Wednesday, 30 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Pre-Human Lucy
I had the good fortune to die and get thrown into a peat bog so when you modern day humans found me 3.2 million years later, most of me was still intact so i am the oldest known human-ish thing, sort of human because my alloted time on the Planet was just as the apes were turning into humans.
I had quite a long life for a prehistoric cave dweller where the average person spent their life trying to chase sabre toothed tigers away with a stick and i died at the ripe old age of 12 when i went looking for dinner with my spear and there was plenty of animals to hunt that ate simple, healthy, plant-based diets, and for the most part, they didn't tend to be particularly bright but that day my lunch decided to make me into a meal instead and if the wildlife wasn't trying to kill us, we also had the Neanderthals who were big, stupid, hairy man-apes who quite rightly were little more than an evolutionary dead end, essentially apes that had figured out how to use clubs until Homo Sapiens got tired of their bullshit and bashed their big, dumb faces in.
It was thanks to us that you knew which berries are a tasty treat and which will have you squatting in a ditch crapping your intestines inside-out and our species ability to pass information and knowledge from one generation to the next so once humans developed enough they were able to settle down and start multiplying like catholic bunnies.
You turned up with an entire World ready created with oceans and most of the deadliest dinosaurs extinct and an absolute freedom to make what you wanted with it and you soared ahead in many ways, but honestly, you should be a utopia already but Human evolution over the next few million years granted you big brains with the ability for complex thought and the following generations came up with a few, great new ideas that changed the world and move things forward like fire, the wheel, the steam engine, the printing press, the engine, spaceships but you also dreamt up innovations that began ballsing everything up big style.
You took the billion of tonnes of dead dinosaurs and burnt them polluting your home and created a wide array of different Gods to explain how the Earth and Humans were created therefore believing that man was made from dust and life was blown in through his nostril and created a woman from one of his ribs.
To some that makes perfect sense, men from dust and women from a bit of skeleton so all that evolving over billions of years is dismissed as as silly nonsense and ironically, those that are most militant about using up the fossil fuels, now don't actually believe in fossils! Hello...missing link between apes and humans sat right here!
Looking at what you have done you lot have been messing it up for a long time now, history is littered with examples of people who have failed you miserably so you have nuclear missiles, guns, religious wars, plastic, pollution, nuclear waste, climate change, you really have jiggered the entire effing lot, haven’t you.
When the human race finally kills its stupid self and makes the Earth uninhabitable, and it obviously will be, i'd like to think that you will be treated to a season-finale-esque montage of the Earths best moments but that won't feature you lot for very long because thanks to you the Planet’s gone. Well done, humans!
Tuesday, 29 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Gregor MacGregor
Deciding that i didn't have anything left to stay in Britain for, i sailed off to Venezuela to join their war for independence against the Spanish and that's where the fun starts because once there i thought this is an opportunity for a new beginning where nobody knows me so i could be anyone i wanted and deciding to be as honest as the day is long, a day on Jupiter that is, i introduced myself as Sir Gregor, a veteran of the British Army and a Knight to boot so they gave me the rank of Colonel and i spent the rest of the war organising and explaining to the Venezuelans how the British did things.
By more luck then judgement, we won and once the fighting in Venezuela ended, i gathered up some troops and continued attacking any surviving Spanish outposts and that's how i discovered Mosquito Coast in Nicaragua, an unwelcoming piece of swampy land and i met with the King and persuaded him to sign the land over to me, a British Knight, Gentleman and war hero of the British and Venezuelan army to build a colony because new colonies were popping up all over the place all the time and as the land was basically just a swamp, he was more than happy to give it to me.
With the land deal under my belt i returned to Britain and graduated from pretending i was a Knight to pretending i was a Prince of the incredibly beautiful land of Poyais in Central America, a paradise with endless summer and fertile ground with vast plantations of sugar, coffee and cotton and for that additional touch, gold in the mountains and to make it even more believable, on the ship journey i had created a guide to Poyais along with a national flag and even an anthem.
It is said that lies spread around the world while the truth is still putting on it's shoes but sometimes the shoes are not even bothered to be taken out of the wardrobe and i set about recruiting wannabe colonists to the paradise and people jumped at the opportunity, paying 4 shillings an acre and exchanging their British pound notes for Poyain currency which i just managed to have 70,000 printed.
The first 50 settlers with a pocketful of useless Poyainian currency set off for the Mosquito Coast on a ship, an uneventful journey until they approached the Mosquito Coast and people noticed how spectacularly Poyais was just not there.
By then i had secured myself a £200,000 loan leveraged against all the gold i owned back in Poyais and i was a Prince so why wouldn't they believe me but knowing that soon there would be a bunch of disgruntled colonists arriving back in the UK and staying there may not be the healthiest option, i buggered off France.
With cartology still in it's infancy, people just assumed they had just sailed slightly off course so the settlers started to unpack while some people went looking for directions to Poyais. Then a bunch of things happened, first a hurricane hit the settlers, scattering and destroying their belongings and stranding them as the ship blew out to sea and without shelter in the humid new land, literally every settler contracted malaria or yellow fever and by the time a rescue mission was launched weeks later, two thirds of the original settlers died but by then another boatload of colonists had arrived only to be told by the Nicaraguan Government that they had been swindled and the new country had been cancelled and to go back home.
I performed the same trick in France and waved off another 50 soon to not be Poyaians and then shot off back to Britain and was immediately arrested due to the whole swindling people and sending them off to a fake land i made up thing but due to a lack of people willing to come forward to admit investing their fortune into a made-up country, and the last thing they wanted was the publicity that they had done their family fortune, i was released for lack of evidence and went back to France where i was arrested and once again released.
Eventually the money ran out so i sailed back to Venezuela, reminded them that i had fought for their independence and they welcomed me like a returning hero and even gave me a pension and i spent the rest of my life living in comfort and reminiscing with my old war buddies about our glory days.
So there you have my life and despite everything, Karma gave me a pass but sometimes you just couldn't make up some peoples greed and stupidity or rather, as i found out, you can and make an absolute fortune from it.
Monday, 28 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Baba Anujka
I was an accomplished amateur chemist in my village of Vladimirovac in Yugoslavia and after my husband died, i made a bit of money selling herbs and potions to the wives of farmers who sought my help for health problems and as my reputation grew, i began to recieve some more demanding requests such as soldiers asking for mixtures which would them just ill enough to escape military service and as popular as that was, my biggest seller was for something i called 'magic water' because a wife's troublesome husband would magically disappear about eight days after drinking it.
I had a particular distaste for domestic violence, that makes me want to put my fist through something but instead i sold my magic water to women with abusive husbands and it contained arsenic in small quantities and certain plant toxins that were difficult to detect but i was professional about it, calculating the exact amount required according to the body mass of the unfortunate recipient.
My primary business was spread by word of mouth by women with shitty husbands and i advised them to refuse any offer of an autopsy for their husbands, and it just wasn't all that uncommon for a middle-aged man to drop dead for no apparent reason back then so there wasn't a great amount of suspicion raised and things were going so well that i even hired a sales agent to find potential clients but that proved to be my mistake as one new client used my potion on her first husband and then the wealthy uncle of her second husband died in the same circumstances not long after the wedding and the police became suspicious and the woman pointed the finger at me.
At my trial i played the 'sweet little old lady' card and got off because nobody would believe i would do such a thing so i went back to making my magic water but i got arrested again a decade later after one client messed up the dosage for her husband and he managed to get himself to a doctor before he died and the doctor discovered what he had taken and the wife snaked me out.
