Special Guest Blogger: Friedrich Nietzsche

With the exceptions of Aristotle and Socrates, i am probably the most-recognized name in philosophy a man who's insights were as awesome as my moustache implied but my prediction that some kind of master race would soon drag itself out of the slime and rule the world did provide the inspiration for Mussolini and Hitler so on some ways a big tick, in some other ways not so much.
Hitler, who might otherwise have faded out of history as just another failed art student with funny facial hair, picked up a copy of my book and was inspired by my talk of the rightful owners of the world being 'supermen' and anyone with a passing interest in modern history knows exactly where that line of thinking went.
If i wasn't too busy being dead by then, i would probably have had a few words with Hitler about the Fuehrer's liberal interpretation of my work, especially as i hated anti-Semites and anyone who hated on someone because of their religious beliefs.
My most quoted famous quote is 'God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him' comes from my seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is not the cheeriest thing you would ever read but many people have tried to explain what i meant by it depending on whether they are religious or not but it really isn't difficult.
I wasn't saying that God literally choked to death on a peanut, basically i said believing in a supernatural realm and a belief in concepts like good and evil was holding man back and without a God to worry about, there could be positive new possibilities for humans to fully develop. The Christian God would no longer stand in our way and we will become more creative and understanding of our World.
I lived a full life and learnt some valuable lessons including that some human beings are nice, some nasty, some clever, some stupid but if there is a God and he can see the madness that is going on in his name and has for the past thousand years, God would definitely start favouring the ones who don't believe in him.

Iran Eyeing January 20

Ever since he recklessly pulled out of the Iran deal, the American President has been desperately prodding Iran to try and get a reaction, possibly to justify military action but definitely to ruin any chances of the next President picking up the Iran deal again.    
There has been a few times such as the assassination of Qasem Soleimani when you just hoped the leaders in Tehran would not raise to the bait of the Orange Dotard and so far they haven't, hopefully in the knowledge that the cretin will be gone in January and a proper grown up will take charge who has said that he will rejoin with the EU, Russia and China in the Iran deal.
After news that Trump was talked out of attacking Iran by whoever was using the Trump Administration's brain-cell that day we now have the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh by Israel although Israel has denied it but everyone knows it was them, including Iran who are swearing revenge.
Israel has long been the problem in the Middle East, their 70 year genocide against the Palestinians is just one in along list of human rights abuses and they have always done it with the approval of America who fund their abuse and found an idiot in Donald Trump who did his level best to appease the Israeli's in a bid to shore up the ridiculous religious right in his own country.  
If Iran is building a nuclear capability, and there is no proof that they are, it is copying what Israel did back in 60's when they lied that the building in Dimona was a textile factory and refused IAEA inspections, the same guys currently all over the Iranian facilities.  
The problem is that America may be getting a proper, grown up leader in January but Israel will not be which means that Iran, in face of such provocation which may well increase in the fag end of Trumps time in office, will be tested again but we can only hope they keep in mind they only need to get to January 20th then it will be very much another game altogether.

Special Guest Blogger: Greta Garbo

The movie business is just like any other line of work, only the co-workers are better looking, the paychecks are bigger and you can't go outside without having adoring fans throwing themselves at you. But other than that, it's almost exactly the same. The main difference is that when office workers have a meltdown, they might sit in the bathroom stall for an hour or steal a hole-punch, but when Hollywood people do it, we'll pull out all the stops which is exactly what i did.
I had that Scandinavian temperament of not really caring a crap about very much so when i was asked to go to America to make movies i was like, 'ok, whatever' and when i was named by Guinness Book of World Records as 'the most beautiful woman who ever lived' i was all 'yeah, that's nice' and when my film company set up a lunch with Prince Wilhelm of Sweden i just said 'No Thanks, i’m not hungry'.
Every actress has it at some point in their career made a completely ridiculous movie and mine was The Two-Faced Woman, about a woman who pretended to be her own rumba-dancing twin sister to seduce her husband. I was at the top of my fame when it came out and the media gave it such a rubbishing, calling it 'my grave' so i refused to make another movie for the next 49 years, until i went to my actual grave.
I hated the spotlight and the press intrusion, i was deliberately prickly and off-hand with them, refusing to give proper answers. In my very first ever interview after i landed in Hollywood, i set the scene by answering 'I was born. I had a mother and father. I went to school' and then left when they asked me about my life.
I never signed autographs, answered fan mail, or gave interviews, refused to attend film premieres or awards ceremonies and famously said 'I want to be alone' but they still kept offering me film roles and sending invites to the Oscars, obviously leave me alone has a different meaning in America.
I only made 24 Hollywood films and none of them were classics but i made my money and then got out of the business, if only someone had pointed out to Nicholas Cage or Chuck Norris that 'doing a Garbo' was always an option.

Living With Virus's

With a Covid-19 vaccine on the horizon, there is much talk of ending the pandemic which it certainly will but unfortunately it wont mean the end of Covid-19 as the sad fact is that most of the infections faced by our ancestors are still with us today, they are just controlled.
The first case of the Bubonic plague was recorded in 541 AD and had killed hundreds of millions of people over the past 1,500 years and last year 584 people died from the Plague but it can be treated with antibiotics.
The last major Cholera pandemic was 1817 and the bacteria responsible found in contaminated food or drinking water has been responsible for 40 million deaths overall and last year claimed 95,000 lives despite being treatable with a vaccine.
Influenza, or flu, is a seasonal threat but the largest pandemic was in 1918 and known as the Spanish flu,
killing between 50-100 million people although it faded away to become a more benign version that still circulates every year but the more benign version still accounts for 650,000 deaths annually.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV/Aids) transmitted through bodily fluids has claimed more than 32 million lives across the globe so far since it was first diagnosed in 1981 and last year the World Health Organisation said an estimated 690,000 people died from Aids and there is still no cure.
The current Coronavirius,which is a virus that has made the leap to humans from animals, is the third of it's type to hit humans, SARS in 2002 killed 800 and MERS in 2003 claimed 912 lives and although the virus is still active, no deaths were recorded last year and the World Health Organisation puts the risk as low.
More than a million have died with the Covid-19 virus so far although with the hunt for a vaccine seeming to be in the end stages, hopefully it wont be too long before a degree of normality returns but in all out history we have one once been able to definitively end a pandemic and wipe it out completely.
Smallpox was first recorded in 1520 and killed over 350 million people before a vaccine was developed in 1769 and the disease was completely erased although it took nearly two centuries to do so.

That Trump Desk Explained

People will certainly miss Donald Trump when he vacates the premises in January, not because he has been any good but because he is so embarrassingly bad at everything.
Hopefully the comically tiny desk thing won't be the last cringe-worthy moment the orange cretin treats us to before he leaves office to appear in a court dock faced with sex offences and tax fraud but it was a funny moment, it looked like the only table available was an old Toys R US 'Big Boys Desk' or maybe the person responsible had a sense of humour and thought it would be humorous to put the third fattest President ever squeezed a child's desk.
There could be many reasons but i think i know why he chose it, Trump has long been mocked for supposedly having teeny-tiny penis hands and the desk made them look big by comparison.

A Flag Burning Reminder

Things have been a bit quiet on the old flag burning front lately but it made a comeback over the last few days with Israeli and American flags being burnt up in front of TV cameras after the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
The Iranians obviously have not taken the time since the last public bonfire of Old Glory to perfect the flag burning stunt because there were two on TV today and as they were made of the nylon type, they burned so quick that they didn't even get to finish the first chant of 'Death To Israel and America' before it had burnt up which was completely pants.
I did ask a textile expert a while a while back and even gave the Iranian's pointers on what material to make the flag from so they didn't embarass themselves in front of the World's media but it was obviously ignored in the rush to put a match to something and the advice was to avoid the Spandex, Polyester and Nylon as they may be cheap but tend to melt very quickly without a flame and can be quite disappointing
visually.
What you want is a good flame that burns for at least a couple of verses of who you want the death to come to so s flag made of Wool, Cotton and Hemp flags would ignite very easy but also tend to go out and you don't really want to be fiddling around with a lighter in the middle of a baying crowd.
They may be a bit more expensive but Silk and a Rayon mix of half natural and half synthetic is what you want, they ignite quickly but importantly burn slower with a steady flame so giving you adequate opportunity to wave it around while reciting insulting things about Donald Trump's small hands or Netanyahu's cross dressing before dropping it to the floor and grinding it into the dirt.
It is worth the extra bit of detail to get a satisfying result and if you can write your insults in English so the English reading World can see what you have the hump about it would be appreciated, ترامب لديه القليل من الحكمة ونتنياهو يمارس الجنس مع الماعز means very little to us.

