Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Hephaestus

As the son of Zeus and Hera i should have been made but i was born with weak limbs and an ugly face and my disappointed mother took one look at me, said 'Ewww' and rather unsympathetically tipped me over the edge of Mount Olympus into the sea.
Luckily not all the Goddesses were unfeeling bitches and Eurynome and Thetis, took pity on me and taught me to make things from metal and i had a real knack for it and i graduated from ashtray's and coat hangers to greater and grander things to become a master blacksmith creating clockwork tables, armor of invincibility and robotic statues.
I set up my own forge under the sea with an anvil and twenty bellows and my skill soon caught the attention of the Gods, Zeus especially liked my thunderbolts for which he placed on regular order and i began making all the weapons of the gods in Olympus which came in very handy during the war with the Titans.
Along with my Cyclopes assistants, Brontes, Steropes and Arges, i crafted much of the magnificent equipment of the gods, Hermes' winged helmet and sandals, the Aegis breastplate, Aphrodite's famed girdle, Agamemnon's staff of office, Achilles' armour, Diomedes' cuirass, Heracles' bronze clappers, Helios' chariot, the shoulder of Pelops and Eros's bow and arrows, all my work.
Peace came and with it new demands as i could make just about anything except make my wife Aphrodite happy, she did cheat on me a lot but i did have a small revenge when i caught her and Ares in a net of and dragged them both to Olympus and put them on display for a bit but the real revenge was kept for my mum for rejecting me.
I was asked to make thrones for all the Gods and i made mum a special magical golden throne, which, when she sat on it, grabbed her and wouldn't allow her to stand up again.
The other gods begged me to let her go, but i refused and she would probably still be there now if Dionysus, the god of wine, didn't get me drunk and forced me to Olympus to release her.
Prometheus stole the fire that he gave to man from my forge and Zeus asked me to create a large jar to hold all the blessings and evils the God's bestowed upon humanity which he gave to Prometheus' brother Epimetheus and created a wife for him, Pandora.
So that didn't turn out so well for mankind what with all the sickness, death and many other evils she released but i can't be blamed for that, i only made the jar but i was not inherently 'good' or 'evil' because all the Gods are imperfect in some way, our personalty and characters refecting society and human nature itself. Oh except Hera, she was a straight up absolute bitch.

Special Guest Blogger: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

I have noticed many of the Roman Emperors writing here were as crazy as a box of frogs but not all of us were a grape short of an orgy, i was guided by the principles of philosophy as practiced by the best of the Greek Philosophers and i became one of only five great Roman Emperors and as there were about 70 of us, it shows just how crap the other 65 were. 
I was born into an established Roman family, but not the royal lineage so as a young man i enjoyed all the usual teenage things such as wrestling and hunting but i did have a passion for learning and when i wasn't grabbing someone in a headlock, i would spend time reading philosopher Epictetus which got me noticed by Emperor Hadrian.
You know someone once said: 'The person who has not taken pleasure in a book must be intolerably stupid' and boy was Rome run by many leaders who had obviously never taken pleasure in a book apart from ones that comes with crayons so when the childless Hadrian was nearing death he had to pick a successor and he chose a Senator called Antoninus Pius on the condition that he adopted me so once Antonious's time came, i would be properly prepared and i worked alongside my adopted father while learning the ways of government and continued my philosophical studies.
In 161 Antoninus died and i became the Emperor of the Roman Empire, the most powerful position in the world at the time, and immediately i had to deal with wars with Barbarian tribes, the rise of Christianity as well as the plague bought back from our troops in Syria.
There was an early challenge for my position after hearing a rumor that i was deathly ill, Avidius Cassius claimed the title of emperor for himself so i traveled to the East to slap him around but before i got there he had been murdered by his own soldiers so my wife and i decided to make the most of it and toured the eastern provinces with my wife but that didn't turn out quite so well as she died of the plague on the trip.
There is a reason the adage that power corrupts has been repeated throughout history as it unfortunately tends to be true but i tried to rule with wisdom and virtue and would write reminders to myself to avoid temptation and not be a dick but it was  very stressful dealing with daily life as a leader of one of the most powerful empires in human history but i would remind myself that my role was all about self-restraint, duty, self-discipline, personal ethics, humility and respect for others.
My diary writings would give myself advice on how to make good on the responsibilities and obligations of my position such as 'Focus on what you can do, and not what you can't and 'There is nothing you can do about the past or future, you can only influence the present'.
I named my son as my successor when i grew ill and one of my last entries before dying was 'when the longest and the shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal' so if when you die people say 'you know what, they were a nice person' and not 'you know what, they were a massive halfwit' then i would suggest it represents a successful time while you were here.

Special Guest Blogger: Deborah Kerr

I started out playing prim and proper school teachers, nuns, and princesses but i longed for roles that would allow me to let my hair down which is how i found myself dressed only in a bikini and cavorting in the waves with a hunky Burt Lancaster getting sand in places where sand really doesn't belong.
I was so shy as a teenager that it ruined my initial career choice as a ballet dancer as i was unable to dance in front of a crowd so when my Aunt suggested acting as a way to overcome it i was skeptical but turned out using someone else's words and movements was far easier and i got pretty good and got spotted by an agent who got me a small role in the spy film Contraband although it was so small that it got cut from the final edit.
My next opportunity was an adaptation of the stage play Love on the Dole and i quickly followed that with a series of other British films which got me taken on by MGM Studio's and a role in Black Narcissus and then things really took off and i made the role of the uptight, reserved British woman my own which was nice but i wanted to be sexy, not prim and proper so i applied for the role in From Here to Eternity.
The producers weren't convinced that i was right for the part and went for Joan Crawford but the egomaniac demanded that she would only work with her own cameraman so they had another rethink about me and took a chance and offered me the role.
In the original script, in that famous beach scene with Burt Lancaster, we were standing up but we decided to take the scene horizontal and rolling around in the waves and getting sand in all the wrong places but it did get me a best actress nomination from the Academy as well as a nasty rash from the damp sand.
Next up was a film remake of the King and I musical but the problem was i had Van Gogh's ear for music and sang like a donkey wearing a bucket over it's head so they dubbed my voice with a professional singer.
With sex scene's and musical ticked off my list, i next went for Bond Girl and despite being 45, i was cast in Casino Royale but by the late 60s,  the film industry was moving towards roles which demanded actresses running around with their clothes off so i only made one more movie, The Gypsy Moth with my wave romper, Burt Lancaster, and then retired.
I did some TV and stage work up until my diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease but i am happy that i am partly responsible for inspiring all those buttock shapes in the sand on the shoreline in the morning.

