Special Guest Blogger: Huddie 'Lead Belly' Ledbetter

Generally most celebrities go criminally insane with fame and fortune but sometimes celebrities start out as hardened criminals, and then spin their crimes into stardom which is the way i went about it.
The first time i was imprisoned it was for carrying a pistol and i sentenced to 30 days on the Harrison County chain gang but i waited until the guard wasn't looking and simply ran away and found work in nearby Bowie County under the assumed name of Walter Boyd.
That went well for about a year until i killed one of my relatives in a fight over a woman and got sentenced to seven to 35 years but it was during this second spell surrounded by people who could easily fold me in half, that i earned my Lead Belly nickname due to the scars on my belly from when i was wounded in the stomach with buckshot and i began writing music on my guitar.
The Governor let me put on shows for the guards and other prisoners which went down really well. Another inmate stabbed me in the neck after one show but hey, there will always be critics but it was the song i wrote for the Governor himself that impressed him and it was a pretty good song and it worked and he released me, explaining that on my current trajectory my future looked as stony as a biblical execution but i had the talent to turn my life around and earn a decent living as a proper musician.
I was a hit and the press called me the singing convict who was so good that i sung my way out of prison and i traveled around the South with my 12 string guitar and even cut some albums with some traditional songs and original songs including Black Betty, Cotton Fields, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? and Ain’t It A Shame.
Things looked good until i got into a knife fight with group of white dudes and wound up back in the slammer for six to 10 years for attempted murder.
I figured that if something ain't broke, don't fix it, so i wrote another song for the Governor asking for my release and he goddamn did, who would have thought that my music could override the legal system so on my release i picked up my career and played in nightclubs and was part of the New York folk music scene and had my own radio show and went to Califonia to record for Capitol Records and i even achieved success in Europe.
I was in France when i fell ill and got diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease and i died a few months later but i did provide hits for Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nirvana, The Animals, Aerosmith, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Meat Loaf, Bryan Ferry and Ram Jam but my advice for anyone, based on my life experiences are if someone comes at you and you feel yourself getting angry, take a deep breath and count out loud to 10. Then throw a punch at 8 as they won't be expecting that.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Catherine of Siena

People today may wonder with no TV or internet, what people did for fun back in 14th Century, well my twin sister and i was children number 23 and 24 for my parents so that's that question answered.  
Parents had to have many children because the at that time the Black Death had strolled up and kicked Europe right in the teeth with its pestilence boot, my twin barely made it a week and by the time i reached my teenage years, there was only 12 of us 24 children left to share birthday cake with.    
From a very young age, i had visions of Jesus, which eventually developed into what i called a mystical marriage but each wedding needs a wedding ring and mine was an invisible ring of Jesus's foreskin.
In adulthood, i worked my foreskin-clad fingers to the bone bettering the lives of the sick and the poor but if you think wearing a foreskin wedding ring is as gross as it gets, you had better stop reading now because it gets much, much worse.
I was big on fasting and i did it so much that my body began rejecting food and by the time i was 25 i could no longer bear food all and eating anything caused me intense stomach pain and vomiting blood.
Doctors came to see me but this was the period of doctors trying to cure everything with leeches. A leech on my stomach for stomach ache, a leech on my forehead for headache, a leech on my bottom for constipation which wasn't that great if you forgot about it and sat down and squashed it.
I did keep down the pus i drank which was oozing from the body of a dying woman i was nursing but pus isn't a balanced diet and by the age of 33 i was dead but my story doesn't end there.
They buried me and then decided it would be better to honor me by moving my mortal remains to a more fitting burial site but when they dug me up my head popped clean off along with other parts of my body.
The Church decided that it would be a waste of good rotting body parts so repaid my devoutness and selflessness by naming me the patron saint of illness and mounted my head and a thumb in a cuckoo clock and sent three fingers and a foot to Venice, a hand and a shoulder blade to Rome and one of my ribs to Florence.
I tend to think the world is a bit of a miserable place, so anyone who can add a bit of cheer is doing a good job, which is what i hope I'm doing on the chime of the hour, every hour, 24 times a day.

Special Guest Blogger: Ray Charles

Record companies would have us believe that the money made by CD pirates goes to fund the drug industry but the money music stars make from legal sales end up in exactly the same place and drugs was one of my many addictions, along with booze and women.
Glaucoma took my eyesight in childhood but i learnt to play the piano and thought i could make a career in music but it was when my mum died when i was 15 that i decided that i should go for it because life is short and it could end anytime.
I dicked around some of the Southern states before deciding the North was where it was and headed to New York and that was when i met up with the booze, the women and the drugs.
A blind piano player was quite a thing and i got a recording contract and despite a couple of arrests for drug possession, i had a hit with 'Georgia On My Mind' which gave me some money which gave me access to even more drugs, booze and women.  
A third arrest for heroin possession bought my career to a stop and i agreed to go to rehab to avoid jail time and eventually kicked my heroin habit at a clinic but replaced it with even more booze and women.
I tell you i was racking up quite a trail of pregnant women, 12 that i knew of but lost count somewhere along the way, on father's day, i was scared to go to my mailbox but the booze and women continued but my career slowed down in the 70s when the record companies moved towards the Rock and Metal genres and people like me got left behind but not so much my complete inability to keep it in my pants and i didn't let it sour me on the joys of hooking up with the ladies again. And again, and again.
I did kick my heroin addiction, only to immediately replace it with a different one (besides women and baby-making). I started drinking massive quantities of liquor for breakfast, with a side of marijuana for dinner every day and people think that there’s no good way to die have obviously never heard the phrase ‘Heart Attack during a Drug-fuelled sex marathon’ but unfortunately for me i was eventually diagnosed with alcoholic liver disease and my liver self-destructed taking the rest of me with it.

Special Guest Blogger: Moondyne Joe

Considering what the Aussies started with through sheer hard work, sweat, toil and tears they built a great country and then ruined it by letting a bunch of nursery school kids name the towns and cities so they ended up with Nobby, Bong Bong, Wagga Wagga, Cocklebiddy, Coo Wee Rup, Humpty Doo, Iron Knob, Koolyanobbing, Mount Buggery, Wooloolmooloo and Tittybong.     
I was born in Cornwall in the UK but i got arrested for stealing food from a neighbours house and was expecting a few months in the pokey but at my trial i thought it would be a laugh to make fun of the judge and to be fair he was smiling when he sentenced me to be deported to the prison colony in Australia because that's what the Brits did back then.  
Once there i was issued a ticket of leave which entitled me to all the wonderful freedoms Australia had to offer including getting horribly mauled by almost every fish, insect and mammal living there and i was a good little deported convict for a few years until i got caught stealing a horse and subsequently locked up in a ramshackle hut and i just walked out and re-stole the very same horse plus the magistrate's saddle.
I was recaptured two days later and sentenced to three years in a place with better security and on my release i killed an ox and got another sentence and escaped three times until the Governor constructed an escape proof cell and only let me out an hour a day to break rocks.
The guards were tasked with removing the broken rocks at the end of each day, but as the guards got lazier, my rock pile got bigger and got so big that it neatly disguised the big-ass hole i knocked through the prison wall and used to let myself out.
Two years later i got nabbed robbing a winery and the judge at the trial said i was beyond a criminal and must be insane so they locked me up in a lunatic asylum which i obviously escaped from four times before i died of dementia but i led an eventful life and got to travel so remember that life is for living and then you die and they throw dirt in your face and then the worms eat you and as long as it happens in that order then be grateful because you haven't done bad.

