Having A Laugh

I never understand the mentality of those American's who look at Donald Trump and think, 'hmmm...i think he had done alright so far so i think i will vote for him to have another four years' but apparently there are many Americans who plan to do just that which would be hilarious if it wasn't for the extra 204,000 coffins which have been pressed into action due to his Coronavirus awfulness.
I know next to nothing about Joe Biden apart from every time i see him it looks as though he has just been woken up but even he cannot be as bad as the present guy who has been making America in his own image, a complete laughing stock.
As for who wins the election in November, i'm 5,000 miles away and care very little but it is the Americans with enough brain cells to see what a moron he is that i feel for, those who actually care that he has taken their country down the gurgler and causing former American Presidents spin so fast in their graves that cemeteries are spontaneously combusting all over the country.
There are many low-lights from the Trump Presidency, the injecting bleach to treat Coronavirus, calling far-right protestors 'very fine people', lying about his inauguration crowd size and trying to buy Greenland but my personal favourite came in the last few days when it was revealed that he spent $70,000 on his hair. The laughs of '$70,000 for that!!' was deafening.
If $70,000 gets you that weird looking mop he has been parading around in for the past four years then he should have paid more because that's almost half as much as he paid Stormy Daniels to keep her mouth shut about their affair, maybe that's why he only paid $750 in tax due to his business interests being in such a dire state, the sixth bankruptcy must be getting lined up on the horizon.
Hard to believe that it is even a thing that he may get back in but maybe there are enough racists, misogynsts and brain dead idiots who prefer him to a proper grown up leader but then we have Boris Johnson over here currently doing such a bang up job himself so we have our fair share of brain dead idiots ourselves.
Maybe it will take another election cycle to finally put the nail in the coffin of the idea that voting for overweight, stupidily haired awful right wingers is anything but disastrous but if that's the case, then for the next four years the nails will literally be coffin nails. 

Special Guest Blogger: Rudolf Nureyev

Ballet deals with the most important issues in the world today, love pain, suffering, skin tight pants and well stretched groin muscles.
It's about depth and texture and the sense of community that emerges from the struggle going on within all of us. Between man and machine, between the angel and the beast but mostly it is about my very, very tight pants.
Ballet cannot be expressed in baggy clothing, it is really important to see my form move through space in very tight pants and i once held up a production for 40 mins until they let me change pants but i was very temperamental and volatile.
I was probably the greatest thing to come from Soviet Union but they were always concerned that i would defect and i said no, i wouldn't do that and they tried to stop me doing a tour to Paris afraid that i wouldn't be coming back but i said i would absolutely 100% guaranteed come back but as soon as i got to Paris i applied for asylum.
The Soviet government considered me crucial to its ambitions to demonstrate its cultural supremacy over the West and as Soviet culture at that time revolved around potatoes and Alexi and his Balalaika Seven, it wasn't much of a stretch.
Leonid Brezhnev wasn't happy about my defection to the West but i wasn't about to be told what to do by a man who had more black, curly hair above his eyes than a whole 1978 copy of Playboy.
Something the West had which the Soviet Union never was a thriving gay scene and i mixed with the likes of Freddie Mercury, Andy Warhol, Gore Vidal, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Mick Jagger and Liza Minnelli but something else that the West also had in the mid 80s was AIDS which i contracted and from which i died from a decade later.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the most degrading, debasing, horrific, unedifying, opportunistic things I have ever done in my life or death since that whole Muppet Show sketch thing with Miss Piggy. Rather then grumble i shall merely bid you Proshchay.

Special Guest Blogger: Frank Zappa

The normal rock star's day is two hours of playing music and 22 hours of sex, drugs and worshipping Satan but i was anything but a normal rock star, for one i disapproved of drugs although you might be mistaken if you hear any of the 60 albums i put out and naming my kids Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen which doesn't help my case much but seriously, i never touched them.
I need to put right the legend that i got into an onstage gross-out contest with my friend Captain Beefheart, in which Beefheart took a dump onstage and then i promptly won the contest by scooping up a handful of poop and popping it in my mouth.
The closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Little Chef in England, English food is disgusting!
I was a bit of a strange duck most of my life, i played strange instruments, performing extended experimental jams, and making counterculture music but the strangest record i ever made was with Burt Ward, the guy who played Robin in Batman and Robin.  
For some reason, MGM decided to pair the Boy Wonder with the distinctly un-wonder me but Ward sang like a donkey passing a watermelon so they told him to simply read fan letters aloud while we played some smooth sixties style jams behind him. The resulting song, 'Boy Wonder I Love You' is basically porn and the record was abruptly pulled before it saw the inside of a record store.
In the 1970's, music videos were the new thing and proved career death for the less than aesthetically pleasing pop stars like me although Steve Tyler who had a mouth like he had been in a car accident and the steering wheel had got jammed in his mouth went on to make millions, but i was an artist, i wasn't in it for the money but the critics never liked us but they never really listened to my music, i doubt if they even listened to the lyrics from 'Son of Suzy Creamcheese', philistines.
Anyway, feel free to go back and listen to my 60 album back catalogue, approximately 90 hours of music but first hide all sharp objects because i promise by the 40th hour you will want to use them.

Special Guest Blogger: Justin II

Empires have never been the fairest form of government, but things get especially difficult when the ruler of a country isn’t necessarily the most grounded human being. In fact, some of us ruled so disastrously that they have become famous in history for being insane, like me.
Apparently they let pretty much anyone be emperor in my day, because i was nucking futs.
Don't bother try to look up Byzantine on a map, it was part of the Eastern Roman Empire with 26 million people spread across the empire, a little over 12% of the entire world’s population at the time but i kind of lost it to the Persians including Italy and losing most of Italy to Persia, which when you're the emperor of Rome, is dropping the ball pretty badly.
When my Uncle Justinian I was on his death-bed, he named me as heir thinking it would be a safe pair of hands but not only did i make such a mess of things that the Persians invaded, but i was as mad as a bag of frogs.
I would hear voices and start howling and hiding under the bed as i thought monsters were going to get me and the only way to calm me down was to be wheeled around the palace on a mobile throne which i can't lie, was great.
It couldn't have been much fun to be around the palace when i went into full crazy mode, when my servants were rushing around trying to restrain me, i would fight back by biting them, often on the head.
I gave up the throne in favour of my adopted son and retired to a lifetime of being pushed around in my throne and looking at the underside of my bed but the monsters never got me so it worked.

Special Guest Blogger: André the Giant

Wrestling is a manly sport, grown men fighting in skin tight leotards with their bare hands and big thighs! This is macho and not homoerotic at all.
I was one of the earliest big wrestling stars and at 500 pounds,7ft 2in and with size 22 feet, i was always going to be called Andre the Giant.
I suffered from a condition called gigantism which made me grow to an incredible size, aged 12 i was 200lb and 6ft and i couldn't fit on the school bus but my dad knew an Irishman with a truck who would drive me to school. That man was playwright Samuel Beckett who was a writer of some sort and would tell me the same joke about having to get back quick as he was waiting for someone called Godot who i assumed was the gasman or something but i was more interested in talking about cricket on these rides.
Like most wrestlers, i did star in a few films including a few in France but i was best known for playing the giant Fezzik in The Princess Bride but i was also in the Six Million Dollar man and played a Yeti in another film.
One advantage of my immense size was the ability to consume a higher amount of alcohol than anyone else. I held an unofficial record for my ability to drink 156 beers in a single sitting!
Once i drank so much that i passed out in a hotel bar but because of my size, none of the staff could move me, so they simply put a velvet cord around me, a sign to say not to wake me and left me there to sleep it off.
I drank to hide the pain in my body because my day job included getting hit repeatedly with steel chairs so it was either take a bowlful of painkillers for breakfast everyday or drink gallons of beer, i went for the gallons of beer option.
During my time with the WWE i was 15 years undefeated until the new WWE hero Hulk Hogan came onto the scene then i was pushed down the pecking order but i was the first Wrestler in the WWE Hall of Fame.
People who have my condition almost always die young and i was no exception, dying at age 46 while in Paris at my fathers funeral although the massive alcohol binges and spending my days being thrown around and jumped on by large men probably didn't help.

