Special Guest Blogger: Alan Rickman

My most compelling movie characters often stemmed from reality, Hans Gruber was loosely based on Andreas Baader of the West German Terrorist group Red Army Faction and Professor Severus Snape took his cues from my school teacher John Nettleship while Bruce Willis in Die Hard drew inspiration from some discarded planks of wood left outside a construction site.
I came to movies quite late, i was 42 when i got my break in the Die Hard movie, before that i was running my own graphic design business and one day after i was just about to turn 30, i thought blow this and dropped absolutely everything and signed up for acting classes which didn't do a lot for my financial security so i supported myself by working as a dresser for other actors which is literally helping them put their clothes on but i did meet some big names but any interaction was limited to 'fetch me my codpiece, boy'.
This went on for a decade then finally i was cast as one of the leads in the stage version of the book Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The play was a hit and was soon adapted by Hollywood as Dangerous Liaisons and everyone involved in it became internationally famous, except me, because they replaced me with John Malkovich.
However, it did get me considered for Four Weddings and a Funeral but Hugh Grant pipped me for it as he was better looking and then i got the offer of the villain in some action movie with some TV actor named Bruce Willis. Something about a bunch of terrorists taking over a skyscraper but as much as the budget went on Bruce Willis wages, i was hired because i was cheap and that is how one of the most distinctly English-sounding actors alive was hired to play a German.
That led to a career of playing villains and it all started with Die Hard, a film where a person sneaks around a tower at night trying to avoid me and ended with Harry Potter, a film where a person sneaks around a tower at night trying to avoid me.

Special Guest Blogger: Charlie Chaplin

Fate ordained that Adolf Hitler and i should make our entries into the world within four days of each other and that little Austrian had an effect on my life and career.
I remain one of the most instantly recognizable film stars of all time and my face become so iconic that some people don't even realise i was a real person and not just a generic mascot for black-and-white movies sporting what would eventually become the most unfortunate moustache ever.
I was a huge star of the silent film era, making several films featuring the Little Tramp character, as well as a handful of scathing political satires, including The Great Dictator, which ridiculed Hitler before making fun of Hitler was cool. The movie was a huge financial success and it's widely considered to be my masterpiece mostly for the epic four-minute speech at the end but it was the speech that led to me being investigated by the FBI and called to testify in front of the House
Un-American Activities Committee.
My speech raging against world governments was reprinted in leaflets by the Communist Party and the FBI began taking a closer look at my file and once my left-wing views became known, i was called an anti-American Commie.
While in London for the premiere of my next film, Limelight, the U.S. kindly invited me to stay the hell out by revoking my passport, effectively exiling me from the country.
Me being a Communist was pretty obvious, my films were intend to be well aimed shots against poverty and inequality with the common theme always the poor guy handing it to the wealthy and powerful so my pro-Communist messages should have hit everyone squarely between the eyes at every turn.
This slipped under the radar as possibly Communist, as did my friendship with William Z. Foster, who would go on to become general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
Ironic as it was that at my height i was the second largest earner in America, $13,000 a week from the Mutual Film Corporation.
When you know all this and hear the Great Dictator speech where i said lines such as: 'In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone' and 'Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security', you realise that far from just being that man with a Hitler moustache who fell over a lot, i was subliminally showing pro-Communist messages to millions of Americans in the most anti-Communist country in the World and got paid $13,000 a week to do it.
Got to love that and i'm proud that a silent movie star spoke one of the greatest monologues in the history of movies.

Special Guest Blogger: John Holmes

I know men look at me and the 20,000 women i had sex with with my 13 inch penis while making over 2,500 porn films and think lucky git and so they should, i had sex with 20,00 women, made over 2500 porn films and had a 13 inch wang, wahey...what's not to be jealous of??
Before making my big break in the pornography industry, i worked as an ambulance driver, a shoe salesman, a furniture salesman, and a door-to-door brush salesman and tried my hand at a job stirring chocolate at a factory which gave me strong wrists which would come in very useful later but my big break came whilst standing next to a man at an urinal who happend to be a porn director and noticed my package and before i knew it i was earning $3,000 a day and having sex with everyone.
If there was a way to be filthy, i tried my hand and one or two other body parts at it but i developed a very expensive drug habit and i had to start looking for new ways to make money, like prostituting myself to men and women and credit card fraud and some other illegal dealings, ended up in prison and eventually contracted HIV, withered away to 90 pounds and died three years later.
Porn actors and actresses don't seem to get the recognition we deserve, there is only so many times you can see Brad and Angelina posing for photographs on a red carpet or Kate Winslett blubbing in front of a podium before you reach the conclusion that God, these gong giving events are brain numbingly boring.
While the more mainstream actors and actresses are getting their backs slapped, we should also celebrate the actors and actresses who get slapped onto their backs. Or up against a wall. Or on the bonnet of a car. Actually, almost anywhere and porn is becoming big business, the porn film Pirates 2: Stagnettis Revenge cost $10 billion to make and is loosely based on the Pirates of the Caribbean film although i don't remember Johnny Depp doing that with a ho ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Special Guest Blogger: Zhengde Emperor

The boring thing about Democracy is that they almost never elect truly crazy people, some are voted in that are a bit weird and some that are borderline crazy but not 100%, out of their tree loopy.
Back when rulers took the throne based only on their bloodline, they let pretty much anyone be emperor in those days and a nation could wind up under the rule of someone who was literally insane which must have been a nightmare for everyone involved who wasn't the Emperor.
Many of the ministers expected that i would become a benevolent and brilliant emperor like my father but i took the throne of the Chinese Empire as a immature 14 year old and remained 14 for the next decade and a half of my rule, building a whole fake city block on the imperial grounds where i would pretend to be a shopkeeper with my invisible friend called Zhu Shou whom i would send on raiding parties to fight the Mongols and he did well although we did share a thing about Eunuch's.
He would order the genitalia of captured soldiers to be cut off and strung up for display in public and i gave the Eunuch's in my court control over the government so i could devote myself to pleasure seeking, my thinking was if they got no testicles how much trouble can they cause.
Being a teenage boy with power, i indulged myself in women, at one point created a palace and initially housing exotic animals such as tigers and leopards but after one tiger clawed me when i tried to pet it, i had them all killed and turned it into a harem with as many beautiful women as i could find although i forgot to feed them and most of them died, my bad.
On another occasion i burned down my palace by storing gunpowder in the courtyard and i eventually died in predictable fashion after getting really drunk and falling off a boat during a fishing trip.
I don't know why China decided to pack in the whole Emporer thing, me and Zhu Shou thought it was a blast.

