2021 Father Time & The Grim Reaper

Old Father Time leant his scythe against the bench and wearily sat down and was removing his 2021 sash when the Grim Reaper walked up the pathway to join him.
'Hiya Time' he said cheerily as he sat down beside him, 'So how was 2021 for you?' he asked digging into the pocket of his cloak and taking out a battered packet of cigarettes.
'Usual stuff with the sex scandals, wars, murders and stupid World Leaders' sighed Time, 'How was your year? Reap anyone interesting?
Death lit a cigarette and blew out a plume of grey smoke before saying: 'Let's see, there was the usual hundred of thousands of war related deaths but celebrity wise, i got Una Stubbs, Sean Lock, Charlie Watts, Sarah Harding, Jimmy Greaves, George Segal, Lionel Blair, Nikki Grahame, Janice Long, Desmond Tutu, Prince Philip, Michael Nesmith, Dustin Diamond and Boycie from Fools and Horses'.
'Prince Philip?'
'Yep, he was pencilled in for the last few years but i kept forgetting him'
'Oh well, keeping you busy then'
'We got Covid-19 and nutters like that Brazilian loon and Boris Johnson so i'm not worried about running out of work anytime soon, so many Brits in one place though, you should hear the whinging' chuckled Death, 'So what's been going on in 2021?'
'You will be glad to hear that America still haven't done anything about their mad gun laws'.
'Good old America, if they are not blowing up somewhere else they are shooting each other, would warm my heart if i had one' said Death 'although i am worried about Putin and Biden having meetings, no WW3 for me now i'm thinking'.
'Indeed' nodded Father Time wistfully.
'Although Biden and the West have been a bit of a let down on the war front this year' said the Reaper, 'Afghanistan has stepped up to the plate, with the Taliban back i can always rely on a steady stream of dead Afghans and there is always my supply of Palestinians courtesy of Israel'.     
'The World have been obsessed with Coronovirus' said Time 'although there was that ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal and America decided they had enough of overthrowing other Governments and had a go at overthrowing their own'.
'Nice, shame about that fat orange guy losing over there, i had high hopes for him' nodded Death stubbing out his cigarette on the arm of the bench 'so how's 2022 shaping up? Global Warming still going ahead unheeded i notice, lucky me'
'Usual stuff i expect with even more sex scandals, wars, murders and stupid World Leaders' sighed Time reaching over to pick up the shiny, new 2022 sash and pulling it over his head.
'How's next year looking for you' he asked Death who smiled and opened his notepad and held it up to Time to read.
He glanced down the full list of names of the soon to be reaped and opened his eyes wide when he got to July.
'Really? he asked 'That many in one month?'    
'Yep, busy, busy, busy, oh well, no rest for the wicked, same time next year pal' and picking up his scythe, walked away whistling the tune of Don't Fear The Reaper.

FOAB 2021 Top 5 Posts

There have been 431 posts on this blog in 2021, mostly Special Guest Blogger posts as time constraints and travelling a stupid amount for work meant that i just didn't have the time to post as much about current affairs as i would have liked so this is a good time to look back and see which ones filled the top 5 slots and which ones can be left to whither on the Internet vine.  

Top post was by the Christian Priest Arius who explained how he met a very messy end when he upset the Church and second was the cat in a box guy Erwin Schrödinger.
Third was the Greek/Roman God Apollo and his complicated family life and how he refuses to be held responsible for boy bands and fourth Saint Louis of France telling us how he was really really bad at Crusades and the fifth most viewed post was the brilliant the entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum for Bouquet Veal and their 'It's Christmas' song.

As always, a massive thank you to anyone who has blundered across my little piece of the Web in the past year and may you have a great 2022 where i am sure i will be clogging up the internet with yet more left wing hippy views and dead celebrities.

Happy New Year From The Future

It's just past 11am as i am writing this and New Zealand are already in the new year and the rest of the World will soon follow it but not everyone will be in the same year as some nations calendars will be showing some very different dates but as we in the West follow the Gregorian calendar, it will 2022 for us so we are in their future and we can pass on some advice.
It's the New Year in North Korea who use the Juche calendar so 새해 복 많이 받으십시오 and all the best for 110 and keep your heads down so the Roman Empire doesn't looks your way and if you are waking up in Nigeria the year on their Igbo calendar will be showing 1022 and you will hear of  something called Gunpowder being invented this year.
Burma will be waking up in 1383 and the shiny new Bengali calendar on the wall will show the Bengali people that it is 1428 which is the year of Joan of Arc which may not make the news over there but was quite big over here.  
As they follow the Solar Hirji calendar, the Persians will waking up in 1443 and some guy called John Hunyadi will be turning up in your neck of the woods and try to convert you all to Christianity in that loving and peaceful way of the Church by killing as many of you as possible. Spoiler Alert: It doesn't work.
Oh and if you get an invite from Vlad II Dracul who has just taken over in Wallachia, fake a headache.
It's عام سعيد and welcome to 1738 Egypt and 1943 on the Balinese Saka calendar in Indonesia and the good news is that you won't be ruled over by the Dutch anymore but you may want to brush up on your Nihongo because you will have a few thousand Japanese turning up very soon.
Ethiopia will welcome 2014 and the chance to see Germany win the World Cup and that Sia song Chandelier will be everywhere as will Islamic State unfortunately.
That is you all up to date because as we are years in the future it is only fair that we share upcoming events with you all unlike those Hindus in 2078, the Tibetans in 2147 and the Thai's in 2564 who haven't told us anything and even worse are the Israeli's who are in 5782 and haven't even told us how to make those flying skateboards from the Back to the Future films the grumpy buggers.

2021 Psychic Predictions Revisited

The problem with making psychic predictions is that smart arsed bloggers write them down and go back and judge them at the end of the year so let's see of the 10 predictions made by Psychic Nicolas Aujula for 2021, which hot the mark and which fell short.

We can put a small tick beside Meghan Markle doing an spilling secrets about the British Royal family, she did do the Oprah interview but no secrets were spilled but Kim Kardashian did split with Kanye West and Prince Harry became a father for the second time so for those we can say well done.

That said, of the other 7 predictions big red crosses besides Tom Cruise suffering heart problems, a male World leader assassinated, volcanic eruption changing the weather, Chancellor Rishi Sunak resigning, a huge fire raging through New York, a new Harry Potter book published and pig flu causing mass panic Worldwide.

Not a great result much to the joy of whichever male World Leader is still with us and the pig community but we can put it down to too much eggnog being consumed in the Spirit realm at the time and try again next year.

Psychic Predictions For 2022

As i sit here, 2021 is fading and 2022 is closing in fast and it is only natural to ponder what will the new year bring. Well, we can stop pondering because Moses may have had to go to Mount Sinai to hear spirit voices and Muhammad travelled to Mount Hira but in the case of psychic Nicolas Aujula, he is so good (in previous lives he was an Egyptian queen, a lion and lived in another galaxy) that the spirits come to his front room and as he charges £350 to £1950 for his services, he must be good so he has given us a peek at what the powers that be have been whispering into his ear of what will unfold in 2022.

Another global health issue – this time swine flu.
Terror attack in Paris  
Public figure assassinated in the US.
Boris Johnson still British PM at the end of the year
Poland to leave the EU,
A shocking scandal around testing on gerbils.
Japan and South Korea will be rocked by Richter 8 earthquake.
There will be a mass recall of chicken soup.
A major oil spill on the motorway in the UK will cause multiple fatalities.
Someone called Jackie will become a Global Superstar
An asteroid that is heading for earth is diverted by the military firing a missile at it

I have taken out the vague ones and just left the ones we can check so there we go then, ease up on the Chicken Soup, don't move into a high rise apartment in Japan and if you are called Jackie then start writing out your resignation letter.

Boris Johnson Is Still A What They Said

Many people have inspired songs to be written about them and Boris Johnson has joined that elite group who have been immortalised in verse.
The song all about Boris Johnson sits at number 5 in the UK Chart but in case you haven't noticed, Boris isn't popular in the UK which gave BBC Radio One a dilemma when it was doing the Official Top 40 Chart run-down because the song is called 'Boris Johnson Is Still A Fuc*king C*nt' (my asterisk) by punk group The Kunts.
Scott Mills decided that there was no possible way that he could play the hit, read the name of the song or mention the group name so said: 'At number five this week is a song about Boris Johnson that has so many bad words in it i can’t possibly play it on daytime Radio 1'.
Ladbaby, who scooped the number one slot said that The Kunts and their song was vulgar and their own hit was for food bank charities so deserved to be number one' which The Kunts responded by saying that they had made a large donation to MIND and Cardiac Risk in the Young after the success of their song and 'We may be vulgar in the language we use to get our point across but we would not be so vulgar as to use food banks to hawk records, increase our profile or sign lucrative sponsorship deals'. Touche Mr K.
The song is the tune of Gary Glitters 'Rock N Roll Part 2' and is a minute and half of just repeating the name of the song over and over but thankfully convicted sex offender Mr Glitter will not get any royalties from it because he sold all of his rights to music years ago to cover legal costs.
Maybe the Song For Europe people should approach The Kunts to perform our entry for Eurovision next year but as a responsible adult i cannot possibly condone a song where the leader of my country is called a Fu*king C*nt, especially when everyone knows he is actually a Fu*king Pr*ck.