Special Guest Blogger: Hugh Depenser the Younger

My Family did that weird thing where they give the kids all the same Christian name so there was my dad Hugh Despenser the Elder, i was the Younger and my son was the even younger but the story starts with my father working for King Edward I as a royal counsellor so i grew up in the royal Household.
Being in the Kings eyeline, he decided i would make a suitable husband for his eldest granddaughter Eleanor and as she came with money, titles and land i obviously i agreed.
Not long afterwards, Edward I died and Edward II took over and he was a very different man to his father, for one, despite being married to Queen Isabella of France, he was having a homosexual relationship with a young nobleman called Piers Gaveston until a group of disgruntled barons killed him, sick of the king’s endless favouritism towards him.
That left a big gap in the shape of the Kings favourite and i wormed my way in, was made royal chamberlain and in just a few years i went from a landless knight to one of the wealthiest magnates in the kingdom as the King showered even more land on me, including Wallingford Castle despite him previously giving it to his wife, Queen Isabella of France, which didn't go down well with her or the Barons, one inparticular called Roger Mortimer.
The Queen and Edward's marriage broke down and rumours began circulating that the King and i were in a gay relationship ourselves and the Queen and the Barons, led by Mortimer, plotted a revolt and sacked and vandalised all my land and forced me into exile.
The King and the army put down the uprising and i returned to England, had Mortimer's locked in the Tower of London and took over all of his land making me the richest man in England.
While all this was going on Queen Isabella was in France still seething about the castle and then i suggested to the King that he remove her children from her care to really tick her off and her seething turned into something much worse.
To cut a long story short, Roger Mortimer escaped the Tower, teamed up with Isabella in France and they both turned up in England with an army who overthrew Edward and i was captured and put on trial.
Found guilty of treason and sodomy, i was sentenced to death but not just any old death, first they wrote biblical passages against sodomy on my naked body which they dragged through the town before hanging me but before i died they cut me down and tied me to a ladder and sliced off my genitals and burned them in front of me before pulling out my entrails and finally cutting out my heart and throwing into a fire.
Not surprisingly i was dead by now so the subsequent beheading and being quartered into four pieces never bothered me but as a proud Englishman, my head can be held up high, and it doesn't get much higher than where it ended up, on top of the gates of London.

Hey America, Shut That Guy Up

The clocks went forward an hour this morning but it was like they had gone back 20 years when i woke up to hear an American President calling for regime change in another nation.
Before you could say 'WTF!! Someone shut that fool up', the White House were out to try and contain the damage by clarifying that when Joe Biden said: 'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power', he didn't actually mean he wanted Putin replaced as leader of Russia, that's regime change and the new America doesn't do that sort of thing anymore.
'The President of Russia is elected by Russians' sniffed a Russian spokesman and the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained that: 'We do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else for that matter' but the present had already been handed over and unwrapped by Putin who will now push the agenda that America cannot be trusted and they are also in the business of removing world leaders they don't like and are looking to add Russia to Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.
To be fair to America, it hasn't actually invaded another country to overthrow it's Governments for a while now so that particular craving seems to be in remission for now.
The UK, who has their own dullard leader who has a full time person going around behind them saying: 'What the PM actually means is...' immediately leapt clear of Biden's words as did the EU who called the language 'antagonistic' that 'risked exacerbating existing tensions'.
A collective 'can you keep that guy away from a microphone please' from the rest of the World then and remember, this guy is seen as a better President than the last one, and he was a moron of biblical proportions.

Taylor Hawkins

Sad news that the Foo Fighters Taylor Hawkins has died aged only 50, found dead in his Colombian hotel room while on tour in South America.
According to a preliminary toxicology test, the drummer died after a cardiac arrest and had at least 10 substances in his body including marijuana, opioids, tricyclic antidepressants and benzodiazepines.
Yep, that would do it.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Cronus

I was the 12th child of Uranus and Gaia and the leader of the Titans but i wasn't that close to my father although i was one time after he hid some of my siblings in Tartarus.
Uranus was terrified of the great ugly kids pregnant Gaia was producing and had them banished to the bowels of the Earth so Mum asked her remaining children to castrate Uranus and it was me who stepped up with my bloody great scyth and seconds later, after a well-aimed swipe, dad's genitals were bobbing around in the sea, his detached meat and two veg did create the goddess Aphrodite though.
The period in which i ruled was called the Golden Age, as the people of the time had no need for laws or rules, everyone just did the right thing, and immorality was absent, they even held a festival for me called Kronia in all the towns with banquets and games.
After freeing my siblings, and with Uranus now out of the way, i became Top God and decided to re-imprison them again, claim Uranus' throne, and marry my own sister, Rhea but Mum said that just as i had overthrown my father, one of my own children will overthrow me.
As any paranoid lunatic would do, i decided to eat my own children, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon however, Rhea and Gaia hid baby Zeus, giving me a rock wrapped in baby clothes to eat instead.
Zeus grew up, forced me to disgorge his brothers and sisters and threw me into Tartarus which is where i stayed until those nice Romans decided to get me out, brush me down and give me the name Saturn and changed the name of the fifth Planet from the Greek Cronus to Saturn.
They even revived my festival, moved it to December and called it Saturnalia and the people decorated their homes, sang, gave each other gifts, drank to excess and introduced each other to their genitals but the nerdy Christians later took my Saturnalia, kept the home decorating, gifts, drinking to excess and introducing each other to their genitals bits and called it Christmas.

War Is Good...For Arm's Companies Profits

War may be good for undertakers and Governments trying to deflect attention away from their own misdemeanors but the obvious winner is the arms companies and the war in Ukraine is just such an opportunity.
Europe's decision to help arm Ukraine with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles has proved a major boon for the world’s defence contractors, the shares for BAE Systems, the largest player in Europe, is up 26% and the US groups, Lockheed and Raytheon have seen their share price increase but they expected that, the Chief Executive of Raytheon telling investors that with regrds to the ongoing conflict in Ulkarine: 'I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it'.
The biggest risk to investors, as explained by Richard Aboulafia, managing director of US defence consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, is that: 'the whole thing is revealed to be a Russian house of cards and the threat dissipates'.
So the arms companies were hoping the war would start, because it would boost shares prices because heaven forbid in the World of Capitalism, someone isn't turning a profit from all the awful death and destruction.