Special Guest Blogger: Dennis Wilson

For a band who made a career out of singing about how rad and cool Surfing was, out of the five of us i was the only one who knew the correct end of a surfboard and could actually surf and it was my idea that surfing should be our thing after going to the beach and seeing lots of the kids taking up surfing and i persuaded the band it was going to be huge so we should sing about it, and maybe call it surfin' to be be a bit more cool, and boy did we milk that with Surfin', Surfin' Safari, Surfin' USA, Catch A Wave, Surfer Girl, Noble Surfer, The Surfer Moon, Surfers Rule, South Bay Surfer and Surf's Up before branching out into songs about the beach, girls, fast cars and then a few more about surfin'.
The band was me, my two brothers, my cousin and a friend and i was the drummer but i wasn't great and a few times they had to get a proper drummer in to dub over my weak offerings.
We were the kings of riding the wild waves and impressing those California girls with our surf moves although we did get into hot water with Surfin' USA as we lifted the tune directly from a Chuck Berry song, denied it and he sued us but Chuck wasn't about to horribly murder us for it unlike the next guy whose song we nicked.
That began with a couple of female hitch-hikers i picked up and bought home who turned out to be members of the Manson Family who invited themselves over, including the head of the family Charles who i got on well with and he played me some of his songs which i liked, so much actually that i took one tune, called 'Cease to Exist' and decided to change the name to 'Never Learn to Love', rewrite a few lines and claim the full credit.
To show his appreciation, Manson threatened to murder me and showed me the bullet he was going to use to do it and that sort of thing puts a strain on a friendship and i skipped town until Manson and his goons were good and locked up for murdering someone else.
I drowned while drunk and high but the seeds for that were sown three years earlier when during a bitter divorce, i threw my ex-wifes belongings into the sea at the Marina Del Ray and i was at the same Marina three years later, felt bad about it and after an afternoon of knocking back tequila, decided to hire a boat and to see if i could dive in and salvage them.
Turns out drinking lots of alcohol and swimming goes together about as well as drinking lots of alcohol and swimming and i drowned but i was proud of what i achieved, it was my idea to give the World the Californian sound and despite the whole Charles Mason thing the guys said that of all of us i was always the real brick of the group, and that's not too bad, sturdy, reliable...my mistake, that first letter is a P. The b*stards.

Calling The Armenian Genocide What Was

The Oxford English Dictionary definition for Genocide is 'the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group' while Article Two of the UN Convention on Genocide of December 1948 describes genocide as 'carrying out acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group'.
With the definition pretty clear, it would be hard to say that the deliberate killing of 1.5 million nationals does not fit the description of genocide as above so it has always been a hard sell for the Turks to get uppity when is it said that what they did to the Armenians in 1915-16 was not genocide.
Turkey does not dispute that many Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks deported them en masse from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert where they either were killed or died from starvation or disease but they have responded angrily to the American President, Joe Biden, issuing a statement formally describing the massacre of Armenians as a genocide.
The Turkish foreign ministry has replied that Turkey 'reject and denounce in the strongest terms the statement made under the pressure of radical Armenian circles and anti-Turkey groups' which begs the question of if it wasn't genocide, what would their act of deliberate killing a large number of people from a particular nation?
The Thesaurus offers up holocaust, mass murder, massacre, slaughter, annihilation, decimation, ethnic cleansing, mass execution or race extermination which are just other ways of saying the same thing so if it looks like genocide, smells like genocide and fits the Dictionary description perfectly, they genocide it is and you don't have to be a radical Armenian or a member of an anti-Turkey group to see that.

Boris's Dead Cat Bounces Back

Boris Johnson failed as Foreign Secretary, was a mediocre Major of London and has been pathetic as Prime Minister but because he has the reputation of being a bit of a clown with his tousled hair and bumbling manner, his many indiscretions are excused as 'That's just Boris being Boris' but finally the punchline may be about to be delivered to this political joke and amusingly it could well be delivered by the man he spent so much political capital trying to protect.
Seemingly made for the same Teflon that once covered Tony Blair, nothing seemed to stick to Boris, the many, many lies, the racism, the affairs, the awful Coronavirus response and the casual view of fatherhood just slid off the Prime Minister but possibly the man who always showed a woeful lack of self-control in the sight of a female body is going to be undone by the same lack of self-control in the face of his bank balance.
The story began with leaks regarding how the Government Ministers were not only feathering their own nest with public Coronavirus Relief money but feathering the nests of their friends and families also and then came the leak that Boris was 'fixing' the Tax System for a certain Tory donor and also requesting other Tory donors pay for the refurbishments to his Downing Street Home.
As the furor grew someone in Number 10 decided that the dead cat strategy would work and decided that the dead cat should be the inventor of the Barnard Castle eye-test himself Dominic Cummings who they perceived was so unpopular in the UK that nobody would believe any leaks that came from him but boy did they pick the wrong guy.
Not one to just take the heat quietly, Dom has not only hit back with a tirade of just how hopeless Boris is but has offered up proof of his incompetency and then gone further and is keen to spill the beans on other scandals that went on, and continue to go on, in Boris's Government such as planning to break the law and interfere with independent inquiries to protect the friend of his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds.
Last seen disappearing from Number 10 holding a cardboard box five months ago, Boris Johnson did not need to pick this fight with his former adviser especially as Cummings has now said he wants to appear again before MPs next month to tell all, an offer the non-Blue MP's in Parliament have accepted with relish.
The British public are surprisingly acceptant of much from the MP's but a sense of unfairness in slanting the playing field in favour of those already with more than most is a line that must not be crossed and as Boris has not only crossed it but leapt fully over it, he must be regretting his decision over who he tried to throw to the wolves to detract from the topic of Tory sleaze because the Pandora box Dominic Cummings has thrown open could prove to be hopefully, much more damaging.

You Spell Tomato, I Spell Tomatoe

It almost took off in America and the Australians almost have a basic grasp of it but the English language has always been a movable feast and has been evolving ever since the first person on our little island off the coast of mainland Europe looked at the letters of an alphabet and decided what order they would go in for the name of things over here.
It has been called the hardest language to learn for non-English speakers due to the nuances of the language which allows sentences like 'High Karen, eye wood like two start bye saying that eye am knot shore ewe red my male..' to be completely wrong but still completely readable as is Aonethr qiruk taht as lnog as the fsirt and lsat lterets are in pacle, the snetecne is still readable although your spell check may explode.
Outside of official documents or projects where perfect English is required, I have never been much of a spelling nazi, to me what someone is trying to say is always more important than how they say it which is a view that may be frowned upon by English Language Teachers but then English Language Teachers are a bit pompous about that sort of thing anyway.
The Education Secretary has been bemoaning the drop in English spelling standards and is blaming mobile phones and computers and i find myself in the strange position of agreeing with a Conservative Minister because during my 17 years in Education, i noticed that as bright as some of the students were, their spelling often sucked.
Quite why Americans, Gawd bless 'em, decided to mangle the English language and drop vowels (vowels for crying out loud) and stick the letter Z in words where the letter S was perfectly acceptable i can't explain but as for the the poor spelling i pin the blame squarely on spellcheck which either automatically corrects the wrong word or just underlines it with a red squiggle which a swift click rectifies for the sender.
Possibly we are seeing evolution of the English language in action, there are already a few words where alternative spelling are acceptable such as acknowledgment/acknowledgement, ambience/ambiance and counselor/counsellor and over the last few centuries the spelling of musick to become music, rime into rhyme and phantasy to fantasy shows how we spell is an ever evolving process.
In a perfect world British kids should just learn the correct spelling rather than adapt the language around there shaky grasp of spelling but as my friend explained that wearing hats probably sped up his baldness, all the time he wears a hat nobody will know he is bald, it's the same concept with spellcheck because as it is now omnipresent, nobody will know your spelling sucks! 

