I'll Vote Later

Ever since the Greeks came up with the idea, nations have been stomping around the globe saying to other nations c'mon, try a little democracy! It won't hurt ya. All the cool kids are toppling inherited rule and if gentle persuasion doesn't work, we send in thousands of heavily armed men to force it on them but Democracy is falling out of favour in many places, especially with the younger generations and the Pew Research Center hasd a neat little table which shows just who can be bothered to turn up at a polling station.
The Belgians are as keen as mustard to take the time to elect their leaders with 87% of them doing so, although they face financial penalties as they do in Australia which probably explains why 79% of Australians also put their tinnies down and voted.
The Swedes and Danes are also Democratically inclined with 83% of Swedes and 80% of Danes voting as are the South Koreans (78%), Netherlands (77%) and Israel (76%).
In the U.K., 63% of us stand in drafty church halls clutching a pencil which is more than Greece on 62% and they came up with it but they are equal with the 62% of Canadians but are better than the 61% of Spanish and 58% of the Irish.
The USA has a turnout of 56% putting down their cheeseburgers and guns to cast a vote, Poland 54% and Chile 52% but the award for the most undemocratic democracy goes to Switzerland where only 38% can be arsed to pick their leader.

2021 Has To Be Better Than 2020

It seems that when the end of year rolls around, Coronavirus will feature heavily in all the 2020 reviews but 2021 has to be better as we will be able to see friends and family again, get married, send our children to school and get careers back on track because once we get through Winter and hang a new calendar on our walls, 2021 will bring a vaccine, mass testing and better treatments and everything will be fine? Won't it experts?
Prof Julian Hiscox, from the University of Liverpool thinks we may be back to some semblance of normality by summer but it could take up to five years to get back to 2019 levels which is more optimistic than Prof Mark Woolhouse from the University of Edinburgh who thinks it will be 18 months before things settle down and is closer to a decade to get back to anything like normal.
University College London Professor Christina Pagel thinks cases will only reduce once enough of us have been affected and we could face a third, or even possible fourth wave until that herd immunity level is reached.
It is also being suggested that it may take a few generations of vaccines to stop it altogether with the first ones acting like the flu vaccine and not stop you from catching it and spreading it, just lessening the effects if you do.
According to people who know about these things, 2021 could be another year of face coverings, 20 second hand washes, socially distancing and looking up people's noses during video meetings. Great.

Here We Go Again

Boris Johnson being two and a half hours late for his Press Conference was no big deal when you consider the six weeks he has been late calling for the inevitable lock-down everyone saw coming except him.
It was September 21st when the SAGE Comittee told him we need a nationwide lock-down of two weeks to prevent the cases rises exponentially but Boris ummed and erred and waffled about local lock-down tier systems but the Virus refused to play ball and now cases in England are so high that it is going to take a lock-down of double that time, a minimum of four weeks, to bring it back under control.
There was a risk of the NHS being over-run by people with eyeball strain with all that eye rolling when he said he had confidence that he would very soon be rolling out rapid turnaround testing across the country, if it is anything like his world beating test and trace system he shouldn't bother, his podium sign may have said Hands-Face-Space but it was more Hands-Face-Smack.
Right, as the lock-down starts from 12.01am Thursday, still got some time for some toilet roll panic buying.

Special Guest Blogger: Georg Andreas Helwing

By far the most popular Halloween character for boys is a vampire and Bram Stokers Dracula began the whole thing but he also included a vampire hunter named Van Helsing who was based on me.  
My day job was a pasteur in Poland and during the plague, i would visit grave-yards and watch the locals who had the bright idea that the plague was being spread by the plague victims who would rise from their graves and bite people to pass on the disease so they called them vampyrs, dug them up, decapitated them and stabbed the corpses with wooden stakes.
As i had an interest in the paranormal and supernatural, i wrote about this practise in scientific magazines and the populations general belief in witches, werewolves and werebears and through a mutual friend, Ármin Vámbéry, Bram Stoker heard of it and came up with me as a counter to his horror creation and very lazily did not try very hard to change my surname.
As a bit of a knowledge on things that go bump in the night and as the real-life inspiration for Van Helsing, i am well placed to prepare you for any visits from one of the living dead tonight.
Witches were killed by the thousand back in medieval times and are basically just warty women with pointy hats and a broom so a blunt object to the head should cool her heels and ghosts are just rubbish because they can’t hurt you and the only thing they can do is make scary noises.
Werewolves are a different story as they can only be killed by a silver bullet and are devastatingly quick so you can melt down all that cheap jewellery you have but you will probably be in 27 bits spread around the living room before you fire the first shot.
Skeletons are basically made of dog treats so entice the family pooch to sleep on your bed tonight and within seconds of putting in an appearance, vital parts of it will be buried in the garden by an excited Rover.

Other reanimated corpses are Zombies but their biggest drawback is that they are as dumb as a post and unless you are wearing lead boots, trousers and coat, you should easily outpace the slowcoaches and Mummies are just zombies wrapped up in bandages, which makes it slower and more flammable than a regular zombie. Hopeless.

The achilles heel of Killer Dolls is that no matter how evil it is, its still doll sized and can be launched across the room with a swift kick while monster created from parts of corpses will have body parts from many different sources and it is hard to get them to fit correctly so their main weakness are their own insecurities. A few put downs and ridiculing their appearance should send them running blubbing out of the room.  
Finally, if it's a robot of some sort, cyborgs from the future, aliens or escapees from a local tourist attraction out to kill all of mankind, robots are made of metal, are immensely strong and impervious to fire, bullets, hitting with blunt objects or swords and have clear, logical thought which anticipates your every move so might be best to make sure you run to a room with intestine coloured wallpaper so the cleaning-up is not so hard on the rest of the household.

Flu And Covid Twin-Demic

There are not many silver linings during the Coronavirus pandemic but one is that the feared twin-demic of Covid and flu attacking us humans this winter is failing to materialise, with flu infections plummeting.
The WHO are putting it down to to the lashings of hand sanitiser being used, social distancing and masks but whatever the reason, countries in the Southern Hemisphere who are emerging from their winter saw a record low in flu rates, Australia essentially skipped their flu season this year and early indicators suggest it will follow suit with those of us north of the equator.
Explanations put forward include flu deaths being wrongly classified as Covid or that Covid has crowded out the flu as it is virtually impossible to be sick with two viruses at once.
The third possibility is that more people, are getting the flu vaccination so there is far more immunity but whatever the reason, it's a very thin sliver of good Coronavirus news for a change.

Judaism The religion, Israel The Country

The Labour Party, and Jeremy Corbyn in-particular, are being rightly hauled across the coals for not properly investigating anti-semitism in his party and the Conservative are making hay while the sun shines whilst hoping thinks to asks them about their own forgotten report regarding their rampant Islamophobia in their own party.  
I am not defending Corbyn, if there is any racism in his party he had to investigate it properly but something i see regularly and try to correct when i do, is the way some of the left seem to attack Jews when it is attacking Israel for it's horrific genocide in Palestine. Being Jewish does not make you an Israeli as being Roman Catholic does not make you Italian so boycott Israeli goods or join one of the many demonstrations against Israel but don't take out your anger on innocent people who happen to be of the same religion of those doing the war crimes.
That any criticism of Israel is met by the howling of anti-semitism to try and shut down the argument doesn't do the Jewish community any favours and if anything it waters down their cries when real anti-semitism rears it ugly head but criticizing Israel for it's actions as we criticize Russia, America or Britain if they did the same is not the same as criticizing Jews, nobody went after Christians when George W Bush and Tony Blair were at their warmongering worst and it would have been ridiculous if they had.   
It really isn't hard and the Israel supporters will try and use this to keep it's critics quiet by conflating the two so let the Israeli supporters shout antisemitism at those of us criticizing Israel’s aggressive policies, it is those defending the repulsive and loathsome Israeli government who are on the wrong side, not us, just remember Judaism is the religion, Israel is the country.

