there was a lot of banging each other blind and sitting on wet, cold surfaces because my clientele were riddled with STD's and hemorrhoids and as my whole schtick was i layed hands on what ails ye...it was centuries until gloves were invented.
Unfortunately i have been kept busy ever since so to help out please remember that the Saint to pray to for protection against bowel disorders is Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio while for dysentery it's Saint Eulalia of Barcelona you should direct your communications towards, not me, i already have my hands full, just don't ask what with.

Special Guest Blogger: Heraclitus

Being a philosopher is tough, we spend our days staring into space just thinking about things, knowing full well that when someone asks what do you do for a living, any answer we give is going to elicit nothing but blank stares.
In Ancient Greece you either became a philosopher or a playwright and as you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a playwright, i went down the philosopher route but i was a grumpy bugger, i argued with everyone and everyone pretty much ended up hating me so i finished up wandering the mountains eating grass and herbs.    
In my old age I developed an illness called dropsy which is where your body swells up with excess water but i did invent an original cure, everybody knows that water evaporates when heated so I thought if I just stay somewhere hot then the excess water would evaporate away and what's a ready source of heat and in plentiful supply, cow dung so i jumped into a big pile of it and buried myself up to my neck.
Unfortunately i was a bit too rash and forgot to bring any water so I just got hotter and hotter and eventually died from heat exhaustion.
My death stank literally but my cure for dropsy may not be well known but Leonardo da Vinci's drawing called the "Vitruvian Man" is, the picture of a naked man which looks like he is making snow angels although Leonardo did me no favours in that picture and living in Greece i don't even have the excuse it was cold that day.

Special Guest Blogger: General Robert E Lee

To most Brits General Lee was the name of the car in The Dukes of Hazard but a Commander had to be spectacular to get his name slapped on the side of a moonshine running Dodge Charger a century later and i was spectacular, a badass to end all badasses.
It takes someone special to lead an entire region of their country that has decided to rebel when the President said they couldn't buy and sell black people anymore and the South's campaign wasn't a success for no reason, it wasn't a success for quite a few reasons.
One was the horrific dysentery and diarrhea we suffered, the whole concept of not drinking or bathing in your own toilet water was a medical innovation that would come along much too late to help and then there was some window shakingly stupid strategies that cost the lives of thousands of men, like when i ordered 12,000 soldiers across an open field and into the loving arms of the rifle firing Union soldiers, getting half of them killed on the spot and getting the shit kicked out of us by those dastardly slavery-haters.
Lucky i didn't have a commander as bad as me so i survived and died from a stroke many years later but my burial was a bit of a pigs ear, my coffin was washed away by floodwater and the one the funeral directors managed to get hold of was a bit short so they buried me without shoes or my hat, fortunately they never had to squeeze in my morals and dignity because they were dead and buried many years before that.

Special Guest Blogger: Tomás de Torquemada

History has not been kind to us Spanish inquisitors, now im not saying the Spanish Inquisition didn't burn the occasional witch alive or stretch the occasional heretic to death but we didn't just go around killing and torturing people willy-nilly, some of 125,000 people tried in our tribunals did not end up crispy fried.
The Spanish Inquisition is often cited by heathens and atheists as an example of religious intolerance and repression but it was a carefully thought out exercise so we would only burn people who we had evidence for such as the absence of chimney smoke on Saturdays meant that the family were secretly honoring the Sabbath and therefore guiltily Jewish, buying lots of vegetables or meat just before Passover or anonymous accusations by neighbors, the paperwork involved was horrendous.
We only investigated heretics and that included anyone involved in witchcraft and superstition, blasphemy, sodomy, freemasonry, reading prohibited books, bigamy or unnatural Marriage and if someone wasn't available to be burnt to death we would burn an effigy of them but that was usually because they selfishly died during torture.
We had a technique which simulates drowning, much like modern waterboarding but my personal favourite was the rack, mostly so i could do my joke about them being due a long stretch but mostly because i was a sadistic bastard but we did stop the practise of tying the rope around the victim's forehead as it was apt to pop the eyes from their sockets, health and safety issue to have eyeball rolling around for anyone to slip on. 
One guy, Antonio Zavallos, was such a zealot that on being sentenced to death following an inquisition that revealed he was Jewish, he demanded to be burnt alive to satisfy God but we refused and he was gutted, gutted literally in every sense and then then we chopped his head off.