Special Guest Blogger: Saint George

Hello, peeps! Issa George here and i is the Patron Saint of many countries, Canada, Greece, Portugal, Georgia but especially England which is a place i never been but they like me there so to them i not a bloody foreigner, we even speaka the Queen's Inglis, like what i does.
I was a Turkish but became a Roman soldier and a priest in the Diocletian Army but Diocletin hated Christians but he know my father very well and he say hey peeps, every Christian is gonna be arrested unless you offer sacrifice to the Roman gods which is absolute disgust as George is God's man, not blinkin' Zeus, so i say not on you nelly.
He say to my father you tell George to believe in Roman gods and i give him land, money and slaves but i still say no so he say gonna chop off your coconut George and i say you is giving me the right Humperdinck so it fine innit so i give all my money to the poor peeps and then the guys take me outside city walls and do that and my head come clean off innit.
I is probably one of the most famous Saints because of the dragon i killed so issabout time I set the records up straight and tell you peeps what was about.
I was riding my horse through Lcyrene when i hear story of a mass crocodile and it was scaring all the peeps who where unable to collect water and so the peeps would give it a sheep each day and while it was eating, the people would fill buckets but soon they run out of sheep and they say this gotta end in tears, marking my words so they say we know, a lady would taste as nice to crocodile as sheep so they gave it a lady instead.
The townspeople chose the victim to be crocodile food by drawing straws and this go on until one day the princesses straw was drawn and the Monarch begged for her to be spared but the people would not have it so she offered to the Crocodile but before she could be eaten, i comes along and stick sword in crocodile and the peeps say good rids and in honour of me being all brave, all convert to Christianity.
The Crocodile later became a dragon in the story but that is bloods stupid, there is no dragons and i would have said hey dragon, you can have her if big fire mouthed dragon was there and not crocodile.
So today in England people wave a big red cross flag and bang on what Saint George and England means which it turns out is very little but you wanna know somethin' wot is going right through my nostril about the English? They invent Cricket.
Issa stupid boring game and no matter who wins, both teams, and all the fans, are losers so come up England and invent a new game, you must have better ideas, you can't run out of ideas, that's like kebab shop running out of lamb innit.

Special Guest Blogger: Wernher von Braun

What i did wasn't brain surgery but it certainly was rocket science and all i wanted to do was develop the means send man to the moon which is what i explained to the Nazi's when they came knocking and they said jah, but as you are aiming rockets at the stars, could you maybe also aim a few towards London and as the Nazi's were not reknown for taking no for an answer, i ended up working as the Technical Director in Germany's rocket development program and developing the V2 rocket.
Due to an oversight in the Treaty of Versailles, rocketry wasn't in it's list of weapons forbidden to Germany so by the time we had the V2 to a usable standard, Germany became the first nation on Earth to fire anything through the stratosphere, reaching a height of 150,000 feet before it plummeted back to Earth on top of some terrified bystanders.
Germany was being surrounded by the Allies, the choice was to either surrender to the Soviets to the right or the Americans and Brits to the left i decided that the Americans would be better to entrust the devastating military power we had built to are they were guided by Christianity and humanity, they would use it for the application of space technology and not for killing people, like pacifists, hippies and spotty faced 16 year old boys, we were making the call of more lovemaking and less war.
The Americans recruited all 1,600 of us NAZI rocket scientists under a program called Operation Paperclip and i explained that all i wanted to do was develop the means send man to the moon which is what i explained to the American's when they came knocking and they said yes, but as you are aiming rockets at the stars, could you also maybe aim a few towards Pyongyang and i was put to work on their intermediate-range ballistic missile program just as the Korean War was starting up.
In the late 1950's, after the Soviets began sending things to the outer limits of the atmosphere including a dog wrapped in a metal chamber, the Americans decided that the Soviets may have beaten them to Space, but they would be the first to the Moon and i was assimilated into Americas brand spanking new space program and worked as the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon but i held back on my ideas for a Space Station above the Earth as the US military wanted to arm it with missiles So America and the Soviet Union fought it out to become the Space Race winners and both nations can count many firsts to argue their point to who actually won but it was my V-2 which became the granddaddy of every modern rocket design around the world but the first nation to actually launch a rocket into Space was Nazi Germany so every cosmonaut and astronaut that followed can say thanks to Hitler. Danke Adolf.

Special Guest Blogger: Francis Hopkinson

America, it seems, have a few obsessions ranging from making sure we keep guns handily placed around our homes for when the Government oppresses us and a preoccupation for the flag and in America, one of the first History lessons the children hear is about how we kicked the hated British out and then Betsy Ross created the first American flag after telling George  Washington himself that his flag design was a piece of crap and instead sketched a new flag with red and white stripes and a blue field in the corner with five-pointed white stars.
Then Washington, who had better things to do such as dismembering British redcoats left it to her and she created the new flag that you can see being set on fire and stamped on in Middle Eastern markets today.
A nice story except that its a crock of shit because Betsy Ross didn't make the first American Flag, i did!
So who spread the word that wrote me out of history and inserted a little old lady with a sewing kit? The Betsy Ross family that's who and they provided proof in the form of signed affidavits from other of the Betsy Ross family members who swore that she did it and even had a painting made of the alleged meeting with her and Washington. Is that dog-crap or cow-crap i smell? Nope, it's pure bull-crap.
I was a representative of New Jersey and a Declaration signatory and had previously designed a number of seals and logos for the government including the Naval Flag and i have a bit more evidence then my family saying i did it, congressional journals explicitly naming me as the creator of the first flag when the Government came to me and asked me to knock out something with some stars and some stripes on it.
I sent them several designs and as i was a patriot, i said i didn't need paying, just throw some Wine my way and we will call it quits.
My original flag had 13 stripes and 13 pointed stars but more got added over time as more states joined but the little old lady telling the President that his flag design sucked and making up her own is a much better story for witnessing the birth of a new country, Benjamin Franklin's latest chin and Old Glory or how it is known in many Asian nations these days, that pile of smoking ashes over there.

Special Guest Blogger: James Joyce

My books included Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Dubliners but there was plenty of other books that people pretend to have read, the latter ones by myself as my eyesight was not good and at one point my doctor advised me not to wear my glasses in the belief that my eyesight would naturally grow stronger, because my doctor was pretty goddamn stupid.
I underwent 10 operations to improve my eyesight but absolutely none of which helped and i was almost totally blind but i am still considered one of the greatest Irish writers of all time due to experimenting with structure in ways that have never done before.
Ulysses, was a version of Homer's Odyssey, except that it took place in then-modern Dublin but my greatest work was Finnegans Wake.
Some artists need total silence to focus. Others need their favorite music. A select few can only create under the influence of either alcohol, or syphilitic hallucinations and Finnegans Wake was so complex that it took me 17 years to write, and i was going to be damned nobody would be able to read it in any less time.
The whole book is written in stream-of-consciousness, dream-logic gibberish, in languages that don't actually exist and had high dork appeal but one guy who loved it was certainly not a dork, Hemingway.
Me and him were drinking buddies in Paris, but we couldn’t be more different in appearance, i was pencil necked and even my own mother would struggle to say she loved my face while Hemingway was known for his ultra-masculinity and his boxing skills which we put to good use as i would get drunk, pick a fight and then hide behind my buddy shouting “Deal with him Hemingway which for his part, he was more than happy to accommodate.
I was one of those people who bangs on about how such and such a place is the greatest place in the world and then hardly spent any time there which is why i was in Switzerland when my ulcer went pop and i fell into a coma but woke up briefly and told the nurse that my dying wish was to have my family around me but as i died before they arrived, i probably would have been better off asking for more oxygen.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Alphege

I rose up through the ranks of the clergy quite quickly and became a monk with a little hut in Somerset and from there assumed the role of Abbot of the abbey of Bath and then the Bishop of Winchester and then King Aethelred the Unready asked me to mediate with the invading Danes who had been burning down the local monasteries and generally terrorising and pillaging English villages.
Now i don't know how many Vikings you had come across but not all of them were maniacs, pillaging and battle were an important part of what they did but they also admired poetry as well, as long as it's poems about whacking someone in with a double-handed battle axe but it shows a softer nature and when i met with the Danish chieftain, Anlaf, his starting position was my God has a massive hammer, yours has a wooden Cross so what's in it for us and we discussed Adam and Eve and how God had thrown them out of paradise after Eve was fooled into eating forbidden fruit by a talking snake, they then began populating the Earth until Adam died aged 930 and so the Christian view is pretty simple, God made the Universe and us humans as we are today six days later and it worked because Anlaf converted to Christianity on the spot and promised him and his boys would to behave themselves from now on.
As a reward i was promoted to Archbishop of Canterbury and went to Rome to receiving a natty piece of clothing called the Pallium in Rome from the Pope.
Feeline pretty chiiper with myself, i returned to England and Canterbury but before i had chance to show off my new neckwear, i was captured by a different bunch of Vikings who besieged Canterbury and took hostage.
The ransom for my release was set at £3000 and the Church went pfft..yeah right like we are going to pay that and said there was more chance of finding a tap dancing Unicorn than paying that much to get me back so i tried reasoning with them that rather than rape an pillage, they could possibly give up their Sunday mornings and spend it kneeling on a hard floor in a draughty Church singing about rowing a boat ashore and listening to someone in a frock bang on for an hour about talking bushes which the Vikings took in typical Viking fashion and politley declined by sticking an Axe in my head.