Special Guest Blogger: Hank Williams

I know y'all Brits think that Country and Western music is for men in dungarees called Billy Bob or Bobby Joe who say things like 'That's a pertty mouth on you, boy' to unsuspecting canoeists after engaging them in a banjo playing contest but it isn't all about stetson wearing escapees from the Dukes of Hazard singing depressing songs about how our dog died and our wives left us taking our pick-up truck. 
I was big news back in my day, mostly amongst red necked Americans with southern accents, buck teeth, mullets and holding guns but they make us tough in the American South and it's lucky they did because Heavens to Betsy that moonshine was strong stuff. 
The South has an obsession with moonshine, it promotes a do-it-yourself attitude and since everyone did-it-themselves, they made it as dern tootin strong as they could but it's hard to actually enjoy moonshine because enjoying moonshine means that you drank enough to forget just how awful the stuff is but it does explain why so many rednecks came to think they been anally probed by aliens.
With names like Mule kick or Panther's breath, as long as the drink's title doesn't include the name of a fruit, it doesn't matter what was in it and my ma made the finest hooch this side of the Mississippi.
Just as my songs about hunting, marrying your cousins and dilapidated trucks made banjo playing good ol boys in stetson hats happier than a tornado in a trailer park, the moonshine took it's toll and i died an alcoholic aged just 29.
I was one of the very first to employ the 'Die Young and Sell a Ton of Records' technique, i even wrote a song about it called 'I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive' which seems a bit obvious as nobody does, it's no secret that everybody dies and you need to grasp that fact and write a song all about it just before you die.
It was your standard down-on-your-luck country type of stuff about my wife leaving me and dying horribly and my own blood clots in the heart and neck bought on by my years of chronic alcohol abuse made sure i barely made it out of 1952, dying on News Years Day in 1953.
As for today's music, it's destroying the radio and is only enjoyed by those who can't appreciate how crucial Hawaiian guitars and wash boards are when constructing anything musical.

Special Guest Blogger: Jack Mytton

The British Aristocracy is often held up as proof that rich people are idiots and i can't speak for all of the Aristocracy but i certainly was both, rich and an idiot.
I was always the kind of person that parents would tell their kids to steer clear of at school. I was expelled from one for getting into a fist-fight with a teacher, then went on to get booted from another school for keeping a horse in the dorm room.
Coming from a wealthy family and inheriting a fortune and not having a job and having lots of time on my hands, i fancied having a go at being a politician and deciding it was easier than campaigning, i spent £10,000 bribing enough voters to elect me to Parliament and then quit the next day because it was boring and if there was one thing i couldn't abide, it was being bored.
I once rode a horse into a hotel, galloped up the staircase and jumped out the window for a dare but the attempt to jump a horse drawn carraige over a fence wasn't quite so successful.
I would fox hunt in the nude and one time hired a bear and rode it to a party where it promptly bit me and then attacked the guests, strangely the parties invites dried up for a while after that.
I invented a medical breakthrough though in the shape of a cure for hiccups. After drinking heavily i had a bad case of the hiccups but none of the conventional cures got rid of them, so i lit my shirt on fire and after a servant beat out the flames, my hiccups were gone. I heartily encourage you to try it at home.
I died due to an alcohol problem, namely i had spent all my money and couldn't afford to buy anymore so in shock at being alcohol free for the first time in decades, my body fatally went into the DT's and i died but boy did i have a fun, hiccup free time.

Special Guest Blogger: Olivia de Havilland

It is said that life is fleeting, but some of us, like me, just go on living so long that journalists who had pre-written my obituary have all since died.
I was an actress in Hollywood's Golden Age and had all the catty feuds, illicit scandals, iconic roles, and steamy romances to prove it.
Catty Feud - Tick. Extra points for it being with my own younger sister, Joan Fontaine, who was also an actress. As i was the older sister she was always jealous of me, i said she couldn't use her real last name, 'De Havilland', because that was mine and there couldn't be two us us so she went with Fontaine instead.
Illicit Scandals - Tick. The very much older and very much married, hard-drinking director John Huston. John F Kennedy who was using Hollywood as his own personal harem at the time and he put the moves on me but i dismissed him as a slime-ball, which he was, so i was right.
Iconic role - Tick. Melanie Hamilton in Gone With the Wind, Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Steamy Romance - Tick. Perm one from Jimmy Stewart, Howard Hughes or Errol Flynn.
My sister and i feuded right up to her death aged 94, she said 'I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because i beat her to it' but strangely enough i didn't give a damn and i was perfectly okay with her winning that one.
I died just after my 104th birthday as the only Gone With The Wind film's lead actor alive, the other three leads had all died more than 50 years ago which is ironic as in the film, i was the only one to die out of all the lead actors.

Special Guest Blogger: Walter Raleigh

Most people know me for bringing potatoes and tobacco back to Britain but i was so much more than spuds and fags, i was a swashbuckling Renaissance man who had more than his fair share of wild stories from my time as a politician, courtier, explorer, spy, soldier, poet, and i still found time to write The History of the World.
I probably should have done the potato and tobacco thing at different times, the amount of times i saw people trying to light up and inhale the potato was embarrassing but once they worked out that the idea was to eat the spud and stick the burning leaves in their mouths they were less reluctant.
I went looking for El Dorado, the lost city of gold after i told the Royal Court that it was definelty, certainly 100% guaranteed there but i never found it but i did find lots and lots of Royal funding to carry on looking and between tropical diseases, a great suntan, bags of brown lumpy things and plants you could inhale, i spent much of my adult life going on adventures at the behest of Queen Elizabeth I, who thought i was great and kept giving me things but the fine carriages, money, luxury estates and as many girls as my tongue could cope with annoyed people, most importantly the soon to be King, James.
The 'coat-in-a-puddle-for-the-queen' trick worked a treat but when Liz died, King James accused me of treason and i decided to defend myself in court and as i later served 13 years in the Tower of London you can guess how well that went.
With time on my hands i did write the first two volumes of the History of the World, the entire history of human civilization starting with the Greeks and Romans which i presented to King James as a 'sorry about the whole treason thing' and he let me go to continue my exploration of the New World as long as i promised not to attack the Catholic Spanish already there.
I crossed my heart and hoped to die and then attacked them for which i was rewarded by having my head chopped off and given to my wife when i made it back to England.
She had it embalmed and carried it around with her for the rest of her life in a red bag but my proud legacy would be introducing the smokers cough and chip shops to England.

Special Guest Blogger: Grace Kelly

Although i was a famous actress in my own right, these days i'm best remembered as 'Princess Grace' after my marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco.
Before that i was known to have had quite the dating life, falling for so many of my older male co-stars including Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Ray Milland and David Niven. Such was my reputation of having it away with the stars that Jimmy Stewart's wife would stay on set and would even drive him to and from set every day to make sure he couldn’t get up to anything, or rather i couldn't.
Another notable tryst took place in the early '50s with randy future President John F. Kennedy but statistically every woman who was breathing would have had that distinction if he hadn't have died.
During the filming of The Country Girl, i was involved in a love pentagon with four actors but then my Prince came and the whirlwind affair was everything a girl could wish for, if her wishes included undergoing a fertility test and proving i was a virgin, which i obviously wasn't but they swallowed the 'my hymen tore when horseback riding' so off i went to live a Royal life in Europe.
As for my legacy, the biggest film i was connected to was one i never starred in but came across while sitting on the 20th Century Fox board of directors.
Some young director came in to pitch for a nerdy space fantasy film which was pretty much the dreams of a grown man who had been playing with action figures on his mum's kitchen table too much but as the the board of directors were unsure, i had the deciding vote but i really didn't give a crap about a geeky space film so gave a bored shrug, which they took as consent which meant Star Wars was made.
I could have done with a Millennium Falcon that day i suffered a stroke and drove my car off a mountain but an American actress becoming a European Princess, that's never going to happen again.

