The Top 10 Historic Polluters

In total, humans have pumped around 2,500 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere since 1850 which has warmed the planet by 1.2C and an argument coming from smaller and poorer nations is that those countries which have added most to the CO2 into our atmosphere and therefore warming our planet and causing the accumulating problems today should take on the greatest responsibility in tackling it.
A study by Carbon Relief has put together a league table of the worst polluters since records began in 1850 and those who should be shouldering the burden of putting it right and comfortably top of the table is the United States who have pumped 509,111 billion tonnes of CO2 (20% of the total) into the atmosphere.
Second with 284,476 billion tonnes of emissions (11.4%) is China and their figure is alarming because most of that has come since the 1970's when China began industrialising in earnest and is now the Worlds ​​largest annual polluter.
R​ussia comes in third (172,432 bn tonnes), ​followed by Brazil (112,903 bn tonnes), Indonesia (102,559 bn tonnes), Germany (88,485 bn tonnes), India (85,668 bn tonnes), UK (74,294 bn tonnes), Japan (68,002bn tonnes) and Canada (65,501bn tonnes) rounding out the top 10.
Of the top 10 who have contributed to the warming Planet, six of the top 10 have yet to make new pledges to cut their emissions before the crucial UN Cop 26 climate summit in Glasgow this week.
Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and the cumulative amount of CO2 emitted since 1850 is directly linked to the 1.2C of heating that the world has already seen.
Mohamed Nasheed, ambassador for the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) called for justice for the severe climate impacts the nations he represents are suffering because of the emissions from big economies that have grown rich from burning fossil fuels by saying: 'Basic justice demands that those who have done most to cause the climate emergency should take the lead in addressing it. The responsibility lies principally with the US, China and Russia'.
Boris Johnson, a late convert to the Green agenda, agreed and replied that: 'We started the industrial revolution in Britain. We were the first to send the great puffs of acrid smoke to the heavens on a scale to derange the natural order'.  
An IPCC climate report compiled by 200 Climate scientists states that is Earth is warmer than it’s been in 125,000 years, before the last ice age, and the current path we are on will see global temperatures rise by 2.1C–3.5C and the last time the Earth temperature raised by that amount it happened over 11,000 years meaning we have achieved in 170 what it took nature 11,000 years to do dismissing the flawed and ignorant argument that the warming planet is a natural cycle and not man made.
The Paris agreement was to keep the temperature to below 1.5C, the World Health Organisation estimates that the current rise of 1.2C results in over 150,000 deaths annually so already baked in is the more frequent and widespread extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall, drought, wildfires and ocean acidification.
We are therefore committed to the deadly effects of the rapidly warming planet we have so recklessly warmed, our actions now will  determine how much of the more dire effects of climate change can be avoided, the future is literally in our leaders hands.

Special Guest Blogger: Satan

I did wonder what with all the Saints being asked to contribute here when the authors would get around to asking me, considering that i was one of the first angels and all, so perfect that they have chosen 31 October or 'High Unholy Day', the day all Satanists clear their calendar so i have taken the time out from pitchforking Michael Jackson in the bum, to write this.
Allow me to introduce myself, i'm Satan, also known as the Devil, Beelzebub, Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, Scratch or Old Nick and founder of the metal genre of music. I'm also a gambler and a businessman, willing to make bets or Faustian contracts with you and grant you wishes/musical abilities in exchange for your immortal soul.
If anybody can tell about the importance of bouncing back when you're down, it's me. I was once the brightest of all angels, but i led a rebellion when God refused to consult me over his plans to create man despite being kind of God's adviser on human relation so he slam dunked my sorry arse to hell to became not only the Prince Of Darkness and mankind's primary antagonist but the yin to God's yang and the guy everyone blames when things go wrong and it was a shock i never really recovered from and since then - apart from a few guest-star roles in the Book of Revelations, South Park and heavy metal albums played backwards - there's been very little.
In the Bible texts, i am acknowledged to have killed 10 people while the loving God killed a total of 10 million men, women and children in a great flood. So if God was the one with the larger taste for blood, why is it that i'm the bad guy but then i have always had a bit of a bad reputation after introducing sin into the world and corrupting God's first couple but that wasn't even me.
The snake in the Garden Of Eden who convinced Eve to eat the forbidden fruit was an actual talking snake rather than a shape-shifting devil, as evidenced by God cursing it to crawl on its belly for eternity. That wasn't anyone from my side, it was just a snake who happened to be an arse.
For Gods opposite i don't get many mentions in the Bible so hell knows where the image of a cloven-hoofed, pitchfork-wielding, red-skinned, goat-legged, horned king of hell came from, i am described as only a disembodied ghost-voice so imagine less Ozzy Osbourne and a better looking James Blunt, all very respectable but Blunt obviously isn't one who came to me to make a deal for musical talent, as anyone who has ever listened to any of his albums will testify.
Tonight though, of all nights, is all about us bad guys and the time when you will want to be doing a bit of demon summoning but the problem seems to be that everyone goes straight for the top guy, me, and as good as i am as the Lord of Hell, even i can't be in several places at the same time so you end up frustrated that your summoning spell didn't work and you give up and go sulk in your room listening to death metal music instead.
The thing with demons and creatures from hell in general is that even if you don't get me, whoever you summon will still be evil so try aiming lower, have your list and your summoning equipment and possibly even a virgin tied up in the garage but something else that needs consideration is that the demon you summon will not do your bidding for nothing, there will be a contract involved.
Contracts can range from a packet of Maryland Cookies to the souls of your first born and you have to remember that the person you are negotiating with is evil, so expect a few dick-moves and read any small print because thinking you have negotiated all the riches you will ever desire for the cost of a cheese sandwich and then finding out you actually signed up to being tortured in a pit of fire for eternity because that can really ruin your weekend.  
Finally, one more consideration before lighting the black candles is the location because Hell and its inhabitants smell of sulfur and sulfur smells of rotten eggs and do you really want something that smelly to be putting in an appearance in your bedroom, you've got to sleep in there later remember, so take it outside or at least into your little sisters room.
Happy summoning people.

The Lucy Museum of Musicians Halloween Songs

The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians came to me this week to ask which Halloween songs they should be ready to receive and after giving it some thought, i decided the only specific Halloween type songs i can think of, Michael Jackson's 'Thriller', Bobby Pickett's 'The Monster Mash' and 'This is Halloween' from the Nightmare before Christmas film.
Because that would look really poor in the Halloween section, i decided to pad it out with the excellent 'Bad Moon Rising' by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Rolling Stones little ditty to Satan himself 'Sympathy for the Devil', Ray Parker Jnr's 'Ghostbusters' although Huey Lewis may have a say in that following the court case which found Mr Jnr directly lifted the tune from his song 'I Want a New Drug'.
ACDC's 'Highway to Hell', 'Howl at the moon' by Ozzy Osbourne, 'Ghost Town' by the Specials although that's a strecth as its about Coventry and not a town full of the undead although anyone who has been to Coventry might argue, we can have 'The Phantom of the Opera' from Andrew Lloyd Webber's play and 'Zombie' by The Cranberries which again isn't so much about brain eating reanimated corpses and more about the troubles in Northern Ireland but i'm struggling here.  
Van Halen's 'Runnin' with the Devil' and Guns N Roses 'Right Next Door to Hell' make the 13 which seems a good enough number for Halloween so i told them to put it out the back somewhere and prepare for the December Christmas songs list of the 12 best commercial ones which everyone hears every single year and 12 which the don't get much or any radio play, believe me you haven't heard Feliz Navidad until you hear it through a punk/rock fuzz guitar filter.