Sunak Stands By Us (Just Not Very Close)

I do wonder how the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Richi Sunak, a millionaire who is married to a billionaire, could possibly understand what it is like to find your food and utility bills trebling and yesterday we found out, he can't.
First off the idea that he helping the man and woman in the street by cutting taxes doesn't quite ring true when he is actually raising them to the highest level since the 40's, that 36.3% of your pay gone before it even sees the inside of your bank account.
A new tack from the Government is to not let a good war go to waste and deflect the blame the rising prices, 7% inflation and falling living standards on what is happening in Ukraine but anyone with even the shortest term memory lapse can remember that things were going South a long time before Russia declared war.
The fuel duty cut of 5p a litre was pretty much wiped out before he had even finished speaking as anyone who has stopped at a petrol station recently will know, it has gone up 3p this past week alone
He did raise the amount at which National Insurance would be paid by £3000 but failed to mention the 1.5% rise in national insurance contributions but he did end the statement by saying that 'The work starts now' but i could have sworn that Conservatives have been in power since 2010 so what have they been doing for the past 12 years?
As for Johnson, he probably can't believe his luck as one disaster seems to come along to bury the last one, self damaging Brexit disguised by Covid, lackluster Covid response overtaken by Partygate and now that's been knocked aside by the War in Ukraine.
With even the right wing press howling at rage at Sunak's sleight of hand, i'm sure over the next few days enough ministers will be rolled out to do interviews to clarify everything and assure us Sunak didn't actually do what we've all seen him do today.

Special Guest Blogger: Chico Marx

Hey. I was not the one with the funny moustache, or the one who never speak or the one who gettsa the girl, i was the Italian one but i wasn't Italian, i just used that because we were surrounded by Italians in New York when i grew up and i liked the way they spoke da English.
I imagine you also pronounce my name Cheek-o but its Chick-o, the Italian's chose all our names and i got mine as i was always chasing chicks, hence Chick-o.
That never changed throughout my life, i cheated on my wife during the honeymoon, and neither did the gambling habit i picked up in the pool-halls in my youth.  
I was never meant to be one of the three main on-screen Marx Brothers, i originally wasn’t part of the family act at all, i was on a solo show business career as a travelling musician long before the rest of my brothers began their group act together on the Vaudeville circuit.
It was only when one night in Illinois, when the schedules of my musical act and my brothers comedy act happened to coincide and in the middle of their performance i got on stage with them and began horsing around in front of the audience.
That got us known and we were offered film contracts and made a lot of money, which i gambled away and i was declared bankrupt so my brothers came out of retirement to make A Night in Casablanca, solely for the benefit of my bank account, i had a line that if anyone asked how much money i had lost gambling over the course of my life, i would say 'Ask Harpo how much money he has. That’s how much I’ve lost'.
I owed gangster Bugsy Siegel big bucks for a gambling debt so i wrote him a cheque and knowing it would bounce and he would be after me, i was packing to leave town when i heard someone had shot and killed him while on his way to cash the cheque, so i unpacked again.
It was suggested that i needed a good bodyguard after that but i said what I need is a good body, the one I've got isn't worth guarding and i died not long after from hardening arteries, the first of the famous Marx brothers to say Ciao.

Special Guest Blogger: Emperor Domitian

You can call me Emperor, Domitian or even Dom but the name i most answer to is 'Master, Lord and God' because i was the Emperor and could call myself whatever the hell i wanted.
My ascension to the throne came when my brother Titus suddenly and unfortunately died of natural causes while we were both travelling. It was definitely perfectly natural causes and i didn't poison him or anything. Nope, completely natural causes.
Emperors didn't last very long in Rome, if you went to bed without someone had having tried to murder you then it had been a good day and i had many good days in my 15 years in charge, strengthening the Roman economy and as much of Rome needed rebuilding, mostly due to fire, decay, and the previous emperors being too busy at orgies, i undertook a massive building programme which included finishing the Colosseum.
Most of my not being gruesomely murdered was due to me giving the army a massive pay rise as soon as i took over although i wasn't so kind to my Senators, often going out of my way to embarrass them.
I once held a dinner party for them all and the place-mats were tombstones with their names on them which i insisted them took home with them but the Roman people liked me, i built huge monuments but buildings are expensive so i raised the money by setting up prominent, wealthy men, executing them and claiming their estates.
On building the Stadium of Domitian, i dedicated it to the people of Rome and that's where we held the Capitoline Games and we had chariot races, women and dwarf gladiator contests and one time i flooded the basement of the Colosseum and held a naval battle.
As my reign progressed, and the more i hated on the Senators, plots against me started to spring up so i began executing Senators and Officers including my niece's husband which made family meals a bit awkward but it wasn't the Senators who got me in the end though, it was my valet and my wife, did i mention i was going to execute her for having an affair?
Anyway, faking an arm injury, he wore a protective wrapping in which he concealed a dagger and while discussing a list of possible conspirators, he leapt up and pulled out the dagger and stabbed me straight in the groin and then hacked me to death.
The Senate immediately denounced me and removed my rule from public record, pulled down my statues and chiselled my name out from inscriptions, eradicated my face from paintings and coins but left the massive 57 meter high building i erected because as much as they hated me, who doesn't like a dwarf gladiator fight.

Special Guest Blogger: Maria Carolina of Austria

The saying is that behind every successful man is a strong woman well i certainly didn’t stand behind anyone, let alone a man.
When my husband became the King of Naples i told him to just be himself but that was pretty mean because we all knew he was a halfwit so i stepped up and was as cunning as any King, even Napoleon called me the only man in Naples.
Being born on the 13th August and being the 13th child you would think i had some bad luck and i did and not just having Marie Antoinette as a sister.
My story really begins when my other sister, Maria Johanna had a date for her wedding with King Ferdinand IV of Naples but when she suddenly died from smallpox, our parents put up our other sister, Maria Josepha, (notice a theme with the first names) but she also got smallpox and died but having 13 kids, my parents had quite an arsenal of young girls to replace dead sisters with and my parents chose me next because they had paid for the wedding cake and they were going to have a damned wedding.
The first hitch was the groom wasn't able to make it to Vienna on that day so he insisted we use a substitute which turned out to be my own brother so after making sure that he wasn’t also the proxy for the honeymoon, we married and i set off to Naples to meet my husband for the first time.
As a King he was awful, as pointless as a blunt pencil, relying on his courtiers to do everything so i thought i should be able to work my way in here and slowly removed all the powerful courtiers and started to make the decisions which my husband agreed to because, halfwit remember.  
Just as i was getting a handle on the Royal life, it broke as over in France my sister was imprisoned by the French Revolutionaries and i was afraid the monarch dumping would spread to Naples so i sent out spies to collect information to know what the plebs where thinking and what they were thinking was that they really hated me.
After Marie Antoinette's beheading, i refused to recognise France as a Republic, which the French took as a slight and they sent battleships to destroy Naples so i sent Councillor Luigi de Medici to negotiate which he did, negotiated how he would help them get rid of us Royals as he also hated me.
In short, Napoleon (see what i did there?) occupied Naples and me and my family escaped to Sicily but the Brits did get our homeland back and i planned a revenge but hanging and beheading 1,000 Neapolitan's who i thought had plotted against me while actively hunting down more meant they were quite pleased to see Napoleon come back and conquer Naples again, leading me and my husband to flee to Sicily again and then i just gave up the whole idea of being Royalty and retired to Vienna where i died of a stroke and really, really hating on the French.