NASA Invites Religious Folk For A Chat

I have never stopped a stranger in the street to try and convert them to Atheism but that doesn't stop religious folk bouncing up to me with their Bibles to try and convert me which pretty much always ends up with me patiently explaining why their man in the clouds is a bunch of hooey.
Not that it does any good, they just continue to ignorantly chunder on at me about whatever it is they believe in a one way conversation, uninterested in any debate which may open a chink of light in their closed mind but NASA has not waited for a overly cheerful loony to come to them, they have gone to them and invited Religious Scholars their views on their beliefs about divinity and creation if life was found on other planets.
Science has always challenged the Religious dogma from the Earth being at the Centre of the Universe to Evolution and the religious have had to adjust the to survive and at some point in the future we will discover life on other planets, or it will discover us, and that may be the step too far and finally the scales fall from so many eyes for those of the opinion that God's sole intent was to create people in his image here on Earth.
The invited include Christian Priests, Jewish Rabbi's, and Islamic Imam's who have accepted and stated that 'teaching would not be affected by the discovery of alien life'.
Science has done its best to show religion for what it is but the discovery of life in the other reaches of the Universe should be yet another body blow to religion on it's way to becoming something that future generations will look back on as a curiosity but i expect the religious leaders would 'find' the answer written in their holy texts somewhere amongst the Unicorns, dragons and horses with the heads of lions, creatures that are half-rooster and half-snake and fire breathing sea creature with multiple heads.

Boris Letting The Bodies Pile High

Not one to make the same mistake twice when he can make it three times, Boris Johnson and his Government have decided that despite being pilloried for locking down late previously, they have decided to ignore the medical advisors in his team and not lock down at all this time.
They seemed to have latched on to the report that the Omicron Variant is more transmissible but milder than previous variants and is happy to let it rip through the nation which it is, today's number of daily Covid cases in the UK has hit the highest of the pandemic, 183,037, but it isn't just in the UK that is setting grim records, over the last few days Italy, Portugal, USA, France, Greece, Poland, Denmark, Australia, Cyprus and Iceland have all reported record daily Covid cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
The gamble from the Government seems to be that as the Omicron variant is milder, this will translate into less hospitalisations and deaths but as almost 3,000 more NHS beds have been taken by Coronavirus patients over the past week, the gamble is beginning to look a very wrong one especially as it takes 2 to 3 weeks for the figure to drip through and another further couple of weeks for the related deaths number so we will know by mid-to late January we will have a clearer picture of just how brilliant, or reckless, the PM's decision was.
The much lauded review on the 28th December came and went with no change to the current restrictions, which is close to no restrictions, so New Year Eve parties have been waved through to go ahead meaning another surge of infections to increase our already deplorable infection figures.
The Government seem to be desperate to not cancel Christmas and New Year Parties and are relying not so much on Medical Experts but crossing their fingers and hoping the full hospital beds and death toll doesn't rise too much but the current numbers rocketing up are from the pre-Christmas period,
when we get those figures late January it will be too late to lock-down then, the damage would have been done.
Boris's advice today was for us all to be sensible and take Lateral Flow Tests before doing anything which would be good if there wasn't a national shortage at Chemists and even the Government Website not having any to send out which is a bit of a flaw in his plan.
He may deny ever saying 'Let the bodies pile high', but it seems to be that is exactly what he is going to get.

Betwixtmas Aka The Feast Of Leftover

There seems to be 3 acts to Christmas with the first beginning in November with the excitement building and people getting into the festive mood and then comes stage two which is the big day itself.
This week we find ourselves in Stage 3 which apparently is called 'Betwixtmas' where, with most people on annual leave until January, we have nothing to do but wait for New Year’s Eve and the time of resolutions and renewed gym memberships before life returns to normal.
My mum always called it the Feast of Leftover because most fridges are bursting with turkey which will go into sandwiches, soups, stews and absolutely anything else it can be crammed into but Turkey isn't the only thing on the menu because there will also be an abundance of chocolate to get through from selection boxes, tree decorations and the big bars of Aero, Whole Nut and Bourneville which were so lovingly gift wrapped.
It will be days until anyone has anything approaching a normal meal, featuring vegetables, and the same goes for still sporting pyjamas and a dressing gown until well after mid-day and drinking sherry and eating Christmas pudding for breakfast.
It's not just a time of leftovers in the home as the shops will be selling off all their Christmas Decorations, trees, cards and gift sets at knock down prices which you can buy and then put in a safe place so in eleven months times you won't be able to find them and have to buy more.
So don't feel bad if you spend the week laying on the sofa, searching through the TIVO to see what was recorded over the Festive period and deleting four versions of 'A Christmas Carol' with Alistair Syms, Patrick Stewart, the muppets and Bill Murray while stirring a tin of Quality Street in the hope that there may be a Purple One left among the sticky wrappers.
However you chose to celebrate this slow-paced time of the year, be it with turkey jam, surrounded by cut-price mini Christmas Trees, pickled onions or by just plain old pickling your liver, enjoy it because come January 4th, the real world comes rushing back at you.

Desmond Tutu

In my mind, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu were a double act of apartheid resistance with Mandela the political power and Tutu the public face and while Mandela spent 27 years in prison, Tutu's position in the Church meant he was an uncomfortable opponent to the country's white supremacist Government but as untouchable as a black man in South Africa could be.
It is right that following his death from prostate cancer yesterday he is receiving the plaudits for his work but it wasn't his religious work that i applaud him for, it was his commitment to calling out inequality, corruption and human rights abuses wherever he found them, regardless of whether it was friend or foe committing them.
Despite his religious beliefs, he railed against homophobia in the Church, saying that he would rather go to the other place than go to sit beside a homophobic God and castigated Israel for 'inflicting such suffering on the Palestinians'.
Despite suffering decades of racism in South Africa, post-apartheid he made a point of telling blacks and whites that they should not see colour and see South Africa as a rainbow nation, and when Mandela and the African National Congress swept into power, he criticised their violent behaviour during the fight against Apartheid, including Mandela and his wife, and castigated the leadership of not doing enough to alleviate poverty with too much wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a new black political elite.
He went after Robert Mugabe, Britain and America for their high black prison populations, Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi for the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority and anyone who didn't support: 'a society that's compassionate, that really makes people feel they mattered. Where people don't go to bed hungry'.
A man of principle and a voice acting as a much needed moral compass in the current times when they are woefully lacking.

Special Guest Blogger: The Ghost of Christmas Past

I won't lie, things are getting far busier each year than we were expecting. When the three of us first started out it was so much easier for us.
There were not so many rich, mean people around, so we could spend so much more time with one miser, and see a definite improvement in their behaviour after showing them the error of their ways, give them something to think about but now they know what to expect and for that i blame Charles Dickens.
Our work would be a lot easier to carry out if people did not know about us in advance, the element of surprise is gone.
Now they just see our work as being something we do around Christmas time and once they receive the visit from their dead business partner they are prepared which makes it even worse, you would expect them to be able to put on the kettle on or even get a decent supply of chocolate digestives in, but they never think of that.
It's thirsty, thankless work, the amount of misers whose lives we have improved but do any of us get a thank you letter, or just some basic recognition for our efforts? Like heck we do but i don't know how much longer we can keep doing it, the amount of extremely poor people is growing exponentially and due to the nature of Capitalism, the money is becoming concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.
If it continues much longer, there will be not enough Ebenezer Scrooge's for us to visit, only a lot of Bob Crachitt's, and he is already a top bloke so there will be no fun in getting him to change.