I'm Off To Glasgow With My CD Collection

Just as i was sitting down to watch Squid Game, the phone rang and it was the Organisers of the COP26 event in Glasgow and they had a problem because they had arranged for introduction music for the World Leaders but the guy responsible has flounced off with his record collection after a dispute over being served the Scottish delicacy, a deep friend mars bars, and now they want me to come to Glasgow with my record collection and play the intro music for each nations leader.   
I originally said no because, well, it's Scotland but they promised to pay me a trillion pounds so i said leave it with me and i began looking through my CD collection for appropriate songs.
The leaders will be introduced alphabetically so first up is Australia's Scott Morrison and after his betrayal of France over the nuclear submarine deal, 'Beautiful Liar' by Beyoncé and Shakira fits the bill as does 'Being Boring' by the Pet Shop Boys for the Belgian leader which should make him think of home.
With his inept record on the Coronavirus running rampant in his country, it has to be 'Don't stand so close to me' by the Police for Jair Bolsonaro and i hope the Canadian Prime Minister remembers his black face because its 'Proud to be Black' by Run DMC for Justin Trudeau
Cuddly Xi Jinping gets the theme tune to Winnie The Pooh and hopefully France's Emmanuel Macron will understand that his music has to be Van Halens 'Hot For Teacher', considering he was and he married her then the Queen Song 'Fat Bottomed Girls' for Germanys Angela Merkel.
'Money Ain't A Thang' by Jay-Z for Greece and Patsy Cline's 'Crazy' should do it for Hungary's Viktor Orbán and then i'll get ready 'Dem Haters' by Rihanna for Iran's Ebrahim Raisi.
Isaac Herzog of Israel follows Iran in so 'Nobody Likes You' by Green Day seems appropriate as does 'Climbing the walls' by They Might Be Giants for Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador as it seems that's what most of his countrymen are doing on the border with America.
New Zealand's beautiful and fragrant Jacinda Ardern get's 'Everybody loves you now' from Billy Joel so the podium should smell nice for when Kim Jong -un arrives to 'Bring Your Own Bomb', if he turns up at all that is.
Palestine's Mahmoud Abbas is up next so it's got to be Guns 'n' Roses, 'Right next door to hell' and 'So Macho' for Russia and Vladimir Putin and as Saudi Arabian King and Prime Minister Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud will be celebrating his 86th Birthday soon, i wonder if he will understand the message behind another Billy Joel song 'Only the good die young'.
Syria's Bashar al-Assad will be whistling along to Gloria Gaynor's 'I will survive' as he enters the room although i'm not sure if  Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is a fan of R&B so 'Sorry For the Stupid Things' by Babyface might go over his head.
Bringing up the rear is the UK and the USA so for Boris 'Send in the Clowns' because he is only a squirty flower and a shiny red nose away from joining Billy Smarts Circus and last but not least is the President of the United States, Joe Biden, and looking at his stumbling ratings recently, 'Every day i love you less and less' by the Kaiser Chiefs or 'Wake Up Call' by Maroon 5 in case he has nodded off again, either of those are fine.
Right, with the lineup complete, me and my CD player are off to Glasgow. Cya there!

Special Guest Blogger: Charles Boycott

I served in the British Army which brought me to Ireland so after retiring from the army i worked as a land agent in charge of managing some Irish farmlands and its employees which mainly consisted of paying Irish workers as little as possible while charging them as much as i could to live there.
It was a harsh life, we had it so rough that sometimes we had to make do with eating duck and chicken rather than swan and goose and we ran so short of coal one time that we could only heat three of the seven bedrooms in our mansion and winters in Ireland could be awful.
One winter was particularly harsh which led to poor harvests which in turn led to poor tenants who came to me to help as they were struggling to pay their rent and pleaded with me not to evict them.
Being homeless in this particular time and place in one of the harshest winters for years meant almost certain death and i sympathised with their plight by cutting their salaries and raising their rents but when some complained i held a meeting with them to say that we've all got something we can bring to this discussion but i think from now on the thing you should bring is your suitcase because you are fired and now gather your things and get the hell off my land.
When the local community heard what i was doing, the other employees required to harvest the crops withdrew their labour and began a campaign of isolation against me and my family in the local community. This campaign included shops and services refusing to serve us, workers refused to harvest the crops, postmen refusing to deliver our mail but as i totally dependent on the underpaid Irish workers to keep the farms going, i did what any Englishman would do and complained about it in a letter to the Times Newspaper about how unfair the beastly Irish were being to me and my family and to send help to harvest the crops and provide someone for me to talk to.
Obviously the English ruling class were outraged by my case, specifically the part where a rich English person was being screwed with by some Irish riff-raffs so fifty men volunteered to come over and save my crops, plus 1,000 soldiers to protect those 50 men from the mad Irish locals.
To show my appreciation to the volunteers, i not only personally greeted them from the ship but immediately put them to work and charged them for their potatoes.
The episode was estimated to have cost the British government £10,000 to harvest about £500 worth of crops so the rescue operation proved to be way too expensive to be repeated every time a landowner was shunned by his community, and 'boycotting' became a thing.
Because the Irish could not be relied upon to continue being reasonable after i cut their wages and evicted them, there was nothing else for it but for me to return to England to become a land agent in Suffolk.
I miss the Emerald Isles, i had some happy times there, when the people still spoke to me obviously, but needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle and i left leaving behind boycott's spouting up against the land owners all over Ireland.
What this all means is that if you're brilliant and industrious and don't like having people speak to you or serve you in shops then you too can leave your name in the annals of history and people will still speak your name even after you are long gone.

Special Guest Blogger: Catalina de Erauso

Think of a nun and you would probably imagine a stern, sexless women who spends most of their days praying and slapping students on the hand with rulers but think again because i was a nun but the praying was done mostly by the people i came across.
My father was a captain and military commander of the Spanish Basque province and from an early age i trained with him and my brothers in the art of warfare so when i was taken to the Dominican convent of San Sebastian el Antiguo, i was not the nun sort and to be brief, i refused to take vows, fought with the head nun and was detained in a cell from which i escaped and went on the run.
You know how some girls cut their hair and they look amazing and others just look like ugly boys? I cut my hair short and looked confusingly masculine and even more when i put on some mans clothes and to cut a long story short, i stole the savings of a doctor, was arrested and imprisoned for fighting in Bilbao, sailed to Venezuela and killed some pirates, shot and killed a sea captain and stole 500 pesos and went to Peru and had a fight with a young man and ended slashing his face and another arrest and jail term.
Released, killed two friends of the man with the slashed face who came after me so another arrest and imprisoned and on release on to Chile and enrolled as a soldier.
In Chile massacring Indians, had an argument with my commander so burnt local fields of crops and got locked in a church for six months, then killed the Governor and was again imprisoned for eight months.
Next up Argentina, raided an Indian village, worked as a smuggler, got caught, killed another guy and sentenced to death, hid out in a Church and took a nun hostage and fled to Peru.
Obviously, in Peru i was arrested but to avoid execution, i begged for mercy to Bishop Agustín de Carvajal, and confessed that i was a woman who had been in a convent and the Bishop sent me back to Spain.
From Spain returned to Mexico and died while steering mules onto a boat so with 2 death sentences, 2 Church incarcerations, 5 prison sentences and 9 murders and killing hundreds of Indians, i don't think i ever really had the right temperament for the life of a nun.

Special Guest Blogger: Hiraga Gennai

My father was a low ranking Samurai and when i was very small he came to me, put his arm around my shoulder and gave me the: 'you can be anything that you want to be son' speech and i put down my toys, gave it some thought and asked: 'Even a physician who invents and writes books while being an expert in Art and botany who makes his own Pottery and writes satirical sketches and ends up a drunken murder?'
My father looked at me, shrugged and said 'Whatever. Knock yourself out kid' and it was as if fate had been writing all that down because i started out as a doctor and ended dying of tetanus in a prison so in some ways, maybe i should have gave it some more thought.
I began studying herbology and natural sciences under a medical doctor eventually becoming a pharmacologist but gave it up to move to Nagasaki because i loved the Western culture and Nagasaki was full of Dutch people with all their Western knowledge.
I learnt much from the foreign traders, even their language and composed a multi-volume work on the taxonomy of animals and plants while using my newly acquired business acumen to open mining and refining plants, mostly asbestos which i used to invent an amazing fire-resistant cloth but i also constructed one of Japan's first thermometers, came up with a more efficient way to produce charcoal and created a static electricity generator for pain therapy which came in useful for all the people working with asbestos because as a material it was a pain in the arse but even moreso in the lungs.
What was also a pain in the arse was homosexuality, controversial in 18th Century Japan but only because bi-sexuality and switching between male and female lovers was considered the way to go and my book stated that homosexual sex was superior to straight sex and i quickly became one of the voices of the gay movement and my novels reflected my homosexual preferences, 'Rootless Weed' about Enma, the king of the underworld coming to Earth to try it out was my best seller followed by the classic 'A Theory of Farting', a satire about a street performer who uses his butt as a musical instrument.
The mines discovered large deposits of clay so i set up workshops and kilns that lessened the country's reliance on imported stoneware and created a new pottery style mixing Western and Japanese aesthetics called Gennai-ware which impressed artist critics everywhere.
With the art critics on my side, i then invented a style of painting that fused traditional Japanese and Dutch masters styles which were so loved that i set up a school to teach it but, sadly, the school was very short-lived because i killed two workers while drunk who i suspected of stealing my blueprints for a mansion.
I was arrested and eventually died in prison of tetanus so when you are asked as a kid what you want to be when you grow up, don't just blurt out anything because you never know who is listening.