Special Guest Blogger: Gavrilo Princip

It's 1914 and Europe was a web of alliances, rivalries and ambition and it was about to get much worse for fatty Franz Ferdinand.
The Austrian Archduke was to being driven around Sarajevo in a open-top car but i was among the crowd with several of my buddies from the Black Hand gang and we was all armed with grenades, keen to assassinate the chubby Austrian.
As the motorcade passed, the first member threw his grenade but he threw it like a girl and missed and injured several pedestrians and the people in the cars behind.
We scarpered amidst the chaos and i went to a local cafe to mull over the debacle with a hot cup of coffee.
Meanwhile, the lardy-arsed Archduke instructed his driver to go to the hospital to visit the people who were injured by the grenade. The driver got lost and drove aimlessly around the streets of Sarajevo until they just randomly happened to pass the cafe where i was sitting outside cupping my hot coffee.
To make it even more of an early Final Destination film, the driver not only drove past the cafe, but realised he was going the wrong way and began to slowly reverse past it again.
Not believing my luck, i walked up to the car and popped a cap in his ass as well as his head and chest but he never saw me because he was busy stuffing his face with a wiener schnitzel or something.
I did hear this led to World War One which led to German Reparations and the financial crisis in Germany which allowed Hitler to be elected who caused World War 2 and America dropping the Nuclear Bomb which resulted in the Cold War which led to wars in places like Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan but it is amazing to consider that the majority of the horror and death of the 20th Century may not have happened had i sat inside the cafe, had ordered a cold drink instead of a hot coffee which had to cool down or the driver had just kept going or even knew where the hospital was.
I got sentenced to twenty years in prison but only served 4 because the poor prison conditions gave me tuberculosis but strange to think that millions of lives lost all because i stopped for a coffee that afternoon.

Spongebob Squarepants Incendio

Just because they believe the World was created by a man nobody has ever seen who lives in a cloud, it doesn't mean all Christians are crazy but where once it was just asking them about the dragons, unicorns and talking snakes in their holy book which would elicit a huffy reaction, now you only have to whistle the tune to Spongebob Squarepants because he has made it onto the list of things which the messengers of the Lord have their rosary beads in a bunch over.
Obviously i somehow missed the episode where the little yellow fellow steps out of the closet inside his Pineapple House wearing a spangly thong and humming YMCA because apparently Spongebob Squarepants is as queer as a cucumber or so the Churchy types say because their being accepting of others comes to a screeching halt when it comes to a man loving anyone other than a woman.
The Christians say that by showing children a cartoon which stars a character who is so obviously homosexual is manipulating and brainwashing our kids into considering homosexuality as 'normal' and we all know that the all loving Jesus isn't going to stand for that crap but another character who apparently burns Jesus's bunions and corrupting childish minds is Harry Potter.
So switch off Spongebob and pitch Potter into the dustbin because nothing should distract from the parents brainwashing their children with stories of misogyny, homophobia and superiority over other religions so they can grow up to be as intolerant and as bigoted as they are.

Special Guest Blogger: Madame de Pompadour

When us French can be bothered to put down our baguettes and wine we can be a romantic lot, actually too romantic to have just one lover most of the time as a Frenchmen needs more than one thing in life, the heart and the loins both on fire.  Groaning and straining and making hot dirty passionate encounters while the wife sleeps downstairs which is how i ended up in the room above King Louis XV‘s and his wifes bed.

When i was young, my mother took me to a fortune teller and the seer foretold that i would one day reign over the heart of a king and boy did i fulfill that prophecy despite being married myself, as i said, us French are a romantic lot.
It was not just my pretty face, blonde hair, blue eyes, alabaster skin, and rosy cheeks that Louis fell for, such was Louis infatuation with my body that the shape of the French champagne glass is based on the size and shape of my breast. Cheeky.
We met at a masked ball at the Palace of Versailles, and i went dressed as Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, which was less of a costume and more of a small sheet wrapped around the juicy bits.
I became the King’s official mistress and Louis XV’s wife, Queen Marie, was completely fine with it after i persuaded Louis to pay off her significant gambling debts in return for her ignoring the squeaking bed in the room above.
It went wrong after i told King Louis it would be a good idea to team up France with Austria which got France into the seven year war which saw us spanked royally by the British and Portuguese and i was blamed and not the fact that as lovers the French are great but when it comes to war, they fight like girls.
It was tuberculosis that killed me aged only 46 but as well as the boob shaped champagne glass, i also gave the world, and Elvis, the Pompadour hairstyle so pour yourself a glass of bubbly and as King Louis said to me most nights, Bottoms Up.

Special Guest Blogger: Norman Schwarzkopf

What's up, not much? Stormin' Norman here and you don't get a nickname like Stormin' unless you been in a few scraps and i was there for all the big ones, Vietnam, Granada and of course Iraq.
A bunch of people told me Saddam had invaded Kuwait and had chemical weapons and i said to Saddam, that's cool, we got them too but did you ever see World War Two? Those two big bombs in Japan were dropped by us so get out of Kuwait and stop making bombs filled with chemicals or that could be your country too dude, I'm just saying.
He said he didn't have them and he was staying in Kuwait so we invaded and he immediately shit every pair of pants that he owned when Uncle Sam came knocking at his door and shoved a slice of ma's apple pie up his ass.
The American military is the only job i know where you could shoot someone or sexually molest them and photograph it and then not only not get in trouble but be called a hero and get paid for it.
We were all about keeping Kuwait safe the first time around but when the call went out for Mother Green and her killing machine to remove Saddam we were called incompetent idiots and i resented that, we misled the public, slagged off any press that questioned us, praised the US military and hid evidence so now nobody knows what we did and no there's nothing incompetent about all that, I say it's our best yet.
Iraq turned bad second time around and they asked us what we were going to do about the appalling crime rates and terror attacks and murders and we said that the US was absolutely determined to stop them but when they said we said that last time i said that previously we were determined to bring it down and now we're absolutely determined we're adding an extra adjective to our determination so any of Bin Laden's boys will think twice about blowing up a marketplace now that we're absolutely determined as opposed to just plain determined to stop him.
I didn't get awarded three Silver Stars, two Purple Hearts, and the Legion of Merit for standing idly by and watching the people we invaded get slaughted by someone else so we hoisted a Mission Accomplished banner and buggered off and left them to it.
Hey, the world is a dangerous place and i was proud to say that i played a major role in making damned sure of that.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

 I wasn't aware that the you had less chance of catching Coronavirus before 10 O'Clock but it must be true otherwise Boris Johnsons latest wheeze of shutting pubs at 10 O'Clock is another case of seats of the pants thinking.
Boris Johnson revealed the Tory government’s latest Coronavirus (Covid-19) measures and waved goodbye to the halcyon days of summer when we gathered in groups of seven, sometimes more, Rishi Sunak bought us all 50% of our dinner and we once again saw the inside of an office because we won't be doing any of that again for 'perhaps the next six months'.
Well, not all of us because on the day Boris was announcing the doubling of fines for not wearing a mask on public transport, one of his ministers was pictured doing just that because 'he forgot' so we can look forward to more Members of the Government taking driving tests with their kids to test their eyesight and sneaking off to have sex with someone else's wife while telling the rest of the nation to socially distance.
There is nothing that the Tories have got right with their mishandling of this pandemic so why would the near future be any different especially as Boris Johnson said himself, 'The nation stands at a perilous point' which is true because just wait until we crash out of the EU.
Debt? You ain't seen nothing yet!