Special Guest Blogger: Oliver Hardy

Before i met Stan Laurel, i went under the name Babe Hardy and before a career getting slapped around the head with planks of wood and carrying piano's up flights of stairs, i started out playing villains in silent films and met my future comedy partner in a film where i robbed him.   
I was the first Tin Man in the original 1925 Wizard of Oz movie but the most famous partnership in comedy came about due to me injuring myself with a leg of lamb.
I was due to appear in 'Get 'Em Young' but just as the filming started, i was unexpectedly hospitalised by the lamb and Stan who had been working as a warm up man was asked if he could step in at the last moment. Being English he of course said yes and that was his big break.
The studio noticed that my rotund figure and Stan looking like a walking stick-man looked funny and we had a chemistry and began teaming us together which led to the start of a Laurel and Hardy series and probably the second most famous toothbrush moustache in history after a certain Austrian gentleman.
This style of moustache was one of the most popular styles at the beginning of the 20th century with me and Charlie Chaplin sporting the tuft of hair below the nostrils but the German Chancellor made it an icon of the right-wing Nazi Party and sadly that brought it's popularity to an end.
As moustache's go, it is a bit of a silly one but it will now forever be known as the Hitler 'tache but we also popularised bowler hats and the painful act of people getting whacked with ladders as colleagues turned around on building sites ever since. 

Special Guest Blogger: Elizabeth Taylor

On the movie screen we see beautiful people lead impossibly exciting lives but once the cameras stop rolling, those actors are supposed to return to the same boring existence as everyone else but some of us didn't get that memo and my off-screen antics were just as unbelievable as anything in my movies.
I made my movie debut aged 10, slept with movie star and future President Ronald Reagan at 15, got married aged 18, 20, 25, 27, 32, 43, 44 and 59 and between eating wedding cake and visiting divorce lawyers, i knocked out some films including Cleopatra for which i was paid $1 million, the largest sum ever paid to an actress at the time. Like i said if someone’s dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I’m certainly not dumb enough to turn it down.
I also never turned down Richard Burton either, marrying, divorcing, remarrying, and divorced him again but no man could resist my film star looks which was due to a condition called distichiasis which is a a double row of eyelashes to flutter at any potential future husband.
With my career mostly behind me, i still had plenty to keep me occupied including a toy-boy new husband, polishing my Oscars and becoming an outspoken AIDS advocate when the disease killed my good friend Rock Hudson, this was back when people wouldn't touch an AIDS victim with a disinfected 10-foot pole.
At the time, members of the Reagan administration called it a gay plague and literally laughed about the disease in press conferences (although they were not so forthcoming on older men having sex with 15 year olds i noted) and when i said President Bush Sr. probably didn't even know how to spell AIDS i received death threats, because nothing screams insecure about one's own sexuality like intimidating a 60-year-old lady trying to help people, some of who happen to be gay, with a terminal illness.
I was such a diva that i had it written into my will that i wanted to be fashionably late to my own funeral, so the coffin turned up 15 minutes after everyone else, classy to the end.

Hold Fire On Engraving Biden's Nobel Prize

When Barack Obama became American President, such was the relief after the foreign policy debacles of George W Bush, that a Nobel Peace Prize was shoveled towards him although there were many calls for this to be taken back when he turned out to be if not as war mongering as his predecessor, happy to continue what he inherited and start a new war in Libya.  
With that in mind you can expect whoever takes over from Donald Trump to be applauded just for not being Donald Trump but for all his faults, Trump has not invaded or started any wars with anyone.
He may be an abhorrent human being on almost every level and easily the most inept American President i have ever in my lifetime, his reaction to the Coronavirus pandemic was as bad as it could be and there are 170,000 and counting less Americans wedged between Canada and Mexico because of it, but what he does there has no consequences to those of us not under his rule.
Withdrawing from the Paris Accords, the Iran deal and leaving the WHO during a pandemic to try and shift blame away from his own inadequacies have an effect worldwide and apart from Putin in Russia, it is hard to think of any other World Leaders who will be hoping he wins a second term in November.
If he does lose then the new President will be Joe Biden, a man who i know very little about but whenever i see him he looks like he is about to either fall asleep or has just woken up.
To make up for his low energy, his Vice President pick seems more upbeat but again i know nothing about her either but both have been described as centralists and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doesn't seem over enamored with the Democrat choice and she is about the only one who caught my eye out of the Democrat Party members. 
For all those who assume there are not enough Americans who will look at Trump's record and think he did a good enough job to get another four years, just a warning that we assumed that all John Kerry had to do was turn up to take the White House keys off George W Bush in 2004, but Bush got sent back for another term so i wouldn't be engraving that Nobel Prize with Biden's name just yet.

Special Guest Blogger: Marquis de Sade

Bonjour, i probably don't have a great reputation outside the whips and chain crowd, given that my major legacy is leaving the world the practice of sado-machism and bringing explicit material to people in a time when showing off your ankles was scandalous, think of 50 shades of grey but with more berets and garlic.
My books of sexual debauchery was somewhat de rigueur in aristocratic circles, i just wrote about what i saw but it was just that i was particularly perverse and particularly open about my proclivities and this was in a time when the upper classes were hardly any cleaner than the commoners, just getting to a person's genitals required a stiff wire brush and a chisel.
The things i wrote, said, and even did would make your mother blush while clutching her pearls in disbelief, but i spent a lot of time behind bars for them. In fact, 32 years of my life were wasted either incarcerated or doing things that would get me incarcerated but it was while i was imprisoned that i did my best literary work.
While in an asylum run by Catholic priests, i was encouraged to write and also direct a play using other patients as actors but seeing as the Catholic Church has as many scandals as it does Saints, that made sense.
At some point i decided i needed to settle down with a nice girl. So married a religious, reserved woman who organised orgies, prostitutes, hid my harem of young girls from the police and during my many stints in jail, made sure i was provided with the essentials, which in my case consisted mostly of gags, drugs and dildos.
My mother in law shockingly, didn't approve of her daughter's marriage to the guy who invented sadism and in fact the snitch was responsible for many of my stints in jail so in an attempt to make peace, i had sex with another one of her daughters on the side although shockingly, it only made things worse.
Being the grand poobah of Perverts had to catch up with me some time, i had problems retaining any staff as few maids and servants responded well to my attempting to bugger them while they served supper and after a set of maids fled my chateau, the father of one of the maids attempted to shoot me at point-blank range. Lucky for me, the gun misfired and i escaped.
My first serious charge was a doozy, i tried to convince a sex worker to use the holy cross for a purpose where no holy cross had gone before but she reported me and i was charged with blasphemy, which led to my very first arrest.
I was actually thrown out of one prison one for disturbing and seducing the prisoners, i was even thrown into the Bastille just as it was being stormed but far from it ending in seven free prisoners, it ended with six free ones and me being taken to another nuthouse for being a sexually deviant.
I died in prison, while having an affair with a teenager who worked there so my story has a happy ending so now i just got to clean up the mess i made on Lucy's chair and leave a note for the next person to use the keyboard that they may want to give it a bit of a wipe down first.