Special Guest Blogger: Norse God Týr

Who doesn't love a Tuesday? It's one of the best between Monday and Wednesday type days we've got and while it may not have the glamour and excitement of a Saturday night or the mournfulness of a Monday morn, it's the good old fashioned, honest to goodness, down to earth, Tuesday, or 'Týr's Day' to give it the proper name.
Who the bloody hell is that you might be saying, and if you are you want to watch yourself matey because i was one of the top Norse Gods responsible for single combat and law and justice and i will give you a left hook to the chops, it would be a right hand to the chops only i had that bitten off by Fenrir, my pet giant wolf.
Fenrir was only a pup, but he was growing quickly and the gods feared he would rear up and make a snack of them so fearing for their lives, they would entice him into playing a game in which they would try to ensnare him but whatever they used, the wolf would break free so the dwarves of Svartalfheim constructed a set of fetters and the gods challenged him to one final game but Fenrir knew the clever dwarves were involved and was afraid that if he couldn't escape, he would be bound forever so he only consented to the game if one of the Gods would stick an arm in his mouth as a pledge of good faith.
Only i was willing/stupid to do so the Gods bound him, he struggled but was unable to break them so bit down on my arm and so began a career of having the words 'the one armed God...' added before my name.
As the son of Odin and Frigga, i was a member of the Aesir tribe which included Thor and they were all about the war and bloodshed and although i was often invoked in battle, Thor was the man for invoking the brute physical combat, i was more about the paperwork and the legal decisions and principles of justice surrounding war.
I was also known for creating puzzles that no mortal mind could solve, like what has cities, mountains and water but no houses, trees or fish or my personal favourite which word in the dictionary is always spelt incorrectly?
Another good one was what can you hold in your left hand, but never in your right hand? Obviously it's your right hand which was especially true for me after Fenrir when i became very left-handed but there are some things that are so baffling that not even a God could answer because i've been to parallel universes, i've seen time running backwards, i've seen Goddesses so beautiful they would drive men insane and vanquished unbeatable enemies but i'm buggered if i know who the hell buys Country and Western albums.

Special Guest Blogger: Ellen Craft

As a black person, two things you learn very quickly are that white people really liked eating organic food and owning other people and they really didn't like it if they tried to escape so you could risk your life slipping through woods by night or as one man did, mail yourself to a safe zone in a wooden crate but me and my husband went a different route and hid in plain sight.
I was mixed-race, another thing you learn is that the slavers didn't like their slaves enough to give them freedom or care about them as actual human beings but they quite liked to bump fuzzies with them so my father was also my enslaver much to his wife’s  annoyance so she gave me away as a 'present' to her daughter, my half sister, who took me to Macon, Georgia, as a house servant.
It was there i met William who had been sold to a bank cashier who came up with a plan that as i was nearly white, i could disguise herself as an invalid gentleman, and assume to be his master and we could escape and not be challenged elsewhere.
I started practicing the posture, gestures, and speech of an upper-class white man and made some men's clothing and tried different ways to disguise my femininity and on the night of December 21, William cut my hair short, i put on my trousers and top hat, said a prayer, and we set off.
The first leg of our journey was by train and as luck would have it the person i sat next to was a friend of my master and when he tried to talk to me i looked out the window and pretended to be deaf to avoid talking to him.
The next leg was by steamboat and one man offered to buy William from me, another scolded me for saying thank you to him and some of the black passengers tried to get William to ditch his 'invalid owner' and escape.  
Finally, on Christmas Day, we made it to Philadelphia and with the help of Philadelphia's abolitionist network, we moved to Boston, where William found work as a cabinetmaker and me as a seamstress.
We ditched the costumes and we became local celebrities among white and Black residents alike, which drew the attention of bounty hunters sent by our former enslavers to track us down but we managed to evade capture by moving between safe houses until the bounty hunters gave up.
The constant fear of capture was too much, and we decided to flee to England and settled in Ockham, Surrey, where we gave public lectures on the brutality going on in the U.S. and the British public was devastated by what they heard and displayed said devastation in their own unique way, by turning up, deciding they couldn't be arsed to listen to it and then going right back to shoving children up chimneys.

If You Liked Squid Game...

Everyone seems to be talking about the South Korean show Squid Game, where 456 people in debt play games to win billions and the losers get exterminated and i was in on the ground floor with that because i have been watching all things Asian horror for years.
No spoilers here but it is as gruesome, brutal and entertaining as we have come to expect from South Korea but it is not a new genre, on the Asian Movies website, the horror genre has a category called 'Death Games' so there are plenty of them around.     
Squid Game has been compared to 'Hunger Games' set on an island where teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death in a televised death match but that is just a not too subtle blatant rip off of the Japanese move 'Battle Royale' which is set on an island where teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death in a televised death match.
The author of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, maintains that she has never heard of Battle Royale and she just had a similar idea but i think she probably got the idea by flipping through the television and happened to stumble across a foreign film that she probably thought wasn't very widely known outside of Asia and thought she would nick the story-line and hoped nobody would notice.  
If you watched Squid Game and fancy a bit more of the same then i could recommend plenty of other movies that use the same concept of games where you win and the losers all get killed, probably the best one is a bunch of teenagers held hostage and forced to play games by two men dressed as giant dancing teddy bears (Japan, go figure) but there is an amazing Thai film called '13 Beloved' aka '13: Game of Death' where a jobless man has to complete 13 ever-more gruesome challenges starting with killing a fly to win 100,000,000 Thai Baht (approx £2m).
As Hollywood has been remaking Asian movies for a while now, it never really captured the sheer creepiness and cruelty that comes with an Asian film  so if you enjoy a bit of blood, gore and having the bejesus scared out of you, do yourself a favour and hunt down the original Asian versions, many are in full on YouTube, and you will not be disappointed.

Deadly Incompetent Or Enacting A Hidden Agenda?

As the Coronavirus numbers hit 50,000 new infections and 180 deaths a day, the Government are saying that they won't be implementing plan B but they are keeping an eye on things but it is not that sense that they should be using because despite them saying that the NHS is not overwhelmed, that is exactly what almost every Medical authority, doctor and nurse is screaming at them.
The Health Secretary said that we can expect to see 100,000 new infections daily in winter as the Governments reckless social experiment   with almost all the previous restrictions on everyday life in England under Covid removed to see how things go, and it isn't going very well as our 4th place in the grim Global Death toll league shows.
England has become one of the worst places for infections in the world, despite a high degree of vaccinations and since the right-wing Conservatives took over in 2010, we have seen 140,000 Coronavirus deaths to add to the 57,000 deaths that their austerity policies led to and you do have to wonder why Boris Johnson hasn't been dragged from Downing Street by pitch-fork wielding locals.
Either the Government are deadly incompetent or they have another agenda which i am starting to believe could be behind their pondering and dithering reaction over the past 18 months.
I spoke to a lady during the week who was due to go to hospital for a minor operation but due to the lengthening NHS waiting times, patients waiting for treatment currently stands at 5,715,698, was told it has had to be postponed for at least a year but, and here's the kicker, if she went private she could get it done next week.
The Conservatives have never liked the NHS, it accounts for a large chunk of the economy and goes very much against their ideology and have been underfunding it and quietly hiving off parts of it to the private sector ever since they came to power so the pandemic has been a golden opportunity to nudge people into pricey Private Healthcare.
It is therefore in their ideological favour for Brits, desperate for surgery, to shun the NHS and go elsewhere, less patients means they don't need to fund it so much and can probably move whole departments to the private sector, as they did with dentists and opticians.
All makes sense now of why the Government are comfortable with 100,000 new infections and a horribly overstretched NHS, it is using the pandemic to usher in an American style healthcare system where your treatment depends on your ability to pay as they have always wanted, but have not been able to find a way to do it, until now. Then again they could just be really, really incompetent so let’s not rule that out either.

Special Guest Blogger: Arius

As a Christian priest my main job was to ensure that people were told that if they are good they go to the good place to listen to harps and if they are bad they go to the bad place and listen to Hawaiian guitars and explain to them how it all came about when a man in the clouds made the first couple who annoyed him by being enticed into eating an apple by a talking snake, that was the easy bit, my problems came when i suggested that there might have been a time when Christ hadn't existed. Like, say, before he was born.
My role in the great fourth-century theological conflict was to ask if Jesus was the son of god, there must have been a time before God Begat him when it was just God all on his lonesome so that must mean that Jesus was not infinite and eternal, only God is, or as i put it 'there was a time when the Son was not'.
Despite there being a massive clue in the name 'Son of God', the Church told me to shut my big fat yap and argued that the Holy Trinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Sprit were the same thing but more and more people began to hear me and question if Jesus was a lesser power than God then  Emperor Constantine got involved and ordered a meeting of all the top Churchy types to end the Christological dispute.
Two months and a few thrown slaps and punches later, while the Church arguing that the God's son wasn't actually the son of God at all but God himself, the rest decided that by decree the son of God will from hence forth be known as 'homoousios', meaning 'one in essence' and anyone who says different is a heretic and will burn in the fires of hell.
It wasn't just heretics being burnt afterwards, i was exiled and the decree said that all my writings should be handed over to the authorities to make a huge bonfire with and anyone found to have hidden anything composed by me shall be put to death.
I went off to Palestine to live but i was invited back into the Church a year later and the Emperor directed Alexander of Constantinople to receive me in Jerusalem which didn't go down well with him which he expressed by saying he was earnestly praying that i might perish before this could happen.
I arrived in my best clothes, had a meal and brushed my beard and set off to the Imperial Palace but on the way there i suddenly felt faint and to put it politley, there was a violent relaxation of my bowels, or to put it less delicately, i shat myself, violently. So violently in fact that amongst the red and brown stuff on the floor behind me was my small intestines, spleen and liver.
My opponents put it down to God making a statement about me being bought back into the fold but i put it down to the copious amounts of poison on my food rather than a Holy assassination by bowel evacuation but God moves in mysterious ways so stay regular kids, just in case.