Things Looking Bleak For Trump

Just when you think Donald Trump couldn't do anything else to embarrass himself anymore, he begins doing that awful dancing to YMCA at the end of his Lets-give-my-supporters-Covid-19 tour of the USA.
Apart from the dancing, he seems to have picked up that Hillary Clinton thing of pointing and mouthing things to people in the crowd and i'm no lip-reader but it's probably, 'thanks for coming, now get tested, and you, and you too'.
Everyone and his dog expects Joe Biden to stay awake long enough to claim the White House next week and the polls have him so far ahead that people are looking up the biggest ever win (1984 – Ronald Reagan 525 to Walter Mondale's 13) and the Poll of Polls has Biden 51% and Trump 43% but that comes with the caveat that the polls got it all wrong last time.
Even if we figure in the margin of error that the polls got it wrong by in 2016, Biden still sweeps Trump aside and parks his backside on the White House sofa but the US Election is all about the electoral college system with each state handing out a differing number of votes so some states are worth more than others.
The big ones to win are California (55 votes), Texas (38), New York (29) and Florida (29) Illinois (20) and Pennsylvania (20) and the current poll of polls has Biden winning in Florida, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois and New York, while Trump only has Texas of the big hitters so even if he only captures there he will improve on Walter Mondale and not be bottom of the list.
All in all it is looking bleak for the orange one but it is not all over until the fat lady sings, or the fat guy dances in Trumps case, because he has one attribute which could yet ensure it is him putting his tiny, iddy biddy hands all over the Bible at the next inauguration, if there was ever one American candidate more likely to cheat and swindle his way to a win, it's him.

Special Guest Blogger: Jean Lafitte

History books make it sound like all pirates were nasty toothless hobo's who talk like morons but i was the exact opposite of that and i was so good at it that i led an entire pirate island in Louisiana, capturing ships and smuggling stolen goods into New Orleans and i was made so much money that when the Governor of Louisiana offered a $300 price for my capture, i responded by offering a $1,000 reward for the capture of the governor.
King George III himself asked me to join his British side in the war against my French comrades. The King promised me a British citizenship and landholdings if i joined his side and warned if i refused his navy would tear my little island to pieces, and sell it for scrap. I said that i needed a few days to think about it and ran straight to New Orleans and warned the Americans that the English were coming.
You see, the United States leaders may not have been a very big fan of me, what with me keep nicking their boats and all that, but i was a a huge fan of the U.S. of A and the people of New Orleans especially who loved me because my smuggling operation allowed them to buy stuff they otherwise couldn't afford which made me very rich so i ordered my entire fleet never to attack an American ship.
So how did the U.S. respond when i warned them about the English? They figured i was pulling a ruse and raided my island until the British attacked and then the authorities changed their minds and agreed to release me and my men if we agreed to assist the U.S. Navy which, at the time, consisted of a couple of wrecks and a row boat and a fraction of the ships in my personal pirate fleet.
It's a good thing, too, because me and my pirates buddies were pretty much the only reason New Orleans didn't fall to the British and the whole Independence things wouldn't have happened and the U.S. we know today wouldn't exist, they would have the letter u in their words, they would call crackers 'biscuits', say 'al-u-min-ium,' instead of 'aluminum' and call soccer 'football'.
You are very welcome America.

Special Guest Blogger: Charlton Heston

I know this should be 500 words about my career and my legacy and my films such as The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Planet of the Apes and the soap, The Colbys but i have unfinished business about what America is becoming thanks to liberal commies like the owner of this blog so i'm going to do the opposite of what she says and give my opinion on today's America.
In old America, the America I fell in love with, we dealt with stupid people very discretely. Now, i don't know if it's something in the water, or the lack of separate water fountains but i had it with the left and their call for blacks and homosexuals equality.  
There is increasingly no place in America for white, God fearing heterosexuals like me but my heart was with the NRA card carrying gun owning working stiff who just didn't count anymore in left wing America.  
I've had it with people whining about 'guns kill people,' guns don't kill people, ask any doctor, it's a medical fact. You can't die from a bullet. You can die from a cardiac arrest or organ failure or a major hemorrhage, a small piece of metal ain't the problem, the problem is the liberals using our educational system to brainwash our kids that guns are bad.
Someone’s breaking into your home. What do you do? Call 911?  By the time the police have turned up a burglar could have his way with your wife, smoked a cigarette, flipped her over and gone in for seconds. Our gun laws protect your family from the evil blacks, gays and the scourge of a liberal society, if you love your family, prove it by bringing a gun into the family home.  
It doesn't makes me a racist because i consider blacks evil, or homophobic because i'm against same sex marriage, or a xenophobe because i want to keep foreigners out, or sexist because i consider pregnancy and getting pregnant is solely the woman's responsibility, it makes me a white American and that's what we need to protect.   
You know, if more people had guns, we'd have less shootings in this country and don't get me started on abortions, or women's rights, we need to be making babies, we need to catch up with the Chinese by birthing with real Americans who love their country, the ones who would tongue kiss the Statue of Liberty and reach underneath that big smock she's wearing and just give her buttocks a nice freedom squeeze.
So i wish you all well unless you are a lily livered lefty in which case i say to you go live in North Korea and see how you enjoy it there, commie liberal scum and let us keep up the great American traditions of hating open-minded liberals and spreading unsubstantiated slurs about 'em.

Special Guest Blogger: Beau Brummell

Something that i was very good at was blagging, which is the art of speaking to make someone believe that we know more than we actually do without actually saying anything about it which turned out well for me to start with because from a young age i had the kind of ugly face that could scare the varnish off a door.
Something else i also had was £30,000 inheritance and i considered starting up a business or investing it but then thought, nah, i'll gamble the lot of it because this was the time when men were men, women were the property of men and everyone sort of daintily posed next to harpsichords before dying of syphilis so i thought enjoy it while i got it so i spent thousands getting a tailor to make me some suits and set about gambling the rest away.
Suits were unknown then, everyone wore pantaloons, cloaks and dressed like they were on psychedelic drugs so my style of a white shirt with a dark jacket, matching trousers and a tied neck ornament caught the attention of member's of the aristocracy who wrongly believed me to be part of their set, and as i never corrected them, they began inviting me to fancy parties, which got me invited to more fancy parties and soon my nob was hobbing with the best of them, including Prince George and the Duke of Wellington who's custom-made leather boots which were weatherproofed for the rain i endorsed and gave birth to the Wellington Boot.
Being the clothes peg for the elite doesn't come cheap and my suits quickly burnt through my savings and when i made the mistake of too much gin at a Royal Ball, i asked someone with the Prince who there Fat friend was which didn't go down well with the rotund Royal so i beat a hasty retreat and ended up in France broke and friendless where i was offered the post of the British Consul.
Now the French are a species that could have used a more thorough check before they left the assembly line and i tried to blag a job at a Consul in another, better country so saying that there was no necessity for a British Consul in France, the Government agreed and closed it.
Problem was the short time i was in France i had ticked them off massively and ran up some huge debts so no sooner were the arms of England taken down from the front of my house, than my French creditors arrested me as i no longer had diplomatic immunity and carried off to jail.
The Prince, still burning from the Fat jibe ignored my pleas for help as did all my aristocratic friends and after months of jail, and the galloping syphilis in me, i lost my mind and was moved to an insane asylum where i died.
I heard there is a statue of me in London with an inscription reading 'To be truly elegant one should be noticed' which really wraps me up in a neat little bow which in no way should men ever, ever wear.

If Only We Knew Who Celebrities Would Vote For

Elections are never easy things to decide on, you can listen to their polices and choose based on that or you can just base your decision on who your favourite singer thinks you should vote for so it is handy that celebrities are not shy on telling you who they think you should plump for.
With election day less than a week away, America celebrities are coming out as either Team Biden or Team Trump so lets see who are waving little American flags and murdering a version of the Star Spangled Banner.  
Wearing MAGA Hats and not worrying about the casual racism is sometimes Trump golf partner Kid Rock and Actress Stacey Dash explained that Trump gets her vote because 'he’s not the establishment' as neither is Roseanne Barr who sees a kindred spirit in Trump as she also has a history of racist tweets of her own.
Jon Voight called Trump 'the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln' and Scott Baio, aka Chaci, likes the way Trump speaks for people like him and he speaks as he finds and 'if you’re offended by it, grow up'.
The youngest of the Baldwin clan, Stephen, is staunch Trump supporter as is Kirstie Alley and 50 Cent who has thrown his support and an F-Bomb or two behind Trump in support of as he 'don’t care Trump doesn’t like black people', but he don't care for Bidens tax plan even more.
In the Biden camp, possibly trying their hardest to keep him awake, is Billie Eilish, John Legend, The Chicks, Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift who said that 'change we need most is to elect a president who recognizes that people of color deserve to feel safe and represented', Jennifer Lawrence thinks that when it comes to Trump, 'He does not represent my values as an American, and most importantly as a human being'.
Shia LaBeouf support's Biden for his stand for violence against women policy and Cher just thinks Biden is a 'Honest, Kind, Civil Man' and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson has broken his policy to not endorse a politician by endorsing a politician, Biden.
The smart money is on Biden to throw Trump and his family out of the White House and the polls are pointing towards Trump leaving the keys with one of the greatest losing landslides in American history which probably means it will a close call with Biden squeaking home.