Changes To The Christmas Eve Song Sheet

Welcome to the Christmas Eve midnight sermon with me, the Right Reverend Lucy. As we celebrate the birth of that child 2021-ish years ago in Bethlehem, let's take a moment to celebrate this miracle in song but due to new directives we are not allowed to sing politically incorrect songs so please take note of the following.
The following songs have been removed from your hymn books, 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' as this song completely excludes women and also missing is 'We Three Kings of Orient Are' which not only generically describes the indigenous people of Asia but again entirely excludes any reference to women in positions of authority.
In light of the recent COP 27 meeting and the ongoing discussion over Climate Change, 'I Saw Three Ships' is no longer to be sung as it glorifies a mode of transportation that damages the environment and anyway it is factually incorrect as Bethlehem is not a port so none of the ships could actually sail there anyway.
We cannot be seen to condone the exploitation of the working class through unjust terms of employment forcing them to work long hours without adequate compensation so 'While Shepherds Watched their Flocks' is out and in the age of Boris Johnson do i really need to explain why 'White Christmas' is banned? 
To save a bit of time here, as all hymns are about Jesus which leaves most other belief systems at a complete disadvantage so thank you for attending, put some cash in the collection plate and take a mince pie on the way out.
Amen

Welcome To A British Christmas

As Britain becomes a more diverse nation with many other religions coming to our green and pleasant land, i have taken upon myself to welcome you to our country and attempt to answer a few questions which you probably have surrounding a British Christmas such as where did it originate, what's it all about and why is everything covered in tinsel?
Put another log on the fire, close the curtains, snuggle down with a mince pie amidst the glow of the twinkling lights on the tree and i will explain all.
It is not considered officially Christmas until you hear Noddy Holder of Slade scream 'It's Christmas' for the first time and then you can safely start wearing that ugly Christmas Jumper and planning Christmas properly.
Christmas was invented many years ago to commemorate the birth of Jesus Christ, a carpenter and handyman, who was given gifts of gold and a couple of other things which nobody knows what they are, further reading can be found in his best selling adventure novel, The Bible or if you have one of the other holy books, read that as most of the same stories are in them also.
The tree standing in every room is representative of the thousands of trees killed during the height of Jesus Christ's Carpentry career and on Christmas Day itself you legally have to put on a Christmas hat and eat something called Brussel Sprouts and Turkey which is a bird that is renowned for hating this time of year and takes approximately thirteen hours to cook.
After the meal another Great British tradition is arguing over who washes up and then falling asleep on the sofa during the Queen's Speech.
As us Brits find the whole idea of religion as stony as a Biblical execution, Santa Claus was invented and is mainly used to coerce children in to going to bed early on December 24th and threatening your young offspring with if they misbehave.
You may notice that every Christmas Card depicts snow on it and every year we play a game of 'will it snow on Christmas Day'? No it won't but we keep up the tradition anyway and if you have a pet, at some point you have to put antlers on them and upload a picture of them to Social Media.
Boxing Day is the day after Christmas and nobody knows exactly what it is for but we use it as a day to exchange the Christmas gifts we got given the day before for something we may actually want.
I wish you all a safe and happy British Christmas.

Warm This Winter - Gabriella Climi

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number one we have Warm This Winter by Gabriella Climi.

If you are Australian you probably know this song from adverts for the Co-operative stores because this version of the song began life as an advertisement for the grocery store and they chose Gabriella Climi to remake the Connie Francis hit from the 60s.  
It has also been used by Orange and Virgin for their adverts so someone has coined it in but Gabriella Climi had a couple of songs which crept into the low reaches of the UK charts and then quietly crept out again and this one was her biggest hit getting to number 22 in 2008 although it never makes it onto the Christmas song rotation on the TV Music Channels because the record company never bothered to make a video for it.
It's a very bouncy, bubble-gum pop record with that double drum beat and i am a sucker for a double drum beat, their must be a psychological reason for that, but also Climi has a nice raspy voice which sounds like she is just getting over a cold and although she only mentions Christmas in passing, it has fire-places, ice skating on a frozen lake, snow and sleigh riding so that's every box ticked for me, great song.

Be A Wise Man When Wrapping Presents This Year

The big day is getting closer so the scraps of wrapping paper left over from last Christmas are starting to be dragged out of the cupboard and there are many tutorials online for how to wrap odd shaped presents and although they don't actually say it, these are predominantly aimed at men.
Unfortunately, gift-wrapping is one of those skills like reading instructions or navigating the short distance between their midriff and a toilet bowl that comes more naturally to women than to men so men not only suck at present buying but they suck royally at wrapping them also.   
My tips would be for men, whenever possible, buy gifts that are already wrapped or if what you are giving your loved one is a very weird shape, like a frying pan or vacuum cleaner, skip the wrapping paper and just put it inside a bag and stick one of those little sticky bows on it and remember that the important thing is not how you wrap it but that you save the receipt so we can exchange it for something we actually want on Boxing Day.
A fine example is that very first Christmas when the Wise Men went to see the little baby Jesus in his shed and presented him gifts, none of the gifts were wrapped, i have checked with my more theological friends and nowhere is it mentioned the wise men using wrapping paper which means that the very first Christmas gifts were not wrapped so that's your get out to not even bother trying.

Bad For Players, Worse For The Fans

Usually about this time the Football managers begin utterances around how many games their teams are to play over the Festive period and it is even worse this year because not only do they have a packed fixture schedule, but many squads are depleted by Coronavirus and the Premier League is standing firm that if there are 13 fit players available, then the games must be played.
I do have some sympathy with strains the amount of games in such a short period of time puts on the teams for the likes of the managers like Liverpool's Jurgen Klopp, Aston Villa's Stephen Gerrard, Arsenal's Mikel Arteta and Chelsea's Thomas Tuchel who have all come out to say the schedule is too harsh made worse by the Covid situation amongst the players, but none of them have questioned the wisdom of allowing tens of thousands of supporters into a ground during these times.
Last night 59,027 fans packed into The Emirates to watch Arsenal beat Sunderland in the Caraboa Cup Quarter Final and tonight there are three more games tonight at Brentford which holds 18,000, Liverpool with a capacity of 53,390 and Tottenham 62,850 which means potentially 134,000 fans sat shoulder to shoulder for two hours.
As the Government seem to afraid of their own MP's to do anything this side of Christmas, that is a lot of people who could be taking something a little bit extra home for their family this Christmas so while i feel sorry for the footballers, my real sympathy goes to the fans paying £60 to get themselves into a situation which screams danger while the highly contagious Omicron is circling.

Cancel Culture Only Bad For The Bigot's

When i was growing up, if you were black, Irish, disabled, Jewish, homosexual a women or any other group that wasn't white British male, then you would be the butt of jokes or worse discriminatory behaviour but thankfully as the 70's turned into the 80's, society changed and those vile views became unacceptable and the sorts of people who felt put out that they could no longer offend anyone they wanted called it Political Correctness.
Now it seems to have become 'Cancel Culture' and 'against Freedom of Speech' but it's the same thing, the people who complain about being cancelled are the ones finding that their offensive view are being challenged by a society that has moved on and in wishing to create a kinder, more tolerant world, refuse to accept hateful, extreme language.
Political Correctness, and it's new Cancel Culture sibling, has ushered in a time of respect and civility for all, where unnecessary offense is avoided and everyone in society has the same opportunities regardless of the colour of your skin, if you are in a wheelchair, if you are Jewish or if you have a vagina and how can anybody seriously say that the disappearance of jokes about Paki's, Spastics or Golliwogs is a bad thing?
Some people will always hold abhorrent views by those who remember the days when they could speak without fear of being accused of upsetting one minority in society or another but society has moved on and it is pleasing to see that it is the younger generation prioritising preventing hateful offensive speech over bigots being able to say what they want regardless of who they offend with their outdated views which are now being weeded out.
A peaceful society is built upon respect and tolerance for all of it's members and although there is still some way to go, we have become a more tolerant, fairer and more culturally aware society reflecting the kind of society most of us want to live in where offending people is frowned upon, the unfortunate part is that it has taken so long.

The Computers Broken, Call That Donkey Kid

This is the time of the year when it is acceptable to make your offspring into a Middle Eastern person by wrapping a tea-towel around their head because it's the time for the school Nativity Play with a cast which includes Mary, Joseph, a bunch of Kings and a donkey but rather than a bit of fun at the end of the year, who they are cast as can predict what jobs they are likely to get in future.
A nationwide study by Virgin discovered a host of traits in adult life, which directly correlate to the role played as children in the school nativity play so as you watch and hold your breath that your child doesn't bungle their only line, you can see their future employment.  
The main role's are Mary and Joseph and most Mary's end up working in retail wishing you a nice day while Joseph's go into the world of banking and finance ruining everyone's day.
If your daughter is currently wearing a sheet and a tinsel headband as she points some Shepherds towards a stable, Angel's are most likely to work in Healthcare as do kids dressed as Lamb's and you may want to keep in contact with the Shepherd's and Donkey's if you are prone to Computer problems because most of them will get work in IT although if your boiler is a bit flaky, also remember the Inn Keeper kid because a lifetime of overcharging for changing a tap washer as a plumber awaits them.
Any one of the Three Kings could be coming around to build your conservatory in a decades time because they are most likely to end up in construction while Ox's are most likely to work in Advertising.
If your child was off sick when the roles were handed out and ended up stood at the side as the Narrator then a career in education awaits them and the chance to be put in charge of the Nativity Play and they can then influence the career paths of their students.

Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight) - The Hellflowers

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number two we have Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight) by Hellflower.