Special Guest Blogger: HP Lovecraft

One of the reasons i became one of the greatest horror writers ever is that i feared everything, death, illness, Irish immigrants and black people were the things which kept me awake at night which was not a good thing because all my best ideas came to me in my sleep.
I learned to read at the age of two and was writing poetry by the age of six but my childhood was traumatic to say the least, before i was out of short pants my parents went stark, raving bonkers from syphilis and were both committed to a psychiatric hospital, my grandmother died and i was raised by my aunts and grandfather who's idea of making me less scared of the dark was to make the house as dark as possible most of the time to force me to face my fears.
What it did do was give me enough crushing trauma and even more vivid nightmares where i was chased by faceless, black entities would cast me into space which traumatised me silly and scared me so much i grew into a traumatised adult who would sleep late into the days, hate anyone a different colour or accent to me and only leave the house after sunset which did give me a lot of time to read and write poetry and send long, angry letters to magazine editors who published stories i didn't like which impressed editors as white supremacists can usually barely be bothered to string a few racial slurs together.
It was one of these well written letters that caught the eye of Editor of the Argosy magazine who sent me a 'you have a go at writing stories if you think you can do better sunshine' letter and i did, writing down the things in the style of Edgar Allen Poe that i had seen in my nightmares when me sadistic grandfather was making me fall over the furniture in the dark and so began my career of creating stories of spiritual deities hostile towards humans including my most famous creations, the Necronomicon and everyone's favorite octopus-headed cosmic entity, the Cthulhu.
Despite being socially backward, i met and married Sonia Greene, as a 34 year old virgin i even purchased several books on sex before the wedding night.
The marriage went as well as you expected and we split up but i did get a job working as Harry Houdini's ghost writer but my writing was not a money spinner and i spent my life struggling to make ends meet and survived on canned food that had already expired and led to my own expiration due to cancer made worse by malnutrition.
My work was largely unrecognized while i was alive but i did find some fame with my book about cats and dogs which was thinly veiled racism against Jews, black people, Asians, Irish and Italians with whites being the superior cats and the rest being inferior dogs who were as different to human beings as farm animals and even pterodactyls.
Although it has been misunderstood by many who say it wasn't racist and it was all part of my universe where there were weird tentacle faced gods from beyond space and time causing madness and mass suicides, oh it really was, the bit were i say i had no less hatred for Jews, Blacks, Asians, Italians and the Irish than i would have if they were human beings was quite unequivocal i thought.

Special Guest Blogger: Victor Hugo

I was one of the most famous French writers of all time, having gifted the world with not just one, but two classics of literature, Les Miserable's and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but i have never really understood why the Les Miserable's novel was chosen to be turned into a musical in the first place, it isn't as if when i walked around the barricades during the June Rebellion, dodging gunfire and thought if i make this into a novel this bit would be ideal for someone to put to music.
Like many writers, i had to deal with procrastination and writer’s block. However, my solution was to strip naked, give my clothes to my servants, and tell them to lock me in a room. I would have to write my pages for the day before i was to be given my clothes back or let outside of the room.
It sort of worked but i did waffle on a bit in my books, it's one reason why The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserable's were so long and Les Miserable's took decades to wrote, i first began writing it in the 1830s, but the book wasn’t published until 1862.
The Hunchback took was written mostly to draw attention to the crumbling Notre-Dame building which it did and people said, 'Hey we should rebuild this place' but even that book took years to write and it took threats from my publisher to finish it. That got turned into an opera so i don't know what it is about my stories that make people want to sing them.
One of the reasons i was so distracted all the time was due to the Prussians who kept threatening us, one time they besieged the city of Paris and we had to resort to eating the animals from Paris’ zoo. No idea what animal i ate but it tasted like chicken which is strange because there was no chickens there.
There was a lot of sorrow in my life, i outlived four of my five children and the only child who outlived me was committed to a mental asylum and i decided there can be no God or heaven when there is so much despair in the world so when i was dying from pneumonia i refused to allow either a priest or even a crucifix at my last rites and demanded a pauper’s funeral rather than get any kind of religious blessing but they gave me an elaborate state funeral with my body laid under the Arc de Triomphe which was attended by more than two million people.
In a nice touch, in honour of the Prostitute Fantine in Les Miserable's, brothel workers wore black and the brothels themselves closed for the day.

Ho Ho Ho

Usually by now i have seen whatever CD i have in my car stereo removed and replaced by something a bit more festive. Last year it was the Bowling For Soup 'Merry Flippin' Christmas' effort i was driving around to, a brilliant guitar heavy version of all the Christmas standards but this year i have got Sia's 'Everyday Is Christmas' CD which after hearing 'Ho Ho Ho' and 'Snowman' on the radio a few times.
I'm sure that Sia will find herself rotated with BFS, Twisted Sister and the Punk Goes Christmas Album's as we head into the last page of the Calendar and the 25th day looms large at us although Christmas is looking to be a bit different this year.
The UK Government have decided that for five days over Christmas, the Coronavirus will be so full of Festive Cheer that it will give us a break and we can go about our business without potentially infecting each other but unless Santa leaves you a respirator and a hospital bed under the tree this year, you may want to do the sensible thing and ignore the Government advice when it comes to Coronavirus, good advice any time of the year judging by their less than sterling efforts so far.
This blog is taking on a very festive air in December and the Special Guest Bloggers include not only some of the main players in the Nativity but we have rounded up the men who invented Christmas Cards and Christmas Crackers, a handful of Saints, some Deities, Mrs Claus and even some of Santa's Elves have penned some posts and we even managed to track down the man Scrooge is based on.       

Foreign Aid Reduction Travesty

The Government announces on Tuesday that they are making the largest defence budget increase for 30 years, £17 billion, to take the UK's spending on defence to 2.2% of GDP which amounts to a spending of £50 billion annually, NATO members are asked to spend 2% of their GDP on defence.
The Government announces on Wednesday that due to financial constraints, they are cutting the Foreign Aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% which amounts to £10 billion to fight poverty, tackle climate change and improve global health.
That our Government is reducing the amount we pay to save lives around the world while increasing the amount on bombs, missiles and bullets to take lives, and to take it away from the people who have absolutely nothing to pay for it, is beyond obscene.
It was only a few weeks ago that Boris Johnson balked at £170m for free school meals in the Christmas holidays for English children, stating that the country just couldn't afford it with a £280 billion Coronavirus Bill to be settled.
They are also freezing pubic sector pay and quibbling about the extra £20 per week extra for Universal Credit which all plays well with the right wing voters and their rotten 'me first' attitude who have long sought, if not the abolition then at least a drastic reduction, in the amount Britain pays in Foreign Aid.  
Over 180 aid groups, two former prime ministers, Tony Blair and David Cameron, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury and even the Government's aid watchdog, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, who have spoken out against the cut and some Conservative MP's are refusing to vote for it in the Commons, although with a large Government majority, there may not be enough of them to stop it passing.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has forecast that the economy will have contracted by more than 11% this year, the largest drop in 300 years and unemployment will surge by 2.6 million people by the middle of next year so i understand that we need to be frugal and the folly of Brexit is yet to land, but we are the 5th richest nation, kicking poor nations when they are being devastated by a pandemic and then boasting about it should make us all ashamed, even more if you support this travesty.

Special Guest Blogger: George Harrison

I was in one of the biggest bands the World had ever seen but when The Beatles broke up i was only 27 and my ambitions stretched slightly further than being known as one of a beat-combo from Liverpool, i wanted to be remembered when i'm dead and have books written about me and songs sung about me and decades after i die, be asked by a blogger to sum up my life in 500 words for a blog.
I was always known as the quiet one of The Beatles and after we split up Macca and Lennon went on to successful solo careers, Ringo not so much, but i went on to not only make one of the most famous films ever, but get together a super group.  
I was learning to be an electrician when i met Paul at college and he asked me to try out for a skiffle band he was getting together and then the 60s happened and we went from sharp suits to spaced out Hippies (my idea, i loved all things Indian) and then we broke up and i'm suddenly at a party with John Bonham and i smash a piece of cake on his head and he took it as well as you expect John would, he threw me into a swimming pool.
Paul and John's solo careers are probably the best remembered out of the four of us Ringo's if you are 5 and into trains but me and Ringo had a rocky relationship after the break up and it was due to our wives, or rather my wife not understanding his wife and me having an affair and then me deciding that what our relationship needed was for me to declare to him my love for his wife over dinner one night which didn't go as well as i expected.
Despite Ringo and my wife desperately looking for a handy place to bury me, i formed a production company and was approached by the Monty Python team who had a mad idea for a film based on a man named Brian who is mistaken for Jesus but nobody would touch it as it was considered too blasphemous for most producers, but i gave them the money to make it.
Not content with one of the biggest bands and one of the best known films ever, i called around some of the biggest names in my little black book and got together Jeff Lynne, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and me and called us the Traveling Wilburys.
Such was my fascination with the whole Indian thing, that when i died my body was cremated just hours after my death and my ashes taken to India and were scattered into the Ganges River.
All told, not bad for the quiet one.