Any Link Is Just A Coincidence

Something i have heard quite a few times is that Trump is a Nazi which is of course ridiculous, he is many nasty things but never a Nazi.
Okay, so he supported some folks who were white supremacist neo-Nazi types but most right wingers have a tendency towards fascism and that side of things, it doesn't make him a Nazi.
I will also concede that his former wife revealed during the divorce proceedings, the most thumbed book in the Trump library was the book of Hitler quotes and there was that infamous 'this guy Hitler had some good ideas' quote but that doesn't make him a wannabe fascist.
So they used an upside red triangle in an advert for those pretesting against them, just happens that the inverted red triangle was used as identity badges by the Nazi's to classify prisoners in the camps during the Second World War, just a coincidence obviously.
Now it's people are pointing at the item in Trump official shop called the 'America First Tee', a t-shirt featuring an eagle standing on a circle but the eagle is a very common bird for American symbolism and circles are everywhere so can't read anything into that so any likeness to the Iron Eagle, the official symbol of the Nazi party, is a pure fluke.
The biggest difference is that one was a racist psychopath who went on long winded, raving rants and spread hate while the other was the leader of Germany in WW2 and had weird facial hair. See, no similarity at all.

Special Guest Blogger: Allen Collins

There were quite a few of us in Lynyrd Skynyrd and i was the lanky one dressed all in white, bushy long hair flowing in the wind, shredding my guitar during Freebird.
Musicians die young all the time and i died aged just 37 but people would drop dead like flies around me before that so Lucy is taking a chance asking me to come here because it seems that most people i was associated with died, Final Destination style.
We were all good ol' southern boys but God must have been on a break that famous day of our plane crash which killed three of my band members and seriously injuring me, severely damaging my right arm. We also landed in a swamp filled with alligators and several survivors who went for help got shot at by a farmer but God looked down at me that day and smiled, deciding he hadn't stopped screwing with me just yet.  
After my recovery i got together a new band with a few of the Lynyrd boys and just as we were preparing our debut tour, my wife died as a result of a hemorrhage but God looked down at me and smiled, deciding he wanted to screw with me some more yet.
Another band, this time the Allen Collins Band with the rest of the Skynyrd survivors and with Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny on vocals but as the group was preparing for a Skynyrd reunion tour i crashed my car and killed my new girlfriend and left myself paralysed from the waist down with limited use of my arms and hands and unable to play again.
God finally stopped screwing with me and instead gave me pneumonia and i finally died in 1990 but my song Free Bird and the kick-ass guitar solo at the end has kept my memory alive but the guitar solo was only originally added to give Van Zant a chance to rest during our shows.
Lynyrd Skynyrd are still going and touring and making albums proving not even a plane crash that killed half the band could stop us.

Blame The Government, Not The BBC

You can hear the howls already as the BBC announce that most of the 1.5 million viewers aged over 75 will now have to start paying the £157.50 annual fee for their TV license from 1 August although any over 75's on Pension Credits will continue to receive it free.
I do have sympathy for the BBC as it was the Government in 2000 who decided to give the over 75's a free license, and then once they got the £745m bill, passed the funding responsibility on to the BBC.
The broadcaster is already facing a challenging financial environment and has launched a programme of voluntary redundancies as it attempts to make £125m in savings this year and has announced job cuts in TV news and local radio but the Government still have the brass neck to say the BBC's decision is a 'body blow to millions of British pensioners'.
The Government do seem to be gaining a reputation for pushing the blame for things that are unpopular onto others but the responsibility lies with the government transferring free licenses to the corporation and the government cannot absolve itself of responsibility of this unpopular move.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Back

Hard to believe that the last episode of Buffy aired in 2003, a show that tops my list of all time favourite programmes.
It doesn't feel that long ago but watching the nightly week-day re-runs on E4, it is amusing to see how young the actors and actresses who lived above the Hell Mouth in Sunnydale look although it does give a sad tinge of 'where did those years go?'
We were wondering just what the cast have been doing since the last show aired and some seemed to have faired better than others.
 
Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Geller)
Gellar moved into movies, most well know being 'I Know What You Did Last Summer', 'Scream 2' 'Scooby-Doo' and 'The Grudge' and married fellow Scooby actor Freddie Prinze Jnr. 

Willow (Alyson Hannigan)
Alyson shifted her Willow character across to Angel and then starred in the American Pie movies and has been a permanent fixture in the TV sitcom 'How I Met Your Mother'. She married Alexis Denisorf who played Wesley.

Xander (Nicholas Brendon)
Brendon stayed in TV and appeared in TV series, Criminal Minds, and now writes Buffy comic books.

Angel (David Boreanaz)
The very easy on the eye Boreanaz starred in his TV series spin-off Angel until 2004 and now stars as FBI Special Agent, Seeley Booth, on the television crime drama series Bones.

Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter)
Carpenter moved from Buffy to Angel and then onto another supernatural TV show Charmed. After appearing in several TV shows, she played the role of Lacy in The Expendables movie.

Spike (James Marsters)
Despite his immaculate English accent, Marsters is American and also made the move across to Angel and appeared in Smallville, the Dr Who spin-off Torchwood and the short lived revival of Hawaii Five O but has now carved out a career narrating audiobooks.

Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (Alesix Denisof)
Denisof was another who joined the cast of Angel and then moved into theatre and made a fleeting appearance in 'How I met Your Mother' alongside his wife Alyson Hannigan and appeared in movies 'The Avengers' and 'Much Ado About Nothing'.

Dawn Summer (Michelle Trachtenberg)
Trachtenberg starred in Six Feet Under and in the movies 'Harriet the Spy', 'Inspector Gadget' and 'Black Christmas'.

Oz (Seth Green)
Green went on to create 'Robot Chicken', appear in movies 'The Italian Job', 'Party Monster' and 'Austin Powers' series but is most well known for his voice role as Chris Griffin on Family Guy.

Anya (Emma Caulfield)
Since dying at the end of Buffy, she has appeared in movies 'Darkness Falls' and TiMER.

Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland)
On leaving the Buffy series, Sutherland attended a photography course and subsequently set up a photography studio.

Faith (Eliza Dushku)
Dushku was another who joined the cast of Angel and then into her own supernatural series, Tru Calling. Her movies include 'True Lies', 'Wrong Turn' and 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back'.

Drusilla (Juliet Landau)
Landau also joined Angel and has since appeared in several Tim Burton projects

Every now and then someone suggests a reunion and possibly a new Buffy film but as much as a Buffy fan as i was, and still am, i want to remember the wise-cracking teenagers of the late nineties and early noughties as they were, a TV show that was as near to perfect as it gets.

Waiting To See What The Tories Catch Is

The Conservative Party under Theresa May was unable to give the nurses a pay rise after 8 years of no pay rise that as they didn't have a magic money tree but the same Conservatives under Boris Johnson seem to have found one because they are handing out money like there's no tomorrow. 
Since the pandemic began, Boris Johnson's government has spent £159bn in direct measures including the job retention scheme and tax cuts, as well as a further £123bn on deferred tax rises and yesterday they added another £30bn to that with an extension of the job retention, this time a £1,000 handout to companies that put furloughed staff back on the payroll until January.
I would not berate the Government for the job retention scheme, if anything it is about the only thing they got right during the whole pandemic crisis but there is something in the back of my mind which says that this 'giving away money' is so unTory like that there has to be a sting somewhere and i can see it being how the massive bill is going to be settled.
The only way is to bring more money in or pay less money out and after a decade of austerity, it is hard to see what there is left to cut, that half of the equation has been squeezed as tight as possible so it will have to be tax rises.
The tax system in the UK is complicated with the three tax rate bands and tax reliefs and expenses so it won't be as simple as just adding a few pence to everyone's income tax as that hits the lowest earners harder but the Conservatives are not known as the nasty party for nothing.
Handing out freebies is just not the Conservatives we know, and Boris Johnson is as trustworthy as asking George Best to mind your drink while you nipped to the loo so we will have to wait and see just what the catch is, because guaranteed there will be one