That was just after my 90th birthday and i imagined the same result but this time the authorities remembered that i had been accused of this once before so dug up the bodies of the deceased and found traces of my potions in whatever was left of their remains and i got given 15 years hard labour.
I got out after eight due to my old age and died two years later age 100 so i lived a long and mostly successful life and my name in the history books and the 150 deaths of shitty husbands accredited to me shows there is always a demand for a sweet, little old lady with poison.
Friday, 25 June 2021
Trans Weightlifter Unfair Advantage
Once the football is over and Italy have the European Championship Trophy safely tucked away somewhere in Rome, it is the turn of the Olympics and a month of superfit athletes jumping, throwing and running but one sport that i have never watched is weight lifting.
Without Googling, i could not name you a single weightlifter alive or dead but one New Zealand lifter is now making headlines as Ms Laurel Hubbard was up until 2012 Mr Laurel Hubbard and will be competing in the women's competition.
Now i am not a biologist, i spent most Biology lessons at school around the back of the bicycle sheds with Benson and Hedges but a male physiology is very different to a females, one scientist who did less smoking at school than i did put the advantage at as much as 34% which is borne out in the record books that the heaviest weight lifted ever by a woman is 246 kg while the male record is 484 kg.
I understand the argument that Laurel is now a woman and more power to her, she can be who she likes, but it seems very unfair that women will be competing against with such a massive biological advantage, especially when athletics spends millions trying to catch drug cheats trying to gain a tiny but important advantage.
We have been here before with 800m runner Mokgadi Caster Semenya who was assigned female at birth but had the body of a man with the XY chromosomes and naturally elevated testosterone levels which won her two Olympic gold medals and three World Championships and despite Hubbard being a totally average male lifter, she will still lift more than the top female lifters because despite everything, she has a male body.
Sport has separate male and female separate competition for a reason and this just blurs the line and no amount of training will be enough to overcome the physical advantage that Hubbard has and that can't be fair.
Grab Your Tape Measure AOC
Not that i know, but i assume young American Republicans are very similar to the Young Conservatives we have here in the UK as in they are clueless, gullible and a bit thick but there may be hope for the American right wing yet because an Axios poll published today revealed that in the capitalist US, just 49% of Americans aged 18-to-34 actually support capitalism, 51% say they have a positive view of Socialism and but the reason for optimism is that 66% of young Republicans support the wonky system, down from 81% in 2019, the rest having grown sick of the system they’re used to defending.
Maybe the impressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should start measuring up for the White House curtains now because Socialism is making a well deserved, and much needed, appearance in America.
Your Government Ladies And Gentlemen
It seems that even being totally effing useless and feathering your own families pocket with millions worth of Government PPE money isn't enough to get you the sack from Boris Johnson's Government so breaking your own rules isn't going to do it so Health Secretary Matt Hancock lives to continue being useless another day which is good news for those who he handed out contracts to including his sister (£300,000), pub landlord friend (£30,000,000) and the brother of the woman he is (rumoured) to be having an affair with and has received millions of pounds worth of NHS contracts.
After CCTV of Mr Hancock and Gina Coladangelo kissing was leaked, he has come out to say that he admitted breaking social distancing rules and had 'let people down' and was 'very sorry' which is obviously enough for Boris Johnson who is no stranger to extra marital affairs himself and is saying that he has accepted the Health Secretary's apology considered the matter was now closed.
Whether Mrs Hancock wife for 15 years or Mr Coladangelo's husband will be quite so keen to brush it under the carpet is another matter but the public will be less forgiving considering that at the time of the incident, Mr Hancock was on TV setting the rules that people must keep their distance from anyone not in their household or support bubble unless for 'work purposes or for the provision of voluntary or charitable services' so unless the health secretary believes the embrace was part of a work meeting, or in Mrs Coladangelo's case, an act of charity to play tonsil tennis with the hapless Minister he broke his own rules.
Another interested party may be the Government adviser, Professor Neil Ferguson, who Hancock said would back the police in any action they wished to take over the breaking of social distancing rules by having his lover visit him at his home, adding that Ferguson was correct to step down from his position on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) as the social distancing rules 'are there for everyone and are deadly serious'.
In a Government were having affairs, handing out tax payers money and contracts like sweets to friends and family as well as wasting billions, lying constantly, dog whistle politics, racism and a death toll of 150,00 through sheer incompetence is not enough, then breaking your own pandemic rules with a woman not your wife and sending NHS contracts to her brother wont do it either..move on, nothing to see here.
Special Guest Blogger: Field Marshall Douglas Haig
I joined the British Army as a young buck and saw active service in India, Sudan and South Africa and became an authority on cavalry warfare and with my social connections at the Polo club, i rose swiftly though the ranks and became the commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France just when we were entering into a entrenched stalemate with the Germans along the Western Front.
One of the biggest changes between 19th century horse led stabby war which is where i learnt my art and the 20th-century mechanical more shooty warfare that we were now engaged in was that the other side had bloody great weapons which could kill men in large numbers.
I found that out when i ordered the Somme offensive which resulted in 60,000 casualties and 20,000 deaths on the first day so i formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field which involved our brave boys climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly towards the enemy and then keep doing it because what was so inspired about it was that it would catch the watchful Hun totally off guard, doing precisely what we've done eighteen times before being exactly the last thing they'll expect us to do the next time.
We launched a series of mighty offensive against the German lines using my knowledge of cavalry charges which included attacking Fritz where their line is strongest and lulling them into a false sense of security that we were led by complete incompetents so when we attacked their weak points, they would be totally surprised but despite all this we failed to break the deadlock or to win any significant territory.
Considering i had to not only coordinate the British army which was full of men who amazingly didn't particularly want to be there but also the French, Americans, Belgians and Portuguese i thought i was getting the hang of it but the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, said i was 'a second-rate, incapable Commander' but if nothing else the army learnt how not to do it which served them well because they began ignoring me and doing things differently so in many ways the final victory over the Bosche was all due to my cleverly awful tactics so i'm taking that as a win for me.
Thursday, 24 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: John Wilkins
As a scientist and Bishop of the Church of England, i had a foot in both camps and tried to integrate the two especially as i was married to Oliver Cromwell's sister and that family made everything about religion so my stance was why have we got to be so many different religions? Why can't we just be one cool religion?
It was her brother that made me the head of Trinity College but my first aim was to bring everyone together in a religious and political love-in which worked well and i was attracting the cream of British scientists to Oxford and we created the Royal Society to study science with the knowledge of the time and that started well until Oliver died and his son was replaced and then the Royalists took over and i was out of favour and my role was reduced to preacher but it was during my time at the college that i published 'The Discovery of a World in the Moone' and followed that up with 'A Discourse Concerning a New Planet'.
I had read The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin which highlights the similarities between the Earth and the Moon and i looked up and thought why not and proposed the idea that the Moon could be housing living beings which i called the Selenites a term derived from Selene, the Greek Moon Goddess.
Whereas Godwin thought that we could use birds to drag us up to the Moon in a chariot, i suggested what better way to make it up there but to let the pure breath of angels do it which had the double advantage of allowing us to breath in space.
I then went on to explain that it was gravity pulling on our stomachs which made us feel hunger and so naturally, food wouldn’t be an issue for the humans flying towards the moon and once there maybe the Selenites would want to engage in trading with us because...who wouldn't?
Unfortunately, my Angel led chariot literally never took off as one of the science guys discovered that space was a vacuum, and no human would survive in it regardless of the amount of Angel breath they were inhaling so i decided that a Angel led chariot may not be the way to go and Space travel was simply not ready for us in the 17th century, with or without the help of angels.