It's a sad fact that the Christmas period translates into some very long queues outside the offices of divorce lawyers in the New Year so we should be more like the Ramones who said in this 1987 classic that 'Christmas ain't the time for breaking each other hearts' in this song with a tune borrowed from Blondie's 'Denis' who in turn acquired it from a 1960's doo wop group who sang a song called 'Denise'.
The Ramones never seemed to get the acclaim they deserved and they were on the slide by the time they recorded this Christmas song, Johnny and Joey were on even worse terms then usual which was not improved by Johnny sleeping with Joey's girlfriend so this song could very well be taken as a plea to his guitarist bandmate.
Sadly all four original members are dead so they never got to take any pleasure in the belated prestige of seeing plenty of youngsters today wearing their T-shirts with their blackened presidential seal but their great music continues and this one does put in an occasional appearance on the Christmas Music channels and many other bands have taken this Ramones song and performed it better, such as the Hellflowers.
The punk band were asked to contribute a song to the Christmas Evel, Volume 1 and they put out this version which is my go to interpretation, the female singer's voice sitting very nicely with the big, choppy chords of the song.

Snowman - Sia

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number three we have Snowman by Sia.

The third entry for Sia, this is a criminally underrated song from a criminally underrated Christmas Album that finally got the recognition it deserved following a TikTok challenge where you had to sing a verse and chorus from Snowman in one breath.
A simple, beautiful piano ballad about the singer running away with her Snowman friend to keep him alive because we have all been there on Christmas Eve with our partner in the living room, the only illumination is the fairy lights on the Christmas Tree while you look into each others eyes and feeling like you're falling in love again with the only sound the sharp crackling from the warm, cosy fire in the fireplace and then you remember, arghh..warm fire and he's a bloody snowman and suddenly you got a massive puddle in your living room to clean up and as she says in the song, 'A puddle of water can't hold me close, baby'.
Her solution is to go to the North Pole to hide from the Sun and live happily and anyone who knows Sia's back-story will know that not only does she richly deserve some happiness but despite everything, she is one of the nicest, most inspirational people you could ever wish to meet and on top of all that she has one of the greatest Christmas Albums to ever adorn a record shop shelf.

 

OM-Nee-Cron, O-Mike-Ron or OH-My-Cron

Naming Coronavirus variants in the Greek Alphabet was always going to cause problems and we had no problem pronouncing Alpha, Beta and Delta but as the likes of Epsilon, Zeta, Iota and Kappa didn't turn out to be variants of concern, we went to Omicron which very much was of concern and so began the debate over OM-Nee-Cron, OM-Mee-Cron or OH-My-Cron.
Scholar, Dr Armand D'Angour, explained that in Ancient Greek it would be said as 'Oh-Mee-kron' with the long e sound but in Modern Greek it's 'Oh-me-cron, with a short e.
Seems fair enough to me, it's their alphabet we are using after all but the Merriam Webster Dictionary people say it should be 'OH-muh-kraan' and that is the way i have heard World Health Organization officials pronounce it but the Oxford English dictionary guys have piled in with 'o-MIKE-Ron' as the word is a compound from the Greek 'o mikron' which means 'small o'.
The British seem to have developed inserting the letter 'n' in it to make it Omni-Kron and that is being put down to it being more pleasing to an English speakers ear with words we know such as omnibus, omnipotent and omnipresent but that is just all sorts of wrong.
Until another variant pops up, (pi next and there can be no doubt over that one) it’s going to be contentious but more importantly, contagious so let's not have any big meetings to discuss it.

Special Guest Blogger: Dionysius Exiguus

Back in the good old days, by which i mean the 6th Century, life was pretty good and Christianity was slowly but surely replacing the Roman Paganism as the top religion but one bone of contention was the fact that we still used the Roman Calendar based on the founding of Rome.
I had quite a good reputation after translating many ecclesiastical canons from Greek into Latin so Pope John I came to me and asked me to set out the dates for Easter from the years 527 to 626 as he was keen to produce some order in the celebration of the main Christian festival which was Easter and to use the birth of Jesus to plot the days which was a bit of a headache because nobody thought to write down exactly what year he was born and the Bible gave no clue.
Christians, with a lack of a proper date celebrated the birth of Jesus on January 6 but Christian leaders were successful at converting many pagans festivals over to Christianity by allowing them to continue the celebration and pasting our own guy in so a second-third century Christian theologian called Hippolytus had came up with the plan of moving Jesus's birthday back a few weeks to December 25th as a way of tacking it onto the end of the Roman Festival of Saturnalia, a week-long festival celebrating the Romans' gods where feasting, drunkenness, gambling and public nudity ensued.
As it was working well at distracting the Christians from the many pagan revelries occurring in late December, i worked back from that date and said Jesus must have been conceived nine months earlier on March 25th and therefore as he was perfect, he also must have died on 25th March, enjoy your chocolate Easter egg when we get around to inventing them.
With a Papal decree, March 25th became the official date of Jesus's death and in doing so cemented Christmas on the map but we still had the problem that we used the Roman calendar so i said if we take the birth of Jesus as Year 1AD, as the Roman year 753 turned to 754, January 1 should be 1 anno domini the year of our Lord in a new era of world history.
A few people did point out that the gospel account of the birth of Jesus says that Jesus was born while Herod was still King and he died in 4BC and they also show that the Census of Quirinius in Bethlehem took place in 6BC, 6 years before he was born so i did consider refining my dates and said to the Pope that maybe we should be more precise but he said it's fine, we are talking about religious people here and it's not like they are gonna kill each other over a slight difference in their religions is it.

Taxi For Boris

His proper name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his title is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party but you could call him Boris. Or Bojo. Or, preferably, nothing at all but you had better do it quick because while while some Politicians are natural leaders fully prepared to take on any challenge in the pursuit of improving the lot of their citizens, others are lucky to get their trousers on in the morning without serious injury and de Pfeffel Johnson is definitely one of the latter.
Even amongst his Eton buddies, he was always considered the joke one, the person you would trust to snort milk out of nose but you wouldn't necessarily trust with anything serious, a saying amongst them was 'If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. If it's not worth doing, give it to Johnson' so quite how he ended up running the country is probably as much a mystery to him as the rest of us.  
Typically, his time as Britain's Leader where he said he wanted to be remembered as a modern Winston Churchill, is coming to an end in circumstances which would be hilarious if they were not so disastrous with scandals dogging him to the very end as the nation belatedly decide that the guy is a actually a massive bell-end.
You do have to give him credit for not being disrupted from making his blatant lies with things so frivolous as evidence as we are seeing with the Downing Street Lock-down Parties which he was still insisted never happened even while we were watching the video of his advisors discussing how they could spin it so it didn't look like a Party.
Then, to add another level of farce to the whole thing, the man he appointed to investigate to see if there had been a party afterall was removed from the invesitigation because his own office had held an illegal lock-down party.  
Then there is the insistence that he never knew who was paying for his £100k refurbishment of his Downing Street residence despite a Whatsapp message where he actually asked the guy to pay for it and this week he oversaw the loss of A Conservative Safe Seat, in their possession for almost 200 years, to the Liberal Democrats.
This is a man who as Foreign Secretary went to Iran to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe who had been sentenced to 1 year in prison for allegedly plotting against the Iranian government but once he had spoken to the Iranian, her sentence had been increased to 5 years and whilst Lord Mayor of London was described as "a fairly lazy tosser who just wants to be there while doing very little work'.
His response to the Coronavirus Pandemic has left Britain with one of the greatest global death tolls and we are currently staring at 100,000 new infections a day in the coming days which is where him being entertaining stops being quite so funny, it's hard to find humour in a situation which ends with that many funerals which is exactly where Alexander has taken us and that distant rumbling isn't thunder or the Underground, that's the many fire engines rushing to Blenheim Palace where Winston Churchill is buried because he was rolling so fast in his grave that the cemetery caught fire.

Another Rock N Roll Christmas - Gary Glitter

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number four we have Another Rock N Roll Christmas by Gary Glitter.

I always have a bit of a dilemma with this song because it is a brilliant song but it's sung by convicted paedophile Gary Glitter and there in lies the dilemma of whether it is okay to listen to it and actually admit to liking it.
Since his arrest for possession of child pornography Glitter has been an outcast and his records banished from the TV and radio but pre his arrest in 1997, Gliter was a national treasure and 'Another Rock n Roll Christmas' was played on the radio as much as The Pogues, Slade's and Wizard's festive efforts are now.
I have even heard Rock and Roll pt.2 played at US sporting events althoigh they probably have no idea who it is or what he did so i will still listen to his 80's Christmas song about raising a glass for old lang syne and kissing under the mistletoe because i grew up with this song as a Christmas staple and it is a very good Festive song but to answer a question he posed in his glam rock glory days, I'll pass on being in your gang thanks Gary.

Oi To The World - The Vandals

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number five we have Oi To The World by The Vandals.