Special Guest Blogger: David Ben-Gurion

Shalom, as the founder of the State of Israel, i do get asked many questions about Judaism and after the usual ones about foreskins, the next thing i get asked most is about Hanukkah and whether it's Christmas because Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday anyone knows about.
Oh vey, some of you may have noticed the Hanukkah displays on a few shelves between the candy canes, stockings and dancing reigndeer in December but it is all about how almost two hundred years before Jesus was even a sparkle in his father's eye, the Syrians outlawed Judaism and us Jews went to war against the entire Syrian Army and won so we made a holiday out of it and it isn't easy to write catchy jingle about it.
So no it isn't Christmas, every idiot that goes about with 'Happy Hanukkah on his lips should be roasted on his own menorah and buried with a chunk of Challah in his throat to almost quote that famous non-Jew Charles Dickens.
We do eat chocolate money though which isn't a great idea for overcoming sterotypes and we have a Hanukkah bush which is a bit like your Christmas tree, my Auntie Hannukkah was always proud of her bush, a man would trim it for her twice a year.    
As for Isreal, it very nearly ended up in Argentina as it was our first choice but we also considered Kenya but on a visit to see where we could pitch up we were attacked by the wildlife so decided on Palestine, a land without people or rather a land with people who we could ignore when they kicked off so whatever, none of them are Jews. Moving on.
I did make a speech to placate the Middle East nations, saying: 'we must do more than make peace with them, we must achieve collaboration and alliance on equal terms' but apart from a few quarrels with our new neighbours, Israel has grown and has gone from strength to strength in my vision of living with our neighbours as equals and as Jews are always fighting with each other, mission accomplished.

Special Guest Blogger: Johnny Cash

The late 1970s is often seen as a time of punk with the rebels like the Sex Pistols and the Clash but none of them were a patch on me, i spent the '60s going in and out of jail, sometimes as a performer and sometimes as a felon sleeping off my misdemeanors in a cell.
I was a true American outlaw, angrily rejecting authority while loving my country, except for the parts when i was actively burning it all to the ground.
I was driving my truck through a Forest one day when my truck overheated and set the whole thing ablaze and i did what what any responsible motorist would do and abandoned it and went fishing.
508 acres of land burnt down that day, you could say i left a burning ring of fire and refused to go down down down as the flames went higher and that pisses all over wrecking a hotel room or lobbing a TV out the window.
My drinks and drug habit was expensive but there comes a point where you're making more money than your drug habit can spend and i used it to buy an exotic bird sanctuary but got into an argument with my Ostrich and attacked it with a tree branch but i swung and missed, of course i did, i was high and pissed remember, and the ostrich responded by ripping open my stomach with it's talons.
By the mid 60's i made the album Bitter Tears, a protest album about the plight of Native Americans saying i was proud of my Cherokee Blood although technically, most of my blood was amphetamine and the actual amount of Native American blood in me was precisely zero but the higher i got the more Indian blood I thought I had in me and i was so blitzed off my tits i could have been Hiawatha.
The KKK also tried to kidnap me but i'm almost out of space here so let's leave it there and anyway, i smell burning.

Special Guest Blogger: King Leonidas I

My mother was also my niece but lets not get bogged down with that, i am most famous for leading 300 Spartans into a fight with the Persian King Xerxes, a feat so great that a film was made about it thousands of year later and it was almost historically accurate, especially the six packs. 
I really did keep power kicking the messengers of Xerxes into Wells but then they kept standing next to them and anyway we weren't big on all that diplomacy stuff, far easier to just kill them and do it in that Spartan way, in slow motion and with neatly coiffed hair. 
Us Spartans were known for our hair, adult Spartan males kept their hair long and flowing except when we went into battle, it was how many of our enemies knew that an arse kicking was coming their way, it was a thing we did as nothing strikes fear into the hearts of our enemies than a bunch of naked men braiding each others hair, we may have been constantly grooming our 'dos but we still managed to look badass doing it.
Hollywood doesn't just make films about any old historical figures and i didn’t get where i am today trying to be reasonable so when Xerxes demanded that Sparta submit to him, and this was the whack-job who ordered his men to flog a river after the waves knocked down his bridge remember, i famously said 'Come and take them', the next line was not quite so well known but went something like 'Oh Shit, he's coming to get them, shit, shit, shit'.
Following a lot of the most badass lines in history, us Spartans fought in the shade of the enemy's arrows and soon we went from being full of fight to now being just full of Persian arrows but the legend of us 300 Spartans (and no mention of the other 7,000 of the non-Spartans on our side) taking on the Persian Army was forged into history along with our impressive six packs.