Special Guest Blogger: Peyton Randolph

How was your Fourth of July this year fellow Yankees? Did you scare the pets with explosions and eat cheeseburgers until you felt sick because it was America's Birthday?
Everyone thinks they know that the first president of the United States was George Washington and he was unless you count me and the other 13 Presidents before him.
The First Continental Congress began meeting before the American colonies declared independence from Great Britain and to watch over the proceedings of the Continental Congress, we elected a President, and the first person to hold the new office was me as i had studied in London and was a member of the English law society had contacts in Britain who were being dicks towards us, not that it's my face on the US one dollar bill.
This office of President of the Continental Congress carried on during the American Revolution and afterward too. When the first attempt at a constitution, the Articles of Confederation, was ratified, the young United States continued to have a President until the Articles were replaced by the Constitution of the United States. This replaced the old government and created a new executive branch led by the president of the United States. Old wooden teeth was elected to this new position, and the presidents of old were conveniently forgotten.
Why don't we ever hear about the old presidents, then? Mainly because we didn't really do anything what with it being a ceremonial position that presided over debates regarding how to achieve independence and do little else, the early U.S. was pretty much just winging it but we were the leaders of the Nation during the American Revolutionary War and trying to steer America to it's independence.
I only lasted 47 days in the position before having to step down after falling ill and Henry Middleton was elected to replace me but he ended up spending just six months in the position before i came back to not only be the First President but the third as well but i found i wasn't as healthy as i thought and stepped down again as President in favour of John Hancock who was the actual 4th President and i actually died while dining with Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd or 17th guy depending on how you count us but i was definitely number one and therefore propose that Washington DC is renamed Randolphville.

Special Guest Blogger: Joseph Friedman

Most products begin with someone thinking how cool it would be if that thing existed and then go and invent that thing and then launch it out into the world and i was one of those and had several ideas and i had several patents to my name but built my fortune around probably the most basic one and changed the world one drink at a time.
My first invention was a tweak to the fountain pen which i sold to Sheaffer Pen Company and then experimented with ideas ranging from engine improvements, household products and sound and optics but an unsuccessful inventor isn't good at paying the bills so i dabbled in real estate and optometry for a while i waited for my big break.
That came while sitting in my brother Albert's sweet shop with my daughter who was drinking something out of a cup with a paper straw but the straw was too high and she was struggling to reach it so i took the straight straw, bent it over a screw which is always in the pocket of an inventor and therefore creating corrugations so the paper straw conveniently bent over the edge of the glass.
Her friends asked me if i could do the same to their straw's and a light bulb went off so i patented it under the catchy title 'Drinking Tube'.
I made a prototype straw with tiny corregations so it would bend easily and showed it to my brother in-laws who offered to finance a machine to mass produce them and we sold them to hospitals for patients who couldn't sit up in bed and struggled to drink from standard vertical straws.
We created the Flexible Straw Corporation and sold tens of millions worldwide and then sold the business to Maryland Cup Corporation who changed the design from paper to plastic and i retired rich and all thanks to a invention that literally sucked.

Colin Powell No Hero

Many nice things are being said about Colin Powell following his death and he may well have been a very nice man who done great things while but to me he was always one of the unscrupulous George W Bush gang who lied their way to war.
He did later say that he regretted his actions at the United Nations, calling it a blot on his record, which resulted in as many as a million dead Iraqi's but far too late, he didn't have to go traveling the world trying, and failing, to build support for U.S. military action, but he did and he didn't have to sit at the UN and hold up a vial as proof that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling biological and chemical weapons and state he was giving 'facts facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence' which turned out to not only be nonsense, but nonsense that he knew was nonsense as the State Department’s own office of intelligence and research (INR), told him that some of the evidence he was to present was not correct, but he went ahead and ignored them and presented it anyway.
In the Security Council chamber, he displayed photographs and diagrams to detail Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and at one point brandished a small vial containing a teaspoon of simulated anthrax, warning that Iraq had not accounted for 'tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons of the deadly disease.
The United Nations quite rightly decided not to give their blessing and no such weapons were ever found and he did say later that he regretted providing misleading intelligence that led to the US invasion, calling it a 'blot on my record' and that the fact that it turned out to be a hat-full of lies as 'painful', but i guarantee it was not as painful as the decades of death, chaos and violence in Iraq and beyond that resulted from it.
As one Iraqi said 'What does that remorse do for us? A whole country was destroyed, and we continue to pay the price' so i'm not sure what the platitudes are for, he was part of the immoral and dishonest gang that went to such lengths to deceive, cheat and lie to go to war so you don't make out somebody to be a hero when they were anything but just because they died, and Powell was no hero.

Special Guest Blogger: Hindu God Krishna

As one of the most popular Hindu deities, a dashing, daring, blue-skinned hero who drove women wild it is fair to say i was a bit of a babe magnet but the other 15,999 wives meant nothing to me, my true love was Radha, although Valentines day was a minefield.
Most of my formative years were spent avoiding death at the hands of jealous friends and relatives and i narrowly avoided being killed at birth by my uncle Kamsa, but Vishnu saved the day by transferring me to the womb of Godlet Vindhyavasini who was then whisked off to heaven, it seems being a God comes with people not only trying to passive-aggressively murder you, but also just straight-up aggressively trying to murder you.
Once safely born, my troubles really began and a succession of baby-killing demons tried their best to dispatch me but they seemed to forget that i was really an indestructible Godly lump with an array of demon dispatching tricks up my sleeves.
One attempt was by Putana who got a job as my wet nurse and she put poison on her nipples but having the digestion of an immortal, rather than spit it out i sucked so hard that she turned inside out. Did feel for the nurse who had the job of changing my nappies after that.
Once grown up, i went off to be a teenage boy and chase girls and would rush to the rescue of the lovely maidens but the flaw was once rescued i had to marry them to prevent any moral complications, hence the many, many wedding anniversaries on my calendar.
This all come a screeching halt when when it was revealed that i was really the Eighth Incarnation of Vishnu, and was therefore supposed to be doing important Godly work instead of messing around rescuing babes and rolling around in the hay all day so i kissed goodbye to all my wives and with that done, three months later i left to start a new career as God and Hero.
Many tales have been told of my amazing Godly adventures, eloping with Rukmini at her own wedding leaving a crowd of highly irritated wedding party guests munching stale wedding cake and feuding with Sisupala and slicing him neatly in half, lifting a hill to protect a city from a flood and generally dodging death the way some people dodge paying for a round when it is there turn to get them in.
I died when i was accidentally pinned to a tree by a dozen arrows during a festival but like Celine Dion, my heart will go on as it ended up in a wooden cart being dragged around the planet but i do not accept that my story was stolen by the Christians for their own god.
I will admit there are a few similarities such as both being born to Virgins under a star and both our births occurred while our fathers returned to their native city, and were both visited by three wise men and indeed we both had a king slaughtering all baby males after our birth and while we both performed miracles and we were both crucified with the noon Sun darkening at both events but apart from that, i was around hundreds of years before Christianity was as much as a twinkle in a rogue Jew's eye so completely different.