What did happen though was a short time later Isaac Newton witnessed that apple dropping and scientists did begin to discuss ways to consider what flying to the moon might be like and how to do it and space travel is a thing now i notice although i died from the medicine i took to treat my kidney stones and thankfully medicine has improved as well but we may find evidence of alien life someday. That would be amazing right?
It'd be great and exciting and maybe terrifying because they may decide that the bunch of Earthling carbon based bipeds were the cause of all the problems and evaporate us immediately to stop us expanding out into the universe but we may finally get an answer to why they come all this way just to mutilate our livestock and anally probe drunk American rednecks?
Wednesday, 23 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Julius Fromm
I was one of the inventors of a new way of vulcanizing rubber which produced a much thinner latex product and we were churning out baby bottle nipples, hot water bottles and rubber gloves and then one day while looking at the fingers on a glove i wondered if rather than hands, i could do something for another part of the body and i came up with the first modern, lightweight seamless condom men are so grateful for today.
I patented the idea and over the next decade set up factories in Germany, Denmark, the UK, Poland and the Netherlands and began mass producing the 'Fromms' as they became known and created the first condom vending machines although we were only allowed to advertise them as hygiene products, not contraceptives as the Catholics have a problem with women not getting pregnant obviously.
At this juncture i should point out that i lived in Germany and i was Jewish and that is important because in the mid 1930's, the Nazi's happened and they couldn't let a Jew succeed at stuff so they forced me to sell them my business at a fraction of its value, to Baroness Elisabeth von Epenstein, Hermann Göring's godmother.
I fled to London with my family and what was left of our lives, and he could only watch helplessly from a distance as Hermann Goering's godmother took the rewards which should have been mine but my condoms were selling well in Britain so if nothing else it was good to see that the British upper lip was not the only thing being kept stiff.
The factory in Germany was almost completely destroyed by Allied Air raids but when the war finished we managed to secretly ship some of the machinery to the Soviet Union and we began once again producing condoms but as the Communists nationalized my company, i never made any money as i died four days after celebrating the end of the war but where safe sex always meant making sure that the bedroom door was locked or the kids were out, now it means using one of my inventions.
Tuesday, 22 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Gouverneur Morris
I didn’t marry until i was 57 as i was having far too much fun being a bachelor, one romantic escapade costing me my leg after after being hit by a carriage while being chased by a furious husband who had just found out that i was sleeping with his wife. Totally worth it.
Not that i let losing 25% of my limbs stop me and soon i was up and about and found myself in France as the US Minister just as the French Revolution was at its peak and in the Lourve in Paris with a very nubile young lady whose husband was in the next room.
I was not a fan of the Revolution and attempted to rescue Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from the revolutionaries who would later execute them so reasoning that she wasn't going to have any use for it anymore, bought all of Marie Antoinette's furniture and shipped it back to my home in the Bronx.
I did once chase off a mob of Frenchies attacking my carriage by taking off my wooden leg and threatening to brain them with it but i managed to get out of France and finally settled down from a life of romancing married women and wed my own housekeeper, a woman 22 years my junior who had got pregnant as a teenager by her brother-in-law and had a child who died shortly after birth and although she was tried for murder, she was acquitted.
I was there at the drafting of the new Constitution and chipped in the line 'We the people of the United States' but i had have some big misgivings about my fellow founding fathers, mostly over Slavery.
I did find the line 'All men are created equal' particularly ironic considering that ten of the first twelve American Presidents were slave owners, the first President, George Washington, wouldn't have lied if you asked him how many slaves he held as he was a major slaveholder with 317 which is almost half as many as the third President, Thomas Jefferson, who not only owned over 600, but fathered six children with one.
My death was just as crazy as my life, i had trouble urinating so took a DIY approach to the problem and attempted to clear the blockage by sticking a piece of whalebone down my urinary tract and causing massive internal injuries and an infection but the papers described it as 'a short but distressing illness' which sounds much better than died of a jabbing a bit of bone in the old jap's eye.
Monday, 21 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Leonarda Emilia
The war was coming to an end and my little Frenchy soldier boy decided to stay with me and live in our village but the townsfolk were not so keen on living with someone who a few short weeks before was shooting at them so they dragged him to the local Governor who slammed him in jail and sentenced him to face the firing squad.
I pleaded with the Governors to spare him, wrote letters until my hands were sore but to no avail as one morning they took him around the back of the jail, put him against a wall and shot him dead.
Heartbroken and more than a little pissed off, i decided to get back at the society that had taken away my true love by transforming myself into an outlaw vigilante, calling myself 'La Carambada' or 'The Amazing Lady'.
Being bought up on a farm i was an excellent horse rider and was very handy with guns and machete and sought to wreak havoc, starting with the men who ignored my pleads to save my man's life by poisoning governor Benito Zenea and president Benito Suarez.
Through this campaign of vengeance, i became the leader of a crime syndicate, robbing travelers in Queretaro and Guanajuato, but also making a point of killing any government officials when i found them and to make matters even more exhilarating, i would dress in men’s clothing and then after robbing someone, to rub extra salt in my victim's wounds, i would showing some boob, so the victim would come to be shamed by the knowledge he had been beaten by a woman, further breaking their fragile masculine egos.
I became seen as a Robin Hood type figure who robbed the rich, killed the corrupt, and exchanged as much gunfire with government forces than had been fired in the entire war.
After three years in the bandit business, i was tracked down to the state of Guanajuato, where in true bandit fashion a shootout erupted and i was shot five times and died but lasted long enough to drag myself to a nearby Church and confess my story to a nearby priest who seemed only too happy to have the famous boob-flashing vengeance vigilante laying in his Church.
Sunday, 20 June 2021
Taikonauts Join Astronauts and Cosmonauts
When we are not doing stupid things like making nuclear missiles mankind has made some impressive leaps in the relatively short time we have been on Earth and amongst our very best moments has been the development of Spacecraft although that development only came about as a way to deliver death upon another nations inhabitants but lets paper over that because since the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957 we have gone on to send man-made machines to view every Planet in our Solar System, landing on some of them, as well as setting foot on the Moon and launching a Space Station that circles our Earth every 90 minutes.
Since its launch in 1998 it has been speeding at 17,100 mph above our heads and i receive texts from NASA's Spot The Station website to let me know when it is within view in my part of the UK and most nights i see at least one passing but now us sky-watchers have another piece of technology to look for in the shape of China's Tianhe-1 Space Station .
China has successfully launched the 54ft core module of its planned Space Station and it is now orbiting around the Earth although it is only one-sixth the size of the 356ft International Space Station and therefore has far less reflective qualities for those of us on Earth scanning the skies for it although it can be seen with the naked eye but is much harder to spot than the ISS.
The NASA website does not yet have an option to receive texts or emails when the Tianhe-1 Station is visible and none of my Space apps have the option to find it so for now it is hoping for a clear sky and the inevitable discussion if that faintly moving light is the Chinese Space Station or one of Elon Mucks Sky Link satellites.
What we do have now is another introduction to the lexicon of Space with Chinese Taikonauts joining American Astronauts and Russian Cosmonauts but whatever we call them, i will be 250 miles below them enviously gazing up at them.
Doing A Public Service
The number of Coronavirus cases in the UK is creeping up and the medical teams are declaring that we are now at the start of the much anticipated third wave and the race is on between the vaccine and the virus.
The good(ish) news is that the most vulnerable who are least able to fight off the disease and most likely to end up in hospital and in the grim death column are not being affected with the younger, unvaccinated part of the population contracting Coronavirus and as they are better placed to successfully fight off the virus, the death toll is staying relatively flat.