Special Guest Blogger: Sarah Bernhardt

Throughout history, women have been seen as the more sensible, caring and sensitive gender but i was none of these, i was a diva before i was even an actress.
I only became an actress because my mum was desperate for some income and she knew Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers, so asked him to get me into the theater although i never really had the temprement for it.
I broke my umbrella over the doorman's head and got into a fight with one of France's top actresses which got me kicked out of the company so i did what any young woman would do and traveled around Europe sleeping with as many men as i could lay my hands on, men who were not interested in a long term relationship but only in interested in the passion of life, usually right outside in the parking lot.
While winding my way through the continent's bankers, industrialists, diplomats and the future Edward VII of England, it came to an end when i got pregnant by a Belgian Prince.
I raised the child as a single mother but after my steamy European jaunts, the stage still called out to me and i returned to the theater in the late 1860s. When i did, my career skyrocketed and i starred in a string of enormous hits, and before long i was the most popular actress in Paris and was invited up in a hot air balloon but the wind suddenly shifted and blew us into a small town several miles away, i got fined 1,000 francs for that.
I would send terrible letters to Editors of newspapers who gave me a bad review but i always had a peculiar obsession with dying and slept in a custom-made, satin-lined rosewood coffin and my trademark luxury coffin became infamous the world round, i also loved playing characters who died at the end of the play.
In the famous 'Alas, poor Yorick' scene in Hamlet, i used the real human skull of Victor Hugo and i beat Johnny Cash to performing in San Quentin Prison, i did a play there in 1906, the same year i lost my leg through gangrene after jumping off a wall but only having one leg never stopped me performing, i hired two servants to carry me around in a custom-made chair and propped myself up on the sets furniture.
All in all it was a magnificent life, magnificent like a beautiful man's naked buttocks in the light of an Italian car park or a group of ugly desperate ones in a very, very dark motel room in Bognor.

Special Guest Blogger: Davy Crockett

When something is said to be based on a true story it's obvious that not every detail can be exactly like it was in reality. Sometimes they have to alter events to make the story move faster, otherwise those things would get pretty boring and sometimes they change things for good reason and other times they just flat-out lie but me being immortalised in the Ballad of Davy Crockett, it all happened.
Okay, so i wasn't actually born on a mountain top, it was a valley actually so the complete opposite to a mountain and i killed many bears, i just wasn't three, that would just be stupid but i did single handley fight the injun war though, just me and a few hundred of my friends but the rest of the tales about frontier manliness, strength and machismo are all true and i know they are because i wrote them.
When i told my wife i was going to fight the injuns, she begged me not to but i said my fellow countrymen had been attacked and the Indians would be scalping the women and children next if we didn't put a stop to it and wiping away a patriotic tear, i slaughtered them all but when i wasn't slaughtering them and setting fire to their villages, i stopped for a bit of bear hunting because that's what real men in coonskin hats do.
I even saved President Andrew Jackson despite hating the guy when a would-be assassin drew two side arms and fired them at him, rather than hand the assassin a bigger gun, i grabbed the gunman and wrestled him to the ground and Jackson beat him with his cane.
My glorious death came at the Alamo, that heroic last stand when a bunch of white settlers in Mexico-owned Texas wanted a taste of sweet, sweet democracy so they rebelled against Mexico.
Famous heroic figures like me and my pal Jim Bowie led an army of rebels who were forced to make their last stand inside a crumbling old building called the Alamo, finally going down in a hail of gunfire and freedom tears atop a pile of dead Mexicans.
The General did tell us it wasn't worth fighting over and ordered us to retreat but we refused and the General went 'Sure, whatever' and left us to it like a big weenie coward who didn't love America.
My dying words were 'Remember the Alamo' which everybody did which is crap because we got us asses whupped that day but i'm also known for making coonskin hats fashionable and those bad boys never go out of fashion.

Special Guest Blogger: Notorious B.I.G.

How are you all doing out there? Partying safe and relaxin' in a hot tub with a fox or three or just kickin back taking it easy gettin' your groove on? I got mine on 24 hours a day, i was always ready to freak on any ladies squeak box, you dig?
A big "whassup" to DMX, they in the house. Also Brooklyn in the house. Washington Beach, on the check-in. Can't forget Long Beach, they in the house. Staten Island in the house. The whole damn countries in BIG's house... apart from Frisco, that place definitely not keeping it moving.
I went by the name Biggie Smalls but some busta was already using that so i  went with Notorious BIG, i was 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighed 395 pounds so kinda fitting.
I was noted for my lyrics being complex with a multisyllabic rhyme scheme and praised for the natural way that i could deliver intricate lines but my rhymes were all about depth and texture and the sense of community that emerges from the struggle going on within all of us, that and all my gang banging, guns and drugs. Love those drugs like a fat kids loves cake.
Me and Tupac actually started out as friends but we fell out, the East and West Coast hip hop scenes bro, any fool can learn from his own mistakes, but it takes a wise man to learn from the mistakes made by others and that diss track got him gunned down by some of my homies.
Got a big shoutout to Jay-Z and his homeboys from up state. Another one for Busta Rhymes and the boys and girls downtown. Lil Kim, i was definitely down with that chick, she's a hottie.
Six months after Tupac’s blown away, some fool pulled out a Gecko 9mm and killed me two weeks before my new album, Life After Death, a convenient title as it turned out.
Check it out, ya'll, it's dangerous out there! So stay in your homes and let Notorious BIG entertain you. That's right, BIG was never sweatin' it, no matter how hot it got.

Special Guest Blogger: Annie Oakley

It's a sad fact that the most profitable place to open a clinic that specializes in penis enlargement operations would be next to a gun range but it may be men with small genitals that like to play with guns but as the owner of a pair of X chromosomes it doesn't apply to me.
After becoming a crack shot to support my family's hunting, i won several shooting competitions and then beat a circus sharpshooter at his own game after he had bet me $100 that i couldn’t win against him, i later married him. I then toured the country with Sitting Bull as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, shooting dimes out of the air, snuffing out candles with one shot, and extinguishing smoking materials while they remained in men's mouths, one cigarette being shot from the gob of Kaiser Willhem of WWI fame.
One of my best tricks was turning my back and shooting at objects that were behind me using a mirror but not being the owner of testicles, the press hated me and ran several false stories and of the 55 suits i filed against the newspapers who ran the false stories to clear my name, i won or settled with all but one of them but the legal costs ended up being more than the settlements i received.
I was firm in my belief that with the exception of any penis related activity, i am of the opinion that anything a man can do, so can a woman and women could be just as skilled with guns as men, saying that i would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies.
As for the Second Amendment Gun Laws, obviously i am in favour so it is a shame that the people who try to defend it are idiots saying stupid things like it is all a left wing plot to disarm law abiding citizens so the Government can oppress them when another group of students end the days with bullet holes in them but don't listen to those soft limeys like this blog owner whose kids grew up playing with Barbies and Lego, American kids should be playing with guns in their bedrooms because a car made out of bright yellow lego bricks will be of no use in modern day America when someone starts to shoot up the local Walmart.