Special Guest Blogger: Peter Sellers

I was very shy as a kid for which i blame my parents, my mum was very outgoing as in always going out for weeks at a time as she was a performer in a touring variety show. My inferiority wasn't helped that i was christened Richard but she later switched it to Peter after my stillborn older brother.

After serving in and surviving WWII, i toyed with the idea of being a drummer but decided to pursue a career in the theater but i wasn't getting anywhere particularly quickly so i decided to make my mark by calling up BBC producer Roy Speer and pretended to be star radio host Kenneth Horne to get the company’s attention.

Lucky for me it actually worked and Speers gave me an audition where i met up-and-coming comics Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan who was pitching a radio comedy called The Goon Show and we were given the job which launched us into the beginnings of stardom.
I met actress Anne Howe and within a year we were married and i thought we would settle down and cruise into a happy life but  we didn’t, mainly because i was an idiot and wanted more than a radio show and began to pursue a film career, starring in titles like The Ladykillers with Alec Guinness but i still wanted more and turned my gaze to Hollywood and was offered the role of an Indian doctor in the romantic comedy The Millionairess with Sophia Loren.
I was shy and insecure in many ways but it didn't stop me having a full-blown affair with Sophia but the role did get me the offer for Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther after Peter Ustinov backed out of the part, so my life was back on a high note so of course i had to go mess it up again.
Most people said i was a nightmare on set, refusing to wear purple as that's the color of death so i had refused to be on screen with anyone wearing the colour.
Dr. Strangelove was my career highlight and Britt Ekland my personal one although marrying her 10 days after meeting her was a bit of a mistake, as was the amyl nitrite poppers which gave me eight cardiac arrests in three hours and as it happens having eight heart attacks is extremely bad for your health and i was told to take things easy.
My next film was Casino Royale but i got fired after an argument with Orson Welles which gave me a chance to focus on destroying my marriage even more by agreeing to star in a flim with Britt and then after a fight demanded the Director fire her, he refused and she served me with divorce papers.
Just as i thought i had hit rock bottom, i found there was still further to go as i married 23-year-old model Miranda Quarry then fell into a chaotic affair with Liza Minnelli which saw me reading through another set of divorce papers.
I married another 23 year old, actress Lynne Frederick and this time we stayed married for the rest of my life which turned out to be not that long as i died while eating lunch at my hotel after my weakened heart said stuff this and just stopped working.

Refugees Welcome (Non Whites Need Not Apply)

It is always nice to see, in time of war and hardship, the European nations are ready to step up and welcome fleeing refugees into their country, space permitting of course because it was only a few short years ago that some nations put up the 'Sorry, we're full' signs when African and Middle Eastern refugees were coming their way.
I'm not sure what has changed between then and now for some European countries to be willing and able to accept the million or so Ukrainians fleeing their country due to the Russian invasion but couldn't find the space for the million Afghans, Iraqi's and Syrians a few years ago, telling them not to try and come.
In 2018 Poland was so full that the Polish Prime Minister said: 'We will not be receiving migrants from the Middle East or North Africa in Poland' but have now taken in 1 million Ukrainian refugees which is a great thing for the Ukrainians who must be thanking their lucky stars that their war happened in 2022 and not a year or two before.
The Bulgarian's are also accepting European refugees, their Prime Minister said: 'These are not refugees we are used to. These people are Europeans. These people are intelligent, they are educated people' so i assume they are asking for qualifications when they cross the border, maybe the Middle Eastern and African educational qualifications don't count in Bulgaria.  
The alternative is that the countries now suddenly so keen to accept Ukrainian's are discriminating against non-white refugees who are also trying to flee a war zone but i've been to both Poland and Bulgaria and i think any refugee spending any time there would say 'Thanks, but i think i could do better' and keep going West to a proper country.
If you refugees want to come to Britain make sure you stop at the English Channel and fill out the 50 page Visa Form if you had the piece of mind to pick up the right documentation while you fled your house being reduced to rubble around your ears.
If you do make it to our sunny shores then don't be put off by the racist Prime Minister currently in charge of the British Government who has pursued a hostile environment agenda for foreigners, hopefully he won't be around much more longer.  

Boris To Blame For Nazanin

Six years after it started, the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe affair has come to a close and she is safely back home with her family and all it took was for Britain to finally setle the £400m bill for an arms deal for British tanks dating back to the 70s which were never delivered.
The question being asked now is why was the debt not paid previously and the answer is because Russian oil is going to be less accessible as sanctions increase on Putin regime and other sources must be found hence the thaw in Iranian-British relations and the scenes of The British Prime Minister cosying up to an oil rich nation which is doing to Yemen exactly what Russia is doing to Ukraine so it's 'Hi, murderous dictators, can you help us out with this problem caused by that other murderous dictator'?.
It is unlikely that Nazanin or her family will be meeting the Prime Minister Boris Johnson anytime soon, it was his carelessness when he was the Foreign Minister which made her situation much worse, commenting that she had been in Tehran training journalists which only bolstered the Iranians claims that she was working against the Government and increased her sentence.
I am sure that the Government will have the brass neck to try and take the plaudits for her release but her husband, who has been campaigning relentlessly since she was taken prisoner, said that the fault lays squarely with the Prime Minister and his 'dismal failure', 'ignorance' and 'devastating blunder in 2017 when he was foreign secretary' and imploring they pay the long standing debt.