Special Guest Blogger: Marvin Gaye

It has been said that my songs like 'Let's Get It On' and 'Sexual Healing' saw the end of many virginities which is something nobody saw coming from a man with Gay as a surname who suffered homophobic jibes all through his childhood, weird what adding an e at the end of your name can achieve.  
My most famous songs may be about genital collision, and that one about Grapevines which is synonymous with Raisins now but i never set out to be a singer, i was a drummer but my story begins, and ends with my father who would hand me regular beating's as a kid.
Desperate to leave home i dropped out of school and joined up with the Air Force at 17 but hated it so faked a mental illness and was given a General Discharge and went back to being a session drummer and got a chance to sing and was signed to Motown under the Motown Records President Barry Gordy and deciding that what my relationship with my boss needed just as i was becoming recognised as a Motown talent and women began hurling their juicy bits in my direction on a daily basis, was the additional tension and awkwardness of marrying the boss's sister, Anna Gordy.
Our marriage crashed spectacularly and with my burgeoning career and an equally burgeoning cocaine habit, when she divorced me most of my money was going up my nose so i had no money to pay her in alimony so our lawyers agreed that 50% of my next album’s royalties would go to her to settle things.
Making money to pay your ex-wife's alimony ranks just below having your nads caught in a car door on the list of things that inspire artistic greatness so one half arsed album coming up i thought but damn my talent, i ended up making a classic double album which would make it into the Rolling Stones magazines top 500 of the best albums ever.
Unbeknown to me, the 'Sexual Healing tour' was the last one i would ever do as i went to live with my parents to help take care of my mother as she was recovering from kidney surgery. As i couldn't always be there and my mum was vulnerable and this being America, instead of a burglar alarm or a dog, i bought them a gun.
My father, not realising that i wasn't a scared weedy kid anymore went back to hitting me and one day i hit him back then he walked off, got the damned gun that i had bought them and shot me twice in the heart.  
My legacy would be showing the World why America is so respected musically across the world, my death would show America why nobody else in the World has the bat-shit crazy gun laws we have.

Special Guest Blogger: Emperor Hadrian

Everyone hopes to leave a legacy. Something to act as a reminder that we were here on Earth after our passing and as a Roman Emperor i did many things but mention me now and the first thing anyone's mind conjours up is the wall.
Most men, having watched Gladiator or Ben Hur, have probably thought to themselves that being a Roman would be the coolest thing since Aqueducts with a wicked hat, big swords and a horse living a life full of orgies, grapes, drinking and stabbing foreigners so how bad could that be?
Julius Caesar, Augustus and Claudius and whoever the hell Russel Crowe was supposed to be in that movie, all made you think that being a Roman Legionairre was the grand poo-bah of the Ancient World but we had it tough, especially in Britannia.
We took a quick look at the cold, windswept top end of Britannia and saw it was full of barbarians in skirts and some weird creature they torture by blowing into and squeezing it until it made an awful screeching noise and we said they can keep that and built a 80 mile long wall from one side of Britannia to the other to make sure they didn't bring their hairy legs into Roman territory.
I reigned for 21 years without anyone sticking a knife in me which is pretty good as Emporers go but i did stay out of Rome quite a lot, half of my reign i was traveling through the Roman provinces keeping things organised and i was one of the very first people to come out as gay and my boyfriend Antinous accompanied me on my tours of the empire including my trip to crack some Jewish heads in Judea.
Very uptight the Jews, they didn't like the massive temple for Jupiter i built in Jerusalem and they revolted and four years and 600,000 dead Jews later, i had kicked out the remaining ones and renamed it Syria Palaestina to end any Jewish connection to the land forever more.
I doubt if anyone bothers to try and build walls to keep the nationals of other countries out anymore and i may have annoyed the Scots but i don't care, you can't understand a word the lot are saying, so in the best Roman way Veni, vidi, vici - we came, we saw, we built a bloody great wall to keep them Jocks out.

The 60 Days Of Christmas

My countdown app is telling it is 60 days to go until Christmas and i have already seen some decorations and Christmas trees up and i think, why not, this year has been crap so why not bring a bit of Christmas cheer to our homes that bit earlier.
The shops are already bringing out the Santa stuff although it is currently sharing shelf space with skeletons, witches and devils but this is always an awkward time of year when you can push the belly of a vampire which plays 'Thriller' and then take three steps to press the button of a snowman singing about his dreams of a White Christmas.
My kitchen radio is been tuned to Christmas FM and i have been washing up to the strains of Slade and Shakin' Stevens for the past few weeks and i indulged in my first Christmas film on Sony Christmas Channel this weekend but i think we are all so desperate for nice things to happen
In this incredibly cursed year that we are willing Christmas into existence so much earlier this year.
Normal rules of society have been suspended this year and in these dire times, how could you deny yourself a two-month Christmas build-up this year so eat that Santa shaped chocolate, buy that gingerbread spiced latte, wear that gaudy Christmas jumper and put up your Christmas tree and do whatever makes this season brighter for you.

Special Guest Blogger: Pochahontis

I was told that they made a film about me which is exciting, i hope they used either my real name Amonute, or my native American name Matoaka, or even my English name Rebecca Rolfe and and not my nickname Pochahontis, i would hate to be known centuries later only by that nickname.
My story is quite interesting albeit short, i was the daughter of the tribal chief in Virginia when 100 British settlers landed in Jamestown and rather than bringing supplies like any sensible people, they relied on the prayers to their man in the clouds to keep them fed and healthy but there God told them to sod off so they ended up begging us Native American's for help and we shared our supplies with them , giving them much-needed food in the harsh months of the winter.
One settler in particular, John Smith, got very friendly with us, we even did the time honoured 'put your head on the rock and we won't beat your brains out' tribal ceremony to show just how much we were friends.
There were rumours that me and him got it on but i was 10 years old and he was like really really old, like 30 or something and i was betrothed to Kocoum from a nearby tribe anyway.
They traded with us but as more settlers arrived and moved onto our territory, dad thought we were getting pushed off our land so we stopped all trade with the Brits which ticked them off so they went to war with us and as the Chiefs daughter, i was taken hostage and the British demanded a ransom which my father refused to pay on principle.
After a year of me sat there like a hungry bump on a log and not being ransomed back, the British realised that they were stuck with me so they forced me convert to Christianity and to pray to their man in the clouds, the same one who had been no help whatsoever when they landed, given a less heathen name, Lady Rebecca, as a sign of my commitment to their faith and married to one of them, tobacco grower John Rolfe.
In the summer of 1616, my husband decided to take me on a trip to England where they called me a Princess as it was just easier to call me that than to explain Native American tribal hierarchies and we lived in Brentford which is very much like Virginia with more scones and cream tea's but after a year and just as we started sailing back to America, the awful British cooking caught up with me and i became so sick they had to turn the boat around and i died soon after at the age of 21.

Tories Still The Nasty Party

If you thought that Conservative MP's actually cheering that they had successfully blocked a pay-rise cap for NHS nurses and firefighters was a reminder of why they are called the nasty party, then this week they reminded us again when they shamefully voted against giving free school dinners for those school children at risk of going hungry over the half-term break due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Just to make sure that the point had been driven home that the Conservatives didn't particularly care, Selaine Saxby, who is Tory MP for North Devon posted a comment on Facebook after dozens of organisations offered to help, saying 'I am delighted our local businesses have bounced back so much after lock-down they are able to give away food for free, and very much hope they will not be seeking any further government support'.
Her post has since been deleted and she has since said that she deeply regrets any offence which may have been caused as did the Tory MP for Mansfield, Ben Bradley, who tweeted that vouchers would end up being given to 'crack dens and brothels'.
In the last election large swathes of the North of England turned their backs on their traditional Labour Party candidates and voted for Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party giving them a huge majority but they might be regretting that now as the Tories are scramble with another shaming PR disaster that if the government of the 6th Richest global nation won’t feed vulnerable kids, then ordinary people will do it.
Even Nigel Farage, possibly one of the most disliked right-wing politicians in Britain, called the government 'mean' and asked 'why they were able to subsidise money for the Eat Out to Help Out scheme but can't help hungry children', and that's coming from the absurd Nigel Farage!!
Appears that feeding hungry children is very low down on this particular Government's list of give-a-tosses, and that's reprehensible but even worse, not unexpected from Boris Johnson and his well deservedly named nasty party.