Shut Up And Sing

That deafening noise across the UK this morning was thousands of British Justin Bieber fans dumping their merchandise into rubbish bins because us British will put up with many things from our stars, but bigging up God and his merry band, nah.
Bieber has said that he has launched into a new direction and that direction is towards the made up man in the sky with the big long beard and good for him if that floats his boat, or Ark, and it may play well in the altogether more Religious USA but over here it puts him in the same league as Cliff Richards and that's not a cool league to be in.
Tony Blair admitted that he was afraid to speak out about his faith while he was prime minister for fear that voters would regard him as 'a nutter' although to be fair we reached for the 'war-mongering tosspot' first, and then the 'religious nutter' but he had a point because in the UK coming out as part of the God Squad sounds the death knell for anyone in the public eye unless you are the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Bieber's story is that everything that’s happened to him over the past decade, the drugs, the women, the negative headlines caught up with him and one night while staying at a Pasteur's apartment, it dawned on him that: 'I shouldn’t be on the planet still. I think it was by the grace of God so i need Jesus in my life'.
Not being one to miss a chance to recruit one of the most famous people and their bank account in the World to his gang of holy rollers, the Pasteur signed up Bieber to his cause and has been showing him the path of Jesus ever since apparently, a path that has lots of cash-point machines probably.   
If Bieber thinks hitching his star to God and his son will give him some sort of inner and mental peace then there is no harm, to his career this side of the Atlantic certainly, that's as dead as the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, but if it soothes his troubled mind then he can knock himself out with all the rosary beads and candles he can carry for all we care.  
If he thinks he can bang on about Jesus being some sort of saviour to British crowds then he can expect shouts of 'Shut up you weirdo and just sing 'Babe' to be hollered at him because we have a long history of mocking anyone who comes to the British public clutching a Bible, and damn right too.

Act NOW Boris

As Covid-19 cases rise significantly in the UK, it should be a no brainer that taking action now will prevent having to take prolonged and more painful action in a few months time but as seems to be the case with this Government, no brains is their specialty.
With a R-rate over 1 and daily cases now topping 4,000 and the corresponding death rate ominously creeping up with it, putting the brakes on immediately for a fortnight would drag the figures down but leaving it a month when the cases and deaths have tripled would take a longer period of lock-down and a world of hurt for families.
The state of the economy is the least of my concerns, it may take years but that will come back eventually, the same cannot be said for the unfortunate souls who die from the disease as it regains it's grim foothold on the population so whoever is advising the Prime Minister needs to grab him by the lapels and give him a good shaking.
Boris Johnson was rightly pilloried for amongst his many misjudgements in March, locking down too late causing the needless deaths of thousands, let's hope that he doesn't make the same mistake this time and can see that even if it takes a succession of short term stops and starts, it has to be better than waiting until the country is being ravaged once again before acting.
He also needs to get a grip on the test and trace system which has been woefully inept despite the relative respite of three months of summer to put a working system in place.
He got it disastrously wrong last time and he will be held to account for that but don't make the same mistake this time around and leave it until the bodies are piling up in the hospital morgues before deciding something has to be done, do it now.   

Special Guest Blogger: Giacomo Casanova

Right around the time the American colonies were throwing tea into Boston harbour and moaning about taxation, i was one of the most iconic male whores of all time and wrapping up a sex tour around Europe, bouncing between major cities and leaving so many impregnated ladies in my wake that it shouldn't be much of a surprise that i ended up sleeping with at least one person in my family tree. Unfortunately, that one person happened to be my daughter.
I lost my virginity aged 11 to my tutor’s younger sister and considered a career in the Church but sex and gambling put a stop to that particular vocation and i did like a practical joke although digging up a corpse and leaving it in my weak hearted friends doorway was a step too far. 

When he had a heart attack and the Venetian inquisitors were asking awkward questions i left Venice sharpish for Paris where i swindled many powerful elites but soon i ran out of women in Paris to introduce my penis to so went to Amsterdam and opened a silk factory manned by female only workforce, obviously.
People would say Giacomo, use your gift make money or buy a yacht, maybe a fast horse, and i say Casanova's gift to women is my groin so i went on my infamous year-long sex tour taking in Marseille, Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, Modena, and Turin, as one does. I got to see so many wonderful cities partly because i got kicked out of nearly every place i went because after sex i would give the woman a biscuit and i was causing an obesity problem.
I turned up in London which is a beautiful city. A real special place filled with hopes and dreams and beautiful and hot women, and men like me. 
Well not many men like me, but it is a jungle out there and i had my fair share of Rhino's in England.  I love all woman, even the fat ones, though I didn't tell anybody about that but then i couldn't because i didn't speak a word of English which was a slight problem when attempting to charm women on the British Isles but i still managed to catch venereal disease, so i did okay.
I lost my left hand in a duel over the heart, or more accurately certain other body parts, of an Italian actress and once fell for a young man who turned out to be a woman in disguise which was a nice bonus and had a ménage à trois with two nuns, one of who became pregnant so explain that one to the Chief Nun.
The daughter thing is even worse than it sounds, i didn't know until after she was pregnant with what turned out to be my own grandson and i asked her to marry me and then the mother decided to reveal that i was the girl's father. Oops.
I died in Bohemia working as a librarian which is a beautiful end to my story, like a gorgeous woman bending over to pick something up you know?

Special Guest Blogger: Rocky Marciano

Despite being the only heavyweight champion to have finished his career undefeated, i am hardly ever mentioned in the list of the greatest heavyweights because it is said that my time came during one of the lowest points ever in the Heavyweight division.
I was described as moving as though i was carrying a sack of coal on my back and was called flat-footed but i was never going to be a piano player, the name simply would not allow it although i was known to my fans as 'The Brockton Blockbuster' and known to my opponents as 'Oh my God, I just got flattened by a truck'.
I was undefeated in 49 fights and a had a knockout record of 87% and i competed in the AAU Olympic try-outs for the 1948 Olympics in the Boston
Garden but i busted up my hands beating George McInnis and had to withdraw and turned professional instead and 4 fights later i dinged the lights out on Jersey Joe Walcott with the infamous right hook i called Suzie Q.
Being from a poor family i was very careful with money and i got out of the boxing game early for two reasons, one is that big men hitting you continuously in the head is never a good idea and people punching each other in the face and bleeding may be some peoples idea of fun, well it was mine to be fair, but the other was that my manager was taking an extra large slice of my earnings so i began hiding money and turning down cheques worth thousands in favour of only hundreds in cash, because cheques could be tracked down by the boss.
It was this obsession with money which led directly to my death when i was only 45. Offered a free flight from Chicago to Des Moines, Iowa on a small private plane, i couldn’t resist. The pilot was inexperienced and the plane crashed, hitting a tree and killing all on board.

Special Guest Blogger: Bon Scott

Australian rock gods are about as rare as a sober Australian but i started out as AC/DC's chauffeur which isn't bad as far as promotions go.
Of course it ended with me being found dead after choking on my own vomit parked on a London back street but the bit between was brilliant.
I brought a loud, crazy, frantic, and overtly sexual energy to the group, not to mention an 8-year-old's sense of humor, at the Sunbury Rock Festival, we got into a fist fight with the rock band Deep Purple when we nicked their equipment and another one with the boys from Black Sabbath when we said they were washed up has-beens.
The adage may be never give up, never slow down, never grow old and never ever die young but it's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll, but apparently at least part of that journey takes you to a club named the Music Machine, a heroin dealers apartment and then finally to East Dulwich where you are left to die.
My band did go on to bigger and better things, they did consider Slade vocalist, Noddy Holder apparently but i was always the force behind AC/DC, I sang the songs and it was my face on the merchandise with the big hair, getting the girls, the non-stop partying, the clubs, the hotel suites, the TV smashed into a thousand pieces on the forecourt beneath our hotel suite window.
I sang about working class people, trying to make it through a tough life, I sang about the things they wanted like trashing hotel rooms, wearing glitter on your eyes, and waking up in a ditch next to a totalled sports car or not waking up in a pokey French car in a back street and dying young and leaving a beautiful, if a bit sick smelling, corpse. Rock n Roll!