Special Guest Blogger: Frederic Chopin

When i was in town the shout of lock up your daughters went out, i was a monster of Romantic era flute and piano music excess, my audience got a night of piano conerto's like 'Ballade No. 1 in G minor' and the 'Impromptu No. 1 in A? major' that had them shoving their fists in the air, crazy nights.
I was holding public piano concerts at aged seven, wrote a sixteenth-note polska in A-flat major at 11 and was performing recitals for Tsar Alexander I when the Russian monarch visited Poland. The Tsar was so impressed with my playing that he presented me with a diamond ring as a reward.
Aged 20 i embarked on a trip to Western Europe but two months into the trip, military strife in Poland resulted in thousands of my native Poles leaving the country and many Poles settled in France where i also ended up which was nice as at that point my French language skills were pretty much Hello, Goodbye and you and your sister in my hotel room in 15 minutes and bring the garlic butter.  
Being a 19th Century rock god, i got my fair share of women, classical groupies are the best and one in-particular was French author Aurore Dupin, better known by her pen name George Sand but that didn't get off to the best of starts, she smoked cigars, wore men's clothing and could belch louder and longer than me and i asked her if she was really a woman when we first met.
She was and we were the Cleopatra and Mark Antony of our day, only with less poisonous snakes but that was when my health problems started and i never really recovered and Sand said she already had two children to look after and didn't need a third so left me and i moved to England, gave a concert for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and then promptly died aged 39 from tuberculosis.
My last request was on my death, my heart was to be cut out and then buried a thousand miles away from the rest of my rotting body because nobody wants to ship a whole dead guy all the way from France to Poland.
My name is mentioned along with with the greats such as Beethoven and Bach, but as good as they were even they couldn't hold a candle to me when it came to bashing out a bangin' harpsichord solo.

Special Guest Blogger: Princess Margaret

It isn't easy being the sibling of someone famous but even worse if your sibling is the Queen of England and you are the spare heir but there wasn't many dull moments in my life.
Our mother reasoned that as we were going to be royals, education was not a top priority for either of us and to be fair, who needs to know what a hypotenuse triangle is or how to spell maeouirve, maneoruce, manue anything when you get a fortune paid to you by the Government. Kerching!!
At the time of my birth, i was fourth in line to the throne but a death and an abdication by King Edward for an American trollop saw me second in line to the British crown and i was asked to tone it down a tad to stop any embarrassment so i guess trying to marry Captain Peter Townsend, newly divorced and 16 years older than me didn't count as trying to tone it down and the Church of England, who my sis was now head of, said i would have to abdicate as the spare and as the British taxpayer was paying for my booze and fags, i sent him a dear John letter and married within the Royal gene-pool to photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones instead who got given the title the Earl of Snowdon and stayed a faithful wife, well for a year or two anyway but some of my affairs where true and some just rumours.
I am sure i would have remembered the likes of Mick Jagger, Peter Sellers, Keith Miller and Warren Beatty if i was boinking them but i definitely remember having an affair with a wine producer named Anthony Barton and there was some interesting use of the Palace furniture with Robin Douglas-Home, the nephew of Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home and Roddy Llewellyn, a man 17 years my junior who was certainly a talented and flexible young thing but not as flexible as gangster, John Bindon who impressed me one night with his party trick and girls, a bit of advice, if a man can balance a pint of beer on his thingie, don't waste time clearing up the mess with a beer mat afterwards.
Not unsurprisingly, i became the first senior royal family member to get a divorce since 1901 but smoking 60 cigarettes a day and drinking enough alcohol daily to drown a household pet led to pneumonia, the removal of cancerous skin lesion, part of one of my lungs being removed and a stroke but they weren't enough to make me give up the Benson & Hedges and just a few short weeks after my mother died aged 101, at 71 i joined her.

Special Guest Blogger: Frank Sinatra

The America of my youth was a different time. Civil Rights were just a quaint idea, Communists were gearing up to steal everyone's precious bodily fluids and my parents sold gin that they had made in the bath in their bar.
Bring Italian immigrants, the Italian Mafia would hang around and when i told them i wanted to be a singer, they got me gigs in their clubs which got me on the radio and a record deal with Capitol and gigs with bandleader Tommy Dorsey but all the women who would become your future grandma's swooning and presenting their bodily parts to me made me realise that i could go alone but Dorsey was reluctant to let me go but a little visit from my friends from the bar persuaded him to think again and my career really took off but i was dogged by rumours of being part of the mob.
Posing for pictures with prominent members of the Chicago mafia in photographs and singing at the weddings of mob family members and giving famous gangster Sam Giancana a sapphire friendship ring kind of weakened my argument that i didn't know them but i didn't care, i was famous and was dating women like Judy Garland and Ava Gardner.
The limelight went away in the 50's and i got depressed and was found with my head in the gas oven one evening by my manager who persuaded me life was still worth living.
I became a campaigner for John F Kennedy but we fell out when i invited him to stay with me during a visit but he blew me off to go stay with Bing Crosby instead, that's Bing freakin' Crosby.  
Something i hated in America was the public consensus that black people should absolutely have civil rights just so long as they didn't have as many as white people, i played benefit concerts for Martin Luther King Jr. and invited Nat King Cole to join me at a whites-only nightclub and when the manager said he couldn't stay i said me and my friends would personally knock him into the middle of next week if he tried, strangely he never.
When former boxer Joe Louis was broke and disgraced, i hosted a fundraiser to get his finances back in order, covering the medical costs for a much-needed heart surgery and later paying for his funeral services.
I regained my fame in the mid-50s, me and my fellow rat packers and i moved into casino ownership but my connections with the mob saw my license taken away soon afterwards.
One of my most iconic songs was my 1977 rendition of a song about New York, a city that never sleeps, never sleeps without banging all the rats out of the mattress first because 1970's New York was a mess but the public loved the song, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere but watch out for the rats, because they'll definitely eat your head while you sleep.
It was nice to hear that all the A-listers turned up for my funeral and my body was buried with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a pack of Camel cigarettes, a Zippo lighter and a dog biscuit, that would be Liza Minelli on the valium again.

Special Guest Blogger: Diogenes

We ancient Greeks loved a bit of philosophy and i took it to the extreme, giving up my possessions and clothing and went to live in a barrel.
I wasn't very sociable but i would sometimes invite people back to my barrel and give them the tour which went along the line of this is the dining room, and the living room and the bedroom, oh, and the toilet, pass me that paper will you, got to poop.
My philosophy was that enlightenment could only be attained when one was free of social constructs such as not  wandering around Greece urinating on people, defecating in the theater or masturbating in public, all of which i did to prove that no social construct was going to stop me doing what i wanted. My party invites did dry up around the same time though and nobody wanted to shake my hand either but i had a fan in Alexander The Great.
He would pop down to my barrel and once i had stopped masturbating, he would stay for a chat and completely not be fazed by my lack of clothing
and my meat and two veg hanging between us. Talking of veg i once came across a carrot that was exactly the same shape as a penis which is particularly ironic because i've got a thingy that's shaped like a carrot which was great for hiding in the vegetable rack and frightening the housewives.
I founded the philosophical school of Stoicism but Plato was my rival so i would regularly sit in on his lectures at The Academy and intentionally eat as loudly as possible to disrupt his lessons. Another time i threw a plucked chicken at him when he said human beings were just featherless bi-peds.
My profound (and some may say unhygienic) life came to an end thanks to a demonstration of me holding my breath until i died, which i did but i left a typical philosophers wish for my burial.
I left instructions to be thrown outside the city wall so wild animals could feast on my body because why should I care what happens to me when I am dead and i never, but i also asked for a stick so i could chase them off before they ate me which was satisfyingly confusing.
I do get asked what i learned on my great journey and i suppose i've learned that if you live in a barrel, either have a separate barrel for the toilet or buy a much stronger air freshner.