Special Guest Blogger: Rick James

Everybody needs a friend who is willing to step in and sit you down and say that we have to talk when we are doing catastrophically stupid things and my friends did that to me at my height of my indulgences, the actress Debbie Allen staged an intervention and pinned me down and pleaded that i was throwing my life away as all i do is get high, sleep and have sex and that was a moment of realisation for me and i made myself a promise that from this moment forth, i would sleep less to make more time for sex and shoving facefuls of pharmaceuticals into my body until i went deaf.
I spent the 80's doing copious amounts of cocaine and acting as a one-person stand against rehab and people would ask me did i remember the 80's?
And I say well, I certainly don't remember anything else since then but i have a vague recollection of grabbing Prince by the hair and pouring cognac down his throat until he cried like a baby but i hated that squeakly voiced little ponce.
It was getting into fights that got me into music, i moved to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft and got into a fight there and was rescued by musicians Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, who invited me to join their band with Neil Young and we signed to Motown but the manager and i got into an argument and he told the Motown owners that i was a draft-dodger and got arrested and served a year in jail but Motown kept me on their books and so after i was released i began a career of copious drug use with the odd song thrown in, including Super-Freak or as it became known, MC Hammers 'You Cant Touch This'.
The second time i served prison time was after i held a woman hostage who stole some of my drugs and while out on parole for that kidnapping, i met with music executive Mary Sauger and for no reason other than i was out of gaud on cocaine, i took her hostage and beat her so i got two-year's in Folsom State Prison and a $1m fine.
I was beginning to think that i was going to be one of those death-defying music legends who seemed immune to the ravages of hard living but sadly, i was only mortal and i died of heart failure at the age of 56 but truth be told, i was astonished that i made it past 30.

NASA'S Exciting Moon News

News from NASA that they have an 'exciting major announcement' to make about the Moon and curiously the results are courtesy of the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), the same observatory which recently detected oxygen in the Martian atmosphere and NASA has teased that the discovery will have some bearing on the Artemis program which is the plan to send humans back to the lunar surface in 2024.
It could be they found life there or that it is actually made of cheese after-all but seeing as the person doing the presenting is Dr. Casey Honniball, and her page on the NASA website puts her current project as 'Investigation of water at pyroclastic deposits on the Earth and Moon using new data sets and techniques', it is pretty safe to assume that the exciting major announcement will be H2O related.
Exciting in that it will help us establish a moon base but my mind went to straight to the clangers or finding out where i could order a massive cracker

Special Guest Blogger: Marshall Applewhite

My belief system wasn't that bizarre or hard to understand, it was that the Biblical God is actually an incredibly advanced alien, that the Earth is due to be recycled and that, under my guidance, humans can ascend to the Evolutionary Level Above Human, it was all there on my website.
After we realised that we were the two witnesses referred to in the Book Of Revelations, my girlfriend Bonnie Nettles and i took off on an 8,000 mile trip and recruited 76 believers to our cause and were just waiting for the sign that they would ascend to a higher plane of existence which as it happened, was a spaceship.
We were not a cult, members routinely left because they would rather smoke weed or have sex, or because the group's lifestyle where alcohol, drugs, and sex were forbidden just didn't click with them although eight of us did go to Mexico and paid a doctor to castrate us put a few off.
As it was the late 90s, we were at the cutting edge of technology and one of the day jobs members held was Web design, our website and emails attracted even more followers as well as insults, because internet comment sections were like that back then.
While we were waiting Nettles died of cancer despite her insistence that she would survive, being the chosen one and all that, and then i got a sign that the Hale-Bopp comet, which was approaching Earth at the time, was accompanied by a spaceship guided by Nettles, and that it was time for me and our followers to evacuate the planet by discarding our physical bodies so our souls could join the ship and ascend to the Next Level.
We rented a mansion in California, got everyone to make 'exit statements' and after including a warning against people against emulating us, because there won't be a spaceship to pick them up, we mixed barbiturates with applesauce, and washed it down with vodka and off we went to our spaceship in outer space.
We were never a strange cult, we were a religion because a cult is a group who believe in bizarre theories and superstitions, practice daft rituals and accept ridiculous restrictions on their behaviour and i provided a roadmap into heaven, just that it had plenty of routes leading to comets and UFO's first and what's ridiculous about that?

Special Guest Blogger: Eleanor of Aquitaine

The Middle Ages was one of the worst times to be alive, the food sucked, the housing sucked, the work sucked, everything really sucked and i was stuck married to the King of France, a man whose nickname was Louis the Fat. Three guesses why.
Louis was king by default, his brother and the rightful king stupidly died falling off his horse when it got spooked by a pig so they dragged Louis out of the monastery where he was training to be a monk and married him off to me.
Obviously before they had dragged him away he had already reached the bit about celibacy because the only time the bed squeaked was when Fat Louis dragged his enormous, bloated carcus into it so after 15 years of sexless marriage i divorced his arse and married Henry II, King of England, and gave birth to five of his sons.
That was a case of one extreme to the other because the problem with Henry was too much sex which would have been fine if it wasn't with women who were not me and then things got complicated so pay attention.
King Henry and his sons Henry Jr, Richard and Geoffrey had a fight after he gave John some of his castles so they ran off to France to ask Fat Louis to help them overthrow their father and seize the throne and as Henry was trying this best to introduce his penis to every vagina in England, i supported our children’s rebellious phase with my ex-husband but King Henry got wind of it and whacked me in jail for the next 16 years.
It turned out that Chubby Louis was as impotent on the battlefield as he was in the bedroom and the British kicked his lardy fat arse so after 16 years Henry released me because my boys Richard and Henry Jr were now fighting each other but as Richard would go on to become called the Lionheart, he not only killed his brother but then began to fight his little brothers Geoffrey and John but i banged their stupid heads together and told them to play nice which they did until King Henry died and Richard become King and immediately buggered off on a Crusade.
When he got killed John took over and after marrying a 12 year old while already being married and starting a war with France, i said i had enough of this crap and went off to become a nun.
Last i heard John sucked at being king so much that he would be forced to sign the Magna Carta by his noblemen agreeing not to be a dick so all in all the middle ages sucked, it was a time when men started wars, men saw women as their property, and everyone hated on each other for having a different religion, it was called the dark ages for a reason so i'm glad the human race progressed beyond those times. Hasn't it?

Democracy Sucks Say Millennial's

The Center for the Future of Democracy has called their report that 52% of British under 38's say they are not satisfied with democracy worrying.
They don't offer any explanation of just why there is a disconnect between the next generation of Brits and Democracy but it isn't hard to hazard a guess, you only have to look at the inept morons in the White House and Downing Street to see that electing a leader is not always a considered vote for the best possible person to do the job.  
So if we are going to ditch Democracy then what could it be replaced with?
All have their good and bad points and it depends who you ask, Anarchist's believe the best form of Government is no Government at all while Communist's see it as a means of abolishing Societies inequalities.
We tried a Monarchy and it does tickle some people's ideological fancy but Communism's watered down sibling Socialism seems to be the most popular choice but there are plenty of others to mull over including a combination of the best bits from each.
As the British Government won't even contemplate abandoning the archaic First Past The Post system to make it more representative then it would appear that a form of Democracy is what we got and what we will be stuck with for the forseeable future, we can only hope that the Parties put up better candidates than they currently offer up.