Zelenskyy On Hiding To Nothing

You really can't blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Politicians for continually asking for NATO to install a no-fly zone above Ukraine, i would be expecting our politicians to be doing exactly the same in his position, but even he must know that however many times he asks, he isn't going to get one.
It may seem harsh considering what we are seeing on our TV screens as his nation gets pulverized by Russian air strikes but a no-fly zone means that NATO would attack and shoot down any Russian plane violating it and that way leads to a World War which will result in far more deaths than we currently fear.
We can only hope that the peace talks finally bear fruit and the horror comes to an end but NATO and the West needs to not be suckered into a conflict that could create a war between nuclear countries because nobody wins that one.
Russia have made six demands in order to end their invasion and they include giving up the dream of joining NATO and handing over Crimea and the two eastern areas currently under Russian control and that seems a case of the best worst scenario for Ukraine.
Joining NATO is not going to happen anytime soon, the 30 strong nation group have as much said that they would not admit Ukraine as it would be too provocative to Russia and Crimea and the two parts of the Donbas region are already lost to Russia so just let them go, as painful as that may be.
It will be hard to take but Ukraine cannot win this war, Russia is too powerful and had too much firepower and the best that will happen is Ukraine turns into Afghanistan and Iraq with the ruling invading nation running the country but facing non-stop guerrilla tactics and the destruction and disorder that results in as the West found out.
Zelenskyy and Ukraine are on a hiding to nothing and it is an awful decision he faces but better to lose a little and gain the rest than keep going and face losing much, much more.
As for Russia, it deserves to be ostracized and the sanctions kept up long after the military are back in Russian barracks and hopefully the momentum against war currently sweeping the corridors of power will turn to some other abhorrent war mongers such as Israel in Palestine and Saudi Arabia in Yemen who deserve as much condemnation as Russia has quite rightly received.

Special Guest Blogger: Marilyn Chambers

While the more mainstream actors and actresses are getting their backs slapped, i was another type of actress who also get slapped onto her back. Or up against a wall. Or on the bonnet of a car. Actually, almost anywhere because i was an Adult Movie actress, ranked No. 6 on the list of Top 50 Porn Stars of All Time and one of Playboy's Top 100 Sex Stars of the 20th Century.
I was still in High School when i landed some modeling assignments and got offered a small role in the film The Owl and the Pussycat which got me noticed by Proctor & Gamble who made me the 'Ivory Soap girl' posing in posters as a mother holding a baby under the tag line '100%' and i had dreams of launching an acting career.
I moved to San Francisco and waited for the offers to roll in but the only thing rolling was the rat poo in my flat so i took a job as a topless dancer in a seedy club but i did answer an advert for what was billed as a major motion picture called 'Behind the Green Door'.
It sounded good, the story of a wealthy San Francisco socialite who is taken to a club and loved as she's never been loved before, several times and in many positions including on a swing and in a harness as it was a porn movie.
As i was out of work, i said i would think about it and then they offered a hefty salary, 10% of the film's gross and every actor would be tested for VD so i thought it might be fun and it launched me on a career of hard core porn.
The film features me having sex with an African American actor which was a first for feature-length hardcore in the U.S., both the porn industry and the public were shocked by the then taboo image of a white woman having sex with a black man.
At one point i was almost cast in the mainstream film Hardcore, opposite George C. Scott, but the casting director took one look at me and said i wouldn't make a realistic Porn Queen.
I really thought that it would be a great way for a young actress to cut her teeth in the world of movies and it almost was, i thought i was definitely going to lose some teeth making Insatiable with John Holmes, that guy was seriously hung.
As no other films were forthcoming i was taking life with a grain of salt. And a line of Cocaine. And a shot of tequila as i had developed an expensive alcohol and cocaine addiction, i kept making porn films and they were all best sellers but the emergence of AIDS scared me off so i went back to the theater and a sex act.
I got busted a few times and charged with committing a lewd act in a public place which seems a bit strange seeing as it was a sex act, what did they think i did? Magic tricks?
After bowing out of porn, i tried to make a comeback with small mainstream roles and also mounted a very unsuccessful bid for vice-president of the U.S. on the Personal Choice Party ticket in 2004 and received a total of 946 votes but undeterred i ran again in the 2008 election.
I died a year later from an aneurysm related to heart disease and some of Hollywood turned up to say goodbye so right up to the end i was surrounded by some of the biggest knobs around.

Special Guest Blogger: Sumerian Goddess Inanna

Despite being the daughter of Anu and being an ancient Sumerian goddess of sex, war, and fertility, i wasn't good girlfriend material as i tended to kill or sacrifice most of my lovers.
I was raped by a lowly gardener called Shukaletuda, he was terrible at his job as all of his plants died, except for one poplar tree and it was while i slept under this particular tree that he raped me. In a fit of rage, i turned the rivers to blood, covered the Earth with storms, and tormented the people with disease. I eventually found my rapist hiding in a city and flailed him, removing his skin.
Despite being married to Dumuzi and building him a city to rule called Uruk, i once tried to seduce King Gilgamesh. He refused because he knew about my reputation for mistreating my past lovers, the shepherd who i turned into a wolf and the gardener who i turned into a dwarf so i released the Bull of Heaven in an attempt to kill him but he killed the Bull instead.
It was at the the funeral in the Underworld that i met the underworld's ruler, my sister Ereshkigal (we were not a close family ) who made me pass through seven gates at the entrance to the Underworld, the Underworlds security is very tight, you might think your security is bad,
trying to get into the realm of the dead is something else.
At each gate i had to remove a piece of clothing or jewelry. This continued until i was naked and in a moment of poor judgment, i sat on Ereshkigal's throne, for which leaving a big sweaty butt patch on it, i was punished by being turned into a corpse and hung upside-down from meat hooks.
Many of the gods blamed me for this fate, but the god of wisdom, Enki, decided to rescue me but as no one could leave the underworld without someone taking their place, i offered up my husband who i thought didn't seem suitably upset enough when he thought i had died.
Not that dying and hanging off a hook slowed me down, having heard that the Tablet of Destinies
which gives the owner super powers and had been left for safekeeping with Enki, i paid him a visit who with a fw bottles of alcohol and got him well and truly sozzled and then tried to nick them but Enki had super-glued them to his chest. God of Wisdom see, he knew what i was up to.
Not sure what happened to them but the Christian God ended up with some of them and last time i saw bits of them were being lugged down a mountain by Moses.