For a band from California, The Vandals sound remarkably English or they do right up until they mention drinking bourbon, we have whisky here not bourbon but to be fair they were trying to find a rhyme for turban so we can let that slide.
On the face of it this a song about punks and skinheads beating each other which isn't very Christmassy but it sets the scene for God to come down and shout Oi at them both. It all kicks off on the roof of 20, Oxford Street on Christmas Day when Punk Haji with his sword and Skinhead Trevor with the nun-chucks broke a lot of bones but as Trevor lay bleeding out, Haji saw the north star, come over all Festive and wrapped Trevors injuries in his Turban and then they both went to the pub to drink Bourbon together and God belatedly came down and said Oi! to the world.
The song, sung by an American man doing an English accent about an English man with an Indian name, is from The Vandals album of Christmas songs, also called Oi To The World which, to be even more English than them about it, is shite but this song is the gleaming jewel amongst a big ball of crap.
No Doubt recorded it in a more pop style a few years later where Gwen Stefani started off in an awful English accent, seemed to forget about it in the middle of the song and then remembered again at the end but it's far inferior to the more punk-esque version the Vandals brilliantly gobbed out.

Christmas Here V Christmas There

We may be separated by an Ocean and the use of the letter 'u' (it's a vowel for crying out loud) but the UK and America are also different animals when it comes to Christmas because there are some Christmas things over here which are not a Christmas thing over there.

One tradition and choking hazard is us putting a silver coin in the Christmas Pudding and the person who finds it are either driven to the hospital to get it surgically removed before they choke to death or they can look forward to a years worth of good luck.  

Another is the Queens Speech on TV where Her Majesty discusses current issues as well as tidbits on what Christmas means to her but due to a bunch of drunken men dressing as Indians and watching tea chests bob around in Boston Harbour years ago, it is understandable and to be fair i have never actually watched one myself, by 3pm on Christmas Day i am usually laying on the sofa in a food induced coma.

I only recently found out that American's don't have Boxing Day, the traditional day to return Christmas gifts to the shops and exchange them for the correct size, an alternative to the same value or make up stories about how it was broken when we got it and can we have the money back please.
Americans are not missing out on much, a national holiday to get over Christmas Day after all those mince pies and an early chance to exchange that Joe Biden Calendar for something of equal value at the 99c store.  

You would assume that if there was one country that would introduce mild explosives to their Christmas dinner it would be the Americans but Christmas Cracker's, cardboard tubes wrapped in colorful paper that are pulled apart by two people, make a loud cracking sound and hold a small toy, a joke, and a tissue-paper crown, never really took off over there and remain a very British thing but then when you see the bad jokes (Who hides in the bakery at Christmas? A mince spy!) i can understand that.

Egg nog but I'm not really sure what that is but i guess it has an egg mixed in with Nog somewhere.

A Christmas pantomime, or panto, are weird and wonderful musical comedies based on famous fairy tales which are performed at Christmas and usually star long forgotten male actors playing women's roles and female's taking male roles with some audience participation which generally includes, blimey, i thought he died years ago when that actor who was in Eastenders in 1986 comes onto stage prancing about in a tutu.

Americans have Televisions and as they have advertisements every 7 mins, you would have thought the stores would have cottoned on to this one but big, lavish Christmas commercials are not a thing, here we sometimes have adverts to advertise the Christmas Adverts which are usually a couple of minutes long and feature a heartwarming story of a dog or an alien such as this years John Lewis offering. Think of the furore around the Super Bowl commercials, only with Jingle Bells.

Who holds the Christmas No. 1 single is a big deal, or rather it was until Simon Cowell ruined it by releasing his newest stars single a week before Christmas and guaranteeing it the number one spot but after a lot of kick back (and the campaigns to get another song there) he has seen the light and stopped doing it but the topping the British singles chart on Christmas Day is still a much sought position and the Beatles currently hold the title with four.

It seems that when children leave a little something for Father Christmas to help keep up his energy levels as he whizzes around the globe delivering presents, in America it is milk and cookies where in Britain we go for wine and a mince pie because you know, Santa is an adult not 6.

There is a big hint in the name 'Christmas' to show who the day is actually about but Jesus hardly gets a look in here, its all Father Christmas and Snowmen and reindeer with nasal deformities so unless you go to a Church or watch Song's of Praise Xmas Special on BBC at some ungodly hour, you won't hear the Birthday Boy's name mentioned anywhere. I have seen enough Hallmark Christmas Films to know that you guys try to keep Jesus front and center as 'the reason for the season', but we zoned him out years ago and replaced him with light up Elf that dances and sings 'Merry Christmas Everyone' when you push his foot. Damned cute it is too.

O Holy Night - Lea Michelle

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number 6 we have O Holy Night by Lea Michelle.

Yes i know it's a Churchy song and i know it's all about baby Jesus and the night he was meant to be born but leaving all that aside, it is an amazing song starting with a tinkling piano and then in comes the strings and then it dips and soars majestically and Lea Michelle's amazing voice does all sort of wonderful things to accentuate it.
The song began life after a church in 19th Century France got a new organ and wanted to show it off so asked a local composer to come up with some music to prove what it could do, another one come up with some lyrics and over a hundred years later it makes an appearance in the TV show Glee and in my humble opinion, the best version i have ever heard.
Many opera singers have had a go at it but they make it sound too stuffy and religious while the likes of Mariah Carey and Celine Dion throw in all those annoying twiddly up and down the scales notes but Lea Michelle, who is a stage singer who learnt her trade on Broadway and therefore does not need to add anything to show off her voice, just sings it and knocks it out the park.
A truly beautiful tingling hairs on the back of your neck song perfectly sung.

Frosty The Snowman - Bowling For Soup

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number 7 we have Frosty The Snowman by Bowling For Soup.

The Bowling for Soup boys have quietly put out a couple of Christmas themed albums called Merry Flippin' Christmas Volumes 1 and 2 where they take traditional standards and attack them with their electric guitars.
They do over the likes of 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' and 'Feliz Navidad' but the one i always skip to is the fast and frantic Frosty the Snowman who it seems everyone and their dog had had a go at since it was released in the 1950's but nobody has managed to capture the pop-punk sound as BFS have.
One of the most famous Christmas songs, it doesn't actually mention Christmas at all, just verses about a Snowman who comes to life but i have always questioned the wisdom of him being made of snow, should he really be smoking his corncob pipe which will surely make him melt even quicker?
 

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Asterius of Amasea

At this time of year you will likely hear many stories about how the Atheist's are trying to ban Christmas but i was way ahead of them and tried to get the whole thing cancelled over 1600 years before them.
That might be surprising to hear, considering i was a Saint and a Bishop but hang on to your rosary beads, because thing are about to get religious.
Let me explain, as shocking as it might seem, Christmas was not a Christian thing, it was a Pagan Roman thing despite what people will try and tell you, and as such, I said Christians should have nothing to do with a certain December day chosen to remix our boy Jesus with the birthday of their guy Mithras.
I become the Bishop of Amasea at a time when Christianity had overtaken the Roman pagan religions but it was still blurred with the Roman holidays of Saturnalia and Kalends and these Roman practices were still being celebrated, especially the gift-giving.
Now i’m not a fascist, i'm a Bishop. Fascists tend to dress up in black and tell people what to do but i wore gold coloured things so i tried to explain that gift giving was foolish and harmful which taught children to be greedy and the gifts made their minds sordid by capitalism which was an entrance to sin and the birth of Christ should be about being led into a life of light and uprightness.
The pagan custom of leaving food out for the gods in midwinter was co-opted as a Christian act, as was decorating the house with greenery but the pagan practice of giving gifts was spun by the church as emphasizing donations to the poor and celebrating the human nature of Jesus but because nobody was willing to give up their pagan celebrations and the idea of getting drunk for three days straight was too strong, my whinging completely tanked and went nowhere.
My drawing to their minds that they were just glorifying Paganism and their gods devastated the most deeply religious folk who displayed said devastation in their own unique way, by ignoring me and going right back to drinking and eating to excess and so the church accepted and accommodated it as part of their celebrations.
Nice job, Religion but be warned that Christmas will lead to an almighty implosion because even milk gets sour y’know. Unless it’s UHT milk, but there’s no demand for that because it’s shite.

Candy Cane Lane - Sia

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number 8 we have Candy Cane Lane by Sia.

The second entry for Sia but i do have a lot of time for her, not only is she wonderfully whacky but her 'Everyday Is Christmas' CD is chock full of brilliant Christmas songs, this one being one of my favourites.
Candy Canes are no so much of a feature over here in the UK, the red and white stripes make me think of a Barber Shop more than a Festive sweet but Candy Cane Lane conjures up images of a snowy street lined with the walking stick shaped treats even if it is sang by Sia in a way that sounds as if her voice has been sped up slightly but that just makes her sound like a child, which is cute.
I guess the nearest thing we have to Candy Canes is Seaside Rock which is the same thing only Summery and much thicker and usually has the name of the resort running through it but Candy Cane Lane conjures up a better image than Rock Road but either way, both are sickly sweet and will rot your teeth while you listen to this wonderfully bouncy, cheerful effort.

What's Mistletoe Got To Do With Xmas?