As we creep towards the 75% vaccine cover required to achieve herd immunity, the chances of anyone catching Coronavirus are still there and the Public Health England (PHE) have put out a report of where you are most likely to catch it with the majority of Covid-19 cases coming from educational settings such as Schools, Colleges and Universities.
Outbreaks in leisure settings are growing in number as they are at hospitality, the workplace, shopping centers and then Healthcare centers so the PHE have given us the perfect excuse to phone your boss on Monday to say you won't be in.
Don't think of it as pulling a sickie, consider it a public service as you are protecting the nation from the third wave by staying at home in your pyjamas to watch the football on TV.
Saturday, 19 June 2021
Best Of British Humour
GB News hasn't made the most auspicious of starts to its fledgling career as Britain's shiniest and brightest News Station with advertisers pulling their adverts and a host of technical difficulties but now they also have to contend with prank name emails.
Since its launch on Sunday, the new 'anti-woke' news channel fronted by Andrew Neil has received a plethora of prank emails across several shows from people claiming to be called names like Mike Hunt, Mike Oxlong, Cleo Torez, Tess Tegel and Hugh Janus.
The station have now pout out an announcement that they will no longer be reading out people’s surnames, just in case they are duped again and Simon McCoy and Alexandra Phillips responded by telling their viewers to 'jolly well grow up' and i agree, grow up, people and definitely do not mock the very serious and important GB News.
Unfortunately, that means if your name is name is Dixie Normus, Phil McCavity or Jenna Talia then there really is no point in emailing the station because your email won't be read out but please keep them coming because as childish as it is, it's brilliantly funny.
ITV Curse Delaying Football's Homecoming
When it comes to Football Tournaments, us England fans play a game where we waver the Flag of Saint George proudly while singing about Football's Coming Home until we get knocked out by the first decent team we meet and then we go in search of any links to any other nation still in the competition to allow us to cheer for someone else.
As usual, pre-contest the hype over the England team rose until many people genuinely believed that we should start clearing out the spare room and set an extra place at the table because football has just texted to let us know it’s coming home but after last nights game against Scotland, the race to find tenuous links to France, Italy, Netherlands or Spain is starting earlier than usual and it is all thanks to ITV.
The anguish that England fans feel watching our team nosedive out of Competitions is made worse by being able to watch the games live on terrestrial TV across either BBC or ITV and while since 1998 the BBC has shown 20 England Tournament games with 14 wins, ITV's return for it's 20 games shows England have won just four and drawn 11 including last nights Scotland debacle.
As England's next game against the Czech Republic is also on ITV, it could be a cause of concern for our chances of progressing deeper but maybe it is all part of Gareth Southgate's cunning plan because whoever wins our group plays the runner up of Group F which will be one of world champions France, reigning European kings Portugal or three-time tournament winners Germany.
A draw in our last game will see us finish second and handed what looks like more favorable last 16 draw against the second-placed team in Group E which contains Spain, Sweden, Poland and Slovakia.
Maybe Southgate isn't so much of a total plonker as we first thought then and is actually a tactical genius for picking a team that would allow his team play out a dour draw against the Scots but for now i will hold onto my England card and wait to accept the shiny new one from Italy/Netherlands/Spain/France due to a great, great great grandparent who was Italian/Dutch/Spanish or French. Possibly.
What About The T-Storms Mother Nature?
Wikipedia states the total volume of water on Earth is estimated at 333 million cubic miles and i think most of that has fallen on England over the past week because the rain started Wednesday and hasn't stopped ever since.
The MET Office figures show that my part of England has been the recipient of a months worth of rain in just one day which explains why the Environment Agency has been handing out flood alerts like sweeties in the South East, 39 at the last count The rain has not been of the drizzle or light rain type, it has been hammering down consistently like in a Japanese Horror Film although annoyingly it hasn't been accompanied with the thunder storms as promised, just the drumming sound of heavy drops drumming out a tattoo on the car roof and window panes which to be fair i quite like, especially as a background white noise at night.
As usual the Jet Stream is to blame with the core of strong winds around five to seven miles above the Earth’s surface stubbornly refusing to shift above the UK and keeping us on the low pressure and wet Northern side rather than the high pressure dry and sunny Southern side.
The Jetstream Forecast map shows the jet stream fairly well over us or just to the south up until Tuesday so its wellies and umbrellas for the next few days at least while the Atlantic continues to fling more rain at us but as a very paled skinned English woman, i am in no rush for Summer
to start again as i have already been applying the after-sun and flailing my arms around at stingy flying insects after the brief sunny spell last week although if Mother Nature can throw in a couple of decent Thunderstorms to go with the rain, it would be appreciated.
Right Wing Tinderbox In Middle East
Only too happy to see the back of Israeli's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who took the genocide against the Palestinians to a whole new level but not so keen to see another right winger take his place in the shape of Naftali Bennett and one of the first things he did was attack the Palestinians for having the temerity to protest against the brutal and murderous military occupation they are under.
Another match thrown into the Middle East tinderbox is the election of ultra Conservative Ebrahim Raisi who is set to be Iran's next president and in a country run according to conservative religious values, being an ultra conservative cannot be a good thing.
Amnesty International have been quick to point to Mr Raisi's role in the mass executions of political prisoners in the 1980's when he was one of four judges who oversaw death sentences for about 5,000 prisoners and said that 'Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture'.
In Iran's political system it is the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the top religious cleric, who has the final say on all state matters but where it leaves the nuclear deal now is a another concern with Iran already re-starting its nuclear operations after Donald Trump withdraw American support from the previous deal.
Thankfully there is a grown up in the White House now who is not so supportive of the vile Israel Government but with two far right leaders in the two places where a spark is likely to lead to a quick escalation of conflict, we could be moving into some very dangerous territory.
Friday, 18 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Muhammad
The first step was a stroke of luck, the famous Black Stone had been removed from the wall of Kaaba during renovations and to mark its return to its rightful place, the clan leaders decided to ask the next man who came through the gate to replace it so i strolled in with a rug under my arm at just the right moment and i was asked to pick it up and pop it back into place.
Feeling i was one of the Holy gang now, i shut myself in a cave for several nights of prayer but i was constantly interrupted by Archangel Gabriel of all people who began telling me stuff about God so i went outside and told the people what i had heard about God's final judgment, Hell and Paradise, asking for forgiveness, remember to face Mecca while praying, all that sort of thing.
To be honest in the beginning not many people stayed around to listen to me but i persevered and slowly we got up quite a decent number, enough that the other religions in Mecca tried to ban us so we all shuffled off to Medina and united most of their tribes to our cause.
After eight years and plenty of more visits from Gabriel who kept handing out the revelations like sweets, i put them all together into a book called the Koran and gathered an army of 10,000 Muslim converts and marched on the city of Mecca but i laid out some pretty progressive rules of warfare such as no killing of women, children or innocents, no burning of trees and orchards and no destruction of wells but despite all the restrictions, we still took the city and started the whole Muslim movement thing which would sweep the World.
A few months after, i fell ill and suffered for several days with fever, head pain, and weakness and died in the arms of the favourite of my 13 wives, Aisha.
I know Muslim and Christians have never really got along although there are many similarities such as we both big up Jesus. Obviously, Muslims don't worship Jesus as our messiah, that would essentially make us Christians, but we have Jesus, or Isa as we call him, as a prophet like me, but to us Isa is not either God himself or his son, just one of Gods messengers but he will lead God's armies at the end of the world, killing Masih ad-Dajjal who is the Islamic version of the antichrist.