Special Guest Blogger: Sharon Tate

A few world-changing events happened in the summer of '69. Hippies had their shindig at Woodstock, a man walked on the moon, Bryan Adams was buying his first real six-string from the five-and-dime and in Southern California a band of drug-fueled acolytes under the guidance and insane instructions of Charles Manson horrifically murdered a houseful of complete strangers.
Roman Polanski and i had a good arrangement. He would lie to me about his affairs and i pretended to believe him but being very pregnant, i moved into 10050 Cielo Drive. It was a mansion fit for Hollywood’s best and brightest, nestled deep in Benedict Canyon, the house used to belong to our friends Terry Melcher and actress Candice Bergen which as it turned out, the previous tenants were quite important.
Charles Manson was an aspiring musician and fully flegded lunatic and friends with Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and producer Terry Melcher who initially expressed interest in Manson’s music but declined to sign him after witnessing the ex-con’s volatile behavior.
Not long after Melcher declined to support Manson’s career, the producer moved out of the home at 10050 Cielo Drive, and it was rented out to us just as Manson ordered four of his followers with instructions to ‘totally destroy everyone in the house as gruesome as you can.’
Manson wasn't the brightest guy on the block and it was his weirdo interpretations of Beatles lyrics on the White Album and the song Helter Skeletr specifically that Charles Manson explaned why he ordered the deaths in our house, saying: 'It’s the Beatles, the music they’re putting out, It’s subliminal.'
It must be a thing about California that all the religious nutcases start of there. California, for all its laid-back vibes, has been a hub for fringe religious cults for decades. Jim Jones Peoples Temple followers were headquartered in San Francisco. Children of God, the weird sex cult that River Phoenix's family belonged to when he was a kid, was started in Huntington Beach, California. Branch Davidians, California. Heavens Gate San Diego. Scientology? Southern California.
Finding a weird cult that didn't start in California is like not finding a pair of breast implants on Venice Beach but as for me, it all ended there.

Special Guest Blogger: Dante Alighieri

Jean-Paul Sartre said Hell was being locked forever in a room with your friends but then all his mates were French so it was probably true for him but i had my own version of hell it included Satan, or Pope Boniface VIII as he was also known.
The Middle Ages weren’t exactly a time when arts and culture flourished, tales of the black death, witch burning's, and the joys of cooking with turnips were not exactly best sellers but i was inspired to write The Divine Comedy, the literary masterpiece of the medieval period and it is all thanks to Pope Bonerface.
I was a diplomat during an age of social instability and great political turbulence in Florence. The city was literally divided into two camps. On the one hand were the Guelphs, who loved the Pope, and on the other the Ghibellines, who were Team Rome.
In an attempt to solve the issues between them i was sent to meet old Boneyface but in a real dick move, the Pope invited me to stay a while as his personal guest while he secretly sent an armed militia to overthrow and execute the government and install a more Pope-friendly regime who in turn, banned me from going back home to Florence.
Then he ordered all my belongings in Florence destroyed, gave me a massive fine for being in Rome and then when i said i couldn't pay it on account of all my stuff either being ashes or siting on the bottom of several Florence rivers, he exiled me and ordered me dead if i ever returned.
Hell hath no fury like a wordsmith scorned so rather than sulk away quietly, i reached for the sweetest plum in the up-yours basket and wrote 14,233 awesome rhyming lines of blistering papal burn in what became one of the most widely read and influential works of literature in the Western world, the Divine Comedy.
It follows the characters of Dante and Virgil as they travel to the center of Hell, passing through the nine circles of Hell where in the eight circle sits a demon who bears a tremendous likeness to Pope Boney, i even had St. Peter himself denouncing the loser.
Since i became a superstar author, Florence decided they weren't too good for me after all, and forgave me for my crimes in 2019, 700 years after i was buried in Ravenna after dying from Malaria and they probably expect me to say that i am thankful my name has been cleared but i think saying ficcalo su per il culo, your 7 centuries too late seems much more appropriate.

Special Guest Blogger: Coco Chanel

The world is full of terrible things, fortunately, money and fame have always acted as a force field against these afflictions and i had both thanks to clothes you probably can't afford as well as a perfume so strong that it would curl your nose hairs.
My fashion career began with my short lived singing career when i briefly made money by singing at a café-concert with a plate being passed around at the end of the night to collect tips from the audience to show their appreciation and my two favourite songs were 'Ko Ko Ri Ko' and 'Qui qu’a vu Coco' and i was known as the Coco singer and that's how i got my name.
A regular attendant was a wealthy heir to a textile fortune named Etienne Balsan and as this was France, i became his mistress and introduced to millionaire Arthur 'Boy' Capel who, again this being France, i also became his mistress and he financed my first shops, got me into Vogue magazine and everything took off until the great depression and i had to fire my workers, shut down my shops and sell a majority stake in my company to the Jewish Wertheimer brothers.
WW2 soon broke out and France was occupied and it turned out the Nazis and i had more than a keen fashion sense in common, namely our shared disdain for Jews and i saw a golden opportunity to leverage Nazi laws banning Jews from owning businesses to wrestle my company back from the Wertheimer's but they got wind of it and they legally turned over control of the company to a Christian friend who returned control to the Wertheimers after the war.
That didn't dampen my enthusiasm for the Third Reich though and i invited German intelligence officer Hans Gunther von Dincklage to blitzkrieg my western front and helped recruit new agents to the Nazi cause but my spying career came to an end in 1943, when i attempted on behalf of  Heinrich Himmler to broker a peace deal with Winston Churchill who said no, but i can help you and The Dinke get off scott free and go live in Switzerland, which we did.
It's amazing how quick people forget you were part of the vilest regime on the planet as long as you give them designer clothes and perfume which really took off big time when Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy began wearing them and the perfume got a huge boost when Marilyn Monroe said that all she wore in bed was 'Just a few drops of Chanel No. 5'.
I want to thank everyone for their support and i may have been born poor but my love of fashion was enough payment, that and having affairs with very rich men and charging extortionate amounts for dresses that cost a fraction to make.

Special Guest Blogger: Bing Crosby

Before there were rock stars, there were crooners, and one of the most successful was me. I was so popular during my heyday that i was named 'the most admired man alive' and i was one of the pioneers of a new style of smoother, quieter singing that was so successful that in 1931 and 1932 almost every top selling song had me singing on it.
What would the holidays be like without my dulcet tones singing about dreaming of a White Christmas drifting through the air of a department store, in an elevator after Halloween and continuing until everyone is too buried in credit card debt to even think about what song is playing or in the background of a favorite old movie and i sang my iconic hit in three different films, Holiday Inn, Blue Skies, and, of course, White Christmas because when a song is that good, and it is actually still the bestselling single of all time, it deserves to be in every damned movie.
Irving Berlin actually wrote it for Holiday Inn because he was stuck in California during a Christmas heatwave when trying to come up with a Christmas song for the film so the song is actually about the singer fantasizing about snowy trees and sleigh bells while getting a sun tan.
While White Christmas may be my most enduring Christmas song, i produced one heck of a tune when i teamed up with David Bowie for the holiday special, titled Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas. We were supposed to perform 'The Little Drummer Boy' but Bowie said he hated the song so we came up with him singing the lyrics of 'Peace on Earth' while i did the drummer boy bits.
The BBC in the UK actually banned one of my songs for being too catchy, they were worried that my wartime hit 'Deep in the Heart of Texas' would cause factory workers to bang their tools and clap along like idiots and worried that their planes and bombs would explode all over the assembly lines, banned it during work hours so i couldn't be held responsible for the Nazis winning because i accidentally sabotaged the Allied war effort with my song about the American South.
I wasn't just a singer though, i appeared alongside Bob Hope in over 25 films but despite that i still won a Best Actor Oscar for a film 'Going My Way' and i also owned several business including an orange juice company, a videotape recording company and a 25% stake in the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team.
When i wasn't recordng the Pirates onto video tape while drinking orange juice, i was playing golf and i played so much i had to turn down the role of the Detective Columbo because filming coincided with a golf tournament i was playing in.
Fittingly my last words were 'good game boys' before a massive heart attack while returning from a game of golf but i might be gone but i'm not forgotten, mostly because from mid October onwards you will be hearing me everywhere you go.

Доброго ранку Mr Trump

Donald Trump has said that if he loses the American election to Joe Biden, he may leave the country but as he has pretty much insulted everywhere, his pick of nations would be very limited.
His half Scottish so he could pitch up there but Britain gave him one of the worst receptions on his tour here last year so he shouldn't expect any peace and we still have that huge baby balloon in storage to fly above his house so he could see every time he stepped outside.  
Iran and China would be only to pleased to take him in after he fostered such warm relations with them and i'm sure Kim Jong Un would have a special place set aside for the dotard, somewhere safe where nobody would bother him, or find his body anyway.
The obvious choice would be Putin's Russia, he already has first hand knowledge of the hotels in Russia and he knows that they change the sheets often when he visits, urine stains are so hard to shift unless you put them on a hot wash immediately but i have the perfect place he can go and save himself a few quid at the same time, Chernobyl.
Think about it, it's deserted so nobody would bother him especially the IRS and it would save him a fortune on fake tan as he could develop a natural orange hue.
Get packing chubby.