I haven't seen a sprig of Mistletoe for years but if you do manage to accidentally find yourself under one this year then remember the Government Coronavirus warning that we are not meant to be kissing under it this year.
The tradition says that any woman standing under mistletoe can be kissed and will be dogged by bad luck if she refuses which sort of answers my own question of why mistletoe has fallen out of fashion, that's a court case just waiting to happen due to the current climate of pervy old men preying on younger ladies but it's probably right that it should die out altogether and be consigned to history along with wassailing whatever that is.
Mistletoe comes from the German word for 'Dung' and 'Tang' for twig and goes back to the pagan belief that the white, sticky goo from the berries was the semen of the gods so how did people think Christmas when asked to kiss under a shit stick full of gentleman batter?
One Christian explanation is that was growing on a tree that was used to make the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified but the Vikings believed that mistletoe had the power to raise humans from the dead and was the property of their God Balder while British pagans believed that mistletoe could keep them safe from evil spirts and would hang it in their homes over the winter Solstice.
Most likely explanation is that it associated with the Roman God of Fertility Venus and was used as part of the Roman Saturnalia fun and games at the end of December which the Christians pasted into Jesus when it tagged it's own guy into their festival therefore meaning more proof, if needed, that Christmas is just a Pagan Festival that the early Christians lazily usurped to nudge out the Roman Gods in favour of their own.

Assange Ruling A Travesty

The High Court has decided that Julian Assange can now be extradited to the US to face espionage charges after the US have given assurances that Assange would not face those strictest measures and be held in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison and if convicted, will be able to serve his time in an Australian prison.
Amnesty International describing the ruling as 'a travesty of justice' and Reporters Without Borders said the ruling was 'a bleak moment for journalists' so this may be a good time to review exactly what Assange did to face the wrath of America and receive quotes such as one time Presidential candidate Mick Huckabee saying 'anything less than execution is too kind a penalty' and one time Vice President Sarah Palin calling for him to be treated as if he was 'an Al Quaeda or Taliban leader'.
In 2010, the Afghan and Iraq wars were in full swing and as the owner of Wikileaks, Assange released classified US military footage of US forces shooting and killing civilians on the streets of Baghdad from an Apache attack helicopter along with torture manuals for Guantanamo Bay, the extraordinary rendition campaign and evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s, a 5-month-old infant and a 7 month old baby shot in the head then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi.
All the horrific acts were strongly denied by the American military until it was uncovered and the following investigation into the chopper incident resulted in one soldier being exonerated and the other being suspended without pay for a month.
The person who revealed this to the world has now spent years hiding out in the Ecudorian Embassy and now faces extradition to America but it isn’t hard to see the US Government hate leakers like him, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden as we would still be in the dark and that is how they would prefer it, much rather we listen unquestioningly to the Government issued reports and sources and take their words as the truth.
The real crime was the criminal war actions of the military and in a truly just world it would be the chopper pilots and the animals who killed the innocent civilians sitting in a prison cell, a far greater crime than revealing their deaths but things are not just and why we should all be deploring the current actions taken against the likes of Assange who pour cold water on the wish for the countries that want their wars to be seen as them as the good guys and the other side as the bad guys.
This is really all about the US government hoping that this will set an example to any future whistleblowers who may be tempted to reveal injustices while America go about their wars.

A Bad Week For Boris

There is an outside chance that Great Britain might get a Christmas Present this year in the shape of a shiny new Prime Minister because the one we have at the moment is drowning in sleaze and lies.
Hot on the heels of him denying a party took place in number 10 days after he put the nation into lock-down and then a video appearing of his staff laughing about the Christmas Party they held, he has been caught out lying about not knowing about who paid for his flat redecoration despite a WhatsApp message where Boris himself asked, and it was agreed, that a rich donor, Lord Brownlow, would pay for it.
Between Partygate on Monday and Wallpapergate on Thursday came Kabulgate where Boris denied prioritising animals over humans desperate to escape the Taliban and then a letter appeared where he seemed to give the okay for a plane to land, pick up and fly back a load of dogs.
With stories of yet more parties at Number 10 when the rest of us was obeying the rules Boris handed down, the Tories are now 7 points behind Labour and the alarm bells are ringing in Tory Central as the anger grows but those who voted for this mob only have themselves to blame, Boris was a proven
liar before he became PM so what made them think he would do anything different once in Charge?
It began with the Brexit lies, carried on into lying to the Queen over suspending parliament, has a roomful of enquiries ongoing over his PPE contracts for his friends and nobody has seen any of the 40 new hospitals he promised which turned out to be not so much new as we understand them but old ones given a lick of paint.
Boris will fight to stay in his job, he was on TV today saying: 'Let me explain' which is a sure sign he was about to start lying but then him taking a breath is also a sure sign he is about to start lying but with open revolt in his Party and murmurs growing that his MPs are already asking around for a replacement, he could be taking the Maggie Thatcher route in the back of a taxi our of Downing Street any day.
The problem is, i take a look around the current bunch of Conservatives and i don't fancy any of them to be a better choice to take charge so we will have to settle for the least worse until Election Day in 2024.

Baby Please Come Home - Joey Ramone

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number 9 we have Baby Please Come Home by Joey Ramone.

I was unsure which way to go with this one because i love this song but the Darlene Love version is the ultimate but it is played so much on the radio and the other versions didn't really change it very much but i wanted to include it because it is a great Christmas song and was ranked by Rolling Stone as the Greatest Rock and Roll Christmas Song.
Amazingly the song never even charted when it was released in 1963 and then didn't bother the charts again the following year either and the highest chart position it has ever attained in the USA is 19 in 2021 and 22 in the UK in 2018 when it was chosen for the ASDA advert, the only place it has ever got into the top 10 is Sweden.
Phil Spector thought that the song was so good that it deserved a non-seasonal version, and made a version called 'Johnny (Baby Please Come Home)' but that tanked also so what did he know.
Of all the bands who have redone this song i usually go with the much less heard one by Joey Ramone  because, well, you can never have too much Joey Ramone.

It's Christmas - Bouquet Of Veal

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number 10 we have It's Christmas by Bouquet of Veal.

For many, Christmas-time is all about the excess and too much beer, eating candy for breakfast, peeing in the snow and reminding the Jews that Christmas is not for them, they have their own thing which doesn't include Bacon Sandwiches as the guys from Bouquet of Veal remind them in this 1.22 of yuletide celebration.
It's an uptempo, albeit far too short, song about the things the singer will miss after the tree is put back in the box and the calendar changes to January and most of it we can all relate to such as chocolate and alcohol for breakfast, having a full belly and writing your name in the snow with your wee-wee although that would be much easier for men, way too difficult for women especially if they are called Bernadette or Alessandra, they would have to do it in sections.
I don't ever recall ever finding a finger in the snow but i did once find a tenner but that's not quite the same.

 

Wake Up Joe, It's For You

Apart from the time he fell asleep at the COP27 summit and a joke about him being the first person in history that had to be woken up to be put to sleep for an operation, we haven't heard too much about American President Joe Biden which is not a bad thing but he had better make sure he has some strong coffee today because he has to make the most important phone call of his Presidency with Vladimir Putin.
The Russian President, who was on much friendlier terms with the Biden Predecessor, Donald Trump, has been menacing the Ukrainian border with 100,000 of his troops and has led Ukraine to accuse Russia of preparing for a military offensive like in 2014 when they peeled Crimea away from Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has pledged his 'unwavering support' to Ukraine and is warning that if Russia invades Ukraine, he will bring down the might of US sanctions but Russia has replied that it's troop build up is not a threat to its neighbour and what it does with it's own troops inside Russia is no concern to anyone else.
As Ukraine is not part of NATO and therefore is not protected under the principle that an attack against one members is considered an attack against all, if Russia does attack it won't necessarily lead to a direct war between Russia and the West but it will make things very nervy.
Maybe after his call with Putin has ended he can put one into President Xi of China after Joe announced
the US government’s diplomatic boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics to which China replied that US diplomats had not even been invited to Beijing in the first place so maybe he can wangle an invite which he can then pull out of, or maybe he will just go for a nap.

Call Me To Negotiate China

The newest members of the Moon Club, China, have made an amazing discovery on the dark side of the moon, a hut.
The Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) have sent their rover to the previously unexplored side of the surface to have a look at what exactly the cube-shaped structure is and they expect it will turn out to be more boringly an extravagantly shaped rock but we won't know for sure for 2-3 lunar days, or 2-3 Earth months.
China is a welcome addition to our Earthly Space Exploration regime and has been working hard to catch up by exploring our satellite, landing a rover on Mars, launching an Earth-orbiting space station, launching a mission to Mars and working on building a lunar base using 3D printing technology.
I do own a bit of the moon, the Vestine crater (take a look towards the outer right hand edge between 1 and 2 o'clock and then send me a cheque because i own that and i charge to view it) but if it is a hut in my bit then it will be worth a fortune.
A prime piece of lunar real estate in a quiet, desirable location with great views of the Earth, plenty of outdoor space with room to extend so CNSA, if it is a hut give me a call and we can negotiate, if it's a boulder then it's all yours, just don't leave tyre-tracks all over my nice neat crater.