So we are not so different and we should be more tolerant and understanding of each others religion...ok, maybe not Scientology because that religion is just plum crazy but the rest of us should be able to get along.
Thursday, 17 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Noah Webster
English has grown to become the second most widely spoken language in the world, but when America kicked out the British we said we should have our language to reflect our newfound independence and not have anything written by quills owned by Shakespeare or King George III or any of that stupid letter U in words British nonsense and set about making American English.
Founding Father Benjamin Franklin was a keen advocate of spelling things the American way and wanted to introduce a more phonetic alphabet, where letters correspond directly to spoken sounds and came up with his own alphabet which left out the letters C, J, Q, W, X and Y, thus making it completely impossible for people called Jack and Jacque to spell their own names but luckily it was met with a complete lack of interest from everyone basically because it was a God awful idea.
He did say that people spell with their ears and that those people spell best who do not know how to spell and since the English language contains too many fun contradictions, it needed reform and as America's most famous lexicographer, it fell upon me to come up with a new way of spelling things.
I chopped and changed things around and took out the dreaded letter U because it was an unseemly letter that had no business in the middle of a perfectly reasonable word like "color" or 'rumor' and i removed all the unnecessary letters in words like Axe and Plough and chopped the -ed from the end of words and replaced it with -t so snapped turned into snapt and passed into past but the traditionalists were pist and refused to use it.
Sensibly, i decided that this problem could best be solved by somebody else, ideally after i was too dead to hear any whining about having to spending time resetting the spellchecker from Actual English to U.S. English and just dumped my American Dictionary on the nation and then died a few days later but to be honest, with spellcheck and the ability to right-click the red squiggly lines, who the hell spells anything correctly these days anyway?
Wednesday, 16 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Pope Gregory XIII
I first had a go at slapping down the Proddies, Thomas Stukeley said if i gave him a ship with 800 heavily armed men, he would land in Ireland to aid the Catholics against the Protestant but once he got his ship and men, he buggered off to join up with King Sebastian of Portugal against Emperor Abdul Malik of Morocco instead.
I did send another one to replace that one with a mere 50 soldiers but they were captured and every single one of them was either hanged or beheaded as soon as they set foot in Ireland so i thought stuff that, let's have another look at this calendar.
The problem was that the Earth and the Sun refused to create a year that's composed of a nice round number of days, God dropped the ball when he set that up, and the Julian calendar, which was prominent in most of the Western world for more than 1,600 years, had an average year of exactly 365.25 days long and it was losing a day a century so i shortened the day by 0.0075 days, making a year 365.2425 days and by tinkering with the leap years, i corrected the Julian calendar.
As it was losing a day a century, the Christian festivals like Easter were all getting out of whack so to bring it all back into line, we jumped 11 days from Thursday 4 October 1582 to Friday 15 October 1582 which immediately annoyed anyone whose birthday was between those dates.
I thought that the changes to the calendar might confuse people so we stayed with the original names for the months so we still have March for Mars, June for Juno and September meaning seven month, October meaning eighth month, November meaning ninth month and December meaning tenth month and we kept the leap year as every 4 years and the double 24 February although later a February 29th was introduced which immediately annoyed anyone whose birthday was February 24 and was getting double presents.
With regards to the Leap years, we made it simply that leap years would occur every year divisible by four, except for years that are also divisible by 100, unless they are also divisible by 400, and it skips the first three leap years every 400 years.
The calendar now made a lot more sense with some months having 31 days, some 30 and February with it's 28, except when it doesn't and in honour of me, it became known as the Gregorian calendar and all the Catholic countries were like 'Hey Cool, we got a new calendar' but the Protestant countries like Britain refused to accept it at first, the British people thinking the Catholics were trying to steal 11 days from them.
Just like my calendar, my days were numbered but after i died my Calendar was accepted across most of the Globe but some nations persevere with the Julian calendar so with two calendars to choose from, there is nothing stopping you from switching between the two and going Julian and then back to the Gregorian and losing those 11 days again later in the year, a few days before your Mother-In Laws birthday would be especially cost saving. Win-Win so well done me.
Tuesday, 15 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Mademoiselle de Maupin
The history books are full of women who could arrange a vase of flowers and then beat you to death with it, for instance me, a French dueler who grew up at the Grand Stables at Versailles, Europe’s flashiest palace with my father who worked for the Comte d'Armagnac.
My fathers main skills were fencing, drinking and sleeping with women and he taught me everything he knew about all three, spending my childhood learning how to ride a horse like a man, fence like a man and dress up like a man so as not to raise suspicion and i got so good that i could beat anyone in a fencing match.
Then, at the age of 14, i started having an affair with my father’s boss and just before we were to wed i promptly got bored and took a new lover who i married instead, a knight named Sieur de Maupin before deciding the only thing he was good for was his name so i took that and decided men were overrated.
I abandoned him and seduced a merchant’s daughter and began my first lesbian affair which in 17th Century France took some balls, so to speak, it was time when women could get into trouble for showing too much ankle or knowing how to think for themselves so my girlfriends family hid their daughter away in a convent to avoid the scandal but that didn't stop me, i simply joined the convent to continue the affair.
I hit upon the wheeze of faking our own deaths so dragged a corpse of a dead nun into our bedchamber, and then burned the convent down to create the illusion that we were both killed in the fire but the ruse failed to trick the authorities, who charged me with kidnapping, body snatching, and arson but the judges refused to believe a woman had kidnapped a nun and burned down a convent, so they said i couldn't have done it and released me.
I then decided the convent and lesbianism was boring, so i eloped with my fencing instructor and swashbuckled my way to Marseille, earning a living performing amazing fencing demonstrations.
During our performances, i would sing and challenge the audience to duel against me but as i was wearing men clothes, many refused to believe that i was a woman as no woman could possibly fence so well, a rumor i dispelled by tearing off my blouse and flashing my boobs at the audience, a move that occasionally got me a few lovers and also an offer from the Opera de Marseilles, for my voice that is, not for my exposed boobs, and i began a career as an opera star.
It was at the opera that i met Madame la Marquise de Florensac, a wealthy noblewoman and we were happy for two years before la Marquise died of a fever and i retired from the opera and joined a convent for real and died at 33, having done more in half of a lifetime than most people could with their full lives.
Monday, 14 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Ernest Shackleton
Antarctica is dangerous, especially if you're British it seems, i was part of Robert Scott's earlier expeditions to find the Pole ten years previous so i knew how dangerous it was and as we drew close to Antarctica, our ship got stuck in the solidifying ocean.
We had to wait for warmer weather for the ship to free itself and as this was the start of the Antarctic winter, we had to wait 10 months but we didn't remain put exactly, the ice sheet we were on moved, taking us over 600 miles farther from where we had planned to land.
When it did become free, the pressure of the ice had punctured the ship so it sank so we grabbed what we could, dogs, food, tents and bizarrely one guy insisted on going back for his banjo and we camped out on the ice while we walked it all back the 600 miles to the shore where we could sail safely.
The dogs got eaten and the banjo mysteriously got smashed to firewood after the second day but we loaded up the lifeboat and headed back the towards the sane part of the world which was less sane than when we set off because while we was freezing our buns off waiting for the ice to melt, World War I had started which meant looking off for sharks, icebergs and Germans trying very hard to kill us.
We made it to the inhabited Elephant Island in South Georgia and it's delicious penguins and was picked up months later by a ship and taken back to Blighty three years after we set off.