Big Decision For Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United, Tottenham And Manchester City

There is a large amount of ire being rightly aimed at Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham and my team Arsenal this evening as they are being outed as the six British teams along with Atletico Madrid, Barcelona, Real Madrid, AC Milan, Inter Milan and Juventus signing up to a breakaway European Super League.
The big idea is to have a money spinning closed league only open to the 'Big European Teams' to replace the Champions League but UEFA, the British, Spanish and Italian leagues have issued a strong, joint statement saying that any clubs taking part in the new competition would be banned from competing in their domestic leagues, UEFA competitions and players involved with clubs taking part would be denied the chance to represent their national teams.   
UEFA were expected to announce an expanded Champions League format but this news may have sunk that especially as a carrot of £310 million for each member of the new league is being dangled in front of the club chairmen which eclipses the £130 million a club winning the Champions League would pocket.
The money making owners of clubs are obviously behind it and they care very little about a clubs history or tradition, they are out for themselves and making as much money as possible but the UEFA threat to ban teams from their domestic leagues will cause a few minds to sharply focus as will the threat to players of those teams who will no longer be able to play for their nations. Would players refuse to sign for a club if they were denied this opportunity and the clubs then only able to attract players who are past their international best and after one last payday like happens in the current American League.   
Big respect to French and German teams for ruling out being involved in all this but football is a super rich plaything nowadays anyway but as much as it would hurt to see my Arsenal involved and therefore out of the domestic competitions, it may make the Premier League and FA Cup competitive again if the usual suspects are no longer involved.
The six Premier League clubs have some big decisions to make but from what i have seen, they may become very, very rich but whether they will retaining their loyal fan base who will be further fleeced to pay to watch the games is something else altogether, and i very much doubt it.

 

Is That A Fun Size Mars Bar In Your Pocket?

I have long said that the most profitable place to open a clinic that specializes in penis enlargement operations would be next to a gun range as it may be men with small genitals that like to play with guns but the queues at gun shops and sports car garages may me growing soon because science has found that thanks to stupidly polluting our own planet, penises are getting smaller.
Environmental and reproductive scientist Dr Shanna Swan has said that humankind is facing an 'existential crisis' because genitals are becoming distorted and affecting fertility levels due to industrial chemicals used in everyday products 'altering male reproductive development'.
The problem is apparently down to phthalates, a chemical used in making plastics which is making its way into the food chain and therefore into the human body and reduces the male bodies capacity for producing sperm and she believes that most men won't be able to produce fertile sperm by 2045.
A 2017 study showed that sperm count in the West was down 50% in the past forty years but it is the thought that some Paul's, Leslie's and Robert's are already not far away becoming Paula, Lesley and Roberta that will shake the XY chromosome contingent the most but in other science news, scientists have developed artificial sperm so it may not be such a problem for the XX Contingent.
With the removal of their purpose, men's place could be looking very shaky but i don't think we could do without men altogether as we women will still need them, there will always be bottle's to be opened, shopping bags to be carried and cars to be parked that we have left in the road because the parking space was too small so stop worrying.

GB News Coming Soon

British Television News is ruled over by Ofcom, the Office of Communications, which ensure that the television news channels keep to a Broadcasting code of accuracy, impartiality and fairness so the arrival of the right wing GB News channel this year shouldn't be too much of concern, they are bound by the rules the same as everyone else.
The channel, led by former BBC host Andrew Neil, has set itself up as a mixture of news, opinion, and debate and is being described as a British version of right-wing network Fox News which consistently puts out misinformation but America has no regulator, we do and Ofcom booted Fox News off all the UK services for not being accurate, impartial or fair so GB News will be very short lived if it follows that blueprint.
GB News Chairman Andrew Neil was always politically to the right, he has some very right wing views on AIDS and Climate Change and was a vocal supporter of both the Afghan and Iraq Wars but he is a first and foremost a journalist of some regard who has been at the game for longer than most which is why the names recruited so far are from both sides of the ideological curtian such as Michael Portillo, Diane Abbott, Kirsty Gallacher, Alastair Stewart, Nick Ferrari, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Rachel Johnson and Piers Morgan.
The Official BBC NEWS response is that it welcomes the competition and GB News refute any comparison with Fox News, stating that it will conform to Ofcom rules on due impartiality but i am certain that Ofcom will be watching very closely that it does.

Coivd-19 Tough Choices

Covid 19 is not going away and we will have to earn to live with it according to the medical people so at some point all the World is going to have to say right that's it, no more lock-downs, we have to get back to normal regardless of the consequences.
Flu kills approximately 8,000 Brits each year, 650,000 globally while Covid 19 has taken 126,000 British souls and 3 million around the World in the same time period so it is obviously much more lethal than Flu but in the Pre-Covid days, the Government never locked down for Flu, just told people to get the jab as 8,000 deaths was an acceptable trade off number for them.
I guess the Government have their hopes pinned on the Covid jab doing the same as the Flu jab and the numbers of infections, hospitlisations and deaths will come down as the nation are vaccinated but the jabs are not 100% effective and some will still catch the highly contagious virus despite having the vaccine so the Government must decide a number which they find acceptable.
A week after restrictions were lifted to allow non-essential shops pubs, bars and restaurants to open, there has been a further 1,882 people tested positive which is an 8.7% increase on last Sunday and the daily death toll has increased too, with the 10 fatalities recorded today compared to seven deaths on this day last week and as there is a few week lag, these figures are from the previous lifting of rules, the figures from this week will be filtering through in a fortnights time.
With news that more virulent variants are cropping up in nations that never stamped on the virus immediately and allowed it to reach high infection levels, Brazil, UK, India, South Africa, then it obviously isn't just going to disappear and will be with us for the foreseeable future and so the decision is that we either treat it like flu and just grit our teeth and accept a certain number of deaths each year as was the UK Governments Plan A, or we go into a never-ending cycle of lock-downs and re-openings and the economic havoc that strategy brings.

I Need New Science Jokes

Whenever i want to impress someone of a scientific bent i have one joke that i fall back on which was told to me years ago and after it was explained to me i logged into my brain to drag out whenever required and revolves around a photon checking into a hotel and being asked by the receptionist where his luggage was to which he replied that he didn't have any as he was traveling light.
I have used that joke many times but in scientific circles it is the equivalent of the 'My Dog Has No Nose' joke so the wind is taken out of my sails when they give me the punchline so i asked the cleverest person i know, a scientist with an alphabet after their name, if they had anymore.
They asked me what was the difference between ignorance and apathy but i just said i don’t know and i don’t care so just give me some jokes to impress the nerds with and then bizarrely he said about some new band called 1023 MB but they haven’t had any gigs yet which was nothing to do with what i asked.
I think he then accused me of stealing because he explained that he would never tells jokes to a kleptomaniac because they are always taking things literally so feeling insulted, i started to pick up my things to leave but he then said that engineers always confuse Halloween and Christmas because Oct. 31 = Dec. 25.
I called him a crackpot and headed to the door but he said to engineers Octal 31 and Decimal 25 are the same and i walked out saying that if he wasn't going to take my request for clever jokes serious by not even using the correct names for the months of the year then i wasn't going to stay and listen and walked out.
The Science community may be very clever but they got no sense of humour those guys.