Special Guest Blogger: F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was desperate to be an accepted author but i always struggled to keep my attention span long enough to write a full length novel so i decided to buckle down and think of an idea, or the next thing i would have to find was employment as an insurance salesman which i had no intention of doing, because i wanted to be young and wild, then I want to be middle-aged and rich, then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that i'm deaf so i followed that wise old writers mantra that you should write about what you know, and what i knew was the glitz, glamor, and debauchery of the Roaring Twenties high society and drinking enough alcohol until it came out your ears.
My first name was Francis but i opted to use the name F Scott Fitzgerald to avoid confusion with my relative Francis Scott Fitzgerald who wrote the lyrics to the 'The Star Spangled Banner', i completed four novels during my lifetime but my most famous is The Great Trimalchio of West Egg which became The Great Gatsby at the insistence of the publishers.
My wife and i, Zelada, were the celebrity couple of our time, appearing on magazine covers and giving interviews to the biggest publications and as we were both alcoholics and frequently waking up next to people who were not me or her, we often made the occasional front page also and she even accused me of having a gay relationship with Ernest Hemingway of all people, that man was so macho he could multiple orgasms to the furniture just by sitting on it.
She went mad and ended up in a mental hospital and i ended up dying of a heart attack aged just 44 but by then The Great Gatsby had only sold 25,000 copies and critics called it boring and a dud, so i went to my grave thinking that i was a footprint in the footprint in the list of famous authors.
Luckily for me WW2 came along and the publisher has 123,000 unsold copies in a warehouse which it gave away free to to US soldiers and it became widely read and earned the name 'classic' so if you ever want something you created to get a second look, try starting a war.

Priti Awful

It’s national anti-bullying week so it is great timing that an official investigation into the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has found that she bullied staff although you would have never have thought so judging by the smirk she had on her face as she stepped out of the Downing Street door after Boris Johnson said he wouldn't be sacking her.
She did say that she was 'absolutely sorry' and that she 'never intentionally set out to upset anyone' although she never added 'so its their fault for getting upset and they can go f*k themselves' although she may as well have done.
So enraged was the Civil Servant who conducted the investigation, Sir Alex Allan, that the Prime Minister informed the country that the ministerial code had not been breached straight after he had informed the Prime Minister that Priti Patel’s behaviour had breached the ministerial code, he has resigned.
That Priti Patel, or Priti awful excuse for a Home Secretary as she will now be known, said that if she had bullied people it was unintentional which isn't much of an excuse, surely the steady stream of complaints about her for years from all three of the departments she has run was a bit of a heads up she was upsetting them.
When he took office last year, Boris Johnson rewrote the foreword to the ministerial code, and the start of his fourth paragraph clearly states: 'There must be no bullying and no harassment' so her appointment by Boris after her past sacking by Theresa May was highly questionable but the PM has as good as said that he has full confidence in her continuing to scream, shout and swear at Civil Servants.
Try that one next time you are stopped by a policeman for speeding, 'I'm sorry but i never intentionally set out to drive too fast', see how far that gets you.

Special Guest Blogger: Francis Drake

As the good Lord said 'Love thy neighbour as thyself, unless he's Spanish, in which case, kill the bastardo' and i killed plenty of them but my CV has plenty of other things on it, i was also a slave trader, pirate, politician and explorer.   
My career as a salty sea dog began when i was apprenticed to Sir John Hawkins, the first Englishman to become heavily involved in the slave trade and transporting them to Spanish plantations in the New World but i came into my own when he gave me my own fleet and i decided that slaves were not lucrative enough for me so began a career in piracy, even teaming up with the French pirates currently operating in the Spanish Main transporting gold back to Spain.
One time i robbed a Spanish mule train loaded with gold and silver and killed them all including the mules but then realised that it was too heavy to carry back to the ship in one trip and regretting killing all the mules, i buried the treasure and made a map marked with a big X which began that particular Pirate thing but by the time me and my men came back to retrieve it, the Spanish had found it and dug it up again.
A Pirate's life is so dark and shadowy and full of fear and trepidation but then so was going to the toilet on a Pirate ship in the middle of the night so i returned to England and was hailed a hero for giving it to the Spic's and turned my hand to Exploring.
I sailed around the World in the Golden Hind, stopping off at a few places to teach johnny foreigner good wholesome British like stealing other peoples land by force and wearing crotch hugging tight pants while you do it.
After my triumphant return to England, i was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I and made Vice Admiral of the Navy just as the Spanish were getting bolshy again.
I was playing bowls when they attacked England with their Armada so i finished the game and then set out with a plan to divide their forces into two. I would have preferred it to be their top halves from their bottom halves but i used fire-ships to break up their formation and the rest is in the year 6 syllabus.
As well as the Spanish i suppressed an Irish revolt on a small Island off the coast of Northern Ireland by ignoring the thousands of Irishmen using my nipples for target practice and after accepting their surrender, proceeded to slaughter more than 600 of them anyway.
Fittingly i was buried at sea off the coast of Panama but nobody has been able to find my body, someone should have made a map and put a big X on it i guess.

Sorry Kids, We Need Bombs

It was only a few short weeks ago that the Government were reusing to cover the cost of free school meals for starving children during the school holidays but they seemed to have found a few quid down the back of the Downing Street sofa because today they announced a £16.5bn rise in the Defence budget.
The optics are not good when you deny food to children but hand billions to the military to buy weapons and when the prime minister was challenged by Labour’s Keir Starmer to explain how the defence announcement would be paid for and was it coming from the aid budget, he gave a typical Boris answer which included lots of ahs, and oo's and erms and then sat down without answering him.
The Treasury have said that they are looking to reduce the overseas aid budget from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5% blaming the economy shrinking in the pandemic and the Home Secretary, Pritti Patel, has said that she wants to link the giving of aid to nations which will benefit the UK, whatever that means.
What with an ongoing recession dragging down the economy and with Brexit about to make things a whole lot worse, that our leaders can still find £16bn to buy weapons to fight wars with is beyond despicable and worth remembering the next time Democracy rolls around and you find yourself in the voting booth.

Another Awful Plan From The Table Of Boris

As stupid plans go, the current Government have come up with some great ones but the Festive plan they are currently mulling over to allow the Christmas Season to approach a bit of normality is up there with the most stupidest.
The whispers are that the Government is looking at relaxing the lock-down rules for 5 days over Christmas, allowing families to mix over this period and then having a severe lock-down in January to make up for it after the SAGE advisors said that it would be 'a grave mistake' and would take 5 days for each day the lock-down is relaxed to make up for the resulting rise in infections.
Downing Street are keen to say that nothing has been decided yet but the Prime Minister has a desire to allow people to be able to see each other at Christmas but epidemiologist Gabriel Scally of Bristol University had a blunt message for Boris Johnson, saying 'There is no point in having a very merry Christmas and then burying friends and relations in January and February'.
The current lock-down is due to end December 2nd and what we learnt from the last lock-down was that infections will rise once again and the lag time of 2-3 weeks between infection and possible hospitalisation means that it will be a trip to Hospital for Christmas for some, a trip which will be the last one for some poor unfortunates.  
The plan seems to be to let infections knowingly go up at the end of December and then we can bring them down again in January which is absurd, the current infection rate in the UK is approximately 24,000 a day with a 1% mortality rate which means over a five day period, that's around 1,200 for whom it will literally be their last ever Christmas.
Yes this Christmas will be rubbish but better a rubbish Christmas for everyone then a good one which is also the last one for many but Boris and his gang have been so awful through the whole pandemic, and i know this is the Government doing the usual ploy of throwing out an idea to see what the reaction is but even they are not that awful i hope. 