Special Guest Blogger: President Felix Faure

I was the Minister of marine in the administration of French President Casimir-Perier and somehow got myself elected as the Republican nominee because the two other Republicans were hated by other Republicans and the party wanted someone who was plain, boring and offended nobody so they put little old innocuous me on the ballot and sacre bleu i won the election, i like to think that having the bitchinest moustache in all of France helped, it certainly impressed the ladies.
You can think of me as the John Mayor of politics when it comes to things i did while in Office and as the Bill Clinton of politics when it come to things i also did while in the office because people have many different ways of coping with the pressure of running their country, some took the chance to grow closer to their citizens. Some take the opportunity to put right some equalities and make life easier for the poorest in society but i gazed out across the landscape of the Champs-Élysées, wiped away a tear, and calmly promised that i would get drunk and screw to a degree hitherto unseen in French society and that takes some doing because infidelity in the workplace in France is what teapots are to England.
Many women were interested to see if the downstairs matched the massive moustache upstairs and the Presidential seal spent the 4 years of my presidency alongside the crumpled underwear of many mademoiselles but my final booty call was to Marguerite Steinheil who was a total babe and i'm not saying that she was a bike, but she had more riders than the Marseille–Paris cycling race.   
One of our little 'games' was pirates, she would be my wench and i was a rough buccaneer and we was about to splice the main-brace when just as we got to the ho-ho-ho bit, something inside my head went twang and i shuffled off my mortal coil as well as my trousers.    
I know that if they could do such a thing, most men would already have made arrangements to meet their makers in the exact same way but not only did i die happy, but in the most way French way possible.

Stop Worrying, All Will Be Sorted At COP26

Boris Johnson has done us the honour of returning from his holiday and has repeated his claim that this Christmas will be better than last Christmas which he stopped so that boast is as trustful as...well...pretty much anything else he has ever said but we can squabble over the lack of HGV drivers, butchers and fruit pickers and the empty shelves in the shops and no petrol, books, paper, tennis balls, wine, bread, tuna, grapes, onions, chocolate digestives, turkeys, pet vaccines, coffee, light-bulbs, pigs, blankets and pigs-in-blankets because Michael Gove is on the case to 'save Christmas', although with that list it seems the one he is saving is the one in 1941 during rationing.
The reason Boris has palmed off the responsibility of 'Saving Christmas' to Michael Ho-Ho-Gove is because 1. He hates him, 2. He then won't get the blame when it all goes tits up and 3. He is far too busy saving the Planet.
A recent convert to human's not destroying the only Planet we have to live on, Boris has gone from calling it 'expensive, politically correct, bunny hugging' which 'is without scientific foundation' to saying at the UN that humanity 'must grow up to halt climate change' and then waffled on madly about Kermit the Frog for a bit but his gist was welcomed, even if it was decades too late.
I have been banging the 'STOP SCREWING UP THE PLANET YOU BELLENDS' drum since the 80's and it has been a long process to overcome the global warming denying cranks which means we have wasted a couple of decades in actually doing something and all it took was for everything to happen which the Scientists were saying would happen, the droughts, desertification, heatwaves, acidification of the sea, floods, extreme weather, sea rises, those type of things.  
So with the sea now lapping around their ankles and record breaking weather conditions continually breaking their own records, World Governments are absolutely determined to do something to stop it before it is goes too far so they are all coming to Scotland for COP26, so called because it is the 26th such meeting when they get together to absolutely do something to stop the Globe warming up even further.
As the COP1 in Berlin was in 1995 and the amount of the lethal CO2 gas into the atmosphere then was 350ppm while today, 25 years and 25 COP meetings later it sits at 413 ppm, the highest than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years, it hasn't been a raging success but we can only hope they do a bit more than promise to absolutely, definitely do something about it as soon as possible and then go back home and forget about it until COP27.       
Still, the Planet may be doomed because of the stupid people we have running it but at least we will get Christmas this year which is looking more like the kind of Christmas turkeys might actually have voted for.

Éric Zemmour: The French Donald Trump

The French elections are coming up and although the present President Emmanuel Macron has a 10 point lead, interesting to hear that they have their eye on the far right and Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour who is being called the French Donald Trump.
Obviously my mind went to a morbidly obese man with awful hair and fluorescent orange skin but when i saw him he looked boringly normal so i guess it must be that like the laughably idiotic Trump, he is a raging racist and it turns out he is as his speeches seem to focus on the three i's, immigration, identity and Islam and a bonus 'm' in banning the name Mohamed.
A former journalist, Zemmour identifies himself as a Bonapartist who base their belief system on the dinky French Emperor and considering that he was the 19th Century version of Hitler invading his way across Europe, that isn't a great starting point but maybe he isn't so bad once you actually look at his policies which include his defence of the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime and stopping the threat of a 'Great Replacement' which is the replacement of France’s white, Christian population with people who are not as white or as Christian as him and his followers.  
So far so whack-a-doodle Trump but it isn't just any old non-White Christians he is against, it's specifically Muslims, feminists, homosexuals, black people and Arabs and throw in that he has been accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour by several women, the Trump comparisons suddenly make sense.
The French election, like America's, gone on far too long and the first round is in December but we won't know who of the 40 starters, who will be left standing in April but unlike the Americans, the French are too clever to vote for a right wing racist with a thing for the Nazi's who has been accused of sexually assaulting women, if the election of Trump taught us anything, it's that never ends well.

Terrorism Still With Us

MP Sir David Amess had recently written about the risk of attacks on parliamentarians, saying that 'it could happen to any of us' and it was an unfortunate prophesy as he became the latest victim, stabbed to death while holding an MP's surgery in his constituency of Leigh-on-Sea.
In his book, he stated that 'The British tradition has always been that members of parliament regularly make themselves available for constituents to meet them face to face at their surgeries' and it was this that saw a 25 year old male armed with a knife waiting among a group of people to see him and launch the attack, stabbing him multiple times, shortly after the MP arrived.
Police have now declared it as a terrorist incident after the suspect, a Briton with Somali heritage, was arrested at the scene.
Quite rightly there are now calls for MPs to have security when they meet the general public but politicians of all parties have stated that the abuse, intimidation and risk for MPs and their staff has increased over the past few years and dealing with harassment is sadly now part and parcel of politics in 2021.
As the police are now saying it was an Islamist terror attack, i am sure we will find out in time if there is any significance that the attack happened in a Church, where Amess held his surgery's, or the MP was targeted due to some view he held but hot on the heels of the fatal attacks in Norway this week, terrorism is still with us.

Sex And Gender Confusion

I have always gone along with the idea that if a man wants to be a woman or a woman wants to be a man then that's fine but Professor Robert Winston made a valid point on TV last night that you may be able to change your gender, but you can never change your sex, that is biologically cast while in the womb and you are destined to forever have XY or a XX chromosomes.
The Labour party got its panties in a bunch the other week by saying that only women have a womb but that isn't true, there are plenty of women who for one reason or another have undergone a hysterectomy to have the womb surgically removed so that's false straight away.
At birth, the sex is determined by the midwife by whatever set of genitals is between the legs but you can have them removed, added or even be born with both or none so that isn't a great method to tell definitively male from female.
Another way to tell is to measure testosterone and estrogen but that is not always clear as in the case of the
South-African female runner Caster Semenya who had very high testosterone levels and had to take medication to lower her testosterone levels.
So biologically and genetically speaking, a person’s sex cannot change from birth, but their gender can so terms such as transgender are correct while terms such as sex change are not but as gender is the set of expectations, standards, and characteristics about how men and women are supposed to act in society, then the changing from one to the other is not a problem.
Their are problems, such as toilets or changing rooms but ultimately it is down to the person involved to identify with whatever gender they feel more comfortable with and i am as guilty as anyone for getting the ideas of a persons 'sex' and their 'gender' confused so the language needs to change but so does society to just accept it because the most important aspect is the person beneath the clothes, not the designated sex on the birth certificate.

Special Guest Blogger: Elmer McCurdy

I started off as a really bad outlaw and ended up in a movie and an episode of the Bionic Man so my life is separated into what the medical profession call 'being alive' and 'being dead' so first the bit before i found TV stardom and that would be when i decided that after i left the army robbing banks and trains would be a good career move so i took the military training in explosives and went looking for an outlaw gang because every good crew needs the guy who’s good at blowing stuff up.
My problem was that i sucked at the whole robbing, shooting, wearing a bandana thing as the gang found out when on my first job i was charged with opening a safe and blew the entire thing sky high, destroying everything in it.
Because outlaws are basically a fair bunch, they gave me another go at a bank heist but this time i bought too few explosives and hardly made a dent in the door.
The third time, and with promises that i had the whole blowing safes open thing sorted, i joined them robbing a train but the local sheriff blew a big hole in me before i even got to the safe and for most people that would have been the end of the ride but for me it was only just the beginning.
My body was embalmed and held at the local undertaker but nobody turned up to claim my body and pay for my coffin so the undertaker did what anybody would do in those circumstances and started putting my body on display outside of his place with a sign around my neck to put a coin in my mouth.
Months passed until some men turned up and offered to take my body which the undertaker was cool with which is how i ended up being carted to a Carnival, tagged the 'Embalmed Bandit' and we toured around the USA until my body was moved on to yet another owner, this time a man who operated a traveling 'Museum of Crime' with a bunch of wax figures of famous criminals he would rent out to venues and as props, one time i appeared in the film Narcotic!, that's me sat in a seat in the theatre scene.
From there i was sold to the Hollywood Wax Museum and was transported there strapped to the roof of a car like a weird looking Christmas tree and when i arrived i was missing both ears, several toes and fingers which had blown off. My new owner wasn't loving the new look so sold me on to an amusement park where i was strapped to the ceiling of a haunted house.
The TV show, The Six Million Dollar Man, came to park to shoot an episode but while filming my arm fell off and the producers realised that the body they were filming was an actual dead man so they reported it and i was freed from my duties and laid to rest in an actual cemetery.
So i may not have been the best or most memorable cowboy but while they were forced to play sad songs on the harmonica out on the open range before riding off into the sunset, i got to star in films and on TV alongside some great actors as well as Lee Mayors who for that episode at least wasn't the stiffest most lifeless thing on the screen for once.