 

Boris Has A Cunning Plan

In the Police Squad comedy series, then was a man who took himself hostage, held a gun to his own head and threatened to shoot himself unless the police backed off, which the police did with the alone 'He's just crazy enough to do it' and that comes to mind with the UK Governments handling of the Brexit negotiations which are quietly slipping under the radar as the Coronavirus pandemic rolls back into the UK.
Following Boris Johnson's promise that he had a Brexit deal 'oven ready', it translates the oven was not only switched off but was still in Curry's shop window as we learnt long ago that Boris not only lies but then lies about the lies he told as the Brexit negotiations come apart at the seams like the waistband on a pair of Donald Trump's trousers.  
After four years of agonising ineptness and being told at the start that 'The free trade agreement that we will have to do with the European Union should be one of the easiest in human history', we are on the verge of Britain leaving the most successful trading bloc in the world thanks to the negotiating skills of people like Liam Fox.
That would be the Liam Fox who Boris described as a leading light of the Conservative Brexit Negotiating Team but by leading light he obviously meant a single bulb swinging from the ceiling of an empty shed.
So thanks to the brains trust running things, if we press ahead with no deal on the back of a pandemic the UK Population could very well kick off 2021 by fighting over bog roll again, those who are not dead and dying through the lack of medication anyway but i do have a theory which ties things together very neatly.
The usually tight fisted Conservatives have been making suspiciously free with the cheque-book during the pandemic, hundreds of billions of pounds spent on furlough schemes which has almost tanked the UK Economy but now with WTO rules about to be applied and another massive dip in the Treasury coffers, they can hide the no-deal Brexit economic damage coming due to their awful negotiating skills with the Coronavirus economic damage already done.
Very cute but i'm onto you Boris.

$10, $25, $50 Or $100 For Biden

I'm not even sure how i got on the Bernie Sanders email list considering i'm 3,000 miles away in another country and not even eligible to vote in the US Elections, but as he got me a new lightbulb for outside my garage i didn't mind getting his regular emails asking for a $2.70 contribution to his war chest which i ignored.
It appears that the Bernie Team have passed on my details to the Biden team because now i am not only getting emails from Biden's lot but also from Kamala Harris and they are not asking for $2.70, their big red contribution button starts at $10 but they have conveniently also given buttons for $25, $50 and $100.
The NPR website keeps count of how much cash each campaign committee have on hand and it shows that Biden has $180,626,411 against Trumps $121,096,473 (minus $750 for his tax bill this year) but judging by the 2016 election, they still have a bit of spending to do as the Center for Responsive Politics put Hillary Clinton's campaign spend at $768.5m and Donald Trump's at $440m.
The Biden campaign emails currently languishing in my recylce bin states that they need my support to help America get the best leader possible but Jacinda Ardern has just been voted back into office in New Zealand so you can't have her so you will have to make do with one of the septuagenarian's currently creaking their way around the nation.
We have a Boris Johnson going spare and he is a right wing fruitcake who has been next to useless in the Coronavirus pandemic, is vastly overweight, caught Coronavirus due to his own stupidity and seems to have no idea what he is doing so it would just be like having Donald Trump again.
Let us know and we will bubble wrap him and let you have him by Wednesday but meanwhile Mr Biden and Mrs Harris, i think i will keep my $10 (£7.74) in my purse because you wouldn't want to be asking a foreigner from overseas to contribute to your campaign would you.

Special Guest Blogger: Bram Stoker

There is a misconception that my story of the vampire Dracula is based on Vlad the Impaler but sorry to disappoint but i never even knew who he was then and i never came up with the concept of Vampires, they were around a long time before i wrote about the guy in Transylvania who i originally called Count Wampyr but changed to Dracula which is Wallachian for 'the devil'.
Although Dracula may be the most famous vampire story ever written, i didn’t invent the vampire story, they had been around for decades, there was even one called Varney the Vampire.
Drac's spooky castle in Transylvania is based on Slains castle in Scotland where i was staying when i was writing the story, the bit where i described it in the book was based on me looking around the room i was in when i wrote that bit and the handsome and suave image of Dracula that you have probably seen on screen and based on Lord Byron, is not how i originally described him in the book, my version had bushy eyebrows, a cruel mouth under a heavy moustache and sharp white teeth which didn't retract at will.
Very few writers make enough money from their writing to pursue it full time, and my story wasn't much of a hit at the time, it wasn't even the most famous horror story at that time, vastly outsold by other horror stories, so i had to work as a civil servant at Dublin Castle and writing theater reviews on the side which saw me offered a job as manager of the famous actor Henry Irvings London Lyceum theater.
I did show Irving my Dracula story hoping that he would play the role in his theatre but he refused and called it dreadful and the whole Dracula thing really didn't take off until it was made into the unauthorised movie Nosferatu and then went up a notch with the Bela Lugosi movie, a decade after i had died so i departed relatively unknown, my obituary barely made mention of my writing at all, noting briefly that i wrote 'creepy fiction' but remembering me more for being the manager of Henry Irving's bloody theater.

Special Guest Blogger: River Phoenix

Some people think the name River is a stage name but it was real, the rest of my family are called Rain, Summer, and Liberty so obviously my parents were hippies but the surname isn't my original surname, before my family changed their last names to Phoenix, it was Bottom so i was River Bottom so you see why the name changed.
We were born into a South American religious sex cult, The Children of God, and in some regards it was was very similar to fundamentalist Christians with all the praying and chanting so in some ways very similar and in others similar to totally sex crazed lunatics.The Children of God believed that whenever they were having sex, they were having it with Jesus, the young dashing Jesus, and not the risen from the dead after 3 days zombiefied version because that would just be weird.
The thinking was that all the Jesus-sex would lead to more children and the population would increase quickly, and all of these new people would be raised on a diet of Jesus themed nookie and soon enough the entire world would be run by Children of God sex addicts but nobody considered that one of the drawbacks would be that it would screw us all up, like it did me.
Some of those hippy ideals did stick though, i was a strict vegan and bought hundreds of acres of rainforest in Brazil and Costa Rica so that nobody else could touch them, allowing them to exist in peace.
My film career was on the rise that Halloween night when i collapsed and died aged 23 from a speedball of heroin and cocaine outside the Viper Room, i was due to start acting in three film and all the roles went to Leonardo DiCaprio including Titanic, and DiCaprio was one of the last people i saw before going to the Viper Room that night, not saying anything, just leaving that there.
As for my legacy, i will probably be remembered mostly for my role of Chris in Stand By Me and the meme that an anagram for RIVER PHOENIX is VIPER HEROIN X, irony sucks sometimes.

Not Following The Science

One of the many criticisms aimed correctly at Boris Johnson back at the start of the pandemic that he was too slow to lock-down therefore allowing the virus a vital couple of weeks to do its damage before the situation got so bleak that he had no choice.
You would hope that now the much anticipated second wave is with us, he wouldn't make the same mistake again but it seems he learnt nothing from the desperately sad death toll in March because for the past three weeks the Medical and Science experts have been urging him to lock-down again to save lives, but he has ignored them.
Calling it a circuit break, they told him on 21 September that a two-week lock-down could cut Covid deaths by January by up to 49% and buy us some time but the Prime Minister, who i am not aware of holds any medical or scientific certificates, instead announced a new three-tier system of restrictions, which tighten in the areas with the highest rates of infections and hospital admissions.
With new infections now consistently topping 15,000 daily and each day bringing new cities and regions moved up into more severe High levels, the scientists have broken their silence to say that 'there are no good epidemiological reasons to delay the break as this will simply push back any benefits until later, leaving more time for additional cases to accumulate'.
The only reason seems to be that the economy will suffer by a complete two week stay at home order but the longer Boris delays taking that inevitable step, the higher the number will be when he is forced to do it and two weeks won't be long enough to drag the virus back to a manageable level.
Around the World, the nations where the battle against Coronavirus has been most successful, such as China, South Korea and New Zealand went fast and early with the lock-downs, the nations that never, the UK, USA and Brazil all sit amongst the top of the morbid deaths league table showing the only reliable way to keep people safe from the virus is to keep them at home and away from other people. 