Special Guest Blogger: Audrey Hepburn

My Parents may have been Nazi Sympathizers, attending Nuremberg rallies but as the Nazi's stamped through Europe, my mother had a change of heart and made the assumption that the Netherlands would safe and relocated with me to Arnhem. The Nazi's never got that memo though as they quickly overran the country moths later.
As a child i worked for the Dutch Resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe, transporting secret messages in my ballet slippers to raise money for the rebels and their underground war against Hitler, money we could have done with as we were boiling grass, nettles and tulip bulbs.
My image is one of sophistication and class and it was probably no surprise that i has a pet deer called Pippin who was in one of my movies and i was told to spending some time with so it would become comfortable around me. So, like any good actress working with a newbie, i took the newcomer under my wing and introduced Pippin to the Hollywood lifestyle.
I was full of grace, elegance, and humility but things could have been very different as i was training to become a dental assistant when i was discovered sitting by a river and chain smoking and asked to star in a play.
I thought i had a big nose and big feet, and far too skinny but Hollywood came knocking and my career defining role as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s which was originally meant for Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote, who wrote the novel on which the movie was based, said that i was terrible in it but he always did have a thing for dumb blondes.
My singing voice was not good in My Fair Lady' and my vocals were replaced by a proper singer and Humphrey Bogart said i couldn’t act and had little talented and even Marlon Brando turned down a part because he didn’t like me but i don't think i did too bad for a skinny girl with a big nose who was raised on a diet of crushed tulip bulbs.

Special Guest Blogger: Aleister Crowley

My father was particularly devout, spending his time as a traveling preacher and reading a chapter from the Bible to me and my mum after breakfast every day but when i queried the bits about unicorns, dragons, talking snakes and horses with the heads of lions he would just tell me to shut up and eat my cornflakes.
That was my problem with religion, some of the stories in the Bible are so far fetched that you really couldn't make it up but obviously someone did and people would spend their Sunday mornings sat on hard pews listening to a man in a frock bang on about a character who was plagiarised from other deities and then someone turns up and rattles a plate in their faces and expect them to make a donation for it all.
I had the idea that as religion is just a load of made up nonsense, i may as well make up my own only mine included smoking, masturbating, and having sex with anyone and everyone. We even had special biscuits, only with added menstrual blood and a mixture of semen and vaginal fluids. Not as tasty as a McVities Rich Tea admittedly but they were okay.
Calling my religion Thelema, i said that i was the prophet who had been contacted by a supernatural entity and guardian angel named Aiwass who provided me with The Book of the Law which served as the basis for Thelema and the message was 'Do what thou wilt' and my wilt was to have sex with as many prostitutes as i could and smoke hashish.
My noteirity led me to being called the 'Wickedest Man in the World' and linked with the occult and writing a butt-load of books on magic but not quite the bunny-in-a-hat type that most people love. The real kind. The kind that does a lot of drugs called Sexual Magick which which is basically just using climax fluids as parts of a spell. And whatever was left over went into the biscuit baking.
At once point i told everyone i had opened a portal between our universe and another, giving aliens a passageway to Earth but after life time of catching gonorrhea and syphilis and a doing a shipload of drugs it was asthma which killed me.
In fairness my religion was no worse than the other 'official' ones, nobody ever got burnt at a stake or ostracised for loving someone of the same sex and my supporters were no more gullible for swallowing my 'God tells us to have a gang-bang' explanation than those who swear that a talking snake told a woman to eat an apple or that a man managed to fit two of every kind of animal on a small boat.

Special Guest Blogger: Prince

Nobody seems to mention my being voted 'the Sexiest Vegetarian of 2006' but early on in my career it was thought that i was gay despite it being obvious to anyone who paid the smallest amount of attention that i loved women although it was only the creepy weirdo's who cared about what anyone did in their bedroom.
I was admired for my ball skills in college, again, not gay, it was basketball despite being 5' 2" although admitedly that photo of me naked on the cover of the Lovesexy Album didn't help, i was about the only person ever who looked less manly when he's not wearing lady clothes but i was certainly effeminate.
My only fist fight was with Sinead O'Connor over her cover of my 'Nothing Compares 2U' song as i hated the way she swore, so i told her, she spat at me and probably the most girly fistfight of all time ensued. I never had that problem with Chaka Khan and The Bangles, Chaka would have knocked my block off.
I also upset a few people by refusing to take part in the charity single 'We Are The World' but i did write a single and give all the proceeds to the Charity, it wasn't because i was fine with kids starving to death, it was solely because i didn't want to stand between Kenny Rogers and Bruce Springsteen while singing a Michael Jackson song.
Talking of Jackson, i was often mistaken for him in the late 80s, he was the Thriller guy and i was the Purple guy singing about doves crying but i was also the guy who would later make the seemingly insane decision to change his name to an unpronounceable squiggle.
Today's pop acts just show up to the studio to sing words they didn't write while real musicians like me do all the stuff that requires actual musical ability, on my debut album i played 27 different instruments including a mini-Moog and a poly-Moog, whatever the hell they are.
I died from an overdose of painkillers, strangely enough turning Purple and making a noise like a dove crying as it got pushed through a shredder.

Special Guest Blogger: John Adams

It's no coincidence that most of our well known Presidents happened to be the ones tasked with navigating America through extremely difficult times and i had a vision for America and i wasn't going to let anyone stand in my way, especially those bloody French and English ruffians.
As the second president and one of the Founding Fathers, i helped author the Declaration of Independence and while in a bit of a tiff with the French, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which said American citizens were no longer allowed to say anything nasty about the government and as President, i could also deport any individual who was from France, or any individual who someone heard say something nice about France.
My real hatred though was towards the British and i hear that they are still whining now.
They moan about us and what we have done in the United States after we kicked them out and bitch and moan about everything, such as their flag.
The Union Flag will be hung up any damn way we wish so stop bitching about it being upside down. If there was meant to be a right way up you should have made it simpler and beer should to be served cold. The warm, flat drink you call beer is properly termed 'ale' and the FDA have determined it to be unfit for human consumption.
They should also learn the difference between crackers, cookies and biscuits to avoid causing unnecessary confusion.
Why they are still hunting with dogs i will never understand, as if hunting with a pick-up truck, some six-packs of beer, two coonhounds and enough guns and ammo to equip a private militia isn't good enough for them and talking of guns, what really gets me is the lack of firearms in citizens homes over there in Limeyland.
You are grown up's so you should be able to own a weapon for legitimate reasons such as gunning down the population of a small town in self-defense.
God Blessed America but he obviously blew a great big raspberry at Great Britain.

Special Guest Blogger: Bobby Moore

My full name was Robert Frederick Chelsea Moore but i preferred to go by the name Bobby Moore, for obvious reasons, i mean Frederick!!
Football is a simple game played by even simpler people so if you want excitement, frustration and a garish replica shirt made out of material which will chafe your nipples, then football's the game for you but if you're after logic and common sense, then you'll have to look elsewhere.
I was famous for captaining the England national team to the 1966 World Cup, playing for West Ham for 16 years and that picture of me and Pele where it looks as though we are asking each other to do each other's washing but we was swapping shirts after a World Cup game in 1970 in Brazil, a tournament that was a bit more memorable for me than i wanted. 
We were defending the World Cup and we rocked up in Bogotá for a friendly against Colombia and when we got to the Hotel we decided to have a quick look in a jewellery shop in the lobby then next thing we know there's alarm bells going off and the shop assistant is saying i stole a ruby bracelet.
The local old bill charged me with the theft of the bracelet but i did my best innocent cockney bit, wringing a flat cap in my hands and whining 'it weren't not nuffink to do with me, mister, I ain't never not done it, I ain't never not done nuffink' and i was released just in time for the start of the tournament.
After 600 appearance for West Ham, i went to Fulham and then had a stint in America but those yanks understand the beautiful game about as much as they understand chocolate, you ever taste a Herschey Bar. WTF is that about??
After a lifetime of being a sporting hero, God decided he was going to reward me but he didn't go with the being eternally young and beautiful, no, he gave me his great gift of cancer.
Still i had a great life, ending up with lots of medals, England caps, an OBE, the undying adulation of a footballing nation and a lovely ruby bracelet.