Special Guest Blogger: Queen Mother

I was by far the most popular Royal and mainly because during the war, it was said that i showed a seemingly indomitable spirit providing moral support to the British public and it's true because things were tough for all of us back then.
So many balls had to be cancelled and Buckingham Palace was bombed and there was a small fire in the grounds which the wiper of the Royals arses got a bit singed trying to put it out. I now know what our men must have gone through at the Somme.
We had to squeeze into three palaces and the rationing was awful, we had to make do with swans and grouse and if you didn't finish your seventh course then it was taken away and given to the corgi's. Our Margaret had a tantrum when she discovered that our usual guy was signed up for the front and the new cook had cut her cucumber sandwiches into squares rather than triangles.
I remember i was listening to the wireless when that nice Mr. Chamberlain said he had declared war on Germany and there were worries that the Germans would invade Britain but apart from the relatives, i never saw any of them over here. 
At my funeral it was said that i had an utterly irresistible mischievousness spirit and it's true i did, most of it gin but it was said that i was a bit of a piss-head but i only drank as much as the next person, if that next person was Oliver Reed.
I would have a Gin and Dubonnet in the morning, a bottle of wine at lunch, a bit of champers with my dinner and a couple of dry Martini's in the evening but as i lived to be 101, i guess that proves that as my blood was 40% proof, alcohol is a great preservative.

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas Midgley Jnr

If the quiz question 'Who has killed the most people in history' came up you could be excused for running through the usual suspects such as Hitler or Stalin but there is one man who is responsible for multiple more deaths than all of them put together and whose influence continues to kill millions today, little old me.
Not content with shortening everybody's life once, i doubled my efforts by thinking up a second way to do it. 
I was the man who decided that what petrol needed was a large dose of atmosphere polluting lead (tetraethyllead or TEL) in it and then came up with the whizz that refridgerators would work better if they contained ozone depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).
I did suffer lead poisoning on several occasions and after numerous deaths at the factory that produced TEL and rumours began spreading that maybe the TEL was poisonous, i poured it over my hands and inhaled the substance for 60 seconds at a press conference to demonstrate the safety of TEL before suffering yet stay in hospital due to another bout of lead poisoning.
I was then on the team that developed CFC's for air conditioning and refrigeration systems before dying aged 55 by accidentally strangling myself in the ropes of a pulley that i had invented to lift himself out of bed.
Thankfully, all my lifes work is now being undone and scientists have confirmed that they have discovered an ozone hole in the pollution layer that i caused but with the thousands of millions of tonnes of lead pushed into the atmosphere and then the depletion of the cancer preventing ozone layer with CFC's, you could make the argument that i have been responsible for more human deaths than any other single person in history. Sorry.

The Moronic Ox

In the UK, July 4th is just the fourth day of July but it is a thing in America for some reason and in the midst of a pandemic with 130,000 dead Americans what is called for is a unifying, somber presidential speech which inspires the hope that the coming months will be less bleak than those that preceded them which is exactly what Donald Trump didn't give, instead he stood in the the shadow of Mount Rushmore and attacked protestors and bashed the ongoing anti-racism uprising.
So far as expected from the son of a KKK member but then came the bizarre term 'far-left fascism' which is an oxymoron too far for even him, a man who is ironically both as large as an ox and a moron but i have heard the term previously and amusingly that was by right wing people with no sense of...actually, let us just leave that there, with no sense.
How you can be a lefty with a fascist ideology is best left to people with less brain cells to worry about but it is considered a way that the right wing pass the baton of Fascism on because the optics of having people like Hitler and Mussolini on your side of the ideological fence is not a good one, other unsuccesful attempts have been to try and persuade people that Hitler was a Socialist and when Mussolini wrote 'The Doctrine of Fascism', it was based on the book by Karl Marx.
I did try and check how the President's oxymoron was received with the Atheists Church Group, the Outdoor Rambling Agoraphobic's Society, the Jose Mourinho Arsenal Appreciation Club and the Jewish Pork Lovers Collective but they never returned my calls but there is one July 4th statistic that is interesting, three of the 44 people who have been America's President, three never woke up on July 5th. Just saying.