I did a bit of lecturing in colleges but the call of the Antarctic never left me and i set off again with plans to sail around the whole ice sheet but i died of a heart attack before we got there so as an explorer i wasn't great but it is good to hear that the spirit of exploring is still with us, i just hope Dora has better luck than i did.
Sunday, 13 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Saint Anthony Of Padua
I was an ordained Priest but some Franciscan friars arrived in the town and they were such great guys that i joined their gang instead and was asked to go to Morocco and spout off about God because it was noted that i had a great way in the fire and brimstone talk but i fell ill on the ship and they pushed me off in Sicily to join up with another bunch of Friars who said they would love to have me as long as i stay far away from them as possible because i looked like death so they gave me a patch far, far away in the armpit of Italy called Forlì.
To everyone's amazement, i didn't die and became famed for my speeches and was asked to give an ordination for some high falutin Friars so i got together all the best bits from my speeches and wrote them down but on the day i couldn't find the writings so i prayed for help finding it and moments later a young friar entered the building with my book which he had accidentally picked up.
The speech was a rousing success and people would come just to hear me bang on about God and it is said that even the animals would listen to me, there is one story of fish coming to the shore to listen to me and a donkey but the pocketful of carrots may have helped on that occasion.
My fiery telling of the bible didn't always go down well with everyone, i usually got the awkward questions from the heretics such as 'If we are all God's children, what's so special about Jesus then'? but i would usually sit with them over a meal and win them over with tales of how when the Almighty rips the sky open, they will only have seconds to figure out which of the many religion's doing the rounds are right.
A wrong decision could really cost them but if they chose right now then they can be smug when the rest are being consumed by whatever nastiness God is doing to them.
One group put poisoned food before me and challenged me to eat it and let God protect me so i blessed the food and ate it which turned out to be a bloody stupid thing to do because i later went down with Ergotism or food poisoning which in the 13th Century was not good so i went home and lived out my final, agonising days in a room built for me under the branches of a walnut tree where i died.
It has been said that thirty years after my death, people decided to pry open my vault to see how i had been getting along and where most of me had turned to dust, my tongue and jawbone was unchanged from when i had been alive.
I was named the patron saint of lost things after the thing with the book and not because half my face is missing, that's just a happy coincidence because i know exactly where my tongue and jaw went, the Church placed them both in a fancy urn to be shown off to future generations because when it comes toparading around dead body parts, nobody beats the Church.
Saturday, 12 June 2021
Special Guest Bloggers Top 10
The Special Guest Bloggers posts are coming to a stop for a while at the end of June while we round up some other famous folk to write some more but the Saints on their Feast Days will continue and we have a doozy lined up on 30 June, the person is probably the oldest actual human-ish person we could think of to ask and i am sure she has a lot to say about what we have done to the place since she was here.
Of the 494 Guest Blogger Posts, some have fared better than others and the top 10 are a disparate bunch but the lover of the Russian Queen and 70's DISCO sensation Rasputin is by far the most popular.
1 Grigori Rasputin
2 Johnny Ramone
3 Tennessee Williams
4 Melchior Of The Three Wise Men
5 Father Christmas
6 King Herod
7 Scott of the Antarctic
8 Saint Seraphim of Sarov
9 Sitting Bull
10 Wild Bill Hickock
Our Marxist Plan's Foiled Again
Sorry fellow left wingers but it seems the jig is up, we have been rumbled and our sneaky plot to install Marxist philosophy through football has failed.
I know this will come as a disappointment to many but we couldn't fool the England fans who saw through our devious plan and booed footballers taking the knee in support of equality for black people and protect their human rights not to be abused on Social media or murdered by American police becuase it is a movement supported by Black Lives Matter, and Black Live Matters are a bunch of Marxist.
As one clever England fan said about the kneeling gesture, 'by doing it in support of Black Lives Matter, you are supporting the BLM Marxist philosophy' and when they put like that it is obvious that when he’s on one knee, Gareth Southgate is secretly thinking about how to gain more subscribers to the Socialist Workers Party newsletter, you can see it in his eyes.
It didn't help that all the major TV companies supported the Black Lives Matter campaign, there’s no bigger supporter of Marxism than BT Sports so the England fans who unpicked our cunning plan were booing their own players to show support for England's players.
The Government are also keen to keep politics out of football by mentioning football at every opportunity including refusing to condemn the booing of the players taking the five seconds to show support for the anti-racism by the patriotic fans and several Conservative MP's have said that they would boycott England's Euro games in protest at the knee gesture therefore proudly joining those who show their support for England by refusing to support England and clearly loving their country by booing the people representing it.
Let's not lose heart though fellow left wingers because there are other sports we can use to sneak in our Leftist philosophy of equality for all, we just have to not make it so obvious next time.
No S*** We Are Swearing More
According to a British Board of Film Classification survey, we are swearing more these days and the first thing we should ask is what the f*** has it got to do with them and then no s*** we are swearing more, what you expect after the year we just had!
Six out of every 10 of us now use 'strong language' (that’s stuff like f*** and s*** and b******* but without the asterisks) in our daily lives and the science bit is that we use it as a release valve but some people i know don't need an excuse, they just f****** love swearing.
I did see a report a while ago where psychologists discovered that swearing is a form of emotional pain relief and they gave us the red light to eff and jeff all we like as long as we say that it was in the act of relieving the agony of stubbing a toe, walking into a lamppost or spending the past 14 months cooped up inside with a complete w******.
Personally it isn't very often that i pull out the big guns of swearing, preferring to stick to their softer and more acceptable cousins although i do find a well timed 'bad' swearword to be very effective and in some circumstances, and from certain people, very funny.
There are some people who manage to cram in more swearwords than regular words into their sentences which isn't very pleasing to the ear but maybe they are constantly in pain, like having a Barry Manilow earworm because that has to be painful. I'd be swearing like a Sailor also if i got him warbling 'Mandy' in my brain on a loop.
Now if only psychologists can find some way to excuse some of society's other shady areas such as people who use the word literally wrongly and say 'Not being rude...' before saying something rude. I expect Science may say otherwise but my hypothesis is that they are just f***** morons.
Is That Shaped Like A Massive....
Then i saw it again on the TV again this week and i thought to myself again...you know what, it really does look like a huge penis.
Now i know that there has been a long history of Freudian speak about missiles and phallic symbols and maybe nobody has pointed it out to Mr Bezo's after all, it is his money and if he wants to spend it on creating a 59ft giant penis shaped thing to go into space than that is up to him but someone should point out that Elons' Musk's rocket is 4 times bigger at 230 ft.
The first crewed New Shepard Flight is penciled in for July 20 and the crew will include Jeff Bezo himself and his brother Mark but the obvious line as New Shepard soars upwards in all its phallic glory is 'pfft, i've seen bigger'.
Friday, 11 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Captain Morgan
My father thought i was going to follow him into the world of farming but i wasn't going to spend a lifetime knee deep in cow poop so i bid farewell to my native Wales and crossed the Atlantic to became the leader of a band of pirates called Brethren of the Coast and targeting the Spanish ships laden with gold with the blessing of the British Government.
I wasn't technically a pirate, i called myself a privateer and was therefore licensed by the British government to attack the Spanish any time the two countries were at war which was pretty much all the time and i even led a daring raid on the Spanish town of Porto Bello in Panama with the clever ruse of capturing a bunch of Catholic nuns and using them as human shields, the God fearing Spanish dared not fire at us and we walked in and captured their town and a handsome pile of gold for our trouble, 100,000 pieces of eight for the return of the port and it's inhabitants.