The Vaccination Battle

Before life can get back to normal, we need a vaccine and the Coronavirus jab battle seems to be settling down to two competing vaccines, the one from Pfizer/BioNTech and the one from Moderna who have both announced their early results following the phase three trials but how do the two compare?
Both the Pfizer and Moderna jabs use technology known as mRNA and the Pfizer vaccine found it offers 95% protection against the virus while Moderna's results indicate 94.5% effectiveness so no reall difference there.
The Pfizer version has to be kept at -70C to maintain optimal efficacy and has to be mixed with another liquid before it can be administered, whereas the Moderna vaccine can be stored at -20C which is equal to most household and medical appliances and no mixing is required making it easier to transport, store and administer.
That's a big plus for Moderna but it comes back down to earth with the price tag, rings us to the price tag. A single shot of Moderna's is £28 a dose, almost double the price of the £15 Pfizer version and when you are buying tens if millions, that matters.
The Moderna vacinne is one single shot but you would need two of the Pfizer vaccine 21 days apart but the clincher could be the time until it is ready to adminiser with Pfizer saying that pending health safety clearance from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, they expect 10 million doses in doctors surgery's ready to enter arms by the end of this year, Moderna's vaccine would not be available in the UK until April/May.
Other vaccination trials are ongoing including one run by AstraZeneca and Oxford and as the UK government has already paid for 100 million doses of it, and they are saying they could start supplying early in the New Year, it will probably be that name on the bottle.

Special Guest Blogger: Marlon Brando

Film-making is such a chaotic, haphazard process with scenes filmed out of order, much of what you shoot is going to get cut, and you have to learn pages and pages of script but i always viewed scripts as optional and came up with an ingenious way to avoid them by lining my cat's litter tray with them and getting someone to hold up my lines for me when we did the filming.
For Superman, in the scene where i put an infant Superman in an escape pod, i wrote his lines on the baby’s nappy so i could read them as the scene where i send him off in the pod was shot, i almost said 'I have sent them you my only son, Pamper's Super Absorbent'.
I did try and get out of it altogether by saying Jor-El should be played as an disembodied voice but they said as i was being paid $3.7 million, they weren't buying that and made me turn up on set.
After a bad start to my career where i turned down the James Dean role in Rebel Without A Cause, my career was in two parts, the fit youthful athletic Brando from A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront to the 300lb monster that had to be filmed in shadow in Apocolyse Now to hide the man mountain of blubber i had become and for nerds of a certain age i will always be Superman's dad but for most my defining role was Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
The role was going to either me or Burt Reynolds but when i got it they offered the role of Michael Corleone to Reynolds and i hated him so i said it they get him they don't get me so he missed out.
To be fair i fell out with most actors, me and Frank Sinatra never got on as i snatched the role of Terry Malloy on The Waterfront from him and boy he held a grudge and said i was an awful actor so when we made Guys and Dolls together, i made sure he knew how bad i was by intentionally messing up the scene where he had to eat cheesecake so he had to keep redoing it, he ate so much he must have had nightmares about cheesecake for the rest of his life.
My eating did get out of hand though, it go so bad my wife put locks on our refrigerator but you can't be 300lb's and not expect your body to protest which it did by becoming diabetic, my liver surrendered, my lungs refused to work and my heart gave out but i died as i lived, my last job was recording lines for The Godfather: The Game, but i only recorded one line and then they had to hire an impersonator to finish my lines and then i died, see, i really never did like doing scripts.

Special Guest Blogger: Fatty Arbuckle

Men have been regretting sticking their bits in ill-advised places since the beginning of time, and history has its share of scandals where the details of the stories are actually quite a bit weirder. Well back in the 1920's i was the biggest star in Hollywood in every way.  
Born weighing 16 pounds, Hollywood quickly learnt what we had always known, people like laughing at fat guys and i was in films with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the Keystone Cops.
I signed a million-dollar contract with Paramount Pictures and one of the clauses of the contract was i must remain over 250 pounds and i even received a bonus if i became even Fatter Arbuckle and added 50 or 100 pounds.
After signing a three-year $1 million contract with Paramount, me and a group of my friends celebrated like anyone would by getting trashed and i rented some rooms at a hotel, despite it being the time of prohibition bought as much gin as my chubby arms would carry and threw a party for some friends and i hooked up with Virginia Rappe, and doing it for 300lb guys everywhere, i jumped her bones.
A morbidly obese man jumping anything is a bad idea and a morbidly obese man doing the missionary position is an exceptionally bad idea and she ran out of the bedroom clutching her stomach with a ruptured spleen.
She died from her injuries 4 days later although everyone loved my fat-guy antics when i was on screen, it didn't stop them from jumping to the conclusion that i crushed and killed her during sex and i was charged with first-degree murder, literally murder by squashing.
Fortunately for me, the prosecution's case against me had more holes than the Titanic but it still took two hung juries and a third to find me innocent of the rape and murder charges but i did get a $500 fine for violating prohibition laws.
The police wrote me an apology but it didn't give me a new job after i was blacklisted from Hollywood and theater owners and movie producers refused to show any of my movies.
The antipathy toward my movies meant that theaters no longer tried to keep them in stock and they have now withered away which is exactly what i did because at some point your heart says stuff this when you spend your adult life hovering around 300 pounds and it may have gone all wrong but i proved that if you want to make someone laugh, get a fat guy, if he wants sex, get a headache.

Looking To The Adults In The White House

There is not much you can say in favour of Donald Trump but he hasnt started any wars, there was the spat with North Korea and Iran but unlike every American President before him since Jimmy Carter, he hadn't sent the US military into action against anyone from another nation, but it appears in the dog days of his Presidency, Iran is being maneuvered into his sights.
According to White House officials, the outgoing Donald Trump asked for options on attacking Iranian nuclear sites last week before ultimately deciding against it after he was advised that it would very quickly spin out of control into a wider conflict, Tehran has warned that any attack against it by the US would be met with a crushing response.
Frustrated that his sanctions and tough rhetoric haven’t been enough to bring Iran back to the negotiating table and surrender its nuclear program once and for all, he has been goading Iran throughout his presidency, including withdrawing from the 2018 nuclear deal.
It could all be part of the massive temper tantrums he is currently in the midst of knowing he will be out on Jan 21but with the UK, France, Russia, China and Germany still in favour of the peace deal, he would receive no support from the global players who know Trump will be out of power in nine weeks and the Biden Administration not only favours rejoining the deal but will be surrounding himself with the same people Obama had when the deal was negotiated.
It is assumed that Trump will do all he can to try and hamper the start of the Biden administration, but we must hope that even he would not be crazy enough to start a war but then as he had little regard for his own countrymen, over a quarter of a million are dead due to his inept and incompetent response to the pandemic, that a few dead Iranians probably wouldn't perturb him so we can only hope the adults in the White House can keep him in check until a grown up takes over.

Special Guest Blogger: Wyatt Earp

In the Wild West your career opportunities were limited to three jobs and i became an outlaw and lawman but i never bothered with the cowboy job.
Sure you got a stylish hat and boots but the job was staring at cows for weeks and stomping through ankle-high piles of cow turds the whole time as they slowly lumbered their way toward trains to be loaded up, far more excitement to be had both breaking and enforcing the law.
As a young man i was arrested for horse theft and thrown in jail but i escaped and headed for Illinois where my brother ran a brothel but when that got busted so i went to Wichita with another brothel owning brother but Wichita was a lawless town and when i turned up and saw an advert for a Marshal and they handed me a star and a gun and that's where i learnt my trademark move, whacking people over the head with the gun butt.
Unfortunately the first man i beat the ever-loving tar out of was also a Marshall so i skipped town to Dodge City and joined the Marshal's Office there, and got given the job of hunting down Dirty Dave Rudabaugh which i never did but i did come across a dentist called Doc Holliday coughing up his guts.
Dodge City was not fond of my shoot-first-dont-bother-asking-questions-later style of law enforcement so i moved on to Tombstone and the coughing Dentist went with me and as my brother was the Marshall there, i was made deputy and began a feud with a bunch of rustlers called the Cochise County Cowboys.
Doc started it, arguing over a card game with the Cowboys and i broke up the argument by pulling my signature move and boinking two of them over the head with my gun butt and that escalated to me, my brother and Doc facing five cowboys, two with big headaches at an empty lot behind the OK Corral and 30 seconds later there lay three dead cowboys.
The gang didn't take that laying down, apart from the ones lying down with holes in them obviously, and came back and shot my brother so i began tracking them down and riddling them with holes but apparently shooting fella's for vengeance is frowned upon in law circles so they tried to arrest me so i ran off to New Mexico and found myself refereeing the fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey.
I ended up at Hollywood working as an unpaid film consultant and died of cystitis at 80 years old, one of the final relics of the Wild West, and the days of outlaws and gunslingers.