Special Guest Blogger: Buffalo Bill Cody

The cowboy is probably the most iconic character in the history of the U.S. Everyone immediately recognises them by their cowboy hats and fancy belt buckles, riding their horses while shooting at each other or, as was more often the case, at Native Americans.
My shows sold the myth of the Wild West to Americans but in reality my shows were about as representative of the real West as Star Trek is about Space travel but it was those shows that created the template for the Western look, including, among other things, the 10-gallon hat which i invented for my performances.
A silly hat, a massive belt buckle and ending each sentence with 'partner' doesn't make you a real cowboy but the look i created survived thanks to people who brought it with them from the East and whose only interaction with the Wild West was my shows they'd seen where where you'd shoot first and then shoot any questions that came later.
The nickname 'Buffalo' came from my time before i began trying to make the wild west romantic, i was charged with providing buffalo meat for the workers employed by Kansas Pacific Railroad and those boys could eat, i shot 4,282 buffalo in a space of 18 months and then i changed jobs and rode for the Pony Express and then i worked as a scout for the US Army under the command of General Custer back in the time when a white man could become a hero for killing Native Americans.
When that ended i began acting in a Wild West Show and then went off to make up my own and took it on tour around the USA and even Europe with many famous figures of the Wild West including Gabriel Dumont, Annie Oakley, Lillian Smith, legendary Sioux leader Sitting Bull, and even well-known frontierswoman Calamity Jane and in a early success for equality, i insisted on equal pay for the men and women who performed in my shows.
We were so successful that when the World's Fair came to Chicago in 1893 and the organisers said they didn't need no stinkin' gun fight show, i went to Chicago anyway and put my show right beside the fair, and it was enormously popular, stealing attention and visitors. Suck on that then.
Despite the fact that i had no real connection to the area, when i died the city of Buffalo, New York used my nickname for their NFL team, the Buffalo Bills, in honour of my contribution to the near extinction of the species, i think the helmets they wore might be a bit tight.

A Joe Biden Foreign Policy

Watching television without my glasses last night i thought how amazing our scientists are to be able to dress up a gorilla in a suit and get them to dance to YMCA but once i put my glasses on i saw it was Donald Trump on another of his national 'lets give all my supporters Coronavirus' campaigns.
There is lots of things we can say about Donald Trump but he is one of only a handful of American Presidents who has not taken his nation to war during his time in the White House.
Now with America waking up to just how much of a disaster he has been, the smart money seems to be on Joe Biden sending Trump and his equally ridiculous family out of the White House but nobody seems to know much about what a Biden Presidency will mean for the rest of the World.
What he does inside America borders we don't care about although it would be a fair assumption that it will be better than what has been going on there for the last four years but what about his foreign policy?
The Joe Biden website states he would make the use of force a last resort and not the first which is a good start and will end the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East including withdrawing American support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
He also says he will make up with NATO, re-sign the Iran nuclear deal, negotiate new arms control arrangements with Russia and rejoin the Paris Climate Accord on day one.
I could see no mention of ending one of the greatest long running sores which is Palestine but he does say he will sustain an ironclad commitment to Israel’s security which means the genocide of the Palestinians will continue with American approval which is the only minus point i can see in his foreign policy but it seems that all wannabe Presidents have to agree to funding the Israeli atrocities to keep the whack-a-doodle faithful onside.
All in all, a Biden Presidency will go some way to redo much of what Trump has undone but the largest surprise is that their are a large enough number of voters without the required amount of working braincells in America to even make it a contest.

Special Guest Blogger: Charlemange

To some, i was Charles the Bastard, to some Charles the Great while to others i was Charles the Cruel but to Pope Leo III i was the bloke with the foreskin. Not mine, i was Catholic and not Jewish and so i had mine safely tucked away in my tunic where it should be but Jesus's, his was in my bag and i handed it to the Pope as a thank you for making me the Emperor of the Romans.
There were plenty of foreskins around at the time, all claiming to have come from the Holy dong but i told Leo mine was the authentic one as it had been delivered to me by an angel and he went 'okay then' and put it in a display case in the Vatican.
The bastard bit was due to my parents not being married when i was born but as my dad was king, it was not such an issue but when my dad died it was a toss up between me and my brother which of us would succeed him and i was devastated when i found out he had died from a nosebleed especially as i was nowhere near him at the time and i could probably find a witnesses to prove that but it conveniently left me in sole possession of the Frankish kingdom and it changed my life forever.
The great was because i was one of the most influential leaders in western history. As Holy Roman Emperor, i united diverse peoples across
the European continent, instituted a culture of learning and scientific advancement which would rival the Renaissance, despite not being able to read or write myself, i introduced a more legible writing system using lower case letters and spaces between words and zealously enforced Christianity throughout Europe and as i had conquered most of Europe, that bit was easy.
The cruel is mostly from all the wars and the 5,000 Saxons i relieved of their heads for refusing to convert to Christianity.
If i had one vice it was my love of roast meat and my doctors would plead with me to restrict my intake but i said if it’s all the same to them, i’d rather carry on eating meat and just let bits of my body fall off at random and when i died at the ripe old age of 72, they buried me in a casket made of gold and silver and as far as i am aware, nobody removed my foreskin to hand out as a present.

Special Guest Blogger: Fred Astaire

There are some things that everyone agrees are awful, like paper cuts, or cancer, or paper cuts from the hospital bills you receive after getting cancer treatment but not everything in life is that certain and when i began my dancing career, it was my sister, Adele, who was the one set for big things and i was just copying her.
When she gave it all up to marry Lord Cavendish and move to a Ireland to live in a castle, i went solo and tried out for a few parts and i was told i couldn't sing, i couldn't act but i could dance a bit so the studios hit upon a strategy, get proper actors like Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers to do the proper talking and acting bits and get me to just dance everything.
I based my trademark onscreen look of top hat (to hide my bald spot), tails, and a white tie on Edward VIII of Britain and off i went to make films.
The early Hollywood dance films had a very different look than how dance is presented today, due to my dancing everything to make up for a lack of other required movie skills, dancing become part of the plot and the producers came up with a new way of filming dance sequences, which was to fit both dancers in the frame.
Ginger Rogers and i starred together in 10 films and became one of Hollywood’s most adored on-screen couples but funnily enough, i never wanted to work with her to start with but there was never any romance between us and i left our partnership to explore new film opportunities, forgetting that acting and i went together like whiskey and driving so actually retired at one point, then came back and danced some more and then after 30 musical films in 25 years, retired again saying i was fed up with dancing in movies.
So i began dancing on Television instead and even got a few straight acting jobs which didn't involve me doing soft shoe shuffle or a paso doble.
I died of pneumonia at the age of 88 and my body was buried at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California and one of my last requests was that there should never be a film made about my life, because if it was my best acting bits, it could be shown in the adverts between films with proper actors in.

Special Guest Blogger: Clyde Barrow

Bonnie and i were pretty notorious outlaws in our days and our lives may have been short, but we crammed a lot into them.
Bonnie was an honor studnet and wanted to be an actress but i persuaded her that she could either find fame and fortune with lots of sweat and hard work or she could just join me in sticking a gun in people's faces and then dying in a hail of bullets and she was up for that, so that's what we did.
Being only 5ft 4", many people understimated me but Mr 20-gauge shotgun soon focused minds but it wasn't easy being so short, i had to put up with the 'hey, what's the weather like down there' comments so i might have had an attitude but you would too if you couldn't reach the frigging cheesy-wotsits at the grocery store.
I got into crime early and was on the run from Prison for stealing a truckload of turkeys when we met but we clicked straight away and Bonnie was a natural with a gun, most girls are stupid when it comes to firearms but she knew that if a gun is loaded, you should always point it away from you.
At a bank clerk or a store owner which were our favourite targets but it meant we had to keep moving as the police were always just behind us and we were always just escaping their clutches.
We almost got caught a few times, one time we had to duck out a window of a motel and left behind all our stuff including my guitar so i telephoned my mum to ask her to ask the police if i could get it back. I’m sure you can guess that the answer was two words, the second one being 'off'.
Our end came after we stopped off at a friends farm to lie low after killing a store holder but that friends father turned to the police to set up an ambush and while we were driving along we saw the elderly friend's father apparently broken down at the side of the road. We stopped to help him and the hiding police put 150 bullets into the car with many going in, and then back out again, of Bonnie and me.
We always said that we wanted to be buried together, but we were buried separately because Bonnie’s mother didn’t approve of me and to be fair she had a point, if she had not met me she probably wouldn't have ended up with more holes than a colander salesman.