Special Guest Blogger: Alice Roosevelt

We all grew up listening to our parents tell us how talent, dedication and hard work would get us far in life. But the reality is that even if you go out and change the world, there's no guarantee you'll be rewarded for your efforts.
There have been plenty of people throughout history that made amazing contributions to modern culture and got precisely dick in return so when my father became President and i got the spotlight, i had a choice of either acting with some class and decorum or running wild with it. I did the latter.
I had a rough start, i was named after my mother who died of kidney failure two days after my birth which devastated my father so much that he couldn’t even stand to be in my presence and sent me to live with my Aunt Anna for years on end so a dead mother and an absent father, Hello World!
My Father remarried and became a Governor and then Vice President and i found myself front and center on the world’s stage after President William McKinley stopped a couple of bullets with his stomach and pop found himself acting president and me the First Daughter.
Women were expected to make polite appearances at parties, but i was having none of that, i smoked, drank and gambled which annoyed my father who forbid me from smoking inside the White House, so i smoked on it's roof instead.
I would be forced to join stuffy meetings but after putting a tack on a chair of one no-chin wonder, i wasn't invited to so many more and after constantly interrupting my father in the Oval Office, he first threatened to throw me out of a window and then offered me a trip to Japan and China with a bunch of boring congressmen on a diplomatic cruise.
Bored with the serious crowd, i grabbed a congressman and dragged him fully clothed into the ship’s pool but that wasn’t the most outrageous thing to happen on that ship.
I got extra friendly with one congressman in particular, Nicholas Longworth III, 14 years older than me and by the time the ship docked back in the United States, we were engaged.
In 1909, my Father left the White House to make way for the disagreeable Taft family but i did leave them a present, a voodoo doll in the likeness of the First Lady, Nellie Taft, which i buried in the front yard of the property. I would have done him but he was so fat there wasn't enough wool.
They later banned me from the White House as did the guy afterwards, Woodrow Wilson, after i told a rude joke about him and i also ticked off Herbert Hoover by saying a Hoover vacuum was more exciting than him but i did get along with the Kennedy's and had a real soft spot for Richard Nixon but had no time for the peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.
As for my marriage, the first years were great but things grew stale and got even staler when my husband ran for election and i publicly backed the other guy and all my affairs, wow there was a few of them, although getting pregnant by a Senator was a tad insensitive i admit.
I gave birth to my daughter Paulina and then carried on partying but then it all came tumbling down, my father died from a blood clot and then came the stock market crash and we almost went bankrupt and my now grown my daughter took her own life after her husband died but eventually, all good things come to an end and although my marriage kept going against all odds, i never and died aged 96 but what a blast!

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Longinus

You probably know me as the Roman Centurion who pierced Christ with a spear but in my defence, we were rattling through a lot of crucifixions at that time and it was a Friday and the weather wasn't great and i just wanted to get home, it was fish for supper and besides, every criminal we stuck up gave some excuse, some argued that we had the wrong person, most said they were a victim of a mis-trial and we had more than a handful of the sons of god and with my bad eyesight, how was i supposed to know this was the actual one?
I had spent my life fighting alongside my fellow soldiers throughout the Roman lands but my eyesight was so bad that i was practically blind and ended up in Jerusalem helping out with crucifixions.
Crucifixion is a bit of a drawn out affair so my job was to poke them with a spear in the side to hurry things along as that was the only job i could do with such poor sight and when Jesus shouted down to forgive us for we know not what we do, i replied, i know exactly what i'm doing, i'm jabbing you in the side with my spear.
It was when the blood and water gushed out onto my face and my eyesight was miraculously cured that i began to suspect that this wasn't just any old hippy nailed up before me so when they took his limp, lifeless body down from the cross, i assisted in cleansing the guy's body before we shut him in a cave.
Turns out he came back anyway after three days when the stone was removed from the entrance of the tomb and when Christ walked out i began to ponder on what if this whole Christian thing is true so i converted, left the army and became a monk preaching about Jesus instead which wasn't a particularly wise move in 1AD Rome, the Emperor said he was disappointed and proved it by having me arrested and forcibly removing my teeth and tongue but i didn't let a little thing like that stop me and i drew pictures instead so they lopped off my head which did finally stop me.
The Christians, being a forgiving bunch, made me a Saint which is nice of them considering i was the guy who actually killed their saviour but what i did that day added another religious holiday to the calendar even if nobody actually knows what it is for.

Special Guest Blogger: Catherine of Aragon

I was Henry VIII’s First and longest lasting Wife but he wasn't my first British Royal husband, that was his older Brother Prince Arthur but it gets creepier because i was just a toddling three years old at the time.
Even people in Medieval times thought that three was a little young to get hitched, so everyone did the patient thing and waited and we wrote to each other until Arthur turned 15, which is obviously the exact age all boys turn into emotionally responsible men. When the clock struck 'teen' i carted myself off to London to meet my groom and we got married in a stately, lavish ceremony that fitted our ranks as royals and we went to Wales for the honeymoon where we both caught sweating sickness and fell desperately ill and i spent the next days fighting for my life only for Arthur to not and make me a widow at 16.
My father-in-law, King Henry VII, was anxious to keep my families dowry pounds so he suggested he marry me but me saying eeew, creepy old guy in every language i knew put him off so he then suggested his other son, the 11 year old future King Henry VIII.
Seven long years later we got married although me being previously married to his brother meant the Pope reluctantly had to give special dispensation for the union based on the previous marriage never being consummated, i did say i was chaste but i didn't mention chaste all over the garden and living room furniture before we got all sick and sweaty.
Just two months after the wedding i was pregnant but that one was stillborn, then the next pregnancy ended in miscarriage, then a phantom pregnancy and in all i was pregnant nine times but i did give birth to Henry who survived for 52 days and Mary and you would think King Henry VIII would be happy with a live daughter. Instead, his response was that since this one was a girl, it meant a better chance for a boy the next time.
When the 1520s rolled around with no male heir in sight, Henry hired Anne Boleyn as my lady-in-waiting, and his lady in bed and he tried every trick in the book to drop me like a cold drumstick and when i say the book I mean The Bible, saying God had cursed us because he had broken God’s law when he married his brother’s widow.
Henry VIII knew it was going to be a political and religious mess to disentangle himself from me and marry Anne Boleyn so he tried to convince me to go obediently into a convent as a celibate nun.
My response was two words, the second of which was 'Off' so he took over as Head of the Church of England, annulled his own marriage and banished me from his court, and then installed Boleyn in my old rooms.
Five days after our 'divorce', he married Anne Boleyn and i went to live in Kimbolton Castle and later died of heart cancer but i didn't go quietly, i may have lost my Crown and wasted my youth on an idiot but him having to change the religion of his entire country to dump me was definitely satisfying.