Only Another 150 To Go

US president Joe Biden recently announced his administration will pull US troops out of Afghanistan, bringing an end to its longest lasting war which started in 2001 and has taken the lives of 111,000 Afghan civilians, 2,000 US Troops and 400 British soldiers all for a price tag of $778bn.
You could be forgiven for not remembering the origins of the war, it was a long time ago and what started it all could be a bit hazy now but what it was absolutely not about at any time was going over there to keep us safe over here.
Let's go back to September 11, 2001 and the planes flying into the World Trade Centre buildings. Al Queada took the credit and as Bin Laden was head of the terrorist group, it was his head that America decided to come down upon.
As Bin Laden was in Afghanistan under the wing of the Afghanistan Government, the Taliban, it was to Afghanistan that America turned ordering the Taliban to hand him over for trial on threat of military action if they never.
The offer was made by George W Bush and Tony Blair that the Taliban would be left in power if they handed him over to the United States and the Taliban offered to trial him in Afghanistan or hand him over to the Pakistan authorities but America rejected the offer and stated that they would not negotiate their demands.
While this was going on, the US and Britain were trying to get United Nations backing to attack Afghanistan but because the UN can only sanction military action as an act of self-defence, the UN never backed it.
A 37-nation poll of world opinion carried out by Gallup in September 2001 found that large majorities in 34 of the countries did not favour military action, only in three countries, the United States, Israel, and India, was there a majority for a military strike.
With no UN backing, it was declared a NATO operation and on October 7, NATO began bombing Afghanistan.
Three days into the bombing, US officials rejected a new offer from the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden to a third country for trial if the Americans halted the bombing.
Nineteen years later and the Taliban may be out of Government but they still run one fifth of the nation and have a force 85,000 strong waiting to swoop back into power but never was it ever about our boys fighting so we can sleep safely in our beds at night. The Afghanistan War was entirely all about punishing the Taliban for not handing over Bin Laden and anything other is an attempt to rewrite the origins of an unpopular and disastrous war.
We shouldn't heap any praise on Biden and America for pulling their invading army out of one country because they still have troops stationed in over 150 other countries so it's a case of saying that's one down, now get you arse's out of the other 150.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Drogo

My mother died during childbirth which was something that i always felt responsible for because, well, i was responsible for it but i was not your average cute child but i did grow into what people would say was the face of a Saint, unfortunately it was a Saint Bernard.
In my teenage years i was stricken with an illness that made me physically repulsive and the townsfolk were kind enough to give me a hut stood far away from them in a field where i wouldn't frighten the children so i gave up all my belongings and deciding to devote myself to God, became a hermit and a shepherd and stayed there on my own for forty years surviving on only barley, water and the Eucharist.
I developed a knack of bilocating which is to appear in two places at once and with a face like mine, i was noticed so i could be in the congregation at Mass and simultaneously appear sitting outside my hut watching the sheep and therefore doubling my boredom in one fell swoop.
One day my hut caught fire and the villagers came running with buckets of water and told me to get out but i said that if the Divine Goodness wants me to escape, he will allow me to and i sat and prayed and several buckets of water later i was sat amidst the smoldering remains of my hut with barely a singed smock so took that as sign that i had been spared.
My hut was rebuilt and on my death i was handed the Patronage of unattractive people but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, which is a pity, because i would regularly receive letters from the Association of Beholders to tell me that I had a face like a sack full of dented bells.
I now regularly receive prayers from young people to say they have a party coming up and can i keep away any pimples or cold sores which i am fine with, it's the requests to make sure that i try and make them look as little like me as possible that sting.

Special Guest Blogger: John Glenn

When it comes to space travel, most of us remember the Sovit Union Dog Laika, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong but all the other astronauts and missions tend to get jumbled together in a hazy mess but it was the competition between the Soviets in the red corner and the Americans in the red, white and blue one which pushed us both onwards and upwards to explore above the clouds.
By 1962 America was having its backside paddled by the Soviets in the Space Race and America's official response was to contemplate nuking the moon to stop the Soviets from making a landing on it but fortunately the United States came to the decision that exploding a nuclear bomb on an orbiting planetary body for no particular reason might make them come across as a tad insane so we upped the game of our own space agency and that's how i became the third American in space and the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times.
The Project Mercury recruitment program began with 508 of us which got whittled down to 110 and then 34 before the grueling series of physical and psychological tests to find the right seven people made of the right mental and physical stuff and most crucially stood exactly 5ft 11 inches which was the size you needed to be to fit into the spacecraft seats.
The first unmanned trial exploded seconds after it left the launchpad but the boffins assured us it wouldn't happen next time and i was considering buying some platform shoes to make me 6ft 2inches when i was selected for Mercury-Atlas 6, NASA's first crewed orbital flight.
We didn't explode this time and made it up to Space but during the first orbit the automatic-control system failed and then the telemetry indicated that the heat shield was loose but it held on until we splashed down in the Ocean almost 5 hours later.
I dabbled in politics afterwards and i did return to Space aged 77 to study the effects of space flight on older people and became the the oldest person to fly in space but i was only a small part in a list of people and dogs which culminated with mankind landing on the moon (or making a fake film of it depending upon your standpoint) where we played golf, drove around in a buggy, stuck a flag in the ground and then just kinda forgot all about it because by now it should be swarming with Americans waving flags and shouting 'awesome' while wearing Uncle Sam hats and eating hot-dogs.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Lidwina

I'm probably not the best advert for Ice Skating so making me the Patron Saint of the Sport which resulted in my death is probably not the best move but there are not many ice skating Saints on the roster so i got the gig.
I suffered a fall while ice skating when a friend shouted at me to watch her do a triple axel but instead of landing gracefully on her feet, she collided with me and caused me to break a rib on the right side which led to an abscess and other illnesses which left me partially paralysed. I spent much of my life in bed, only able to move my left arm which i was told was a gift from God, especially as my hands and feet then started bleeding which become known as Stigmata.  
As if that isn't enough suffering, my flesh began to fall off and even parts of my intestines rotted and fell away but my parents picked them up, threw out the flowers and kept them in a vase on the mantelpiece in our house because why have daffodils when you can have rancid parts of your decaying daughter on show instead.
News of the rotting, bed ridden girl blessed by God with bloody feet and paralysis soon broke and i had people coming to see my decomposing body with one man in England having the water i washed in sent to him to bathe in, hoping it would heal his gammy leg.
Another woman drank my breast milk but i really don't know what that was all about but it was very weird but on those long nights, i would close my eyes and pray, pray that if all this was a gift from God, i hope he doesn't know when my birthday is.

Special Guest Blogger: William Brewster

To be elected Head of a zealously religious bunch who thought celebrating the birth and death of the saviour was not religious enough, it shows how religious i was but then that's why i left the Church of England and teamed up with the Puritans in Scrooby, Nottingham.
As part of the Scrooby Gang, we tried to get things changed in England but they were happy to carry on ignoring the tale of how God had thrown a man and woman he made from her rib out of paradise after being fooled into eating forbidden fruit by a talking snake and then began populating the Earth until the man died aged 930.
Our view was pretty simple, God made the Universe and us humans as we are today six days later and there is no room for evolution and all that science nonsense but amazingly they chose to ignore our warnings so we wanted to live around people like ourselves, and there was a bunch of like-minded folk in the Netherlands so we tried to leave but leaving England without permission was illegal at the time, so on our first attempt we all got arrested but we managed to sneak out on the second attempt and when we got to the Low Country it turned out that i was the highest-ranking layperson of the congregation and made the designated spiritual leader in the New World.
So off we went on the Mayflower, that would be me, my wife Mary and our sons Love Brewster, Wrestling Brewster and our daughters Fear Brewster and Patience Brewster and when we landed at Plymouth i was the top religious guy and set about banning things such as Christmas and cards, dice, fancy clothing and smoking in public.
That first Winter was harsh but lots of praying got us through it, praying and to a small degree the Indians feeding us but mostly praying and we went on to make a country in our own image where a person is free to prosecute anyone with a different religious view or with the ability to reason and think for themselves or is armed with fossils and a handful of dinosaur bones.