Special Guest Blogger: Erik the Red

As sure as you can't be a midwife to a fairy, expect wisdom from a fool, or find a well dressed Englishman, it is assumed i was known as Erik the Red due to having red hair but it was more to mine and my families fiery temper.
Originally from Norway, my family and i ended up in Iceland after we were exiled from Denmark when my father killed a man after an argument and while in Iceland i attacked Eyiolf the Foul and killed him and then there was Thorgest the house builder who accepted the crystal cup at the feast offered by the dwarf or how you say nowadays, done a right cowboy job on our house so i killed him also and his sons and a few of his friends.
My son Leif had his mothers temperament, he went to North America and never killed anyone but his sister, Freydis, was certainly a chip off my block.
She followed her brother to North America and became caught up in a battle with the natives and ran through them slaughtering them, even more impressive that she was eight months pregnant at the time.
I did discover Greenland, a land of the frost giants but i wanted to attract settlers so i gave it the pleasant sounding name Greenland because Freezeyourballsoffland just doesn't have the same ring to it so it must have been a shock for those settlers when they found out how much of Greenland is covered in snow and ice.
Being a Viking was pretty cool, especially how we would roam around smiting fools with that massive sword of ours and taking a longboat with 20 of my finest men, heading to where the sun sets and finding a village to pillage, plunder and burn. Good days.
Sadly, by the coming of spring i was no more and ascended to the great halls of Valhalla but my legacy would be Greenland and the advice that to win in a game of life, you have to annihilate everything and everyone in your path in a blind rage which worked for me.

Special Guest Blogger: Joseph McCarthy

Paranoia is a terrible thing. Are you disagreeing with me? There's no point denying it, i know you are. Anyway, you don't have to take my word for it (and we know you don't) because you just have to look at all the Communists who were fired from their jobs and blacklisted from their industries for showing communist sympathies.
I had a list but we didn't get them all, those sneaky SOB's were everywhere and everything in America that has gone wrong was the communists fault but my fellow Americans were too smart to be fooled by Commies and you know what makes a real American?
Not a cowboy hat or enjoying a fine T-bone steak or even going to a baseball game nor is it shooting a gun. It’s something the Reds don't have, our freedom to defend the indefensible.
They hate that we have the freedom to ruin peoples livelihoods with scandalous lies or the freedom to elect a complete dumbass to President but most importantly it's the freedom to go into an oil rich country and tell them how to do things, blindly defending these freedoms is what makes a true patriot.
People say to me Mr McCarthy, what are the warning signs that my son or daughter could be becoming an extreme left wing Communist?
There are a few signs such as if they read complicated literature, have concern for their fellow man, they think for themselves and they like to share or show any doubts about the fairness of our Capitalist system then they should be immediately reported to a policeman because you have a Communist in training on your hands and the nightmare scenario of your child applying for a Democrat Party membership.  
Keep faith though because catch them early enough and in the right's company you can help rid them of any human decency to become a proper right winger. Keep them peeled people, those sneaky red bastards are everywhere!

Special Guest Blogger: Billie Holiday

When your father is 16 and your mother 13, life isn't going to be easy and throw in being guilty of being black in America then it's almost impossible. I became one of the first women of color to sing in an orchestra comprised of white people when i began to work with bandleader and clarinetist Artie Shaw although as i was guilty of not being white, i was not allowed to sit on the bandstand with my fellow musicians and had to enter and leave buildings through the kitchen rather than the front door.
I got into heroin and alcohol and one day in 1947 everything changed for me when i got busted for possession and sentenced to Alderson Federal Prison Camp.
As i now had a criminal conviction, my Cabaret Card was revoked which meant that i was unable to perform music anywhere which sold alcohol which hit my career.
One of my most famous songs was Gloomy Sunday, a song which was said to be so depressing that at least one hundred suicides were attributed to it and the BBC banned my version of the song from being broadcast, only allowing performances of instrumental versions.
My other, and most famous song, was 'Strange Fruit', a song about the 'fruit' often seen swinging in the breeze that trees in the Southern US states seemed to sprout at an alarmingly and horrific rate at that time.
After years of alcohol dependency, i was diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and took up treatment for liver disease and heart disease but that day in 1947 came back to haunt me even as i lay dying.
I spent my final moments of life under arrest, it seemed the police were so determined to log that they had arrested me again, they made damned sure they got me before i inconveniently died so arrested me just as i took my last breath.

Special Guest Blogger: Solon

I don't know what was in the water in Ancient Greece but they sure did churn out a lot of us philosophers, probably the most famous being Socrates, Plato,  Diogenes and Aristotle and all very impressive and a good case could be made for all of them being the greatest thinkers ever, but i am credited for not only thinking up the earliest form of Democracy that would later become the system that you have today but i did it in the forms of poems.
How much more fun would it be and what with the age of austerity we are now in, all those poems about bankers although i'm struggling to think of any words that rhyme with bankers. Nope, can't think of any.
All my poetry has since been destroyed and it was a long time ago but my legislation including clear constitutional, economic and moral changes which led to me being included as one of the seven sages of Athens, the top seven individuals who were held in high esteem for their wisdom. 
I put into legislation that my reforms must stand for ten years and then to make sure i scarpered to Cyprus but it all fell apart after four and my nephew took over and formed a tyranny but the idea of democracy was formed and took hold later.
As for poetry, it has become the art form of choice for lovelorn lovers rather than law makers so here's one for you.

To poetry writers everywhere,
You may find this poem unfair,
Your cloud may wander lonely in the air,
But for your writing i just don't care,
It's adolescents with floppy hair,
With broken hearts they must repair,
Their deepest thoughts that they must bare,
With rhyming couplets laden with despair,
We all get passionate about things some time,
Just we don't make it into a bloody Rhyme!

Thank you, i'm here all week and the one after that, and the one after that and for all of eternity actually.

Lesser Spotted Right Wing Comedians

There is a bit of a debate going on with the new guy at the BBC who is asking why there are not more right wing comedians on the BBC panel shows, simply its because the right wing are not funny, well not in the way he means anyway.
The whole thing the left wing has got is that the right wingers are so ridiculous and mock-worthy that it is simplicity itself to make fun of them and to mock their muddle headed views which is why you can't swing a sack of lentils without hitting a left wing comedian but right wing comedians are as rare as a coherent thought in Donald Trump's manically coiffered head.    
Also, if there are any right wingers with the required amount of working brain-cells, they wouldn't want to be seen to be on the same side of the fence as the current crop of right wingers, especially the blonde clown who must dread Fathers Day in the UK and the orange faced racist lunatic currently doing such a bang up job in America, to be associated with either would be career suicide.  
A lack of decent material is the same reason why there is a dearth of songs that highlight right wing ideals with lyrics about smaller Government, free markets and more wars against Muslim countries filled with oil or heaping praise upon right wing luminaries such as Margaret Thatcher, George W Bush or even that right wing god-father Hitler.
So good luck trying to find any humorous right wingers who can join panel shows and be funny because there are no right-wing comedians with decent material for the same reason that there are no decent Phil Collins songs, they just don't exist.