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

My father was part of the French aristocracy and came to Saint-Domingue, a French-Caribbean colony, and took a shine to one of his female black slaves, and she gave birth to me and three daughters and we all lived together until news reached him that his parents back in France had died and he was eligible to inherit their title.
The very next day he made a list which went: 'Things to do: Stop milk, pay papers, sell female family members to slave traders' which is exactly what he did and he raised enough money to take him and me back to France.
Being a black man in 18th-century France wasn't easy but being part of the aristocracy meant i went to a decent school and studied philosophy, fencing and equestrianism and it all looked good until my dad wanted to marry a domestic servant and i refused to sign as a witness so he cut off my allowance.
With no money i had to join the army and the nobility would generally go in as Officers but as a black man i had to start at the bottom rank and found myself posted to a small, backwater town but that was where i met and married my wife.

 She announced her pregnancy just as the French Revolution kicked off and i got called to defend the capital and got caught up in the Champs de Mars Massacre where 50 peasants were shot and killed and as the black man i was the only one stood before the notorious Committee of Public Safety who bought my claim that i acted to prevent even more bloodshed of the Officers and was cleared but still sent away to join France's Black Legion, a group of freed slaves. 

I rose through the ranks to Brigadier General but while i was away my wife gave birth to our child, a boy called Alexandre Dumas, who would grow to become a writer and include me in many of his books.
I was sent to command the Army of the Alps and under my command we captured the mountain range from the Austrians and i came to the notice of Napoleon Bonaparte who had a very complex relationship with me, he either hated or loved me depending on the day.
He tried to demote me for resisting his order to ransack any city we entered then got his praise for taking the city of Mantua then demoted me again when i complained about a General then promoted again after almost single-handedly defending a bridge in an Italian village after the rest of the men retreated.
He took me to Egypt with him but when men began dying of the heat, thirst and inadequate supplies and i complained to Napoleon, he promptly sent me back to France, or he would have done if the British hadn't sank all our ships in Cairo Harbour so i hired a ship to take me home to my family but the ship was a dog and sinking and we had to land our ship in Naples which was friendly to France or rather it was when we left but in the meantime the Government had been overthrown and the new guys were warring against us.
I spent the next two years locked up somewhere in Naples, Napoleon heard but preferred to carry on not sticking it to Josephine than try and get me released and the guards treated me so badly that when i was released i was partially paralyzed, almost blind and deaf in one ear but i went home thinking at least i had my army back-dated wages and pension to live on.
I wrote multiple times to Napoleon, asking for both explaining that my son couldn't get an education without it but nobody ever replied and i died of stomach cancer a year later but if I had ever got my hands on him i would have tied him to a cannon and made him into Napoleon Blown-apart.

How Dare The EU Do What We Agreed to

As we found with Donald Trump and his loony supporters, it is hard to satirise people who are so awful in real life that it is impossible to write anything worse than what they actually say or do which brings us to Boris Johnson and his satire writers worst dream of a Government.
Hot on the heels of Iain Duncan Smith article asking what has gone wrong with Britain because workers are refusing to return to the office while in the 1940s they kept coming to the office even when Hitler’s bombs were raining down (to which many people pointed out that the Home WIFI capabilities in the Blitz were not really up to home working so they had no choice but to go to the office), we have Lord Frost.
It should be pointed out that this is the same Lord Frost who negotiated the Northern Ireland Brexit Protocol, the one him and Boris Johnson called a 'great deal that was oven ready' which was agreed by both sides and is designed to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland.
The very same Northern Ireland protocol he said was 'an excellent deal' with the EU that he had been 'proud to secure' but now he wants to rip up and start again because the EU was breaking the spirit of the thing by going to the trouble of actually implementing it, accusing the EU of acting in bad faith by applying the treaty in the form in which it had been agreed.
Irish deputy PM Leo Varadkar has warned other nations considering doing deals with the UK that they should be wary because it might not keep its word, to which the only reply is to look at our inept Government and say 'duh...you reckon'?

Special Guest Blogger: Noah

A long, long time ago when God first made the Earth, we haven't got time to get into the dates and things but let's go with the Bible and say 5,000 years ago, God looked at his humans being evil and threw a massive hissy fit and said to himself they are so wicked so went straight to the genocide and said i know, i'll have to wipe them off the face of the earth with a flood along with every living thing because he was angry with the animals too for some reason.
There was one man who was still very good, that would be me, and despite being 600 years old at the time, God told me the plan to just start again with me and the wife and i should round up two of every animal, build an ark to keep them alive and i did what God said but let me tell you, it was a proper nightmare.
There are 5,000 million species of animals, that's 10 million animals on an Ark 300 cubits long (437ft), 50 cubits wide (72ft) and 30 cubits high (43ft) and it rained for 40 days and nights the flood water rose higher and higher until it covered the tops of the highest mountains and so every living thing was drowned except us and the animals in the ark.
The sea creatures were fine, they were better off in fact, but i had the problem of feeding and cleaning up after the 10 million animals and as God was busy massacring everyone, it only left us to do the feeding, water and to shovel the poop over the side of the ark.
For a hundred and fifty days the earth was covered with water and we bobbed around until i opened a window of the Ark and looked out and noticed that the water seemed to be going down so i sent a raven out but it soon came flying back as it couldn't find anywhere to settle so i waited another week avoiding being mauled by the vicious animals or trampled by the heavy ones and sent out a dove who came back with a green olive branch and God told me to land and let all the animals out.
Now with God being a bit of a moody sod, i asked if i could keep the Ark moored somewhere safely in case he got all murdery again but he said no need, he would never again send a flood to destroy the earth and here's a pretty rainbow to prove it.
So when you've done wrong and you are feeling very sad about it, think of the rainbow and the peace which God wants to put into your heart and don't ask any akward questions about how did 10 million animals fit on a Ark with 95,832 square feet of floor space or why almost every other and earlier religion also had a deity causing a killer flood to almost wipe out mankind for being evil, just shut up, look at the rainbow and say thank you for the loving mass murder of your ancestors because God is love remember. Yep, it was a good thing, for me it was anyway, i lived to be 950.

Special Guest Blogger: Ganna Walska

Russian-occupied Poland was a bleak place for women, and also men, and frankly most of the animals didn't have it great either but with nothing more than sheer force of will, mad scientists and some truly great divorce lawyers i made my way to international celebrity.
It all began with a chance meeting of Tsar Nicholas at the royal ball in St. Petersburg and he declared me the most beautiful woman at the ball and even commissioned a special portrait of me which bought me to the attention of certain young men and i met and married a wealthy baron but he wanted to live in cold, desolate Russia and i had much higher ambitions so i divorced him and moved with half of his fortune to New York and into the bedroom of an elderly, well off doctor who i married and then he helpfully died two years later leaving me heartbroken but the huge inheritance helped to soothe my broken heart along with Harold McCormick, who was the head of the world's biggest producer of farm equipment and who went to Switzerland to ask his wife for a divorce so he could marry me but by the time he got back with his divorce papers, i had got fed up waiting and married another millionaire.
That marriage soon ran into trouble and at the divorce proceedings my lawyers successfully argued that i had suffered numerous acts of cruelty like him giving me Cartier bracelets as they covered 'the natural beauty of my delicate wrists' and he 'forced me to accept a sable coat worth a million francs, so big and heavy that it made me look old and fat'.
Amazingly the court agreed that i had no choice but to divorce the cruel bastard and i had to accept a hefty out-of-court settlement, and then immediately married Harold McCormick after all.
Now Harold was all man, apart from his testicles because he had baboon glands inserted to increase his sex drive but his super-gonads did not interest me as much as his opera contacts because i fancied myself as a bit of a singer and he staged numerous elaborate productions starring me
with one performance ending with the audience booing and throwing rotten vegetables so i packed my bags and departed for Europe where i bought a theater on the Champs-Elysees and staged many lavish performances.
With my own theater and no further need for a man with monkey balls, i divorced him and married the inventor Harry Grindell Matthews who was putting the final touches to his death ray which turned out to be so weak that at the demonstration, three scientists stepped into the path of the beam to show that nothing would happen, which it never, so as appealing as an Opera singer with a death ray might have been, we divorced months after getting married and by now, with 5 divorce settlements in my bank account, i was stinking rich and next up was Theos Bernard, a Buddhist mystic 21 years younger than me but while his testicles were human, his brain was certainly baboon and we divorced, he used his divorce settlement to fund an expedition to Tibet, where he was immediately shot in the head and dumped in a river.
I never married again, mostly because i was so rich i had more to lose in divorce settlements so i bought a big house and spent millions building up my mansion's gardens so my journey through everything ended with nothing more than an interest in gardening and avoiding the monkey cages at the zoo's.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek/Roman God Zeus