Clinton 2016 Trump Predictions

You didn't need to be a psychic to predict in 2016 that Donald Trump would be an awful President and he hasn't disapointed and it is widely expected that he will be sent skidding buttocks first out of the White House in November but we will never know if Hillary Clinton had won last time, how things would have played out but she did make some predictions of what was coming down the line from the first Orange President.  

She said Trump didn’t pay any income tax and she was only $750 out with reports showing he paid no tax at all in 11 out of the last 18 years.
She said the US’s reputation would plummet and a recent Pew Research Centre poll shows the reputation of the country dropped from 64% in 2016 to to 49% Worldwide now. Ouch, that gotta hurt.
She said Mexico won’t pay for Trump’s wall and so far the amount of Peso's sent to the US Treasury for the 260 miles of wall that has been built is nil. It has cost the American taxpayers £11bn though.
She said racial tensions will rise and no argument there but a survey by Pew Research Centre said 73% Black people, 69% Hispanics and 65% of Asian's agree.
She said LGBT rights would be stripped and opposition to the Equality Act, banning transgender service members from the military and making it harder for LGBT people seeking asylum in the US gives this one a tick.
She said he would hand tax cuts to billionaires and according to University of California at Berkeley, Donald Trump's $1.5tr tax cuts helped billionaires pay a lower rate than the working class for the first time in history.

What do you know, she was right afterall, who would have thought it??

It's Her Party And She'll Stay If She Wants To

Some World leaders consider Democracy to be so good that they are willing to send other peoples husbands, wives and children into war and bomb the population of far flung places to try and install it but as the current crop of Western Democratically elected leaders are showing, sometimes you get a couple of real duffers in charge.
That's the main problem with Democracy, the whole process is only 1 day every 4-5 years and the elected personnel can do what he or she wants without censor until the wheel slowly grinds back around again and we get the chance to vote him or her out.
What would improve Democracy is a way to remove the elected officials if they turn out to be a dud or found breaking the rules during a global pandemic which brings us neatly to SNP Margaret Ferrier who travelled on a train from London to Scotland whilst aware she was contagious with COVID-19 but is insisting that she will not resign.
She has held up her now sanitised hands to travelling to London from Glasgow after taking a Coronavirus test last month despite showing symptoms for Coronavirus and once she received confirmation of a positive result, took the train back to her Scottish constituency therefore breaking the Coronavirus rules of two countries, Scotland and England.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has told Margaret Ferrier that she should resign as an MP and has removed the whip which effectively throws her out of the SNP but with no attachment to a political party, it allows her to continue as an Independent MP until the next election and nothing anybody can do to stop her.
As Churchill nodded towards, Democracy is deeply imperfect but it is what we have and the reason why Margaret Ferrier will still be looking at her £6827 plus expenses MP's payslip this month and not her P45.

Special Guest Blogger: Lou Reed

I was hard to nail down, either musically, artistically or ideologically and my sexuality was always a bit ambiguous also but one thing i definitely was, was high.
I used to be concerned and nervous about the future, sometimes i'd get panic attacks before an important event and i found it hard to focus on anything but sometimes you need a little help navigating life's trouble spots and that's when I discovered Heroin and all my troubles were forgotten.
True Heroin also makes you forget your name, or where to properly go to the bathroom but it was the 60's, nobody went to the bathroom in the right place then anyway.
It's difficult to sum up my life, partly due to all the brain cells i damaged with drugs but my greatest achievement was being a founding member of the Velvet Underground, a band managed by Andy Warhol which is as mad as it sounds.
My drug use was never in question due to half of my songs being about heroin but my sexuality always was due to the other half of my songs being about transvestites.
I did start out planning to be a journalist, even attending University to study it but while there i met John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Angus MacLise and we got noticed by Warhol and invited to become the house band at the Factory and after adding singer Nico, off we went to become one of the coolest and most influential bands of our time.
I did go solo after a while and had a massive hit with 'Perfect Day' which was a strange choice for a BBC Children's Charity single because although it wasn't about transvestites, it was about doing a 24 hour long heroin bender.
Nobody really expects rock musicians to be nice people and after i died of liver disease it came out that i was a tad violent, misogynist and racist and the guy who was writing my biography asked one of my friends to describe me and he said that i was 'the worst person who ever lived' and a 'stupid, disgusting, awful human being' but i’ll tell ya, i lived that life of a rock n roll star and so sometimes i woke up in weird places, beat on my women and made fun of black performers but i always looked brilliantly moody while doing it and that's all that matters.

Special Guest Blogger: Babe Ruth

Baseball was never a difficult game, anyone can hit a home run and the British have the same game only they call it rounders and it's played by girl scouts. In baseball you stand around a field waiting for some action earning a fortune but i was known as a baseball legend, both on and off the field and it was fun as long as your idea of fun is having 50,000 low IQ morons in Washington, or Pittsburgh or Detroit or wherever, screaming and howling they want you dead just because you're playing for the Yankees.
I may be best known as a batter but i began as a pitcher, my break came when i was 14 and standing at the side of the Orioles field at St. Mary’s and making snidey jokes at the other kids’ pitching and the coach shouted over come and have a go if i thought i could better and yeah, turns out i definitely could and they signed me and as i was a kid, they nicknamed me 'babe' and the name stuck.
I made it to the major leagues, joining the Boston Red Sox as a pitcher but i fancied myself as a batter but the Sox guys were dicks, they tried to put me in my place by sawing all of my bats in half so when i joined the Sox, i was happy to see the back of them and i also left them with a curse, the infamous 'Curse of the Bambino'. Before trading me, Boston won five of 16 World Series and after, they wouldn’t win another for nearly a century.
Before me, the Yankees had won exactly zero American League championships. Once they had me? Seven pennants, baby—not to mention four World Series, not blowing my own trumpet but, y'know, just saying.
I'm best known for my tenure with the New York Yankees and those iconic Yank pinstripes which made me look slimmer because at the height of my stardom, i was known for outrageous carousing and partying but i still managed to rack up a staggering number of records many for batting but also for pitching but it all caught up with me and the Yankees traded me to the Boston Braves but i could barely between run the bases, it got so bad that my fellow pitchers refused to play if i was on the field.
I did have the advantage of not having to play against black people, the league i played in at the time excluded an entire segment of the population from competing but after baseball i embarked on a tour on the Vaudeville circuit and you would think people would said Wow, who could have known that the Great Bambino was as talented a showman as he was an athlete but no they didn't because i wasn't, my shows were basically me talking about baseball for an hour and then signing some autographs.
I died of cancer aged 53 but i didn't do too bad for a guy who was good at hitting a ball with a stick.

Still Not The Time For Universal Basic Income

When the unemployment queues grew substantially as employers laid off workers due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the UK Government stepped in to pay 80% of workers wages in companies across the nation, effectively nationalising massive swathes of the private sector by paying most of the wages of workers instead of their employers in order to prevent the economy from imploding.
Sensing the time is ripe, advocators of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) are now pushing for the Government to go the full hog and introduce it to the UK and the idea seems to be appealing to the left who see it as a way to cut poverty and inequality but this is one of those times where i just can't agree with them.
I understand the argument that it would eradicate poverty and free people to do what they want but struggle to get my head around how this could possibly work and how we can afford to give each citizen a monthly payment of £520 as is being suggested.
My query was answered by a man with some calculations on a back of a fag packet who explained that by folding in all the current elements of the welfare state and the tax relief system, each person in the UK could receive £520 per month and the UK economy would not be adversely affected.
As it would be impossible to live on £6240 per year, most people would still need to work although they could possibly reduce their hours which would create more employment opportunities which is fine if you can work, some people can't and as things stand they get extra financial support but £6240 UBI is all the welfare benefits they will get.
I like the idea in principle but in order to work and to not have to worry about making ends meet if you can't work, the figure for each person will need to be much higher and no Government Finances could sustain that so until the man with the fag packet comes back to me with a better solution to pay for it, i'm out.