Special Guest Blogger: John Logie Baird

In 1928 a Scotsman invented the television and 92 years later and they still can't use it properly, have you seen Take The High Road??
My fascination with moving images on a screen started when i was a kid and read a German book about the photoelectric properties of selenium which meant that i didn't have many friends so i had to come up with something cool.
I began experimenting with television by transmitting outlines of objects and successfully televised human faces that were visible enough to be recognizable although they looked like ghosts, people would think they were looking at spirits and faint during the experiments and those were Scots, for God's sake. They eat haggis on purpose.
Upon giving the first public demonstration of my new invention which i called The Televisor, i invited 50 scientists to my attic and gave a speech promising that this invention will revolutionise the world of entertainment. As the world of entertainment up until then had consisted of Charlie Chaplin waving his cane in an amusing manner and walking like he had hemorrhoids, it wasn't much of a boast but i think that most people are glad that i invented the box of delights that sits in the corner of the room and keeps men quiet for hours when golf comes on.
Not to say that everything on my television was brilliant, just let me throw out the name Lee Majors and let it rest there.
Something else i was tinkering with but nobody had a use for was Phonovision which was a way to record the television signal and sound on gramophone records which could be played back from a device, which i called a Phonovisor but obviously nobody would want to record what was on the television so i gave up on that idea which is a shame as i had quite high hopes for that, especially if a more smaller, reliable disk could be used, something a bit more compact or Versatile to record onto and they could have collected all the same of one show and made them into a box set.
I set up the Baird Television Development Company and was bought out by the BBC who began broadcasting television programmes and the rest is history but i feel partly responsible for giving careers to Jeremy Clarkson, Piers Morgan, William Shatner, Jerry Seinfeld and Simon Cowell, sorry about that.

Back On The Covid-19 Rollercoaster

According to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), the latest estimate for R across the UK is between 1.0 and 1.2 with Covid-19 infections in England soaring by 60% with Birmingham becoming the latest city to face lock-down to try and stop the spread.
The figure from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for the period 30 August to 5 September is up to 3,000 a day.
Wow, never saw that coming through the Government confused signals. Stay at home, go to work, don't go to work, go to the pub, get on a bus, 12 people in your house, eat out to save the hospitality industry, test your eyes by driving but don't despair because the government which promised a world beating contract tracing regime have announced the long awaited NHS contact-tracing app is to be launched on 24 September.
That would be the app which was deemed a key weapon and essential back in April but was relegated to 'the cherry on the cake' when it was abandoned at a cost of £100m in May because it just didn't work.
On so up we go back on the Covid-19 roller-coaster, what a ride!

9/11 Consequences

Strange how clearly i can remember being stood in the car park beneath our building having a smoke with a couple of people from the DVLA offices opposite in 2001 when an out of breath researcher came running over and told me to get back to the office quick.
When i meandered my way back up, i saw the whole office staring at the TV screens watching the first World Trade Centre Building smoking and then a huge gasp as the plane went into the second one.
That moment set the tone for the 19 years since which must have surpassed even Bin Laden's wildest dreams and it hasn't finished yet as it spawned the 'War on Terror' and left so many people dead that the number is counted in the millions.
George W Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq which led to the rise of Al Queda which led onto Islamic State who landed in Libya leading to a war there and as well as invading Syria which bought Iran into play and the debacle which is now Syria.
In the UK Tony Blair foolishly backed the Americans wars which saw him leave for the unpopular Gordon Brown who soon went the same way with the Labour Party struck down for a generation to be replaced by David Cameron who gave us the Brexit vote and Theresa May and now Boris Johnson for who the word incompetent just isn't strong enough as he makes a horrendous mistake of Brexit and the Coronavirus crisis.   
The resulting War on Terror has bought terrorism to the shores of Madrid, Bali, Mumbai and London amongst many other nations on the globe and while Bin Laden was last seen slipping off the side of a US Warship, Blair and Bush are retired in luxury absolving themselves of what they unleashed.
What Bin Laden did that warm, September day in 2001 while i was smoking in a car park changed everything and the roots can be traced back even further but mostly because of that day and what followed, there are millions and millions of people around the World who are not with us today because of what happened that day and even while Bin Laden sat in his cave plotting the attack, he couldn't have thought that would happen.

Special Guest Blogger: Zsa Zsa Gabor

Dah-ling, so nice for you to have me here. I call everyone dah-ling, it is easier than trying to remeber peoples names and with my husky Hungarian accent, it sounded very sexy.
I starred in over 40 films and made a guest appearance on most sitcoms but i am mostly famous for slapping a Beverly Hills cop and being a hopeless romantic with nine husbands of my own, i had many more husbands that were married to other people but my husband number 6 (i think he was 6, it gets confusing) designed the Barbie doll.
Back in the '60s and '70s, rich men were to be admired and looked up to and then i forced them to cut a wedding cake with me, i had a strict criteria for my husbands, I want a man who's kind and understanding and he must have more money than i have time to spend it but i was a marvelous housekeeper.
Every time I divorced my husband, i kept his house! I always said marriage should be a fifty-fifty proposition. He should be at least fifty years old, and have at least fifty-million dollars.
Old people like me didn't sit around stagnating watching game shows and talking about the good old day's, i made a fitness video aged 76 which was pretty much me moving my hands while leaning on a chair while two fine, young, nubile, muscle bound men did all the exercising in very, very tight shorts.
As a Hollywood celebrity i was involved in the required feud, mine was with Elke Sommer who made fun of my weight, i said she looked like a balding, 100-year-old grandmother' and lived in the worst section of Los Angeles.
My final act was with the motorcycle policeman who pulled me over for expired tags but he was taking forever so i asked him why he was taking so long and do you know who i am etc etc and he told me to F*** Off, so i did and when he caught up with me i slapped him around the head.
I spent three days in prison for that and for driving without a license and possessing an open container of Jack Daniel's.
I died fifty days short of my 100th but dah-lings, i love you, I really do. Life in the fire and all that. Always good for my fans to meet me.

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas Cranmer

I had the fortune to be the Archbishop of Canterbury when Henry 8th decided to flip off the Catholic Church and he made me responsible for establishing the first doctrinal and liturgical structures of the new Church of England.
I decided to look at what other religions there was around and to see what bits i could take from them but so there were a few i would discount immediately.
Judaism is no good, all that removing foreskins and not eating bacon while Islam is a no-no because of Ramadan, Henry would never go for a religion where you couldn't eat for hours on end.
My choice of religion for Henry would be one where he didn't have to do anything, it doesn't cost him anything and he could live the sort of life he chose and sin left, right and centre but as long as he repent before he take his last breath, he was in heaven so that's what i did.
While Muslims are fasting for 15 hours a day and Jews are turning up their noses at bacon sandwiches and Catholics are sweating on the rhythm method, us Church of Englander's could stuff our face all day long with all manners of pork, carving images of other Gods on a Sunday while blaspheming like a trooper and covering our neighbours donkey, but as long as we have the split second to repent before we die, we are going to end up in the same place as all Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and all the rest of them.
Maybe it didn't seem fair really but we were not complaining because the Church of England is perfect for us because it's a complete blag.
If you ever make it up here come and say hi, i'll be the one smelling faintly of gammon steak.

Special Guest Blogger: Baden Powell

Some of the most important things that any young boy can learn is discipline, the knowledge of how to tie a reef knot and how to fold a Union Flag correctly.
When i left the British Army, i decided to dress young boys in a military style uniform and teach them survival techniques that i had learned in the army and thus the Scouting movement was born and kids could earn badges for passing certain tasks, badges that had a swastika symbol on them.
With hindsight, i could try and make the argument that i was not a Nazi sympathiser, rather that the symbol was from India and meant 'good luck' but that rather falls apart where you look in the pages of my own diary where i wrote in 1939 'Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc'.
Indeed, Mein Kampf is a ripping yarn but after i died the Scouts quickly dumped the use of the Swastika on their badges although they continued to use my oaths to 'love my God' and 'serve the Queen and country', or rather they did because that has gone the way of the Swastika and been kicked out.
Unfortunately, as hardly anyone is left who still believes in God and the Royals are not as popular as they once where, making an oath to a God that hardly anyone believes in anymore in modern times and a mega-rich lady who lives in a Palace doesn't rank very high on any ones list.
Still, my scouts are still going strong and who doesn't love a boy i uniform, i know i certainly did.