Special Guest Blogger: Princess Olga of Kiev

Things were going well for me in 10th century Kiev, i was married to a nice man, Prince Igor, and we lived a nice life or as nice as we could in a time when you had a varied choice of diseases to die from and the latest wonder medical procedure was having your blood drained from your body.
One day Igor went out to collect tribute from the neighboring Drevlians, but instead of paying up they killed him by tying his legs to two bent down birch trees and then letting the trees straighten again and tearing his body apart.
Because our son was too young to take the throne, it was passed to me and the Drevlians saw an opportunity to take over my Kingdom but rather than war, they thought they could use my newfound husband-less situation to marry me off to one of them and unite our Kingdoms with their guy as King over both.
They obviously hunted around for their best guys as potential suitors and sent 20 men to me to chose which one would share the throne so i put on my best smile and welcomed the visitors and told them that my people would carry them in their boats to the castle, so they wouldn't have to walk. And they did but when they got to the castle's courtyard, the carriers dumped the suitors, boat and all, into a giant trench where they were all buried alive.
I then sent a messenger to say i had chosen and to send their top people to help prepare for the wedding which they did and i directed them to a a bathhouse to wash up after their long journey and once inside, i barred the doors and set the whole building on fire.
I sent another messenger with an oops, sorry about that, accidents will happen and all that so you had better send some people to attend the funerals and they sent five thousand mourners who delicately stepped around the smouldering remains of a bathhouse to a wake where i plied them with drink and when they were good and drunk, me and a few hundred of my troops went around and killed them all.
The Drevlians by now were starting to think something was amiss when none of the thousands guys they sent my way ever returned and noticing thousands of freshly dug graves sent a WTF message which i replied with my own message of OK, its a fair cop i have been whacking your guys but as a a gesture of peace, if you send three pigeons from each Drevlian household then all would be cool between us.
As they were running out of men for their army, they agreed and delivered the birds and later that night i had fabric covered in sulfur attached to all the birds’ legs and lit them, letting them fly back to their home nests and burning the whole city to the ground and as a nice touch, i stationed my army around the city to kill anybody who passed us trying to flee the fire.
I then took over their land and doubled the taxes of the those remaining alive so forget about revenge being a dish best served cold, i always prefered the hot, complex, and very, very bloody type.

Special Guest Blogger: Prince Philip

Life is fleeting, and a percentage of the people reading this will die before they reach the end of this post but then other people go on living. In fact, they stay alive so long, it's scary and us Royals do tend to live long and healthy lives, much to my son Charles disappointment, but i know the Royal secret to living to a fair old age, do very little.
We wave at the plebs lining the streets every now and then, travel First Class to far flung parts of the World and remember to feed the corgi's while having our every whim seen to by an army of lackeys, but that's it.  
My nickname was Phil The Greek but i may have been born on Corfu into Greece’s royal family, yet i was as Greek as a Cornish pasty as we were actually a mix of Dane, Russian and German, our family name was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs.
As the Royal marriage pool is very shallow, Lizzie and i were third cousins and we actually first met when she was 13 and came to Dartmouth College where i was studying to have a bit of a nose around and then we met up again a few years later at a family get together and that shallow marriage pool really played to my favour as i proposed to her.
The British were initially not keen on me, the war was just over and my German heritage and two of my sisters being married to a couple of Nazi's didn't play that well but i took British citizenship, dropped the ridiculous Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs name in favour of Mountbatten and settled in for a decent couple of fun filled decades before the wife took the throne but George VI inconveniently died soon after and so began a career of me walking behind the now Queen looking grumpy as her consort despite going all around the World and showing how grateful i was for their generous welcome by insulting them.
I said China was ghastly and told British students there they will get slitty eyes if they stay there too long, said the people in Papau New Guinea were cannibals, called Hungarians pot bellied, said Canada was boring, Kenyan women looked like men, Caymen Islanders were all descended from Pirates, the French couldn't cook and the Australian aborigines were spear chuckers but what were they going to do about it? Sack me?
I may have had a face like a pug-dog chewing a bee but i will miss Britain now i'm no longer in the land of the living, not all of it obviously, there are some cities in it even i couldn't do down by insulting it, but i am now up here looking forward to see if Meghan turns up at my funeral although i did rush as quickly as i could through the pearly gates, they looked so unsafe they could only have been put up by an Indian.

99 And Out

On the news that Prince Philip had died, the first thoughts of many of his British subjects was, do we get a day off then?
Apparently we don't, that's only for when the Queen's clogs are popped but tributes have been made for the the man whose claim to fame was being married to the Queen and who died aged 99 and just months before he was due to get the 100th birthday letter from his wife.
As the Royal marriage pool is very shallow, the Queen and Philip actually met at a family get together, they were third cousins, but once all the gushing about what a great person he was who served his country so admirably has died down, the darker side of him will be what he is most remembered for, the asking an Aborigine if they still threw spears at each other, telling British students in China that if they stayed there much longer they will get slitty eyes and saying that his Palaces wiring was so bad it was probably put in by an Indian, those sort of things.   
The Royals do tend to live long and healthy lives, much to Prince Charles disappointment, but i know the Royal secret to living to a fair old age, actually do very little.
That's the Royals secret. They do nothing whatsoever. Wave at the plebs lining the streets every now and then and remember to feed the corgi's while having your every whim seen to by an army of lackeys, but that's it.
The big question is whether Meghan will turn up with Harry for the funeral after what she said about the Royals because that could make for a very awkward few moments at the funeral but we won't know because we will all be working that day.

Special Guest Blogger: Syd Barrett

Rock stars are meant to be a bit weird and out there and it's not just part of the act either because the best tunes comes from brains which are broken and that can be through drinking, snorting or inhaling all sorts of interesting things or as in my case, popping LSD tablets like smarties.
I was the original singer and guitarist for Pink Floyd and we were The Abdabs, The Screaming Abdabs, Sigma 6, T-Set, The Meggadeaths and the Pink Floyd Sound before we settled on that name when we went to record our debut Album.
It was me who wrote all the early songs and guided the band through the experimental stage in the 1960s which is no mean feat as i was living through a fog of acid in which i existed which got heavier and heavier until i was barely able to function.
There would be times when 6.30pm became 11.30pm without me noticing and sometimes that was on stage where i would stand perfectly still either just staring into space or repeatedly striking the same chord on my guitar for the entire performance so the band hired another guitarist, Dave Gilmour, to play my bits when i was too out of my mind to perform, which tended to be most of the time.
Since i had written all their songs up to that point, the band was reluctant to give me the boot entirely and tried to keep me around but eventually they just sacked me but i wasn't the type to sit at home sulking, i instead did that from the front row of their concerts and just stood there staring evils at them.
I did try and make a solo album but that turned out as well as can expected from a man out of his face on LSD and i went to live with my parents in Cambridge until i died of cancer but when the history book of music is written it will show that i was the force behind one of the biggest bands in the 70's and although i may not remember it, i'd been there and i knew what the rock n roll lifestyle was and believe me, it's far better to have lived and lost it than to listen to a whole album by bloody Olivia Newton-John.

Special Guest Blogger: Squanto

The White man was coming to our lands long before the Mayflower gang turned up and ruined everything. They would trade with us and the fishermen from northern France and southern England had been coming over every spring to fish for cod and take it back to Europe and then one day European explorers arrived and one of them, Captain George Weymouth, came searching for gold but when he didn't find any, decided that capturing a bunch of us native American Indians instead was just as good and kidnapped us and took us back to England.
I spent a decade in that cold, rainy island where it is dark for 6 months of the year until we were taken to Spain to be sold but a group of local priests took me in and sent me back to England and from there i went back to North America to find that my tribe had been wiped out by smallpox courtesy of the Europeans, thanks guys.
I went to live with the Wampanoag tribe and then the Pilgrims turned up and after a discussion of whether to attack or help them, i persuaded the tribe chief that these guys were not the brightest, one of them had bought 129 pairs of shoes instead of food or seeds and we could be on a nice little earner so as i had picked up the English language during my time over there, i was sent to negotiate with them.
Being not that bright as expected, they were all slowly dying of starvation so i taught them how to plant corn, catch fish, eat wild plants, and other ways to survive and most of them did live and we had a nice little thing going and until even more of them turned up and began encroaching onto our land and stealing our corn.
The Wampanoag's said i was favouring them and when the Indians began pushing back the Pilgrims blamed me for not stopping them so i said right, you stop nicking their land and you stop threatening to scalp them but i am not sure how that turned out because i died straight afterwards after eating some suspiciously weird tasting fish but i am sure that they made up and the Indians and the settlers now live together in peace and harmony because the Christian religion is all about love and peace so how bad can a nation created by religious fanatics be to each other?