Israel Expecting Praise For Not Being Quite So Evil

Were we supposed to be impressed by the UAE and Israel agreement which was hailed by the White House as an 'historical peace agreement' yesterday?
Part of the deal is that Israel will suspend plans to annex large swathes of the Palestinian land in the West Bank which will still remain occupied and Palestinians are still denied basic rights.
That's like a bully expecting praise for not punching you in the neck while they are stealing your lunch, and Israel has been the bully in the area for the past 70 years.
Palestinian's history seems to be one of other people deciding their fate, from the British handing over half their land to the World standing idly by as the neighbour steals their land and terrorises the population and is now being rewarded with regional acceptance.
All the time Israel continues to militarily occupy Palestine, illegally seize and builds settlements on Palestinian land, defy countless UN Resolutions, kill innocent Palestinians, hold thousands of Palestinians in its prisons, destroys farms and bulldoze homes and businesses then nobody should be cozying up to Israel.
America under Trump is a joke but the rest of the international community should be taking decisive action towards Israel respecting human rights in Palestine who, if they want to be on friendlier terms with their neighbours, should take a woefully long-overdue steps towards peace with their neighbour, maybe then they won't be viewed as the murderous and truly awful nation Israel is in their treatment of the Palestinians.
Agreeing to not treat their neighbours quite so abhorrently to earn praise and agreements is just wrong in every way.

Special Guest Blogger: Percy Julian

They say history is written by the winners, but frankly i'm pretty sure history is just written by idiots because how come the guy who isolated the hormones progesterone, estrogen and testosterone which are in pretty much everything of what's in our medicine cabinets is unknown.
I gave the world birth control pills, arthritis cream, asthma inhalers, eczema and cancer treatments, hemorrhoids and the cream for allergies but i'm unknown.
Much of the vast majority of the things we use every day were created by people whose names we never bothered to learn, such as me.
I was working at Howard University but as a black man in America in the 40's, there wasn't a university in the country that would offer me a spot in a doctorate program for me to gain my PHD so i flicked them the finger and buggered off to Vienna University in Austria.
Homesick, stressed and still angry over having to leave my own country to get my Doctorate, i sent a letter or twelve to one of my former colleagues back home in which i slaged off everyone at the University but years later, clutching my freshly printed Doctorate, i ended up back at that same University and face to face with the people i had bad mouthed and my pen pal who in a pique of jealousy, accidentally slipped all my letters to the staff and press, who found it totally appropriate to publish them.
Then, as if having my private smack-talk letters made public wasn't enough, i was accused of having an affair with my assistant's wife, which i was but that's not the point, i had made sure she wouldn't get pregnant by playing my part in inventing a pill that would make sure she couldn't.
I was forced to quit Howard University and left town humiliated and vilified but as i have always maintained, success is all about not annoying the right people, everyone remembers Louis Pasteur for cripes sake and all he did was invent hot milk, i relieved peoples piles for crying out loud.

Special Guest Blogger: David Bowie

Everyone who was cool in the '70s was expected to be wild, sexually ambiguous hedonistic junkies so who was i to disappoint.
One of my first girlfriends was costume designer Ola Hudson and her son Saul, they were from Stoke in England which is the home of fancy teapots and cockney Rhyming slang for being homosexual and she had given birth to a music legend of her own, Not-Yet-Slash Saul and wow that boy hated me, and things didn't improve much after soon-to-be Slash walked in on me and his mum naked, either.
We broke up but she did ask me to step in when Slash was at the height of his drug problem but as swapped the drugs for snakes, i will let you decide how influential i was.
She asked me because even i can't remember all that freaky shit i was into in the 1970s but i do remember being so whacked out on heroin that i started to believe that German electronic music was a worthwhile career move but my career was one of constant reinvention with characters like Ziggy Stardust, Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, and The Thin White Duke so it was only a matter of time before one of my personas turned out to be a bit of a dick, one phase including calling for a fascist uprising in Britain and calling Adolf Hitler one of the first rock stars.
I don't know how much Acid i dropped then but there must have been a global shortage afterwards.
Probably explains my fear of being stalked by witches who i thought were trying to get their hands on my semen to make a baby that they were going to sacrifice to Satan, like a glam-rock version of Rosemary's Baby with added glitter.
I got over it after i hooked up with a practicing white witch who performed an exorcism for me, after which i finally stopped worrying about witches and i also quit cocaine around that same time, but i'm sure that had nothing to do with it.
So kids, remember to take your protein pills, put your helmet on and enjoy the hazy, cosmic jive but  keep an eye out for women with pointy hats and test tubes.

Special Guest Blogger: Rev. John Lothropp

Many people think that Australia was the only nation founded by a bunch of criminals but it wasn't only those in the land down under who were the recipient of the less than law abiding British population, over 55,000 prisoners of the limey persuasion were also shipped off to colonial America before the yanks got up-tight about Britain ruling over them and started chucking the tea into harbours.
I was one of them when the British started emptying their prisons into the New World, as a Church of England Curate, my crime was to renounce the CoE as it was not religious enough and attempt to set up my own Independent Church for which i was sentenced to prison and after 12 months i was given the offer of staying in prison or being sent to the New World so my six children and i packed our things and six months later 200 of my fellow passengers and us landed in Massachusetts.
In a nation created by religious fanatics, my views were embraced more enthusiastically and i tried to set up another Church but we had a bit of a falling out, where as England was not holy enough, the crackpots in the New World were much too religious even for me so i stayed at home which explains how i ended up fathering 13 children but whereas it never really happened for me, my legacy is not so much what i did but what my great, great great etc Grandchildren did.
Britain may have got rid of me but my revenge was that my direct descendants include 4 Presidents, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush as well as Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Wild Bill Hickock, Clint Eastwood and Kevin Bacon.
Benedict Arnold would have called me Grandad and although my Church was a busted flush, my descendents had better luck and created the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons as they became known, the fruit of my loins coming to a doorstep to depress you soon.

Special Guest Blogger: Robin Williams

Someone once described me as funny as i was hairy and i must have been hilarious because i was one of the hairiest people on the planet.
When i was a child, i was quite overweight, shy, and nobody would play with me so as a result, i would entertain myself by talking in different voices, one of them an alien. 
I graduated from Redwood High School voted 'Least Likely to Succeed' and to make money i would perform on the street outside of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as a mime but my career took off thanks to an appearance on Happy Days where i played an alien called Mork who meets the fonz to learn about human dating, it was the 70's when this sort of plot device made sense, which led to Mork getting his own spin-off, Mork & Mindy, an alien from the planet Ork, who lived with a human girl to study Earth culture and all of its strangeness.
I invented the words Shazbot and Nanu Nanu but in the late 70s and early 80s, i was heavily addicted to alcohol and other harder substances. 
My first major film debut was Popeye, a movie so bad that even i was ashamed of it and i was in Bicentennial Man.
I was considered for the lead role in The Shining, but after seeing Mork & Mindy, Stanley Kubrick rejected the idea because i was too psychotic, can you imagine being called 'too psychotic' for a role in The Shining?
Being an ex-alcoholic didn't stop me from owning a vineyard which is a bit like Karen Carpenter owning a cake shop.
I took my own life after becoming depressed and suffering from dementia and in one of my last interviews i was asked what would God say to me when i entered Heaven.
I said something about a concert with Mozart and Elvis but the big guys first words to me were Nanu Nanu while twisting his ears and that's what i am remembered for, that and being really, really hairy.