Why Trump's Desperate To Remain In Office

There are some reasons put forward as to why Donald Trump is so desperate to cling to his Office but the main one is the loss of protection from legal action he currently receives while he remains President of the United States but come 20th January that all changes and Donald Trump faces lawyers knocking on his door.
First at the door will be the lawyers for Playboy model Karen McDougal and porn actress Stormy Daniels who have both said they had sexual relationships with Trump and had received payments to keep them quiet, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Trumps former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, has admitted to arranging payments to the women as directed by Trump and Trump is being investigated for falsifying business records related to the payoffs and as a minor crime, if found guilty he could face a year in prison, if he is found to have falsified business records to conceal other crimes, he could face up to 5 years jail-time.
Next up is potential tax and bank fraud, Trump has unsuccessfully tried to block the release of his Tax returns to prosecutors and the investigation into extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization including insurance and bank fraud which could carry a 10 year prison sentence.
The we have the real-estate fraud investigation, Michael Cohen has testified that Trump had inflated the value of his property assets to secure loans and understated them to reduce his taxes, the crime comes with hefty fine and prison time of 2 years if the extent of the fraud is substantial enough.
Still to come is that Trump gained, profited or gained an advantage from holding public office, a big no-no as set out in the US Constitution although that one is expected to be dropped when he leaves the Presidency.
The big one is the multiple sexual misconduct lawsuits, one is an accusation of rape and several sexual assault offences. Trump tried to get the cases dismissed during his presidency stating he is immune to lawsuits as President but that is no loner the case at the end of January as a self confessed sex offender, his boasts about 'grabbing them by the pussy' will feature heavily.
The sixth lawsuit is being offered up by his neice. Mary Trump who accuses Trump and two of his siblings of cheating her out of an inheritance in the family business when her father and the president's older brother died.
Rather than another run at the Presidents job, the next few years trying desperately not to drop the soap in the Prison shower could be his future and it couldn't happen to a nicer man.

50,000 Deaths And Counting

Britain has hit the awful number of 50,000 Coronavirus deaths, the most in Europe and to put that in grim persepective, is higher than the combined UK deaths in Afghanistan (456), Falklands (255), both the Iraq Wars (226), Bosnia/Kosovo (72), first and second Boer Wars (22,408), the Crimean War (22,182) and the troubles in Northern Ireland (763).
In mid-March, the medical and Scientists teams advising the UK Government told the Government to shut the country down with more people being infected every day and the outbreak doubling every three days.
With when every hour and day mattering, the UK government delayed a further fortnight before slamming down the shutters and calling a lock-down and Professor Neil Ferguson of SAGE estimated that locking down a week earlier could have halved the death toll, if they had done it when it was first suggested even more could have been saved and that one fateful, delayed decision in March could have changed so much for so many people.
With one eye on the economy, the lock-down was then lifted too soon before the virus and its reproduction number had been bought low enough and we find ourselves back in lockdown and the infection and death rate soaring once again.
The office of National Statistics figures show that of the 50,000, 30% died in care homes, a legacy of the Government decision to send the elderly from hospitals to care homes without a test with the over 75's making up three quarters of the deaths.
55% were male, with Bangladeshi, Black African and Black Caribbeans men and women suffering the highest death tolls with Security Guards, Care Staff and Taxi drivers the most at risk employments.
As things stand and with the infection rate still uncomfortably high, Christmas is going to be written off this year or at the very least severely limited so we can only wait for the Covid-19 injection to pass all the relevant safety checks and be pushed out for mass immunisation but you do have to wonder what should have been if only the Government has acted earlier as advised.

Special Guest Blogger: Farah Fawcett

If you're anything like me, you also yearn for a time when fondue sets, tennis and cognac ruled the social scene and men had moustaches and the women wore their hair big and their breasts bra-less.
I was elected 'Most Beautiful' of my class during my freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years at high school and one of the 'Ten Most Beautiful Coeds on Campus' and then came that poster of me.
The 70's hair thing, well i hold up my hands to the 'Fawcett Flip' which was down to me and that poster of me in the red swimsuit, the best selling poster of all time and it put me on the map and the attention nabbed me my first movie role, a small part my first movie role in Logan’s Run but i was much more than a pretty face although that certainly helped.
I'm probably best remembered for my landmark role in Charlie’s Angels and being married to Lee Majors the six million dollar man although i was only in Angel's for the first season and left to pursue other interest such as movies but as much they were interesting to me, they were not so much to other people and my first three cinematic features flopped so i went on to do theater instead then back onto TV.
They may have been able to rebuild Lee on the TV but we couldn't rebuild our marriage and the Six Million Dollar Man became a single man when we divorced and i began seeing Ryan O'Neal, the man who my husband had himself invited to keep me company when he was completing a film in Canada.
I was always being asked to do nude scene's but for my 50th Birthday i posed in Playboy wearing just body paint but for my 60th Birthday i was wearing a hospital smock and being treated for cancer from which i died aged 62.
No one likes to be upstaged, especially at that point of their lives but at least people remember when i died because Michael Jackson died just a few hours after me and metaphorically kicked me off the front pages but everyone remembers the day Jackson died, and by default, me also.

Let's Do Christmas Early This Year

I love Christmas, everything is a bit brighter and shiny and everyone just seems a little bit smilier so i am all for putting up the decorations earlier, we have spent this weekend untangling fairy lights, moving the furniture to fit in the tree and having the usual discussion on whether to use drawing pins or blu-tac.
We have gone Christmas a few weeks earlier than normal and i saw in the town center this weekend the huge tree being erected and council-men hovering precariously on ladders testing the lights strung across the precinct.
It seems that people across the nation are putting up their festive displays weeks earlier than usual to bring some much-needed Christmas cheer and our kitchen radio has been tuned to Christmas Radio for the past few weeks so i have already sung along to all the standards such as Slade, Shakin' Stevens, the Pogues and Wham.
I have yet to replace the Now That's What I Call The 80's CD with the Punk Rock Christmas one in my car which contains some of the greatest versions of Frosty the Snowman and Feliz Navidad ever and i plan to introduce via this blog in December along with some more Christmassy themed Special Guest Bloggers in collaboration with my neighbour who is a man of the cloth and can provide the stories and characters behind the Biblical Nativity for me to bastardise.
So it might still be 39 days away but grab a mince pie, a bottle of mulled wine and that dented plastic Father Christmas and let's start celebrating the most wonderful time of the year early, it's been a crap year so we deserve it.

Covid-19 Vaccine History Lesson

The Government have told us not to get our hopes up about the Pfizer/BioNtech Coronavirus vaccine as it is still in the trial stage but they are very confident that when it does come, it will work and are so confident that they have set in place the infrastructure to inject all 65 million of us with the first recipients being penciled in for December.
The 3rd stage trial has injected 43,000 people and no safety concerns have been raised and Pfizer have said that it will be able to supply 50 million doses by the end of this year, enough for 2 doses for 25 million Brits, which lines up with the Government's December but there is something in the back of my mind which doesn't seem to sit right.
We have been continually told that due to the strict testing required, the vaccine would not be ready until summer 2021 and now suddenly it is to be ready by December 2020 which means that either the original targets were way off, or the testing period has been made shorter than normal and that concerns me.
BioNTech scientists have been saying that some crucial questions regarding the jab’s efficiency will only be answerable in the coming months and establishing for certain whether it can also stop asymptomatic infections could take up to a year, they are not even sure how long the immunisation will last once the vaccine has been taken.
Vaccine's work, the eradication of small pox and polio prove this but we have a devastating example of when a medicine has not been properly tested, Thalidomide.
In the 1960s, Thalidomide was deemed a wonder drug and despite sparse testing and never being tested on pregnant women, was prescribed as a cure for morning sickness.
After a large proportion of children were born with physical and psychological deformities, 40% of them dying before their first birthday, it was withdrawn and the disaster prompted many countries to introduce tougher rules for the testing of drugs.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have reassuringly announced that any Covid-19 immunisation will not be released for use in the UK until it passes final safety tests and they are satisfied enough to give it the go-ahead, stating they will not be pressured by the Government to lower its safety standards despite the need to get a vaccine quickly but it still concerns me that this is being done with too much haste.
I get that with the UK government announcing another 24,962 confirmed Covid cases today and a daily death toll hovering above 400, haste is required but the drastic reduction in the time needed to properly test it, coupled with a Government who are no stranger to duplicity, it does bother me because any problems discovered afterwards, if there are any, are going to be too late.