Special Guest Blogger: Pamela Lyndon Travers

You may have heard of the books i wrote, the ones about a magical nanny called Mary Poppins, but more than likely you have seen the awful film that got made of my books but thanks to me they almost never made it to the cinema.
I was a Shakespearean actress in Australia and came to England to act and during one cold winter in Sussex, i began writing a short story about a nanny and a street artist named Bert which was loosely based on the Peter Pan stories and they were well received so i wrote some more but unknown to me, somewhere in America the children of a very famous man was reading them and said they would make a great film and that set in motion the next 20 years of Walt Disney trying to purchase the film rights to Mary Poppins from me, he even turned up at my home but i kept telling him no as i really didn't want him and his cheap, low quality commercial nonsense anywhere near my brilliant stories.
Finally, after my finances took a turn for the worst and he paid for my first class flight to Los Angeles, i finally agreed to sell the rights for $100,000 and five percent of the movie’s gross earnings and then spent the rest of my life hating the result and fighting tooth and nail against the changes he was making to my stories.
I objected to everything from the animated penguin sequences, the silly made-up words like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, and even the movie stars hired to star in the film.
Julie Andrews as the sweet, smiling, lover dovey Mary Poppins was wrong in every way as my Mary Poppins was a cross, short tempered, unloving, and grumpy cow and anyone with ears couldn't help but be offended by Dick Van Dyke's hideous British accent.
Despite my protests, Disney refused to rewrite the movie and put out the finished version complete with the bloody dancing penguins so i agreed to a stage version of Mary Poppins and made it a condition that only if no one who worked on the Disney film could be involved and in my will i made a stipulation that will hurt him when he eventually thaws himself out and reads it, Disney can never make a sequel and no Americans shall ever be granted permission to work on a Poppins project ever again and no amount of sugar would make that medicine go down.

Special Guest Blogger: Wolf Tone

There are times in your life when fate is screaming at you to stop doing whatever stupid thing you are doing and change direction and there are some people who take heed and go off and do something else instead and there are those who just say what the hell and plough on regardless even when fate is repeatedly kneeing them in the testicles. I was the second type.
After a brief journey in the world of law and a few run in's with a lawyer named George Hill, i thought it was time to change career and i considered becoming an actor, a lawyer or soldier but my aspiration was to overthrow the Kingdom of Ireland and free my nation of the dreaded British.
I became the head of the Irish Independence movement and my followers called me the Irish George Washington but rather than valiantly leading my forces to victory, founding an independent nation that would go on to become the most powerful in the world, i fell from one disaster to the next and ended up slashing my own throat.
I had a kindred spirit in the Reverend William Jackson who agreed with me that Ireland was ripe for revolution and i drew up a blueprint for him which he showed to a friend who immediately told the British who arrested him for treason and he committed suicide during his trial.
Fearing the same fate, i made a dash to America and decided to direct affairs from the safe distance of the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
Calling ourselves The United Irishmen, we began to look to France to support a rising with troops, they hated the British as much as us and i took my plan to Paris and the French Colonels agreed that the British Empire should be taken down a peg or two and agreed to send 43 ships and 14,000 men to the coast of Ireland but the luck of the Irish kicked in immediately, sending gales and fog to meet the French fleet whose ships of course all promptly sunk or turned sail and ran away.
We tried again, this time sailing from the Netherlands but ran straight into a British convoy who crushed the French fleet so third time lucky, we sailed again and was immediately captured by the British and taken prisoner.
I was brought ashore at Letterkenny Port and all the captured French forces were to be arrested but my captors didn't even recognise me and i was just starting to think i would have gotten away if Lady Luck hadn't taken the time to deliver a flying dropkick to my nuts yet again. By sheer bad luck, while stepping off the prison boat i happened to be noticed by a passing George Hill, the same one i had argued with several times back when i was practicing law and he ratted me out.
I was charged with treason and sentenced to death which i accepted but made a request that rather than be hanged, i be given a more honorable death by firing squad.
The British, being utter dicks, insisted that hanging was the only way to go so in a strategically ill-considered move, i countered by cutting my own throat and in a daft move the British tried for a week to stop me from dying just so they could kill me instead but i had the last laugh by dying first.

Special Guest Blogger: Jack Johnson

There's a reason why nothing gets your name written into history books quicker than being first at something. Humanity is all about breaking new ground so of course we idolise those who are the first at something with the exception of being the first Black Heavyweight Champion, that didn't go down so well at the time.
Before i became the Galveston Giant, i was a bit of a weedy kid growing up in Texas but i grew up with white boys and my race was never an issue until a local tough began picking on me and i beat the tar out of him which got me an invite to a local boxing league and then invites to Prize Fights and eventually a shot at the World Coloured Heavyweight Championship which i won.
I held the title until i beat Tommy Burns for the World Heavyweight title and became the first black man to be World Heavyweight Champion and then it was noticed that i was black and the white folk had realised they had allowed black folk become too powerful by letting them be successful in sports and having non white skin and that wasn't supposed to happen.
The racism among whites ran so deep that they called for a 'Great White Hope' to set the racial hierarchy back to its natural order with them at the top and take the title away from me 'to stop ignorant blacks misinterpreting his victory as justifying claims that they are physically equal with their white neighbors' as the New York Times helpfully explained.
Great White Hopes came and were carried away again, i hit one guy called Stanley Ketchel so hard that my trainer had to remove his teeth from my glove. True story, his front teeth were actually embedded in my boxing glove.
A former undefeated heavyweight champion, James J. Jeffries, even came out of retirement to challenge me to prove 'that a white man is better than a Negro' although he didn't specify what they were better at but he was certainly better than this negro at spending time on his back with stars spinning around his head.
The more White challengers i knocked out the more tense the racism got and me having a thing for white women really annoyed other white people along with my racing flashy sports cars, traveling the world, rocking gold teeth and a gold handled cane and at one point i got jailed for a year for violating the Mann Act by transporting women across state lines for immoral purposes despite the fact that the incident took place before the Mann Act was passed and the woman in question was my future wife.
I did refuse to fight black opponents because i was being very well paid taking on whatever white challengers they put in front of me but i did lose my title to a cowboy called Jess Willard who knocked me out in the 26th round.
I kept fighting because it gave me a rewarding career maiming others and i knew how to stay fit through running, wrestling, stuffing 20s down panties of foxy strippers and beating the hell out of people in private cellar fights.
I made my last ring appearance at age 67 but the hit i took to the head a year later from a telegraph pole when i drove my car at high speed into it ended it for me so i never improved race relations but my success got the racists frothing at the mouth with rage and i ended up with the front teeth of one of them embedded in my gloves so i'm chalking that up as a win.

Vaccine Passports On The Way Soon

Known for making more U-Turns then a faulty Sat-Nav, Boris Johnson has changed his mind on Covid Passports and is set to announce a system for 'COVID-status certification which could allow people to return to sporting fixtures, theatres and other public events'.
Officials are planning a series of trial events over the coming months as they look to find a way for venues such as sporting events and concerts to reopen without the need for social distancing based on vaccinations, a recent negative test or natural immunity determined on the basis of a positive test taken in the previous six months following similar schemes already being used in Israel and China although some are suspicious about the plan and say they are dangerous and discriminatory.
The sticking point seems to be exemptions for people for whom vaccination is not advised such as pregnant women but polls are showing that the public is more relaxed than politicians about vaccine passports with most people just longing for lock-down to be over and they can start going out again.
Personally, i have no problem with carrying proof that i have been vaccinated if it means we can get back to normal and i agree that nobody should be forced to be vacinnated against their will but my issue is if everything is reopened then what will make those not yet vaccinated get the jab and protect everyone else which will leave the UK vulnerable to a new surge of Covid-19 infections and we are back to square one.
If i am going to be sat on a train or in a cinema in close proximity with a group of other people, i want to know that while doing everything we can to protect ourselves, some thoughtless person hasn't slipped though to potentially start the whole thing up again once we have gone through a year of lock-downs and 126,000 deaths to eradicate it.  
The voices against say that the immunity passports could be used to restrict the rights of people who have refused a Covid-19 vaccine, which to me is the whole point.