Special Guest Blogger: Albert Hofmann

Science has always been a double-edged sword, with advances like penicillin, electricity and TV balanced by napalm, nuclear weapons and TV's showing Piers Morgan but sometimes it throws up a bit of a strange one which neither benefits or hinders mankind, but wow does it make you feel good.
I was goofing about with some mould growing on bread and i did that mad scientist thing and thought to myself 'I wonder what it tastes like' and i ate some and started to feel a bit weird so packed up my things and rode home, rather wobbly, on my bike.
A few days later, i decided to see what the hell that strange stuff was so i took some more and i began hallucinating, all the pretty colours communing with nature and spiritual enlightenment, but unbeknown to me i had became the first known person to synthesize and ingest lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
I continued to take small doses of LSD throughout much of my life, and always hoped to find a use for it but apart from floating away with the fairies, i never did but the CIA tried.
They noticed that the during trials for treason, the most compliant Russians on trial were, to put it modestly, off their tits, and rather than passing it off as too much vodka, they figured out pretty quickly that he had been doped into testifying.
The CIA launched an extensive, decades long research program focused on my LSD named Project MK-ULTRA with a goal of mind control with the goal of getting someone so high that they'll kill themselves if they asked them nicely.
I died aged 102 but i can't put that down to LSD and i'm not sure if that is a good legacy i left behind but there is one regret i have, i invented hippies and the associated tie-die shirts and psychedelic music.

Special Guest Blogger: Benedict Arnold

It has been said that i was an American who switched sides to fight alongside the British during the American Revolution but i was always British, as British as an electric kettle as us Britishlanders say so as i'm 100% British there may be some words here that you Americano's won't understand.
I did start out fighting in the American army, getting into many a kerfuffle and i led the famous siege of Fort Ticonderoga, masterminded the invasion of Quebec where i got shot in the leg. If i had bought some slaves and retired then they would have built a statue of me in Conneticut but the military repeatedly passed me over for promotion with younger, less experienced men and other officers tried to take credit for my achievements and i was even investigated by congress on baseless accusations of corruption, so after all my bravery, sacrifice and bullet holes, America kicked me repeatedly in the guts so i thought they can bloody well naff off somewhere else. Effing cheek of it and i quit the team and decided to go for the full English and offered West Point to my British homies.
I would have got away with it to if it wasn't for me being a proper arse and holding lengthy negotiations with the British regarding how much i would be paid and then the damned yankee plums found out and i had to flee to the safety of the British-occupied territory of New Brunswick in Canada and then to England.
I can't suss out why the idea of naming a traditional American breakfast known as Eggs Benedict after me is meant to be an insult but those yankees don't have the sense of humour that us Britishers have and anyway, so what if i did screw you over, hey, America, you started it so bugger to the lot of you.

Special Guest Blogger: Chuck Berry

Look, i know that putting out a song called my ding-a-ling, which had the line which went 'Every time the bell would ring, You'd catch me playing with my ding-a-ling' doesn't look good but i did have some Pavolvian reaction to bells, it's a Tennessee thing, but i was not a massive pervert.
The 14-year-old girl i got caught trying to smuggle across state lines was not for immoral purposes, we was looking for her lost puppy and then there is the restaurant thing.
Having made all kinds of money for being a musical legend, i decided to buy a few restaurants. Then i decided to buy some video cameras. Then i decided to install those cameras around the restaurants and a few got installed in the ladies restrooms, then i decided to view the security footage from those cameras. Look, my crime was hiring lousy workmen.
I have been called one of the greatest guitarists of all time, one of the inventors of rock music but i wasn't just the daddy of an entire musical genre, i also gave the world the duckwalk which most guitarists at some point have tried to copy and there's a funny story behind that.
Early in my career there was a bunch of talent scouts at one of my concerts but i had dripped beer down the front of my shirt moments before i went on stage and covered up the embarrassing stains by hunching over, the crowd loved it and playing the guitar like Quasimodo with a bad bout of constipation was born.
My 'Johnny B Goode' song was chosen to represent Humans on the Voyager Space Mission so if any alien life finds it they will think those funny looking humans on that blue planet can't be all bad and not obliterate us
I had a great career and died aged 90 but i wasn't looking forward to having to explain My Ding-a-Ling to St. Peter especially after having to ring the the bell on the Pearly gate. 

Shields V Masks

If you had told me in January that we were all going to have such an in-depth knowledge of how we spray aerosol droplets from our mouths and noses in August i would have assumed you have been at the left over Christmas egg-nog but then if you had said i would be going on a Toilet Roll hunt in supermarkets i wouldn't have believed you either.
So we now know that every time we utter just a couple of words, we spray thousands of invisible aerosol droplets into the air in front of us.
Just talking can send droplets 1.2m, singing 1.5m, coughing 1.9m and sneezing up to 8m in front of us and there is growing evidence that some of the droplets fall onto surfaces but some hang around in the air just waiting to be breathed in by innocent bystanders.
Wearing a mask does not therefore stop you breathing in the potentially infected droplets but they do stop you breathing out quite so many every time you cough or burst into a chorus of Aga Doo which brings me to face shields which most service workers seem to be wearing now.
Sure they stop droplets shooting forth from the mouth of the wearer and stop other droplets hitting there own face, it even allows you to talk clearly without chewing on a section of cloth but they only stop droplets coming at you straight on.
With a sizable gap below the shield, the droplets have a handy space to invade and as they seem to be the protection of choice for waitresses, hairdressers and other professions where the shield wearer is above the sitting customer, it's an open invite for any passing nasty.
Any protection is better than no protection but i think i will stick with my mask for now.

Ending The Furlough Scheme

The UK Government havent got much right during the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic but the furlough scheme where it paid 80% of an employees wages, was one of its very few successes.
Of course the pain will come later when we have to pay for it and with the bill expected to be in the region of £337 billion, that's a whole lot of pain looming at us down the road but it had to be done to save massive redundancies but there is a new problem now, getting people back to work.
I completely understand how after 4 months off on which amounts to paid leave, dragging yourself back to work is no fun, in my previous job i had a eight week gap in the summer and getting back into the routine is tough so i completely understand that.
I also get that the virus is still out there lurking and waiting for fresh new bodies to infect and the World Beating track and trace we were promised turned out to be a busted flush and the app, well, what app.
I get all that and the confusing signals sent out by the Government about staying 1m away from each other but under no circumstances should you get closer than 2m and the work from home but you should go into the office nonsense but i agree that the scheme should not be extended past October.  
Until then grab your hand sanitiser and your face mask and enjoy the Government paying you to bask in the summer sunshine while staying a safe distance away from others and you never know, come October, when the weather turns colder and we all lock ourselves indoors away from the cold, the smart money is on us looking at Lockdown Part 2 and a socially distanced Christmas and we can do it all again.