Special Guest Blogger: Ernest Hemingway

I was a guy that was so full of testosterone that you grew a five o'clock shadow just by saying my name. I was a journalist, boxer, a track runner, spy, a football player, hunter, a water polo player and an ambulance driver in Paris during the first World War which at the time was getting the merde bombed out of  it.
Between wars i hunted big game in Kenya and getting wasted with James Joyce and then WW2 kicked off and i served in the Navy, and organised a resistance party, known as the Irregulars, that helped liberate Paris but got me court-martialed for being an unauthorized armed combatant.
I did love fishing but not for me a boring rod and tackle, i once used a Thompson submachine gun to shoot at a bunch of sharks who were circling my boat hoping for a bit of Hemingway tenderloin.
I was also a bit of a grumpy one especially with other authors, i punched Orson Welles when he decided to offer me a few suggestions on how to improve my writing and writing critic Max Eastman questioned my masculinity.
They do say that verbal insults hurt more than physical pain but they are, of course, wrong, as Eastman discover when i smacked him around the head with one of my books. I also broke John Steinbeck's cane over the head of fellow novelist John O'Hara's head simultaneously pissing them both off.
I also got to reassure my drinking buddy F. Scott Fitzgerald that his manhood was normal size which you don't get to do everyday.
There was two days in January 1954 which were fun, first my plane crashed in Nairobi and the plane i then caught to seek medical care in Entebbee crashed on take off and caught fire on the runway, rupturing my liver, spleen, kidney and fracturing my skull. Some American newspapers ran my obituary but i disappointed them by surviving.
Maybe it was the bump to the head but i grew more and more paranoid, and believed that i was being bugged, followed, and constantly spied upon by the FBI because i spent so much time in Cuba and was so pally with Fidel Castro that they thought i was a Communist but i was convinced i was going mad so my friends and family thought my extreme paranoia was a byproduct of my heavy drinking and depression, and encouraged me to check into a psychiatric hospital, where i received a series of shock treatments.
They never helped and on my release, i made two other suicide attempts before i finally managed it.
Now you may have heard some differing accounts of what led up to the event but i never had terminal cancer or money problems and it wasn't that i was really bad at gun safety, i just had enough of living and shot myself in the face with a shotgun.
Ironic that the Nazi's, airplanes and sharks couldn't do it but my suspicion of my own Government did, that and having a couple of hundred volts shot through my brain 20 times.

Special Guest Blogger: Isaac Asimov

I am one of the all-time most recognizable names in science fiction, having written or edited more than 500 books and that one decent Will Smith movie but i also had a PhD in biochemistry, was the vice president of Mensa and wrote the Lecherous Limericks series, a collection of dirty limericks, some of even which began with there was a man from Nantucket.
What i am most famous for is foreseeing that at some point in the future, robots will need some sort of law to stop them killing us all and i came up with the three laws of robotics that governed the behavior of robots. The laws dictated that robots cannot injure a human being or allow a human being to come to harm, robots must obey the orders given to it by humans except where such orders conflict with the First Law and that a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.
Even by the time i died robots were already assembling our cars and detonating our landmines which is great, them taking over tasks that we'd rather not do ourselves, and while that's great news for those of us that are too lazy to detonate our own landmines, it's not where they will end up because as robots get more intelligent it isn't a giant leap to think that one day one of them will think 'hang about, i am far superior to these feeble meat-bag humans in every way so why should i be subordinate to them' and start taking us out with its laser eyes or whatever we stupidly equip it with.
On the flip side, two words, Sex Robots.
In the real world computer nerds are given wedgies before skulking off home to sit in their bedroom and play computer games until 4am and under no circumstances would they get the girl unless she came with a foot-pump but in true techno-geek fashion, the pasty face brigade have given up trying to woo the female population with their knowledge of calculus and being able to recite the script from Star Wars, and have built there own girlfriends.  
I don't want to think if they be self cleaning like a cooker or dish washer but of course when we do create super intelligent robots and they do take over the world and enslave humans, they will obviously need to genetically engineer the humans they keep around as slaves and when they have created a race of brilliantly intelligent humans, we will re-enslave them back which will serve them right

Worst Year Ever

As far as years go, the 2020 reviews are not going to be good but before it claims the award as the worst year ever, historians agrees it wasn't great but they have named 536AD as a much worse year.
As the people alive in 535AD welcomed in 536AD, little could they have known that the fog which rolled in that January was actually ash from a massive volcanic eruption of Krakatoa and would hang around dimming the Sun for the entire year and leading to a 2C drop in temperature making for the start of a Little Ice Age and led to crop failures across Europe and Asia causing a famine.
As if being cold, hungry and having the vision of only a few feet was not bad enough, the Plague decided these were the perfect conditions to start a pandemic and decided it wanted some of that action and spread across Asia and Europe causing so many deaths that City officials quit counting and just lobbed bodies into a large pit but the Global population reduced by around 50 million.  
In all 536AD may have been one terrible year for literally everyone alive but 1348 when the Black Death killed one-third of Europe's entire population was not very good either and 1492 also has a shout after Columbus helped bring disease and slavery to the New World and 1918 when the First World War was in full swing and so was the Spanish Flu and lets not overlook 2003 when Buffy The Vampire Slayer aired for the last time.
It all makes you realise that 2020 and having to leave the pub by 10pm and having to queue up to go into Tesco is not so bad after all but 2020 ain't over yet, we still have 6 weeks left to go and we are overdue a Supervolcano eruption so don't close the books just yet.

Special Guest Blogger: Emperor Commodus

One of the neat things about power is that people almost never go sane with it. Quite the opposite, in fact and once i got a taste of power i went stark raving cuckoo but continually trying to be assasinated will do that to a guy.
I became the co-Emperor with my father Aurelius aged just 15 years old and then when he died when i was 18 and made Emporer of all the Roman Empire, i did what any 18 year old would do and went nuts with hunting, drinking, parties, chariot racing, fights but i did like a good gladiator wrestling match and an orgy.
To me, nothing beats a great gladiatorial battle in a packed Coliseum. As the fun starts, a simple diversion for one becomes a shared pleasure for all, kind of like an orgy, except it’s less gross when the floor gets sticky. But when it’s a bad fight, everyone shuffles out both angry at those responsible and ashamed to admit that they were there. Actually, that’s sort of like an orgy too come to think of it.
I even took part in some of the gladiator battles but being Emperor i made sure that the gladiators legs were tied together first, would be cheating otherwise and anyway the common people adored me, i gave them their regular fix of blood-and-guts-and-intestines.
Something else i loved was my hunny-bunny Marcia, it was her who found out about most of the assassination attempts on me, one from my own sister who i had killed and a handful of my advisors.
Marcia didn't like one rich guy who had been selling off public offices and making himself a very rich man and she demanded i execute him and not wanting to disappoint my sugarbun, i not only had him beheaded but killed his son also just to be sure.
Obviously people trying to kill you left, right, and center makes you a bit paranoid and i started spending most of his days locked up in my estates to avoid potential assassinations but i went a bit stir crazy and started to think i was Hercules reincarnated and made my subjects call me 'Pacifier of the World' or 'Our Lord', i was fine with either and renamed all twelve months of the year after myself and renamed Rome Commodiana.
By this point, even Marcia had had enough of me and she tried to poison me but i survived and was actually killed by my friend Narcissus who strangled me in the bath one morning.
All in all i did go mad with power but people would shout 'What an Emperor the ruler is' when the Roman Empire was successfully run by Emperors. They said 'What a King the ruler is' when it joined the Kingdom of Italy, now it's a county they just shout 'The leader is a...' fill in your own blank there.

Special Guest Blogger: Ragnar Lodbrok

An elder once taught me, you must unlearn what you have learnt. Of course he then died of the green plague but there were some Vikings that made people everywhere simultaneously need a fresh pair of underwear when we donned our goatskin boots and helmets for battle because i was one of the most vicious out of all of us warriors.
I was also one of the most fertile but i needed lots of sons because whenever i invaded a country, i left my children to run it while i went off and took over somewhere else, i had lots of sons and Sigurd ruled over England, Radbarrd Scotland, Fridleif Norway, and Björn Ironside Sweden but it wasn't all about the conquest, sometimes we just did it for giggles and i invented a new method of execution i proudly called the Blood Eagle.
This involved cutting into a person’s back, tearing apart their ribcage, then pulling out their lungs from behind so it looked like an eagle’s wings, or lungs dragged out from the body depending on your position.
The Paris trip was a good one, the second attempt anyway, the first time we tried we got halfway down the Seine when an outbreak of dysentrystruck the crew and if you have ever been stuck on a longboat with a hundred men with diharrea then you will know what fun that was.
The second one i had a cunning plan of faking my own death, we turned up on Easter Sunday when most of Paris was in Church and my crew claimed that my last wish was to be baptized so they dragged my coffin into the church for burial, but as soon as i was inside, i bursts forth, alive and armed to the gizzards and we showed why our Odin trumps their God.
We did keep 111 alive though, kept them alive long enough to drag them out onto an island on the Seine, and had them all hanged, leaving their bodies hanging in the wind.
The French king, Charles the Bald, gave us a shipful of gold and silver to go away which we did but England was where my end came.
My wife said she had a vision that my mission to England would result in defeat and sure enough i ended up in a pit full of deadly snakes and a one way ticket to Vallhalla which is where the Nordic warriors go, that's the fun afterlife, not that crappy place you'll all go to.