Special Guest Blogger: Joseph Smith Jr

If there one thing that my Book of Mormon didn't make clear when i translated it from ancient Egyptian texts was exactly where Kolob is.
Mormon scripture doesn't differentiate between stars and planets, so everything in space is called a star. This means that when us Mormons die, our souls either travel the vastness of space to land on a paradise they can call home for all eternity, or they fry forever on the surface of a sun.
My first taste of religion was in New York when i experienced a series of visions, including one which i saw 'two personages' (presumably God the Father and Jesus Christ) and another in 1823 in which an angel directed me to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a Judeo-Christian history of an ancient American civilization.
This became the Book of Mormon, which i claimed was a translation of golden plates which had been compiled by the ancient prophet-historian Mormon.
I am considered a prophet of the Mormon Church as God gave me his commandments which were no booze, fags, coffee and tea but my personal favourite was the multiple wives thing but who am i to doubt Gods word, i had over 30 wives in my lifetime, and claimed a revelation from God instructing me to gain plural wives in order to gain a higher ranking in God's kingdom.
Practicing adult Mormons also had to wear religious underpants as a source of protection from the evils of the world.
I do sometimes feel a pang of jealousy for atheists, all that spare time from all the reading, arguing, and thinking they don't have to do would be nice.

Special Guest Blogger: Janis Joplin

My lifestyle of a hard-partying '60s rock star was short lived, mostly because i was short lived and my doctor told me that i wouldn't reach 24 if i continued my drink and drugs lifestyle, but i proved him wrong, dying from an accidental heroin overdose aged 27, part of that exclusive 27 club and i was joined by Jimi Hendrix just 16 days later.
As well as the speed and heroin, i did love Southern Comfort and would take a fifth of the whiskey onto stage with me during performances and when i died i left $2500 in my will for my friends to throw a party for me with Southern Comfort for everyone to get as drunk as humanly possible.
I did spend a night in jail after performing for a rowdy crowd and police officers climbed onto the stage and asked me to help them quiet the crowd.
I refused and instead screamed obscenities at the cops who decided they actually didn’t really like being sworn at and arrested me in my dressing room.
I was an angry young lady but musicians should be angry and spitting venom at injustices and if you dip out and return a decade later, they should still be just as angry and still looking for targets to aim their barbs at. Nobody wants that song that made you go 'Hell Yeah' to turn up telling you to buy a Mercedes-Benz or something.
If there is there's one thing us sweaty, hippies hate, it's consumerism and doing things for profit but i understand that choosing the right song for your commercial is a delicate process. You need to find a tune that gets the viewers' attention or sets the proper mood, conveys the intended message, and convinces everyone that they need to buy your product immediately or alternatively, you could just choose a song that mentions your product which is probably what happened with my song turning up on that car advert.
As the song was about how pointless and depressing rampant consumerism is, especially crappy expensive cars, the Mercedes-Benz executives just thought "Hey, she mentioned us! Let's use it!"
Maybe the message is to not look too deeply into the lyrics of the songs we are singing, to recognise that it is just a song with a bunch of words strung together but it was as if half a million hippies gathering for Woodstock and letting their private parts flap all over the marijuana covered mud was all for nothing.

Special Guest Blogger: Victor Grayson

Whoever said politics is rock 'n' roll for ugly people had obviously never seen Ozzy Osbourne but i was proper political rock 'n' roll, the Elvis of my day and with my strong views on Socialism and the unfairness of the system, i won a seat in the British parliament aged just 25 and my star shone brightly but many people warned me not to let it go to my head but it never, it went to my liver instead as i soon developed a drinking problem and ended up losing my seat at the next election. 
As a left winger, and with the Communist Russian Revolution in the offing, the Prime Minister David Lloyd George, had me spied on but i had some dirt on the Prime Minister and his secretary after finding out that they were selling knighthoods and lordships to all sorts of dodgy characters and at a public meeting i hinted that i would soon be naming 'the monocled dandy with offices in Whitehall'.
Rather than just name names i tried to build some tension to have a sense of drama before the big unviel and even after being beaten up in The Strand in an attempt to frighten me, i continued threatening to name the men behind the corruption, Lloyd George and his personal fixer and creepy weirdo whose name begins with M and ends with aundy Gregory.
What happened next is hazy but i was asked to go to a house, a house owned by M Gregory as it turned out, and then when i entered the next time i was seen outside was two months later in an unsealed coffin on a riverbank.
I can't say it was Gregory that killed me to shut me up but when he found himself in need of money, a wealthy friend mysteriously dropped dead, leaving a new will scrawled on a menu giving everything to good ol' Maundy so yeah, it probably was.

Special Guest Blogger: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

An 18th-century philosopher who helped form the modern political, sociological, and educational thought which is a surprise considering that i barely made it day to day alive considering how much i had wrong with me.
My friends called it hypochondria but i checked with a medical encyclopedia and feeling a bit dizzy one day, i found a few medical books and began to read about Typhoid Fever. Before i had even finished the list of symptoms i realised that i had got it.
I sat for a while, frozen with horror and then, in the listlessness of despair, i turned the page and read about St Vitus Dance, again read the symptoms and discovered that i had that also and must have had it for months without knowing it.
Wondering what else I was suffering from, i found the index and starting alphabetically, read up on Ague, and learned that I was sickening for it, and was in the early stages of Bright’s disease although i was relieved to find i only had it in a mild form.
Cholera I had and also Diphtheria while Epidermolysis Bullosa? I seemed to have been born with.  I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, learning i had everything from Acute Valley Fever to Zymosis and as there were no more diseases after Zymosis, i concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
Somehow i managed to write some of the stuff you learnt in college and then forget all about but i was considered one of the most influential philosophers of all time.
My seminal work, The Social Contract, inspired the Declaration of Independence and strongly shaped the Constitution although the bits about guns was all theirs, i never wrote that.
My most important was the 1762 book Emile, or On Education, a treatise on the education of children where i refused to accept the strict, authoritarian education style of the day and maintained that children should be free to discover the world on their own, play, and explore, with an ever approachable father always present to answer their questions about the nature of the world.
My philosophical nemesis Voltaire called me a hypocrite as i dumped all of my five children outside the door of an orphanage but i shut him up because i never dumped them at the door, i took them inside, which shows what a liar he was.

Special Guest Blogger: Clara Bow

Boop Boop Be Doop, that me, Betty Boop is me in cartoon form although you wouldn't have known that because i was a silent movie star but my star fell quicker than a fat kid at a skating rink.
I was never one of those actresses who would light up the room, i was more likely to light up a fag but i was the first 'It Girl' which was the name of my blockbuster movie at the time, 'It', and earned me the nickname.
I was a flapper actress in the roaring 20s wearing short skirts, short hair, and generally having good, reckless fun all the time, living life to the limit, and becoming a tabloid staple during the heady years of my fame. I had no problem carousing late into the night and then rolling onto the film set in the early hours of the morning, taking whatever lover i pleased along the way. Some of my most famous flings included the heartthrob actors Gary Cooper and I partied and canoodling with actors such as John Wayne and Bela Lugosi.
Then it all came crashing down when Hollywood shifted from silent films to talkies and audiences were shocked at what they heard because i had a very strong Brooklyn accent.
Talkies were now the thing in Hollywood and the stress of talkies pushed me over the limit. My nerves were shot and then one of my best friends turned on me after i found out she had been conning me out of money and took her to court.
Somehow i ended up with all the backlash, especially when she revealed all of my worst secrets in front of the judge and jury, relating a series of stories about my fast and loose ways, tales of my fondness for public sex, threesomes with prostitutes and, oh yeah, fornicating with dogs.
True or not, it didn’t matter. The tabloids started running vicious stories about me and the damage to my career was catastrophic. The public and my studio no longer considered me an independent, sexually liberated woman, they saw me as a dog lover in the worst possible way.
When the i died from a heart attack at the age of 65, i was a has-been by choice, locking myself up in my bungalow for decades, and i passed almost entirely alone. Yet that wasn’t the only tragedy.
As the the bulk of all silent films were stored on ludicrously flammable nitrate stock, and Hollywood didn't even think of them as something worth preserving until 1935 and around 70 percent of Hollywood's silent films are plain gone. Fuhgedaboutit? They certainly did.