Xmas

I always thought the word Xmas was just a quick way of writing Christmas but some Christians apparently take umbrage at it because it is us Atheists trying to take Christ out of Chiristmas.
Now i am all for making Christmas a less religious event but i was unaware until this weekend that writing Xmas was what we was doing so thanks to bringing it to my attention, i will make sure i write it more often from now on but as usual the Christians have their panties in a bunch for nothing because i asked a lexicographer (everyone should have one handy) and they bah-humbugged it as a load of ignorant tosh. Religious folk being ignorant??? My flabber has never been so ghasted!!
If they bothered to do some research such as read a book other than the one they find in Church they would find that the -X began in 11th Century Greece as an abbreviation for Christo so Xmas is actually Christomas and was a way for Christian scholars to refer to Jesus in their ancient language.
It's an ecclesiastical abbreviation that has been used for almost as long as Christmas has been in existence.
As i have said previously to religious types, next time you want to angrily shake your rosary beads at atheists and accuse us of trying to ban Christmas, remember who it was that actually banned it before.

Feliz Navidad - It Dies Today

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of  Musicians and at number 11 we have Feliz Navidad by It Dies Today.

Quite a few people have had a go at this song including Boney M, Michael Buble and even Dora the Explorer but if ever there was a song just begging to be played on an electric Guitar with the Gain ramped up to max it's this song.
I don't know much about the group 'It Dies Today' apart from they were a short lived American metal band who were asked to belt out a Christmas song for the Punk Rock Christmas Album 'A Santa Cause' and chose a song which is the Spanish Christmas New Year greeting sung 50% in Spanish, sped it up and created a song with a riff so thick and dirty it merits a cold shower after listening to it.    
Maybe the band name means the thing that dies today will be your speakers because this is the sort of song that if they are not creaking and distorting during the 3 minutes of this song then you are not playing it loud enough .

Merry Christmas From The Law Makers

Here's a very festive picture of US Congressman, Thomas Massie, with his family armed with semi-automatic weapons. It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside at the time of peace on earth and goodwill to all men as they gather around the Christmas tree, grinning inanely and holding weapons of death.
His tweet includes the line: 'Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo' so we had better hope that Santa has enough room in his bag because that is a lot of guns to provide for.
It comes only days after yet another school shooting in America and to those of us outside of America, we may believe that it is down to easy access to firearms and bat-shit crazy gun laws but that's incorrect if you ask any bunch of gun toting second-amenders.
If being able to buy a gun at supermarkets along with your breakfast cereal and potatoes isn't the cause then i'm confused why America has these things happening with such frequency.
It can't be a lack of thoughts and prayers because they get mentioned after every massacre and must come as soothing to the families of dead children as they bury them and it can't be because a debate has been worked over because no debate is ever needed, what with it always being too soon for a debate on dangerously inadequate gun laws.
I guess it will come down to the Congressmen, the people who make the laws, to decide whether the woefully lax gun laws which allows easy access to weapons need to be tightened up to try and prevent more deaths or to continue with the status quo which sees 40,000 gun deaths a year.
Anyway, that's for another time, it's Christmas-time so let's just enjoy the lovely family picture of Congressman Massie and his family not letting the death of three teenagers killed by a 15-year-old who shot and killed them with an early Christmas present from his parents ruin their own Christmas.
It's what the baby Jesus would want after-all.

You Think Coal Is A Bad Present?

So what if you have been bad this past year? In most places the worst fate a naughty child can expect on Christmas is a lump of coal in your stocking but children in other countries, however, can expect worse.
Naughty kids in Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and northern Italy can expect a visit from Krampus, a demonic half-goat monster who drags chains behind him as he walks, whipping bad children and if they have been really bad, kidnapping them which sounds bad but then Austrian children also have Frau Perchta to contend with, and she slits the bellies of bad children and stuffs their corpses with straw.
In Wales, a knock on the door could be Mari Lwyd, a creature with a horse’s skull while Icelandic children should plug up any cat flaps in their door to stop the giant ogre Gryla's Yule Cat from entering as he is searching for naughty children for his master to feast upon, cooking them in a vat of stew.
Hans Trapp is a man dressed as a scarecrow and has a taste for human flesh as he roams France at Christmas looking for young, tasty children but at least there is only one of him, Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish children have to avoid a horde of Goblins called The Kallikantzari who spend most of the year underground, trying to bring about the apocalypse but come out along with the tinsel and baubles to stick their tusks into naughty children.
Père Fouettard was a butcher who kidnapped, robbed and killed children and then carved up their bodies and hid them in barrels and follows St Nick around in France, Belgium and Switzerland, dealing with the problem children the way he knows best, and he has a large supply of barrels.
So some kids will get coal and others will be eaten by monsters and witches but other than that, it's the same thing, only with disembowelment.

Christmas Day (I wish I Was Surfing) - Emmy The Great and Tim Wheeler

Of all the Christmas songs which have been recorded, only the best can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number 12 we have Christmas Day (I wish i was surfing) by Emmy The Great and Tim Wheeler.

This always sounds very Beach Boy's but that could be the Surfing lyrics which isn't very Christmassy i agree and it is about hating the cold with the singer wishing he was somewhere warm and where the sun is shining which is fair enough because Wheeler, once of Ash fame, hails from Northern Ireland which is somewhere that the Sun only puts in a fleeting appearance for a couple of days each August.
Emmy the Great is Chinese/English and they were a couple when they put this out from their 'This is Christmas Album' which came about when they were snowed in one Christmas and includes Jesus the Reindeer and Don't call me Mrs Christmas.
My favourite song from a very good Festive album and it has a very 90's feel to it with a pop-punk edge and it's a very catchy, up tempo song with not a snowman or a jingle bell to be heard.

Get The Beer's In Aussies

In another poll where the answer is 'well duh..obviously', Australia has been voted the drunkest country in the world.
The Global Drug Survey 2021 asked people in 22 nations about their alcohol consumption and found that Australians got drunk 27 times a year, double the global average of 14 times with Denmark and Finland tied in second place reporting getting drunk 23 times a year.
I assume they only got as far as 22 countries because once they got to Australia they called it, a bit like looking for the least drunk nation and starting with Saudi Arabia.
To be fair our Aussie cousins only being drunk 27 times a year, or as the report subtly puts it: 'where physical and mental faculties were impaired to the point that balance, focus, and speech were affected' is lower than i expected, after all there are 365 days in a year so maybe they held the poll in the early morning and found some still sober enough to make a coherent reply, or at least mumble one, before the breakfast beer kicked in.
At least the barbie and boomerang gang had the excuse of consuming several times their own weight in alcohol to impair their mental faculties, we have seen enough Donald Trump supporters to judge who has impaired mental faculties and the majority of those guys are teetotal.  
So enjoy your crown as the Worlds biggest drunks Australia, try not to get eaten by a wallaby and wear your hat with corks with pride.

Party On Say's Boris

Hours after a Government scientists told people to be careful over the Christmas with the Chief Executive of the UK Health Security Agency, Jenny Harris, even deciding that she isn't going to just thoughtlessly blurt out whatever nonsense the Government ask her to and said that we should decrease our social contacts a little bit to help keep the new variant at bay, Boris comes out and poo-poos all her advice.
Boris, in his style of cheering that everything is going to turn out for the best right up until the time it invariably doesn’t, say's that there is no need to cancel Christmas parties although the bit he left out was 'like last year', well not for them anyway because while he cancelled Christmas for everyone else, his parties still went ahead in full swing.  
Now to us pheasants, a booze up with a couple of dozen people in one room with food and games is a party but not to Boris who is trying to persuade everyone that it wasn't a party but 'a gathering of work colleagues' and no Government guidelines were breached in the December 18th meeting which would hold more water if two days before, on the 16th, he hadn't announced London entering a Tier 3 lock-down, meaning people were not allowed to mix indoors with anyone outside their household or support bubble.
Just to avoid any confusion, the guidance specifically stated: "You must not have a work Christmas lunch or party, where that is a primarily social activity and is not otherwise permitted by the rules in your tier'.
As people were fied up to £10,000 for holding parties during lock-down last year, the Police are sure to be taking an interest but the Tories are pursuing their fatal agenda of economy first, people who keep the economy going, second and moving on to this Christmas and saying that they will be holding Festive Parties and everyone should 'Keep Calm and Carry on with whatever they planned.
I’m not sure how we'd cope if a load of Tories caught Covid which kept them out of work for an extended period of time but i suppose we would just have to keep calm and carry on i guess.