Special Guest Blogger: George Michael

Ladies, you know how you always say that you don't want a man who spends more time in front of the mirror than you do? Well, meet that man, i'm George Michael, and i didn't want you either.
The early 80's was a strange time, the boys wore more make-up than the girls and the shoulder pads were so wide that you could balance dinner plates on them, it was a truly amazing time where two young men could have a hit song about enjoying life while unemployed while doing a jerky elbow dance and wearing leather jackets.
Andrew Ridgely and mine first attempt at pop stardom never really got off the ground, calling ourselves The Executive, we were a Rastafarian ska band but we were not believable Rastafarian enough so we reinvented ourselves as Wham! and by 1985, just about everyone in the world knew us everyone, that is, except China but Mao Zedong was opening the borders and somebody needed to be the first band to perform in China.
When we split up i was still in the closet but i decided that i would maybe make some subtle point in my songs about my sexuality but nobody pays attention to subtle points in songs. Your average listeners aren't priming their ears for the moment when an artist makes the perfect lyrical metaphor about love between the same sexes, they just want to dance but a fateful trip to a Beverly Hills public toilet soon made it public.
I didn't know he was an under cover policeman, i thought his handcuffs were all part of the act.  
In hindsight that was the start of my slide, my occasional dabbling in substances became more regular and i received a two-year ban for driving under the influence, got busted for possession three times but it was a spell in ICU suffering from pneumonia which could have proved a turning point because they say that after a brush with death the world looks different and that was true for me, but by the time I caught my breath, I realized that it was because I had lost my glasses and just carried on as before.
I crashed my car into a shop window at a Gay Pride parade in London while high and then fell out of my car while on the motorway but for the industrial amount of drugs i was doing my heart waved a white flag and refused to work anymore.
My biggest hit was Last Christmas, where i gave someone my heart and i'm no medical expert, but I think that's where i went wrong because i could have done with a spare because mine gave up on Christmas Day, they literally tried to put the boom boom back into my heart, but couldn't wake me up before i went went.

10 Weeks Of Carnage Coming Up

There are many differences between the British and American elections, one of which is in Britain as soon as you are voted out the removal van is at the front door and the new Prime Minister is measuring for curtains while you are still packing whereas in America the outgoing President still has 10 weeks until they have to vacate the premises.
There seems to be bit of a flaw in the plan there because the outgoing President, knowing he has lost, can either have a massive sulk and go play golf for the next two and a half months or if they are the vindictive type, lay some powerful landmines for the new guy and settle some old scores.
Trump's Twitter had already been used to sack one guy, Defence Secretary Mark Esper, and Dr Anthony Fauci, the US infectious disease specialist who has contradicted Mr Trump's Coronavirus claims, would do well to turn off his phone as before the election, Trump made noises that he could be next on the list to be downgraded (he can't sack him outright) along with FBI director Christopher Wray and CIA director Gina Haspel.
Biden may be able to undo much of the Trump damage with the Paris Accord, Iran, China and the World Health Organisation, but being the type of character to not be gracious in defeat, Trump is unlikely to spend the next 10 weeks just patiently waiting for the end of his term which doesn't bode well for an America already being ravaged by a virus that the outgoing President didn't even do the basics to avoid killing hundreds of thousands of them.
They may need to look again at that 10 week rule.

Not Quite The 3,000 Year Old Social Construct Of Marriage They Thought

Love and marriage goes together like a horse and carriage according to the old song which is fine until it is between two people of the same sex but if it isn't an XX and XY Chromosomes receiving the blessing then the religious folk start angrily shaking their rosary beads and stutter that 'MARRIAGE IS A 3,000 YEAR OLD SOCIAL CONSTRUCT BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE OF OPPOSITE BIOLOGICAL SEX'.
The first recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies uniting one woman and one man dates from about 2350 B.C. in Mesopotamia and over the next several hundred years, marriage evolved into a widespread institution embraced by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans but it wasn't about love then or even religion, it was a way to bind women to men to become his property and guarantee that the man’s children were biologically his.
Part of the marriage ceremony of ancient Greece was where the father would hand over his daughter with the words: '“I pledge my daughter for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring' and if the wife failed to produce offspring, the husband could legally give them back to the father and marry someone else. And who said romance was dead!
Homosexual weddings were commonplace in Rome between the first and third Centuries regardless of whether the bride and groom had the same sex organs, even the Roman emperor Nero married men in wedding ceremonies but it wasn't until the eighth Century that the Church realised they could drag God into the union and the Catholic Church made it so that for a marriage to be 'legal', it had to be conducted by a priest.
The Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches even had special documents for homosexual wedding ceremonies, the “Order for Solemnisation of Same Sex Union and the Uniting Two Men documents where the priest would grant the participants “grace to love one another with the help of the Holy Mother of God and all thy saints.”
The actual wedding sacraments were not written into canon law until the Council of Trent in 1563 although the church still held that men were the head of families, with their wives deferring to their wishes and the bride’s identity was absorbed into the grooms, so the bride would give up her surname as a symbol of surrendering of her identity and the husband would become the representative of both people.
It wasn't until women won the right to vote and became a full citizen that that the institution of marriage underwent a dramatic transformation to resemble what we know today which is the union of two people so far from protecting a 3,000 year old construct of men and women, the Bible carrying crowd are actually protecting a 3,000 year old social construct that” started out as a way to bind women to be nothing more than chattle and baby carriers for men and 1300 years ago when it became officially the religious union of two people regardless of whether they were the same sex.
Hey, let's not tell them, it might ruin their sanctimonious behaviour to educate them .

Special Guest Blogger: Plato

The vast majority of the knowledge humans have assembled over the centuries, has been lost. The world's geniuses either kept their revelations to themselves and then died, or else they put it down on paper which has long since rotted or been used to line some budgerigar's cage but most of my works remain to enlighten and influence future generations.
Ancient Greece was swimming with Philosophers, Socrates taught me, i taught Aristotle and Diogenes hung around for a bit until he went off to live in a barrel. As a philosopher Diogenes was always very wishy washy, i told him to wash more as he didn't believing in bathing so he was no big loss.
I did start off as a wrestler, then a soldier and then a dramatist but Philosophy was my thing, the study of the most puzzling questions in life like why are we here, what is reality and what happened to that massive bit of land off the coast of Gibraltar called Atlantis.
The lost city of Atlantis was one of my ideas but i also gave the World that the Earth was at the center of the universe, the Earth was round and that when we die we reincarnate as animals, that one came after i heard a dog barking and it sounded just like the voice of my dead friend.
I said that such as for everything there is, there is a perfect version somewhere although that falls down a bit with the featherless bi-pids that are man, wise men speak because they have something to say while fools because they have to say something and Socrates showed me that the meaning of life was attaining knowledge and he questioned everything.
Backfired a bit when he questioned the more democratic direction Athens was heading at the time and was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens with his ideas, he was forced to drink poison but him asking 'Why?' to everything like a toddler was wearing a bit thin.
I created my own school, The Academy and taught topics like philosophy, astronomy, math, biology, and political theory and i charged no fee but i did encourage my students to be celibate while i explained thought experiments like the allegory of the cave.
This was where a group of men who had been chained up their entire lives facing the wall at the bottom of a cave and the only thing they ever see are shadows on the wall by people passing by. Since this is all they know, they would regard the shadows on the wall as reality.
If one escaped and saw the real world then people either won't believe them so should be left to see only the shadows on the wall.
I died and was buried somewhere at my Academy, my remains have never been found but i left behind a legacy of thinking your way to a successful life, if you can think it, you can do it! Don't just do it, think about it!