Special Guest Blogger: The Easter Bunny

In our busy lives we don't often get the chance to sit down and reflect on the true meaning of Easter or the sacrifice of someone who gave their all for us. Who? Don't be silly, I’m talking about me, the Easter Bunny.
With the possible exception of Santa Claus himself, there is not a busier mammal on the face of the earth than the Easter Bunny. Once a year i hop into the home of hundreds of millions of boys and girls all over the World, dropping off chocolate eggs.
Christmas is obviously the big one when it comes to holidays, we get blasted with songs about snowmen and Santa but Easter is just about stuffing chocolate and trying to avoid the religious films on the television.
For some reason, nobody has managed to come up with a good Easter song in the same way that Christmas has caught the imagination of songwriters.
I can't think of one tune that tells us that the Easter Bunny is coming to town or how we wish it could be Easter everyday.
If Easter is more important than Christmas to the religious crowd then you would have thought Slade or The Pogues would have put out a 'Merry Easter Everybody' single about hanging up a crucifix on your wall, it's the time that every Judas has a ball.
The only rabbit based film i can recall was Watership Down and there wasn't a chocolate egg in sight.
The Spring holiday used to be simple enough, you'd dig the old druidic robes out of the closet, pop down to the local ring of giant stones to watch a virgin get stabbed in the heart with a goats horn but then as usual the Christians came along and ruined everyone's good time by calling the day their saviour was beaten, tortured and nailed to a big piece of wood 'Good Friday'.
Good is not the word i'd use to describe it but then i don't know where it says in the Bible that they should celebrate the Crucifixion of God's only son by eating our own weight in chocolate, or where a rabbit fits into the whole scheme of things but that's the way Christians have decided to do it and who are we to argue. Keeps me in a job after all.

The Sensitive Issue Of Male Baldness

Men can be sensitive souls and one of the things they are most sensitive over is when they begin losing their hair so the subject has to be approached with tact and delicacy to protect feelings of men who are follicly challenged but there could hope on the horizon for chrome domes everywhere because scientists have identified a potential cure that could restore ailing thatches to their former glory.
Excited scientists at Harvard University are hopeful they have discovered the key that slap heads have been waiting for by identifying the mechanism which causes the hair to fall out and they have managed to reverse the process in rodents and are confident that it will translate to the shiny heads of men who are rocking the Kojak look.
They are warning that the discovery is only the first key step towards helping men who haven't said the words 'Good Hair Day' for decades and this is not a miracle cure for Baldilocks but they are discussing whether it could be administered through a tablet, injection, genetic manipulation or some other form to gentlemen with a head as hairless as a polar ice cap.
Their experiments revealed that high corticosterone levels stop hair follicles from regenerating leading to the snow globe look but when levels of the hormone are depleted, new hair grows and the male head starts to less resemble a snooker ball.
Some good news then for all those men as bald as a coot but until the science has been proven, those of us not going with the comb under look can just carry on being sensitive to all the egg heads out there who may not be in our hairdressers or barbers, but they are in our thoughts.

Racism? No Racism Here

It is great to hear that the latest report on racism in the UK has found that there is no racism in the UK although it may come as quite a surprise to the many victims of racism in the UK.
In response to the Black Lives Matters protests last year, Boris Johnson instigated the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities to compile a report on inequality in Britain and it's findings along the lines of 'Move along, nothing to see here' has not gone down well with many people, including the people who were referenced in the report who have accused the report of misrepresenting them, cherry picking the evidence and including quotes from people who were not even consulted.
It didn't help that Boris Johnson's most senior black adviser for civil society and communities resigned due to the lack of action on the previous reports which found the opposite to the reports findings and found that race discrimination in the UK is very real and very much still ongoing.
The report states that the team found no evidence of 'institutional racism' and the term 'racism' had become a 'catch-all phrase' and probably the most controversial section which states that there should be a 'positive spin on slavery and empire when teaching history in schools', a view the right Wing Daily Mail trumpeted on its front page.
I guess if you if you ignore the UK’s racist prime minister, its institutional racism, the many other reports citing racism and the right wing media's long history of racist propaganda, then yes we can all agree that the UK is not institutionally racist as the blinkered, willfully ignorant, deludedly patriotic flag waving anti-woke warriors will now claim.

Special Guest Blogger: Nicolae Ceausescu

As the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Romania, i fought Capitalism the hard way, in designer clothes with millions in the bank and sports cars but we were late to the Communist Revolution and we had to catch up fast.
I said to my people that under Communism they would have so much access to food that they could pile it on top of each other and reach God but then we banned God saying he did not exist and as they soon found out neither did the food so it was true but what Romania did have was The Genius of the Carpathians, aka me, and a magnificent scepter which was so great even Salvador Dali wrote to me to say how awesome it was and with facial hair like that, he would know magnificent when he sees it.
As i did have some enemies, i was convinced that someone might be trying to poison me through my clothing so i only wore each set of clothes just once then sent them to the incinerator but with great success there is always a price to pay and i became scared of things normal people don’t have to be scared about such as them trying to storm the gates of my home so i cleared an area of 19 Churches and 30,000 homes and built a Palace surrounded by only the best security equipment to stop any invaders, strangers or unwanted relative making it inside.
Strangely the other nations Communist leaders never seemed to warm to me very much but the West did, the British even knighted me and the French granted me it's Legion of Honor but my secure Palace shielded me from the outside so i had no idea just how jealous my own people were of me.
1989 was not a good year for Communism and the entire country flipped out in an uprising and i thought i would make a reassuring speech to soothe the crowd but it only made them angrier and i thought it would be prudent to get the hell out of there but they caught me and tied my wife and myself together and shot us both.   
That was on Christmas Day and just to add insult to injury, the last thing i heard was that the Queen of Britain had revoked my knighthood.

Special Guest Blogger: Ada Lovelace

Nine months after my mother's brief liaison with mad, bad and dangerous to know poet and nutcase Lord Byron, i was born but Mum was worried that i would inherit his insanity and go crazy and start writing odes to clouds and things so she hit me with the only known thing that could temper my hot Byronic blood, mathematics.
Some people are absolute beasts at figuring out the length of the slanty side of a triangle and i did have a natural ability for maths and i had some great teachers to learn from including Charles Babbage who would invite me to his nerd parties to hear him talk about his Analytical Engine.
Despite being a monster at maths, it was next to impossible for a woman to get a career in maths because the only counting a woman was expected to do was keep a total of how many children she had given birth to but i found Babbage's Engine fascinating.
I said a new vast and powerful language could be developed for the future use of analysis and provide a practical application for the purposes of mankind which was quickly followed by someone else saying 'Look, the very first computer geek'.
I wrote the very first algorithm for the computer, or the Analytical Engine as he stupidly decided to call it, to compute Bernoulli numbers which is considered to be the first computer algorithm and earned me the title of the first computer programmer, not the first female computer scientist, mind you, but the first one ever, period.
Babbage might have had the idea, but it was me who figured out how to make it work but i died at the age of 36 from uterine cancer and Babbage never did build any of his calculating machines but that's a bit of a disappointing end to my story but computers have gone from strength to strength and now dominate human life.
Of course the increase in more powerful computers does have a creepy side, what's to say that at some point the machines won't view us as the cause of all the Worlds problems and decide that what the World needs is less of us humans around mucking things up so computers will take over the World and all those pale faced, girl-friendless people are now out there writing computer code that will make you unemployed, so don't feel bad about that time you accidentally spilt coffee over your laptop, it deserved it, the soon to be job stealing fecker.