Special Guest Blogger: St. Francis Xavier

It tough being a Saint and having your Feast Day in December because nobody really cares, all eyes are on the big day towards the end of the month but my story is great so put that mince pie to one side and read about how Francis Xavier changed the World, or the Asian bit of it anyway.
I wasn't really content with the Christian religions we had at the time, they just never seemed proactive enough in recruiting new soul's so six of us drew up a formula for a new religious order, the Society of Jesus, aka the Jesuits, with the idea of going out into the World and spreading the word of our God and his son and the Pope gave his blessing and told us to go ahead, so we did.
After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem was thwarted by war, me and my companions went to Rome instead and accepted a request that we bring Christianity to the Portuguese-run colonies overseas.
I wasn't too thrilled at being sent off to minister to the people of Asia, over here in Europe the world was a simpler place, everyone just took our word for things but on my 35th Birthday, straight after the cake and candles bit, i boarded a boat and headed to Japan where Shimazu Takahisa, the Daimyo of Satsuma, gave us a friendly reception and due to the language barrier i took along a painting of the Madonna and the Madonna and Child to help teach the Japanese about Christianity.
Unfortunately, the Japanese people were not easily converted. Seriously, have you ever tried converting somebody? It's way harder than it looks. Most of them completely refuse to stand still and let you change their minds on who created them. Totally unreasonable and anyway many of the people were already Buddhist or Shinto and they refused to believe that a God who had created everything, including evil, could be good. They also refused to believe in Hell, that really got numerous panties quite tightly knotted, it bothered them that their ancestors may be living in Hell.
I wasn't making much headway when the previously friendly Daiymo changed his mind and forbade the conversion of his subjects to Christianity under penalty of death so i packed up my paintings and went to China instead because damn it, i came all this way to convert somebody or that was the plan but as i was waiting for the boat i caught a fever and died, falling into a consignment of fruit destined for Europe.
What i am mostly known for though is the many miracles attributed to me, such as healing, raising the dead, creating and replenishing water supplies, stopping storms, casting out demons and evil spirits, returning sight to the blind, telling prophecies, and my personal favourite of a crab bringing back my crucifix that i carelessly dropped into the sea.
Despite devoting my life to God however, God wasn't such a huge fan of me and i assume i died as divine punishment for the crucifix on a crab thing but while i did not get to see how far my ideas spread, i certainly left an impression, unfortunatey it was on a dozen boxes of apples in a Japanese dockyard.

Happy Christmas or Merry Christmas?

As strange as it sounds, i don't associate the 'Christ' part with Christmas at all, it's just the name of the bit of the season when Santa shows up and the presents are handed out and i have never been wished, or been wished, Happy Holidays, that makes me think of someone going off on their summer holidays, and the only time i have seen 'Season's Greetings' is on a Christmas Card so i go for either Happy Christmas or Merry Christmas.  
I don't give a second thought to whether a person celebrates it or not, i wish them a Happy/Merry Christmas anyway and leave it up to them to either accept it or ignore it as they wish but i did ask a lexicographer a while ago which is correct, Merry or Happy Christmas?
Apparently, the old saying of 'Merry Christmas' dates back to the Middle Ages and means to enjoy the alcohol, food and general revelry which comes with Christmas while 'Happy Christmas' means enjoy the decorations, twinkling lights and genial atmosphere which comes with the season.
Makes sense i guess as 'Happy' is a word that describes an emotional condition, the state of 'being happy' while 'Merry' is more of a behavior descriptor as in the act of merry-making.
Something i have never noticed until it was pointed out is that when the Queen does her thing on Christmas Day, she always wishes all her subjects a 'Happy Christmas' and never a Merry one because of the connotations of 'merry' which is associated with the excess and rowdiness of Christmas.
I guess what it boils down to is if the person you are about to say it to is the sort who will neck a dozen bottles of WKD Blue, eat their own weight in mince pies and fall asleep face down in their Christmas Pudding then it's Merry Christmas otherwise it's safer to go with the Queen and say Happy Christmas.
Either way, regardless of what you say, the sentiment is to have an enjoyable time over the Christmas period and you hope they have a good time however they spend it except when you say it to right-wing politicians, we all hope they have a rotten Christmas.

Lucy Museum of Musician's Top Christmas Songs

Not sure how i missed it before but the Lucy Museum of Musician's who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum is suspiciously devoid of Christmas songs and i do love a Christmas song which is handy because it's the Christmas season, which means Christmas music. Lots and lots of Christmas music, most of which we have all heard a bazillion times before.
Now while "Driving Home For Christmas' by Chris Rea and Mud's 'Lonely This Christmas' are great, and resilient, it does get a bit samey so i am always on the look-out for new Christmas songs or even the old classics overhauled and i have a decent collection and i am putting forward my top 20.

In the time honoured Top of the Pops tradition, the run down from 20 to 13 is:  

20 Little Silent Boy - The Boo.
This is the family of Billy Joe Armstrong who decided to make a musical family Christmas card in 2011 and as nothing has been heard from The Boo since i guess it was a one off but it is an amazing 2:02 minutes punking up of some plodding old Christmas songs.   
This song gets the full guitar treatment and Mrs Armstrong has a nice, slightly raspy voice and Billy sings the Little Drummer Boy bits between so making a musical EP card is a nice touch but my family shouldn't expect anything like this, they will have to make do with getting Christmas Cards with Robins and Snowmen on them.   

19 Let it Snow - Twisted Sister.
Their Twisted Christmas Album features classic Christmas songs performed in metal versions but in a brilliant and imaginative twist they managed to incorporate classic metal tunes into the songs and this one has the riff from Black Sabbath's 'Children of the Grave' while Daniel "Dee" Snider sings about the weather being frightful and the fire being delightful. Dean Martin really missed trick because this version knocks his version into a cocked Christmas hat.

18 Xmas Time of the year - Green Day.
As a Green Day fan from the very start i was as happy as a snowman in a blizzard when this gem turned up in 2015.
It's a run of the mill Green Day mellow type song so if you like the Green Day sound this will be right up your alley, if you don't then don't worry because i have never heard it on the radio so you can just miss this one out.

17 Run Rudolph Run - LA Guns.
I do like a Chuck Berry song at the best of times because they are up mostly up tempo, guitar twanging affairs even if they do not vary very much and this 1958 effort was written by the same guy who wrote 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'
The song is pure Berry, he even used the exact same tune on 'Little Queenie' a year later but if anything the LA Guns took the Berry Christmas song and made it even moreso.
The LA Guns do have a strange history, named by the guitarist Tracii Guns, they broke up and combined their band with another group called Hollywood Rose named after their lead singer Axel Rose to make Guns N' Roses. Guns fell out with Axel and was replaced by Slash and they went on to become the biggest and best rock band ever while Guns got together a new LA Guns, this time with members of the defunct Mötley Crüe.

16 Whats This? - Danny Elfman
TV Schedulers do have a problem with the animated movie, 'The Nightmare Before Christmas'. Is it a Halloween or Christmas film? There are many great songs in this film courtesy of Danny Elfman but this is my favourite with Jack Skellington arriving in Christmas Town and discovering that 'There are children throwing snowballs here, Instead of throwing heads, They're busy building toys, And absolutely no one's dead' and nothing says the Festive of Good Cheer more than not getting hit by the dismembered head of a neighbour when you are walking down the street.
Jolly, upbeat and with a full orchestra, a real joy.
 
15 Merry Christmas Everyone - Shakin' Stevens
Mr Stevens began out as an Elvis impersonator and he would turn up on Top of the Pops in the early 80's in double denim and do the shaky leg thing and belt out 50's songs and he would be a question in a pub quiz if it wasn't for this 1985 Christmas classic. Wearing a jumper which even Elton John would describe as too much, it hits every Christmas button with snow, elves, Santa, sleigh rides, snowmen and makes a reappearance every December in the UK Charts Shakin' topping up his pension and making sure he is kept in Denim jackets.
 
14 Ho Ho Ho - Sia 
I have had Sia's brilliant 'Everyday Is Christmas' CD on repeat ever since it surfaced in 2017 and she will put in more appearances in my top 20 list but this one is a great song about the Misfit Toys from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on the Island getting drunk on Rum and Whisky Bourbon because well, why not.
Being Australian, growing up a Sia Christmas must have involved Christmas Dinner on the beach and singing Carols in 35C heat so kudo's to her for entering into the spirit of a Northern Hemisphere Christmas and not the Australian version and singing about not getting eaten by a crocodile on the way home from the Office Xmas Party.

13 I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday - Wizzard
The British public voted this song second behind 'Fairytale of New York' and i once heard Roy Wood explain how he constructed the song, explaining how he wanted a rock n roll Christmas song which sounded like a Phil Spector hit and how it took months of refining to get the blending of the many instruments on the single and the hours spent making sure the sound was just right.
Obviously he could have just said he used the same tune from 'See My Baby Jive' and changed the lyrics to something more Christmassy but where's the romance in that.
It is a classic and was kept off the top spot by Slade's effort in the 70's but although as tempting as it might be to have Christmas everyday, basing your calendar on glam rockers may not be that wise after all. 

Top 12 next.