Ammonium Nitrate in Portsmouth's Port

With almost perfect timing, a company has put in a bid to Portsmouth City Council to store 5,000 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate in Portsmouth's Port.
That's 5,000 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate, almost double the amount of the same stuff that was stored in Beirut and exploded killing 150 and injuring over 5,000 people.
I'm not sure if the Council leader, Gerald Vernon-Jackson, has been under a rock and missed the headlines for the last couple of days but he is very keen to house the explosive fertilizer in his home city, saying that since the Port lost the contract to store bananas, it has been looking for new revenue streams to protect the council services which doesn't necessarily show a firm grasp of the concept of protecting.
From bananas to explosive substances is a big leap but i say go for it Portsmouth City Council and when future generations say what happened to Portsmouth, we can show them the big Portsmouth shaped hole on the South Coast.

Special Guest Blogger: Doc Holiday

I was an outlaw, bar owner, gambler, gunfighter, and dentist which isn't bad for someone who could barely get out of bed without vomiting up a gallon of lung tissue.
When i got diagnosed with Tuberculosis, i was given 3 months to live so instead of hacking up the rest of my lungs in terrified spasms like some knee-knocking wiener, i gave up my practise of coughing up my lungs over terrified dental patients and hit the gambling halls across the US southwest and becoming one of the worst badasses from the Old West complete with a big moustache, a wide brimmed gunfighters hat and a big knife.
Contrary to popular belief, the Wild West wasn't a never-ending riot of gun battles, outlaws, horse rustlers and card cheats. It was pretty peaceful, save for the odd maniac dentist.
However, that's not to say that it was a pacifist wonderland. One town i visited with my dentist kit bag was so rough that it was regarded as being 'too tough for women and churches' on the Wild West Deathometer, even i didn't hang around to do any crowns and fillings in that place.
I buddied up with the lawman Wyatt Earp, joining him for the famous gunfight at the OK Corral where a fight broke out, can't remember why exactly but either because someone accused someone of horse theft or because someone was discovered to be cheating at cards or even maybe a horse cheated at cards, it's a bit of a blank.
I did get into so many other scrapes though, i almost beat one guy to death with his own walking stick after he cheated at cards which isn't easy to do with lungs the size of a pair of walnuts.
I died at the ripe old age of 36, 15 years of drinking copiously and living recklessly after i was given just 3 months to live.

Special Guest Blogger: Steve Irwin

G'day! It's Crocodile Hunter here, everyone's favourite Aussie. I've got a cork-rimmed hat, a boomerang, a surfboard, some tinnies, a chook, some snags, a kangaroo, several other clichés, and I just love me footy but not as much as i loved my crocs. 
Crikey, if animals could talk, they would spend most of their time telling us not to be such dicks and telling us to get off their land and if we didn't they would be happy to further elaborate but that didn't stop me tackling 12-foot crocodiles for fun and waving angry snakes filled with poison that would stop your heart in a second at a camera.
I had been around animals almost all of my life. For my sixth birthday i was given a python, i did ask for a Chopper bike but it led me to becoming World famous and appearing in Dr. Dolittle 2.
I did get into trouble for feeding a crocodile at our zoo while holding our newborn son as i was putting my baby’s life in jeopardy but this is Australia, strewth, almost everything over here is just waiting to eat, sting, bite or inject poison into you and a visit to the dunny could very well be the last thing you ever do.
Of all the mean, aggressive, dangerous animals that i dealt with, the creature that did what so many bigger and more venomous animals had failed to do and kill me, it was a flamin' Stingray, mistaking me for a shark and jabbing me in the heart with its tail.
Nice to see my shows are still watched around the World and if there's one thing i taught you all, it's that crocodiles love it when you hug and wrestle with them but you should know they sometimes eat people so remember, all you need to do is grab the croc's jaws, flip it over and you're home free! Crikey, what could be easier than that?

Special Guest Blogger: Vlad the Impaler

My actual name was Vlad Dracul but as i was given the nickname 'Vlad the Impaler' and the Turks called me 'Sir Impaler' so you can assume i really, really liked impaling people.
I was the Prince of Wallachia in Romania but as a child i was taken hostage by the Turks and broke free and years later, to show there was no hard feelings, i invited two hundred Turkish nobles and their families for a dinner at my castle on Easter Sunday.
As for the after-dinner entertainment, i took the male nobles outside and had each of them impaled, showing an artistic flair by arranging the bodies along the hillside in rows, it did look pretty.
The surviving wives and children were then taken into the mountains and in their finest Easter clothes, i impaled them also. Look, i was called Vlad The Impaler, not Vlad The Guy Who Hands Out Sweets.
It did kind of give me a taste for it though and i was soon rounding up whatever mustached Wallachian turnip-farmers i hadn't gotten around to impaling yet and during my war with nearby Transylvania, i impaled every businessman that i could find and you get three guesses as to what i did to all the men, women, and children who i captured. Yep, good guess.
Not one to make the same mistake twice when they can make it four or five times, i would invite peasants to dinner at my castle, give them a feast, and then have them impaled at the dinner table, all that screaming and pleading for their lives does help the digestion i find.
I was big on the social outreach, poverty was widespread in Wallachia so to help out, i invited hundreds of the poorest folk to a feast (by now my signature move) and while they ate and drank, guess what i did to them. Nope, i locked the doors and set the hall on fire. Problem fixed.
I died in battle while fighting the Turks but my legacy would read five stars, top quality service. I'd recommend Vlad as the best impaler working today.

Special Guest Blogger: James Brown

I always thought that the Godfather of soul was a crappy nickname, and i also thought that i may have a problem when i got up here, meeting God, the father of souls but he was cool about it but not so much with the other crap i did. 
I served time for robbery, assault, drug use, theft, possession of weapons, domestic violence and drink driving but my worst crime was being a lifelong Republican and a supporter of Richard Nixon, that cost me my support among the black community, that and being a maniac gun nut which in the land of maniac gun nuts takes some doing.
During an argument with a fellow singer over him mocking my brightly coloured suits and super cool cape, i shot at him with a shotgun and missed and accidentally shot seven other people, i got away with that as my management team paid off the injured people. 
There was also that time when i shot up my wife's clothes closet and when i went to an insurance seminar with a shotgun and a pistol, not to learnabout insurance, i showed them my weapons and ordered everyone out of the room, and then left the scene in my pickup truck with the police in hot pursuit.
I was smashed off my face on PCP that time, as i was when during a TV interview when i answered every question with 'living in America'.
I was called the hardest working man in show business, as evidenced by my also being the sweatiest, man those capes made me hot in every way.
As for my death, i said to my doctor that i was feeling a little funky and on Christmas Eve i was feeling like a sex machine but on Christmas Day i was feeling a life support machine but even my death wasn't an end to the craziness. 
Before i was buried they had to cut off my legs to settle a paternity suit to extract bone marrow for a DNA reading. Living in America, oh yeah.