My reputation for violence was legendary, one of my party pieces was strapping a leather cord around the person's head and tightening it with a metal bar until their eyeballs popped out but despite the almost cuddly image of me today, i was as bloodthirsty and brutal as the rest of the pirate fraternity and concerned only with indulging my every whim and amassing as much wealth as possible but i never wasted all my gold on booze and wenches, i used most of my share to buy up huge amounts of land in Jamaica.
I eventually become the Governor of Jamaica and the proud owner of three plantations and hundreds of African slaves but although i had personally given up the life of Pirating, i continued to finance many raids on the Spanish and French fleets by other pirates.
When i returned to England i was treated as a hero and King Charles II even knighted me but my goal was always to become one of the landed gentry even if it killed me and eventually it did, doing what all the landed gentry do which was eat too much, drink too much and do very little else and i died of dropsy which is a cute name for the painful swelling due to the build-up of fluid in the body's tissue.
So enjoy the drink which now bears my name and always remember that if you drink enough Rum you will do great things, crazy things yes, but they will be great.
Thursday, 10 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Anu
Statistically speaking, eighty-five percent of the total world population worships some kind of God so you can't throw a set of rosary beads without hitting a religion, so the answer to who made all this depends on who you ask but throughout history new religions have nicked the stories from the older ones and tried to pass them off as their own so at some point there must have been a first deity and there was, that would be me and every all powerful God that has followed started from little old Sumerian me or to give me my full title, divine personification of the sky, supreme God, and the original all powerful God.
Today's religions say they are the one true faith but working backwards the Christians nicked their guys from the Romans, who took theirs from the Greeks who borrowed theirs from the Egyptians and we go back all the way through the Babylonians to the Sumerians and the story of Nammu giving birth to me and my sister Ki and us starting up the whole human race thing with Heaven for anyone who behaves themselves but the original heaven was a series of three domes covering the earth and the later religions embellished on that.
In our story i had two sons and one overthrew me by biting off my genitals and populating the Earth with it, a story the Greeks based their story of Uranus being overthrown and castrated by his son Cronos and the Romans changed Uranus to Caelus and Cronos to Saturn but it still ended with a son doing something to castrate a penis.
We also wielded the Tablet of Destinies which were decrees issued by my son on clay tablets with guidance written on them so they were not new when the Christians had Moses clambering down a mountain with his own clay tablets so next time you get into a theological discussion about which religion is the right one, consider that since i put in an appearance 4,000 years ago, there had been nearly 3000 other Gods but you think only yours actually exists and the others are silly made up nonsense?
For some reason you think only yours is real which is the exact same argument the Romans made and the Greeks and the Egyptians and the Babylonians etc etc but all yours came from me and you wouldn't have a God to argue about if some Sumerian hadn't sat there one day and thought, i wonder who created this World and with his vivid imagination started off the whole religion thing.
Keeping Politics Out Of Football
The Euros are here tomorrow and the England team are already under the cosh from some supporters and that's before the inevitable failure and removal from the competition against the first half decent team we come up against.
In the last two friendlies, England players were booed for the peaceful, anti-racism gesture of 'taking the knee' amidst many splutterings from the booers that they do not have a racist bone in their body but it is about keeping politics out of sport.
They say that nobody wants political messages rammed down their throats, especially not at a Football match even if the message is for young, black footballers to not be greeted by an avalanche of racist tweets after a game and for them to be treated as equal human beings and why oh why can't black people just restrict themselves to opposing racism in ways sanctioned by white people and anyway Boris did a study that proved us Brits are not racist so just shut up and kick the bloody ball.
To be fair, that is par for the course from some knuckle dragging Football supporters, the sort who sing anti-IRA and WW2 songs about the Germans at matches but now the Politicians have piled in with Conservative MP Lee Anderson saying he will boycott England games on the TV all the time the absurd knee taking business continues and national embarrassment Nigel Farage has tweeted something which can be summed as meaning let’s keep politics that i don't agree with out of sport before keeping politics out of sport by tweeting multiple times about the decision to suspend a cricketer for historical, racist tweets.
The Culture Secretary, Oliver Dowden, agreed and said that the Cricket Board had gone 'over the top' suspending the player and even Boris 'watermelon smile' Johnson has refuse to condemn those people booing England footballers who take the knee before matches as did former Brexit MEP Martin Daubney, who has been wetting his pants about the whole taking-the-knee thing and tweeted that he would like to shake the hand of the two English players who did not take the knee in England's friendly with Romania, those two players being Ionuţ Nedelcearu and Nicolae Stanciu who as the names indicate, were very much Romanian.
I don't know so much about keeping Politics out of sport, it would be much better if we kept Politicians out of sport or even better, just keep Tory politicians out of everything.
Wednesday, 9 June 2021
Trump's Trousers
It really shouldn't be too difficult to make sure your trousers are the right way round, the fly being at the front is the biggest clue but the obvious reason is that he just can't be trusted to dress himself but there are also rumours that he had 'a little accident' just before taking to the stage and turned the trousers around as the wee-wee stain would have really shown up stood front and centre of the crowd.
Whatever the reason, it is good that ol' pissy pants Don is still giving us something to laugh at despite him no longer being in power but i do wonder if the 85 million Americans who voted for him still consider him the better option.
Third Wave Arrives Before June 21
The much feared third wave seems to have made its way to the UK as the number of daily new Coronavirus infections hits 7,540 in the latest 24-hour period and now everyone is nervously eyeing that 21 June date to see whether the last of the restrictions are lifted.
Depending on who you ask, it is either a no brainer that the rising infections means the date has to be pushed back or the Government has to gird its collective loins and throw off the shackles but Boris Johnson is refusing to commit either way, just saying that he will look at the data and make his decision on Monday.
The case set out by the Medical personnel is that with infections rising the rise in hospitilisations will follow in two to three weeks and ultimately a rise in deaths will come two to three weeks after that and to drop any restrictions now will just add to the numbers which would be on a par with the second wave which saw 40,000 new cases daily and over 1,000 deaths a day.
The case for opening is that the infection rise is in the unvaccinated and younger members of society and they are the ones who can best fight the infection, most notably the new Delta variant, and it is safe for the vaccinated older and more vulnerable group to be out and about now.
As the case to reopen is being made by businessmen keen to attract people back into their theaters, airplanes, clubs and pubs then it is in their financial interests to see June 21st as Freedom Day so my attention is on the medical and science people and they are clearly stating, loud and clear that although 77% of adults have now had at least one dose, only 44% have had both and we will need a number of 80% of adults to have had both doses to reach the much mentioned herd immunity but the sticking point is the 14 million children and teenagers under 18 who are not currently being vaccinated but can still still spread the virus so 80% of adults still only means 63% of the total population which is a way short of of herd immunity.
When the inquiry finally gets underway, the Government know they are to be roundly castigated for their lax actions so far and we learnt at Christmas what terrible and fatal consequences a bad decision can have so hopefully they err on the side of caution and announce a delay and i am sure that our TV's will be full of business people bemoaning the Governments decision to delay reopening but when it comes to deciding between people with our Health as they main concern against people concentrating on their business concerns, the Medical view should win out every time.
Special Guest Blogger: Jean de Dunois
How the hell a 17-year-old farm girl with no military experience whatsoever and who believed her orders came from the archangel Michael was able to be taken seriously by any military is bad enough, even a French one.
At first i was more than happy keeping Joan out of battle and, for the most part, ignoring her, which was exactly what i did saying that i was not being condescending but i was far too busy thinking about far more important things which as a girl, she wouldn’t understand so i left her out of my war counsels but she did complain to me about that i told her that i had more important things on my mind than what a schizophrenic teenager thought and that losing wars to the English was something better left to the men of the French military.