Back in my day i was the top banana, numero uno and the Chief of Gods as well as being responsible for the sky, thunder, weather, law and justice and when i wasn't battling with the giant Titans and engaging in all manner of gut-busting glorious Godly pursuits, i ruled Olympus. It is the lofty cloud-land where us Greek Gods lived and looked down upon you feeble humans but i didn't make the best start, my father Cronus was terrified of my awesome power and concerned that one of his kids would grow up and overthrow him, he swallowed us but my mum wasn't having any of that and gave him a stone to swallow instead of me and she smuggled me out to the nymph Adamanthea who hid me by dangling me by a rope from a tree so that my dad couldn't see me so i grew up and learned to walk, talk, and rule the Universe and the story does have a happy ending as i went back and made him puke up my siblings and then me and my brothers Hades and Poseidon, chucked him into the Abyss of Tartarus with the rest of the Titan's who arses we kicked.
Being a hunky, irresistible God i did have an eye for the Goddesses, mortals, animals, actually anything that would keep still long enough but my wife and sister, Hera (again, Greece), was very understanding, a God needed to relax after a hard days successfully crushing revolts against me by my fellow gods.
To seduce Eurymedusa, i disguised myself as an ant, i really didn't think that one through, but from all my affairs i had hundreds of children but my main family included Artemis, Apollo, Hermes, Athena, Ares, and Aphrodite who all went on to be Gods themselves although we did all get new names when the Romans took over, i became Jupiter but i was still the top dog in charge of weather and thunderbolts although sometimes a well lobbed thunderbolt up the jacksy wasn't enough and i had to get proper Greek on their arses.
Humans did like to make sacrifices to me and usually it was a virgin or a goat and i would say what's the point in sending me a burnt virgin but they continued so i decided to wipe out mankind and flooded the world with the help of my brother Poseidon. None of that ark business with two of each animals, just flooded the damned place but that was the kind of guy i was, rewarding good conduct and punishing evil with floods and guess what else, yep, thunderbolts, i did love a good thunderbolt.
When the Roman's took over matters they kept me as top God but changed my name to Jupiter and named a Planet after me and considering that it is a massive ball of gas, that seems quite right but then so would you be after all that nectar and ambrosia.

Special Guest Blogger: St. Denis of Paris

Life as a missionary can be tough, especially if it's in third century Paris under Roman rule where the Christians had almost vanished thanks to the head choppy ways of Emperor Decius.
If your only knowledge of Christian saints is that holidays and cities are named after them, hang on to your hat because some of us guys went down in history because we had superpowers like functioning without heads.
I was sent by Pope Fabian along with six other missionaries to Gaul to convert the Pagan's and increase the Christian population again so we found a nice place on the River Seine and set about the business of converting.
I don't want to blow my own trumpet but i was good, a bit too good actually because i was made the Bishop of Paris but the Pagan priests became alarmed over their loss of followers to my side of the religious fence so they called in the Roman's to put a stop to our little game.
The Emperor sent threats and started dropping tactful hints in the form of a goddamn executioner standing outside my window swinging a huge sword but undeterred i continued to convert Parisians to Christianity which resulted in me being beheaded which to some could be considered a handicap but not me, i carried on undeterred. You could say i was a head of my time...ba dum tss.
I picked up my own severed head, dusted it down and washed it in a spring because all that blood was not a good look for a Priest and i walked for about six or so miles preaching all the way through the mouth of my severed head which i was carrying.
At this point i should point out that headless missionaries are not a familiar sight in Paris so credit must go to those who stayed to listen to my message of salvation and saw past the headless guy walking toward them with blood spurting from a ragged neck stump, carrying his own own head.
I carried on walking until i reached a spot that looked nice and promptly dropped dead thereby forever giving artists the problem of where to put my halo in paintings. Many discussions must have gone on whether it goes where the head used to be or where the head is now in my hands.
Fun fact: I am the patron saint of people suffering from headaches which is nice but as usually happens, i thought of something cool to say way too late and have always regretted not saying on my walk from my execution 'See guys, Christians are head and shoulders above all the rest of those other religions' but the moments passed now.

Missed Rolling Up My Sleeve

I missed my slot for my seasonal flu jab this week which usually would be greeted with a shrug of 'oh well' but today the Health chiefs have issued a warning that there is: 'a realistic possibility that the UK will see a surge in flu cases this winter' and England's deputy chief medical officer, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, is using the winter of 1989/90 and the 19,000 excess deaths as a marker of what to expect this season.
The report mentioned a triple threat of coronavirus, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) due to
extremely low flu infection rates last winter means community immunity will be much lower as we head into the flu season.
In an average year, 11,000 people die from flu in England while in 2020, the death toll from Coronavirus was 72,178 so to have both circulating at the same time is a worrying prospect, especially at the UK Government seem to have given up any pretense of battling Coronavirus and we are currently contracting 40,000 new cases a day in what is considered to be the time of lowest transmission.
With the economy tanking spectacularly due to the madness that is Brexit and the strain of the Coronavirus struggle, the Government will be desperate to try to avoid another expensive lock-down although the cynic in me say's that the last 15 months Covid implications has acted as a very convenient fig leaf to blame all the problems on and not the Brexit deal they gave us which saw many EU citizens driving lorries and picking fruit decide that Britain was not a place they wanted to be.
I am sure that i will get a text inviting me to another session where i can roll up my sleeve and close my eyes because where generally i would have had that internal argument about i haven't had flu for 20 years so it isn't such a priority, i think i will make the effort to chase it up this year.

Howay The Human Rights Abusers

How a consortium headed by the reprehensible human rights abuses, torture, executions, state-sanctioned assassinations, bombings and responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi passed the FA's fit and proper person's test is a good question they will obviously dodge answering but while the unloved Mike Ashley disappears off into the sunset with his back pocket bulging with £300 million notes in it, the new guys from Saudi Arabia are the latest to join in the game of Football Manager 2021 which is the Premier League.
Of the 20 clubs currently in the Premier League, there are only four owned by Brits in the shape of Norwich, Brentford, Tottenham and Brighton while the rest are the playthings of billionaires from elsewhere.
There are Americans in the top seats at Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and Burnley and a mix of Brit and Yankee at West Ham United and Crystal Palace and an Iranian/Brit partnership at Everton.
Italians control things at Watford and Leeds and then out comes the atlas to see Russians at Cheslea, United Arab Emirates at Manchester City, Honk Kong at Wolverhampton, Thai at Leicester, Aston Villa is run by an Egyptian and the Chinese at Southampton.  
So with the Newcastle changing rooms clothes pegs now expected to containing the jackets of many £100m players very soon, Newcastle fans have been wetting themselves since the news broke yesterday although i doubt many have stopped celebrating Ashley’s departure and their new found billions to consider that they are actively cheerleading on behalf of a replacement responsible for far worse atrocities than the unloved chubby shop owner who wasn't great but as far as i can remember, he never exploited them as propagandists trying to polish its global image.

Not A Smart Move By Insulate Britain

The 'Insulate Britain' protest is a worthwhile cause but wow are they going the wrong way about it by blocking busy roads during rush hour.
The tipping point was when motorists physically dragged them out of the way to allow an Ambulance through, that was when any semblance of public support went out the window.
Now into the 12th day of protests, the activists claim they will continue until the government commits to a national programme providing insulation for 29 million homes therefore reducing CO2 emissions which isn't going to be happening anytime soon unfortunately.
I'm all for the reasoning that it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease and without the protests going on, nobody would be talking about the CO2 emissions leaking from uninsulated homes, but once the public tunrs against you, then you may as well pack up your banners and go home because it would only be public support that would force the Government to do anything.
Home Secretary Priti Patel has already used the blocking of roads to set in motion further tightening of protests which may well be supported by those who are late for work or unable to travel freely and although it may well end this particular one, it will have far reaching consequences going forward.
The clock is ticking on the climate crisis, after years of feet dragging it may already be too late and future generations are in for a rough ride thanks to the ignorance and stupidity of previous generations, but this isnt the way to do it and the lasting memory will be the woman pleading with the unmoving protesters to let her through to visit her mum in hospital.
Got to be smarter than this to make your argument and take the public with you.