Special Guest Blogger: Madame Ching

Pirating can be a dangerous and fickle business and while most pirates wind up with barely enough booty to buy parrot food, i was pretty good at it and became one of the richest people on the planet.
Before i turn to piracy, it was other mens timbers which were shivered in my floating brothel but then that got busted and i was captured by pirates of the infamous Red Flag Fleet and forced to marry the top pirate, Cheng I, but such is the life of a pirate he was soon bobbing lifeless in the China Sea getting gnawed on by passing fish and i inherited his leadership position and using my keen business mind from my brothel days, i ran it as a business.
Most salty sea dogs believed that having a woman on your ship meant bad things would befall them, and nobody made a better case for that than me if i ever boarded your ship, gathering rivalling Cantonese pirate fleets into an alliance and my pirate business had over 1,500 ships and crewed by 180,000 of the blood thirstiest loyal scum of the time, my fleet was so large that we took on the Chinese, British, and Portuguese navies.
Rather than waste time robbing merchant shipping, although we did do that also, i made a law that no pirate was to steal from the poorest villages and we'd mainly plunder wealthy towns and then, like a salt-brined Robin Hood, we would redistribute some of that wealth to the impoverished countryside therby earning their loyalty and more importantly, a steady supply of willing recruits.
I also made it law that all plunder was to be shared out equally amongst all the crew, making me an early advocate of Socialism.
In the end, after capturing so many of the ships the Chinese Government sent to stop us, they offered me a settlement to disband my fleet in return for a full pardon and to keep all the stolen booty as well as 120 ships to use for my next business in the salt trade and a return to another floating brothel, thar she blows you might say.
I not only survived being a pirate and escaped the usual pirate fate of being made to walk the plank or set adrift in a rowing boat with twelve men tossing in it, i died peacefully in my sleep aged 69.

Dolly Wasn't Clueless

I found out today that the TV show, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, probably wouldn't have existed if it hadn't have been for a Country and Western singer.
The Buffster began as a so-so film which even Joss Whedon wasn't best pleased with but an executive at the production house which co-produced the film, Sandollar, convinced the company to acquire the television rights.
Sandollar was co-founded by Dolly Parton and her manager in order for Dolly to get into the movie business and it had a big hit with the film Clueless in 1995 and it used the proceeds to hire Whedon to write a pilot based on the Buffy film, and the rest is blood drenched, vampire gore history.
Us Buffy fans have the person who wrote the world's greatest song about tumbling outta bed and stumbling to the kitchen to pour ourselves a cup of ambition working from 9 to 5 to thank for giving us the best TV program ever.
Thanks Dolly.

Covid-19 Silver Linings

Even in countries that took the Coronavirus seriously from the start, the virus has been devastating, in the countries that were not so quick on the start line it has been catastrophic but if there has been a  silver lining, it is how quick the science has been to pick up the gauntlet of a vaccine and while looking, they have discovered some promising additional developments for other vaccines.
One is the role of mRNA, the copies our cells make of the DNA and how viruses which infect human cells by injecting their DNA into the cells and forcing the body to make viral proteins using this DNA.
Where today's vaccines involve taking inactivated viruses and injecting them to teach our bodies how to make antibodies against the virus, a new vaccine being tested eliminates the need for viruses in the vaccine by injecting mRNA that teaches our cells how to make a spike protein found on the outside of the virus so when our immune system attacks it by producing antibodies, it gives us the same type of protection we would get from exposure to the virus.
This brings the vaccine development process from 10 years to a few months.
Another advance is the problem with virus's mutating, such as the flu virus, which means flu shots every year to provide immunity against the latest version but scientists have discovered a vaccine for the part of the virus that does not change meaning a single vaccine would make us immune to most strains of the flu for a much longer time.
This pandemic has been horrific but it could have led to some very important silver linings for the future.

American Racism Pre-1783 Was British Racism

It is easy for us in the UK to look across the Atlantic at how Americans have treated black people and make all the right noises about it being abhorrent and awful but we seem to forget that up until 1783, America didn't exist and it was the British who made the decisions.
It was Great Britain in the early 17th Century who started the slave trade, ripping the first Africans away from their continent and shipping them to the colony of Virginia in the New World where they were sold, setting in train a legacy that tragically reverberates today.
It was British ships patrolling the coastline for escaping slaves and returning them to their owners and the British lawmakers who set in place the laws which allowed white owners to treat black slaves as their property to do with as they wished and it wasn't until until the Treaty of Paris was signed that America officially became America. 
Of course, all that has happened in the decades since is down to America and for all that it should be roundly condemned, the civil war with the South fighting to keep slavery in place particularly, but Britain played a repugnant leading role in all of it and anyone who has looked at the history of the British Empire will know that the slave trade was only one of many, many loathsome and shameful things Britain did and racism is rife here also so let's not be too smug about what's happening over there.

Special Guest Blogger: Saparmurat Niyazov

Turkmenistan isn't known for much of anything, most people wouldn't be able to find it on a map but if you ever find yourself in central Asia and see a massive Archway with a golden statue of me that rotates to face the sun, congratulations, you found us. Have a bagel.
Being the President for Life, i thought well i may as well rename some things so January became 'Turkmenbashi',  the calendars changed the days of the week from Saturday to 'Young Day' and Sunday to 'Spirituality Day' and 'bread' to 'Gurbansoltan', which was also the name of my mother.
I banned beards, chewing tobacco and lip-syncing basically because i could, i was the damned President for Life.
I establishing a national holiday on my birthday, declared a National Melon Day because who doesn't like melons,
I also wrote a book called Ruhnama, which meant 'Book of the Soul' and then made everyone in the country read it, students studied it in schools and i even made having an in-depth knowledge of it part of the driving test. I even launched a copy of it into space for aliens to read because it seemed a bit stingy to not let the Universe take a peek at it also.
I did say i made an agreement with Allah that anybody who read my book at least three times would automatically go to heaven but some people thought my changes were a bit over the top and there was a few assainations on my life, mostly from 16 year old Turkman who failed their driver's license exam for the sixth time but i escaped every one of them before dying of cardiac arrest in 2006.

Special Guest Blogger: Emperor Tiberius

I thought i was a pretty effective leader, i built my city-state into a prosperous, well-equipped place to raise a family which in theory, this makes my dominion one of the best spots to crash-land when your homemade time machine inevitably breaks down and leaves you stranded in the 1st century BC. In practice, it would take roughly 5 seconds for me to give the order to have your dick tied with lute strings so you couldn't pee, then forced to drink copious amounts of wine until your bladder eventually burst.
As i ruled Rome before my great-nephew Caligula took over, my time in power is generally overshadowed by the horse-worshiping reign of bat-shittery that followed which is unfair because i was a perfectly capable insane supervillain myself.
One subject presented me with a fish he had caught to show his affection for his leader but he was an ugly brute and if there is one thing i hate it's ugly people so i responded by ordering my guards to scrub his face raw with the fish's sharp scales, didn't work, he was just ugly and bloody now.
I was known as a great military leader and orator who gave great speeches, my many ejaculations were famous throughout the land. It was also considered that my sexual perversions with young boys was a bit on the highly depraved side, those ejaculations were also famous throughout the land but it was the result of an altogether more divine ejaculation which meant that another man was around at the same time as me time, Jesus of Nazareth, means mine are often forgotten.
Unfortunately, being a nasty git is not destined to last, and i eventually found out that citizen's exploding bladders and being a massive pervert tend to come with a huge side order of karma and after i was smothered to death (don't ask me who by, i had a pillow over my face at the time) there were celebrations when i died but they didn't last that long as following me was Caligula, and that boy was proper crazy.