One worry i had was the strong Northerly wind that was preventing our ships from dropping off our food supplies so i gave a flippant, have a word with your man upstairs to sort the wind out if you want to help and i walked off trading high fives and bum slaps with my Generals.
All of a sudden, before i had got back to my tent, the wind just suddenly dropped and changed direction so it actually helped the ships come ashore and there was Joan standing with a 'what ya think of that then bastard' look on her face.
I had no choice but to believe that Joan had stopped the wind with the power of her prayers or something so thinking she must have the big guy on her side, i made her head of the army and together we led the French defenses at the siege of Orléans, and that girl with the divine inspirations sure could fight, sending the British skittering buttocks first out of Orléans, then out of Les Augustins, Patay and Troyes and our confidence grew as we believed that through Joan, God was supporting the French against the stupid English and then she got captured, put on trial and turned into a crispy shade of burnt black and us French went back to getting out arses whupped by the English and losing the hundred year war.
I returned to my comfortable job in the Royal household but for one brief moment i thought not being a sexist bastard was going to work but it never so i was just went back to being a plain old bastard and i was happy with that.
Tuesday, 8 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Aaron Burr
That came about after a guy named Alexander Hamilton called me 'a dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government' so i went to see him and have a word with him about it. Now Hamilton was a mouthy git who handed out duel challenges like candy but when he bad mouthed me i smack talked him back and as expected he handed out the usual duel ultimatum and to his shock i took him up on it and we faced off with pistols ready.
Hamilton fired first and being a jerk he missed but i didn't and my bullet found its mark right in his stomach and he died there on the spot.
My political career not unsurprisingly collapsed after that bit of homicide and i was sacked as VP although i was somehow found not guilty of murder at the trial but i wasn't ready to give up running a country so decided to try and create my own.
I traveled to Philadelphia and offered my services to the British and explained that i wanted to help them take over the Louisiana territory and Mexico but the Brits were not interested so i decided to press ahead regardless. I got myself a riverboat and set off down the Ohio River, at which point i realised that i didn't have an army so, on the way to New Orleans, i recruiting any and every settler i encountered to my cause.
Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for word of my revolution to reach the authorities who ordered me arrested but at my trial the great American justice system once again found me not guilty so i nipped off sharpish to Britain but still couldn't get their support and i kept nagging at them so much that they ended up booting me out so i returned to New York and married a wealthy widow but it lasted only four months then she divorced me and her divorce lawyer was Alexander Hamilton Jr., the son of the dead duelist and the divorce was officially completed on September 14 1836 which wasn't a great day for me as the decree nisi was the last thing i read as i died that same day.
Monday, 7 June 2021
Special Guest Blogger: Beatrix Potter
I was fascinated by the natural world as a child and would go around and collect anything that moved, slithered, or hopped for my personal menagerie, then i would take it home, skin it, and boil the flesh off so i could study the skeleton.
I began writing properly after my career in biology fell by the wayside after academia rejected my paper on the natural world due to old-timey sexism and women and science not being compatible which included hundreds of sketches of the innards of animals which i had dissected but my characters really lived, until i killed and boiled them but they all ended up starring in the books which made me, and them, famous.
I found my niche in children's literature but after six rejections for my Tales of Peter Rabbit story, i self published and printed 250 copies which became so popular that a publisher took notice and made me an offer to write more so i used my previous pets for inspiration.
Benjamin Bouncer was my first rabbit, he ended up being chloroformed and dissected and he was replaced by Peter Piper who went the same way while Squirrel Nutkins was a squirrel i asked a gamekeeper to shoot so i could boil and dissect it, a wood mouse i caught was Mrs Tittlemouse,
and Jeremy Fisher was a frog i cut up to look at what was inside it's stomach which was flies mostly.
The books sold well, i ended up writing 36 of them but the real money was in the merchandise, i filed a patent for my characters so i could sell a line of stuffed animals and i made more cash off the merchandise than the books until i died of pneumonia.
I guess if my paper hadn't have been rejected i would never have become famous but writing for children was easy, all you need is a love of nature, a large collection of animals to draw on, a large enough pot and an oven that cooks at 180C and the knowledge that the way to a beloved pets heart is through it's chest with a scalpel.
Sunday, 6 June 2021
Note The Unexplained Bit Of UFO
I have been asked many times whether i believe in aliens and the simple answer is that the answer is not quite so simple.
If the question is do i believe that life has evolved on other planets then yes i do because the Universe is too vast and there are too many galaxies, stars and planets for life only to have began on just one.
If the question is do i believe that aliens are visiting Earth then the answer is no for the same reason as the previous question, the vastness of the Universe and the fact that Earth is one planet amongst tens of billions of solar systems in our galaxy alone, a galaxy which is in turn amongst hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe.
A US government report released 25th June which investigated decades of unexplained aerial sightings in US airspace, found that there were no evidence of alien activity but there are 120 unidentified flying objects (UFOs) that they are unable to explain short of they are not US military and could possibly be the experimental technology of a rival power, such as China or Russia or but it does not rule out extraterrestrial activity as a possible explanation.
The report details US Navy pilots who said they had seen inexplicable aircraft that flew faster than anything ever developed on earth and were more maneuverable that anything seen before and the obvious conclusion many will jump to is that if it isn't man-made, then it must be alien made but what the report actually states is that they are UFO's with extra emphasis, italics and underlining of the Unidentified part of those three words.
The nearest star system to ours is Alpha Centauri 4.3 light-years away or 25 trillion miles.
The New Horizons spacecraft, travelling at 36,373 mph, took just shy of a decade to reach Pluto so if New Horizons was aimed toward the Alpha Centauri system it would take this spacecraft about 78,000 years to get there.
The sheer distance and time to travel from one star system to another could explain why nobody has turned up from other planets, could be they are on their way but as they only left on the trip to Earth 39,000 years ago so they are only halfway here.
Without doubt, out there somewhere there is a very high probability that someone or something is gazing towards our arm of the Milky Way Galaxy in the Virgo Supercluster, tens of billions of light years away and wondering if any of those billions of solar systems in the billions of galaxies over there has life on a ball of rock going around just one of those stars and wondering if there is, have they visited them.
No and it is just as unlikely that we ever have the required technology to make the trip or they will turn up in spaceships here to say hi to us.
Saturday, 5 June 2021
NHS Digital
David Cameron's Government had the idea of scraping everyone in England’s entire GP records
including everything from mental and sexual health, abuse, criminal records, ethnicity, gender, drug and alcohol history and putting them on one central database, where they would be semi anonymized and then made available for research purposes to third parties, including private corporations.
It failed because privacy campaigners, worried doctors and some MPs found it both ethically and technically dodgy as hell and the Government backed down and never mentioned it again, or at least not for eight years because it’s doing the same thing under the cover of a global pandemic without any consultation or endorsement by the British Medical Association nor the Royal College of GPs and a deadline of 23 June for patients to opt out although most don’t even know about it.
The data NHS Digital will store is pseudonymised, and it says it’ll only be shared with commercial third parties for “research and planning purposes”although that comes with the caveat that it can be unpseudonymised 'in certain circumstances, and where there is a valid legal reason'.
Should you feel that a UK Government which has been scandalously incompetent and is facing a lifetime of inquiries into corruption is not the best people to be trusting your medical data with and would like to opt out, here’s where to go.
If you think there is nothing to worry your pretty little head about, you can do nothing and be the recipient of some brilliant emails and letters from medical companies keen to hock you relief from whatever you told your doctor in strict confidentiality ails you.