Special Guest Blogger: Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg

I had it all, the title, wealth, the beautiful face and suitors from all over Europe who tried to win my hand in marriage including King Charles I of England but i fell in love with King Gustav of Sweden. He gave me his heart and i mean that literally, when he died i refused to bury his body for more than a year and as a compromise they removed his heart and i hung it above my bed in a gold casket. I was romantic like that.
We had all the court buffoons and jesters as well as the hilarious 17th-century craze for keeping dwarfs as court curios but the one thing i couldn't have was a son to become a male heir and it drove me crazy and Sweden was really, really boring.
If i had given Charles of England a bit more encouragement i could have been Queen of England with its rolling hills and green and pleasant land but i went for Gustav and Sweden and the freezing temperatures, snow and forests and the roads which were always muddy and the tiny wooden houses so one time, my lady in waiting and i escaped by sneaking out of a kitchen window, hopping onto a boat and then a carriage, and boarding a ship to Denmark and freedom.
Unfortunately, after all the running away drama, Denmark was even more boring than Sweden, it must be a Nordic thing, so i came back.
I did bare the King a girl named Christina and it said that i immediately rejected her because i wanted a boy, and i can see how that rumour got started because the child was very accident prone, she somehow tumbled down a full flight of stairs, was dropped a few times on the hard, stone floor and a large wooden beam fell into her cradle but she grew up to be Queen of Sweden and then reaslised that was like being Queen of Squaresville so abdicated and went off to live in Rome, so that turned out okay.

Saying Hello To Stupid

It seems that straight after the vaccination for Coronavirus has been found, the next most pressing thing to inoculate against is stupid because i swear people are getting stupider by the day, or possibly it was just the ones i met this weekend who tried to tell me that the Coronavirus doesn't exist and it is all a Government plot.
Bristol Council had better make with industrial amounts of sanitiser in Castle Park because this Bank Holiday saw a crowd of around 100 people telling everyone who would listen that they know it's a hoax, one i spoke to at a safe distance was a car mechanic who grudgingly agreed that he had no medical qualifications to speak of but he knew it was a hoax because he had researched it on the internet.
Call me picky but i don't consider him far enough up the World Health Organisation chain of command to take his word over the 99.99% of medical staff who believe that there is a virus ravishing the Planet at the moment and taking lives and who have to deal with it and whose patients are made up of people who refuse to take it seriously.
It is reminiscent of the Climate Change deniers who refused to believe the climate was changing until the hurricanes got stronger, the rivers started overflowing and the summers got fatally hotter and even now there are some who still refuse to believe it, literally while the flood water laps around their ankles.
Today's protest in my Town Centre was thankfully very small with six people with a loud speaker handing out leaflets and i am happy to say they got a bit of an earful from the passers-by for the hour that I was there, but i did get to speak to the leader who ran through why it is a hoax (Government control over us all) and how people like Bill Gates stand to make billions from it by selling us a vaccine to a virus that doesn't exist.
This time when i asked what medical background he had he was ready, and said that he had an extensive background in all things medical although he strangely refused to name where he trained or what qualifications he held, prefering to stick with his 'people need to open their eyes' and calling me a 'sheep who is being hoodwinked by the Governments'.
'All the Governments in the World' i replied, 'except one which means that on my side of the fence i have almost every medically trained person on the planet and every World Leader except one who is on your side, so you have Donald Trump and he suggested drinking bleach, how you feel about that'? 
By the way he huffed and walked off saying 'i don't get it' i would guess he didn't feel that chipper about it but he was right, i didn't get it but if he keeps going about things like he is, he will get it and unfortunatley pass it on to people who had the required amount of brain cells to not be in a town centre shouting that a killer virus doesn't exist.

Special Guest Blogger: Aaliya

Since it seems like every movie and music star is just a drug and sex scandal waiting to happen, you could almost think that it's not possible to be a prominent musician without also having an utterly depraved life behind the scenes and looking back at the great musicians of history you couldn't help but wonder if that's right but not me, i was praised for my clean-cut image and moral values.
My musical mentor was R Kelly and it was him who named my album 'Age Ain't Nothing but a Number' a title that people who don't understand irony would call ironic because when we got married, he was 27 and i was 15 although my birth certificate said i was 18, or at least it did after we altered it with a biro.
The marriage was annulled a year later after my parents learned about it and forced me to cut off Kelly personally and professionally for the rest of time, they wanted to cut off something altogether different.
It was reported by some that i was the predatory one and not a teen who'd been groomed by an adult with control over every aspect of my life but this wouldn't be the only time my ex-husband would be accused of heinous sex crimes. It wouldn't even be the second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth come to think of it but i was always seeing women throw themselves at my husband.
We was at this party once and there was this old cow. I mean she was OLD! Must have been like 30. At least. At any rate, she was really annoying my husband and throwing herself at him. I mean.. GEEZ! I said by the time i’m thirty i’d be doing something REALLY important, or so i thought.
My life was not filled with enough sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to kill a rock god but i died like a true rock star, in a plane crash.
We were coming back from Bahamas after filming my music video for 'Rock The Boat’, the plane was overloaded with all my equipment and the pilot had falsified his licence with the same biro that i had used on my birth certificate and he flew straight into a marsh at the end of the runway.
I squeezes quite a lot into my 22 years and i wasn't nasty or spitting venom but i really hope none of my songs turn up advertising Washing-Up Liquid and or telling you to buy a Vauxhall Vectra.

Special Guest Blogger: Bela Lugosi

My finest role was as Count Dracula, and everyone loves Vampires as evidenced by all the TV shows with vampires produced each and every day in the world today.
Whenever i was starting out and would receive a script to read through i would comment that it needed vampires. Sure enough they soon got fed up with it and stopped sending me things to read through but i stubbornly maintain that any story can be improved with the introduction of the blood drinking living dead. Just think how much better Pride and Prejudice would have been if Mr Darcy had taken to rampaging through the village of Longbourn in an orgy of blood lust instead of chasing the prudish Elizabeth about the place but then Jane Austen seemed to do quite well without my advice. Could have been better though.
My Vampire career began when i played Dracula in a stage play which was so frightenig that in one theatre in San Francisco there was actual real life nurses on hand with smelling salts, my acting was THAT good but it was also the Hungarian accent and the way i said 'I vant to suck your blood'.
After appearing as Dracula in the iconic 1931 film, i was briefly the most popular star in Hollywood and i got more female fan mail than even Clark Gable. I told you, chicks dig vampires.
Dracula was part of the core group of monsters Universal Studios kept on hand along with Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man and the Wolf Man although being the go-to guy for the ghoulish role, it typecast me but it got me the chicks, including Betty Boop, or rather the woman that Betty Boop is based on, Clara Bow.
When i died they even buried me in one of my Dracula capes but in true horror fashion, rather than die peacefully and leave a used-vampire-cape-sized hole in Hollywood, i still made movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space which came out three years after my death with cobbled together footage of me previously unreleased production as a final tribute to me, in true horror fashion, i refused to just stay dead.