Stay Away Blair, You Are Not Wanted

There are many things that you hope once gone will stay away forever such as flared trousers, DISCO music and films starring Madonna but nobody seems to have told Tony Blair who has an eye on making a comeback to UK politics.
Blair is keen to return to the Labour Party as an advisor to the leader Keir Starmer and generally anyone who won 3 General Elections would be worth listening to but when it comes to Tony Blair, he burnt his bridges long ago with Labour Supporters with Iraq.
The worst thing about Blair is the colossal disappointment he gave us because when he came to power i was as happy as an Aussie with a six pack and when he bought in the Minimum Wage, raised funding for public services, Northern Ireland peace and introduced the Tax Credits system it was a moment when us lefties thought brilliant, we finally have a proper Socialist who will make Britain a batter and fairer place and from 1997 to 2002 i was one of his staunchest defenders, then Iraq happened.
Almost overnight his star rightly fell as he lied and spun his way to a war alongside the reprehensible George W Bush and although he had the sense to jump before he was pushed, the Labour Party was irreparably damaged and deservedly lost power and that is what hurts the most, the fact that Tony Blair made us hate our own party.
Nobody who is responsible for the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians in their own country for no good reason should be welcomed back into public life so as we despair over an illegal war in Ukraine, let's not forget Blair's legacy and his involvement in the same so in the politest way possible, sod off Tony, you are not wanted.

UK Supporting Refugee's To Go Anywhere But Here

Boris Johnson does like to tag the words' World Beating' onto things so when asked this week about the pretty woeful policy on Ukrainian refugees, Boris announced that his Government had a: 'World-beating record on refugees' and 'We've done more to resettle vulnerable people than any other European country' which isn't even in the same city as the Ballpark as Britain barely make the top 20 of the most welcoming European countries but he wasn't going to let the facts stand in the way of lying his arse off.
Unfortunately, Boris has surrounded himself with half-wits such as Pritti Patel who was sacked from Theresa May's Cabinet and then when Boris Johnson became prime minister, he promoted her to home secretary and kept her safe after she was found guilty of breaking the ministerial code for bullying staff.
Her performance has therefore been as awful as you would expect, while other European countries have opened their borders to welcome refugees, she went out of her way to make it almost impossible for any Ukrainians to reach this country by first not disclosing where most of the visa application centres were situated meaning refugees being sent on pointless journeys from Calais to Lille to Paris and back again.
Her underling, Kevin Foster, took to Twitter to say that refugees could always take advantage of the seasonal agricultural workers scheme picking fruit but by then Patel had announced that she would be making it easier for Ukrainians fleeing a war-zone to come to the UK and all they would need is that UK visa, their Ukrainian passports and a family in the UK which doesn't sound like it has been made easier and she had actually tagged on two additional conditions but then nobody asked me.   
She did stick up for herself though when some other MP's asked why when Poland has taken 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees, Hungary has taken 190,000, Germany 50,000 but we had only taken 50 by angrily pointing out that actually we had taken 300, or 3 times the the number of people you’d invite to a Downing Street bring-your-own-bottle party in the middle of a lock-down if that helps you put it into perspective.
Alongside her on the front bench we have the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss who won’t rest till every UK citizen is fighting in Ukraine although her speech that she would welcome any Brit who wanted to go to Ukraine to fight against Russia was sharply slapped down as illegal by everyone else,
still, she has been sitting in tanks for photo opportunities at every turn so she probably wasn't up to speed.  All in all, a perfect shambles but to be fair, did we really expect any different from this circus of clowns who were voted by the racists and fruitcakes into Office to bring about Brexit whose Raison d'être was to shift the foreigners out and keep them out? 

COVID-19 Still Around

With Ukraine the only story in town for the past few weeks, Coronavirus has slipped down the news agenda but it has still been around, quietly infecting whoever it comes across but as we have all been looking elsewhere and Omicorn and Delta have merged and mutated into Deltacron and cases of the new variant have been found spreading in America, Netherlands, Denmark, France and Cyprus with one case discovered in the UK.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) are concerned that the Delta variant had more severe effects on those who caught it, while Omicron was more infectious and if we now have a more severe infection which is more infectious, then it could cause significant problems but they have not yet raised it to a variant of concern but they are keeping their eye closely on it.
With all of the restrictions now lifted in the UK, we are no longer subject to daily briefings but the numbers are still staying unsurprisingly high with today's figures showing 71,259 new daily infections, 11,751 in hospital and 142 deaths but Boris and the Government have made their bed but it is us who have to lay in it, the health of the economy placed firmly put before the health of the nation.
The Government seem to have taken a view that if we just ignore it then the virus will go away but it isn't going anywhere just yet because unfortunatley, it hasn't finished with us yet.

We'll Give You A Fiver For Lukaku

This isn't the best time to be a Russian Oligarch in the UK or a Chelsea Fan.
The Government have finally managed to get around to sanctioning the rich Russian's in the UK although they did kindly give them 2 weeks notice to shift their wealth elsewhere but even that window of opportunity wasn't long enough for Abramovich who tried unsuccessfully to offload his football team for £3 billion.
Now Chelsea have been sanctioned and already sponsors are withdrawing their support, mobile phone company, Three, have already requested that Chelsea Football Club remove their brand from the football shirts and from around the stadium and another club sponsor, delivery service Zapp, said its partnership with the club is also now under review.
Chelsea can play their remaining fixtures but they can’t sell tickets or merchandise or sign players or give players new contracts so all we need now is for Manchester City and Liverpool to be sanctioned for some reason also and then my team Arsenal can start dusting the trophy cabinet again.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Pan

In some pictures you see i may be copulating with a goat, in others a human woman but i was half of each so i would hit either, i wasn't fussed.
The goat was on my Fathers side, not Odysseus, one of the other 108 that my mother got it on with, probably the one who went in the meadow and ate some grass afterwards but us Greek God's, we would nail anything that wasn't..well..actually, even then, we just didn't care. Nymphs at orgies with flutes. That sort of thing. You get the picture.
With the hind legs and horns of a goat and the top half of a human, my domain was mostly shepherds, flocks and hunters but i was also a fertility symbol with a ravenous sexual appetite (A god of sex and sheep. What does that tell you about the ancient Greeks?) and if it moved i played hide the sausage with it although the nymph Syrinx wasn't impressed, she ran away when i asked if she up for some bow chicka bow wow and her sisters turned her into a reed which led to me creating the Pan Pipes from her.
Echo, another nymph, also refused me but i had her killed, i got a bunch of shepherds to rip her to pieces but that wasn't the only time everyone's favorite sex-pest was rejected. I know, what is wrong with these women, my lower half was a goat for crying out loud!!!!
Pity her name was and the God's turned her into a Pine Tree to escape me, not that it stopped me, lots of knot holes in Pine Trees if you catch my drift.
I was a God with his hooves firmly placed on the ground, so much so that the Romans renamed me Faunus but all that bumping uglies along with the sexual ecstasy, incest, murder and cannibalism upset the Christian's who made this horny old goat with my cloven hooves and horns the blueprint for popular conceptions of their Devil and you know the Devil has all the best tunes and you haven't lived until you have heard my banging solo in 'Flight of Icarus' on the Pan Pipes.