Special Guest Blogger: Robert Liston

The 19th Century wasn't exactly known for its state-of-the-art medical facilities, it was a time in history when getting a splinter was enough reason to go coffin shopping and main treatment for pretty much anything was chopping off the affected bit of body which was every bit as effective as it sounds as in terms of pain and survivability, it all depended on how quick the surgeon was, anesthetic not yet being a thing.
I was known as the 'fastest knife in the West' during my time as chief surgeon and trainer at The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and held the record of amputating a mans leg and his testicles in just under 2 and a half minutes although the testicles were an accident in my haste, i would have apologised to him afterwards only he died of gangarene like so many of the patients.
Working so fast there was always going to be accidents but my blood stained frock coat was testament to my skill, the more blood and pus on the coat, the busier and therefore more sought out the surgeon and i would spring across the stained boards upon the strapped-down patient in-front of medical students and the flash of my knife was followed swiftly by the rasp of saw on bone clasping the bloody knife between my teeth.
Such was the blur of the knife that one time i took off the patients leg, two fingers of my assistant who was holding down the patient and accidentally slashed a watching official who fainted and later died of shock although actually all three later died, the patient, assistant and spectator, i did it all remarkably quickly.
It took just over 3 minutes of slashing to help the man who came to me with a 45-pound scrotal tumour, so heavy he had to carry it round in a wheelbarrow but two of my students were James Simpson and Joseph Lister who would go on to be pioneers of chloroform and anesthetic techniques.
It was said that such was my legacy that some patients had a heart attack just by looking at me but this was Scotland and to be fair, it's probably not all that difficult to induce heart attacks in people whose favorite dessert is a deep-fried Mars bar

Special Guest Blogger: Billy Tipton

Throughout history, men and women have disguised themselves as the opposite sex, some of them really, really well right up until some surprise genitals turn up, or don't turn up, in a medical emergency.
Born Dorothy with all the required female bits, i loved jazz and tried to join my Missouri High School band and was told no women allowed because they lacked testicles, which are obviously necessary for making music, so i returned home to Oklahoma, started binding my breasts and dressing as a man and joined bands calling myself Billy Tipton.
At first it was just to fool people so i could play jazz gigs, but i dug it so much and nobody seemed to realise that i was a woman and when i became the leader of a band playing on KFXR radio and began touring the Midwest and greater things were coming down the line such as a recording deal, i realised that i had to keep my secret, declared myself a full time member of the penis owning club and so began living full time as a man.
Our success grew and we began getting more work and were performing at all the top clubs along with all the big names of the era and still nobody noticed the guy at the front pounding the piano keys was actually a female.
Incredibly, i got away with it during several relationship with women including four 'wives' to who i explained the lack of bedroom activity was down to a serious car accident and the bandaged chest was broken ribs from when i was a child and nothing down there worked so we had better visit the orphanage if children were required.
I was the adopted 'father' to three sons but in the late 50's jazz was on the way out and rock n roll was on the way in so i decided to bail out while the going was still good and took my well disguised womanly bits to Spokane, Washington to became a talent broker.
I managed to keep my secret until i was on my death bed, dying from a peptic ulcer and the paramedics who were trying to save my life removed my shirt to give me CPR and things either popped out or failed to pop out, possibly both, and my son William got the surprise of his life.
My son, bless him, had me cremated to try and keep my secret but word got out and four very shocked 'wives' and band mates turned up at my funeral service but i could never work out if i had been very, very clever or the people around me all that time were very, very stupid.

Special Guest Blogger: Peter I Of Portugal

Romeo and Juliet has nothing on the passion, drama, blood and despair in the tale of Inês de Castro and I. Grab your tissues, because trust me, anyone who reads this tale of star-crossed lovers is going to need them.
Being the rightful heir to the Kingdom of Portugal sounds like a pretty sweet deal on the surface, but when my father came to me and told me i was getting married to the Castilian Princess, Constanza Manuel of Vilena, in a political alliance, i was only 8 years old and my first question was can I finish my ice cream and jelly first?
We were married soon afterwards but it was four years later until we met for the first time and she was pleasant enough but it was her lady in waiting, Inês de Castro, that caught my eye and the greatest love story of Portuguese history began.
My wife was already a distant memory as i met Inês in secret but we were rubbish at the secret bit and we got caught and my father banished Inês from the court to stop me from seeing her but i just ran off to be with her.
Seeing his political advantage slipping away, my father proposed i marry another princess but i said i only wanted to marry Inês but he refused
so we lived as a married couple and had several children but my father knew that he had to shake me free from Inês and could only think of one feasible way to do it.
I went on a weekend hunting trip and upon hearing of my trip, my father ordered three of his men to pay Inês a visit and they took along a huge sword with them which they used to decapitate her.
Now comes the blood bit because i went as berserk as only a man who comes home to find his wifes head in one room and her body in another could and spent a year along with the Castilian army run by Inês’s brothers who were none too pleased by their sister’s decapitation, sweeping through the country invading towns and cause as much chaos as possible and was about to ravage Porto when my mother got message to me that my father was dying and the crown would be passed onto me as heir and to generally stop being a dick as i was destroying the country i was set to rule over.
With the crown on my head, one of my first acts was to set out to find the three men that took Inês’s life but one managed to escape but i found the other two, dragged them back to Portugal and tied them up in the public square.
I did consider lopping off their heads but instead plumped for ripping one man’s heart out through his back and ripped the other man’s heart out through his chest and then declared although Inês was dead, being the old romantic that i was, she was still the rightful queen and should have the coronation ceremony and exhumed her body from her grave, sat her on the throne, dressed her with a crown and royal robes, and forced all my vassals to approach and kiss her decaying hand.
As no one really wanted to argue with the man that had just ripped out the hearts of two men, most members of the court decided to go with it and make her queen and then i had her re-buried in one of two tombs i had constructed facing each other with the words 'to the end of time' enscribed between them at the Monastery of Alcobaça where i joined her ten years later and we continue to look each other to this day. Beautiful.

Special Guest Blogger: Ignaz Semmelweis

Sometimes a little guy will wander onto History's highway and manage to do something that changes the world for the better, and in a huge way but not only not get recognised but die in a mental hospital for it but i'm not bitter. Okay a bit maybe.
I worked as a doctor and trainer at the Obstetrical Clinic of the Vienna General Hospital where we had two clinics, a training one and a second one run only by midwives with no actual doctors or students but the first one had such an awful rate of disease and mortality that pregnant women would beg to be admitted to the second one which had hardly any deaths.
My story starts when i was sat there one day and pondered why the women who came to our clinic not only gained a baby but a deadly disease so i began comparing the two and the only difference was the first clinic had students learning birthing, autopsying and everything in between and the second was run just by midwives and then after a colleague died after being poked by a scalpel and his autopsy discovered he had the same disease most of the women were dying from, the light-bulb flashed that the students were carrying particles on their hands and instruments from the autopsy room to the patients they examined in the first Clinic, contaminating the women with the disease from the autopsies.
I instructed the students to perform a simple hand washing task after handling dead guys and immediately got the death rate down to 1% and excited by my discovery, i wrote a book suggesting that doctors and students should wash their hands and instruments between the autopsy room and the birthing rooms and it would drastically reduce the contamination.
You would think that i would be chaired on shoulders around Vienna in triumph but what happened was monocles popped out all over Europe as the continents stuffiest old coots dropped their morning cognacs in unison and harrumphed in rage, as elegant ladies swooned in horror at the suggestion that doctors hands were dirty enough to kill people.
At this point i possibly could have accepted my request was too radical for a profession that decided blood letting was the sharp edge of medical technology and just quietly gone about my job but i took the other option of writing angry letters to all the prominent doctors who were rejected and ridiculing my discovery and calling them morons, ignoramuses and murderers which saw me dismissed from my job at the hospital.
Jobless and with the ridicule continuing, i began to drink heavily and sought out prostitutes and would rant about how only i knew the secret of how doctors were killing their patients which was so embarrassing for my family and the medical profession that they invited me to have a look at the new Viennese Insane asylum which proved to be a bad move on my part because when i got there they grabbed me, threw me into a straight jacket and tried to lock me in a cell.
A struggle ensued and i was beaten so badly by the guards that i died from my wounds two weeks later.  Years later Joseph Lister actually took my findings and confirmed them in his Germ Theory of Disease and the rest of the world came around to the concept of washing their hands to keep from getting sick and decided that i wasn't a nut after all and named me as a pioneer of antiseptic policy, named medical universities and put my face on stamps and even named a minor planet after me but too late ignoramuses, far too late.