Special Guest Blogger: Roger Moore

My first steps into the world of Entertainment was as an apprentice cartoonist but that didn't last long after i accidentally ruined some animation cels, and the company i worked for wasn’t big on second chances and fired me on the spot.
My father was a policeman and my big break came when the house of director Brian Desmond Hurst got burgled and my dad was put on the case and one day he mentioned that his son was looking into getting into movies and the Director told him to get me along to the studio and he would put me in his upcoming film Caesar and Cleopatra as an extra standing at the back holding a spear somewhere.
At 6’4 with golden hair and deep blue eyes, i got quite a bit of attention from the females on set and seeing how popular i was with the ladies, Hurst decided to offer me the chance to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) to learn the acting chops i would need.
I didn't last long there but i met and married wife number 1, Doorn Van Steyn, but after my career didn't go anywhere we had a blazing row and she threw a teapot at my head so i decided she may not be the best choice as a spouse and left her.
I then met wife 2, Dorothy Squires, who was a famous singer and introduced me to all the right people and my career started taking off with roles in film and television. Meanwhile, Squires’ career declined and she never threw any teapots, opting for a guitar instead which she smashed over my head.
When i met wife number 3, Luisa Mattioli, wife number two didn't take it very well and threw a brick through my living room window but amidst glazier invoices came a letter asking me to try out for the role of secret agent Simon Templar in The Saint.
It was such a hit that when the role of James Bond came along i snapped it up as long as they never made me run, i ran like a lanky giraffe and they agreed to use a body double if i ever had to run on film.
I made seven Bond films in total then went on to become a UNICEF’s Goodwill Ambassador and leave wife number 3 for wife number 4 and she hit me with a £10 million divorce settlement which at least wasn't a guitar or teapot but i managed to stay with this one until i died of prostate cancer at the age of 89.

Special Guest Blogger: Emperor Wanli

History books are generally full of historical figures who are remembered for what they do, but i became famous for what i didn’t do.
My father was the Longqing Emperor of the Ming Dynasty but he didn’t really have much to teach me about all things royal as he died when i was 10 but he prepared for his untimely demise by commissioning Zhang Juzheng as a sort of mentor to take on the responsibilities of the emperor until i was old enough.
Juzheng taught me everything a young emperor needed to know: useful things like horseback riding, archery, and writing calligraphy and he did a great job as stand in Emperor, somehow managed to fix all the societal problems at the time, and staying way under budget.
He also improved the economy, the military and even started a cultural renaissance all under my name and at 19 he died and i stepped up to become Emperor so i looked around my country and saw all the great things my mentor had done and decided i didn't need to do anything so left them to it.
I filled my time marrying and then knocking around with my consorts, one called Zheng who i promised that the son she’d had with me would be the next emperor. The only problem was another one of my consorts had already given me a male heir and the rules stated that he would be the next emperor.
My officials made it clear Zheng's boy wouldn't inherit my role and the people got angry and they hurled insults at me so i said right then, i quit.
I stayed on as emperor but stopped attending to my duties so no more morning meetings, no sit-downs with the ministers and i didn't bother showing up for foreign dignitaries.
After more than 15 years of basically doing nothing as emperor, i gave in and reluctantly agreed to make my first son, Chu Zhangluo, the next emperor which ticked off Zheng no end and she hired a man to kill Chu Zhangluo but he botched it and was captured and spilled the beans on Zheng.
The outraged public demanded a trial but unable to find a judge that would let my girlfriend get away with murder, i made myself the judge and let her off myself.
When i wasn't doing Emperor type things, i discovered morphine, food drink and gained a ton of weight so much i couldn't even stand up and i died of a heart attack after the longest reign of any Ming Dynasty monarch.
My first born son did become emperor but he only lasted a month before dying of a mystery illness given to him by one his maids who were gifted to him by Zheng, she was one sneaky girl that one.

NATO And Russia Same Side Of An Immoral Coin

Before the ridiculous American President with the Orange hue and tiny hands was another ridiculous President who had an equally iffy grip on the English language but while the 45th President was happy to see his own people die, the 43rd one was much more keener on other nations people dying horribly.
As a quick recap, Bush wanted to invade Afghanistan and Iraq but everyone else said woah you nutter and refused to sanction it at the UN so he teamed up with Tony Blair and NATO and long story short, 1m dead Iraqi's and a two decade war in Afghanistan which only just ended in defeat for the might of the 30 nation NATO.
Bush had a handy turn of phrase where he would say you are either with us (as we murder millions for highly dubious reasons) or against us which worked on the more gullible in his own country but over here Tony Blair was much more subtle, he just lied about it but they got their regime change and used NATO to do it.
Spin on 20 years and past the NATO led Libyan and Syrian military invasions and we see Vladimir Putin's Russia throwing his military hardware at Ukraine to overthrow its current ruler and install a more Russian friendly ruler in the neighbouring country.
There is absolutely nothing to admire in any of this so while Russia is rightly castigated for its actions in invading a sovereign nation, it is incredulous that NATO is being held up as some sort of good guy when it is still cleaning off the dust from its latest regime change adventure.
What Russia is doing in Ukraine is abhorrent but then what NATO did in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria was also. Where we see scared Ukrainian children today we saw plenty of scared Iraqi, Afghanistan, Libyan and Syrian children so it isn't one or the other, either Russia or NATO, because that's like deciding whether you want a punch in the head or a kick in the groin, both choices are awful and so are the choices being presented in this conflict and we should reject both because despite how they are being presented, NATO and Putin are the same sides of a regime changing, very immoral coin. 

My Plan To Terraform The Moon

When i was younger i was always confused by other planets moons and couldn't understand why our Moon was named for what it was, wasn't that like calling your child 'Human' which is a ridiculous name but then someone explained it was called Luna and that made sense and kept me happy for a while with Lunar Eclipses and the Astronauts landing on the Lunar Surface but then i realised actually, Luna was the Roman name for the moon after their moon goddess.
So the moon is called Moon which is why it's name is capitalised and a moon is the name of a body circling another Planet although they have proper names like Europa, Phobos, Enceladus, Triton and S/2017 J9 which brings me to the idea of us at some future point going to live on our moon, or the Moon to give it it's proper name.
The first problem is The Moon is too small to hold an atmosphere and has no magnetic field so we would need to terraform it to make it habitable so lets make a plan to do just that.
First, the problem of the missing atmosphere which means we will have to increase the mass of the Moon, the ideal size would be a bit bigger than Mars so if we drag Mars and Mercury over and combine it with the Moon then it would be the right size and have the effect of all that relocation and molten rock heat will give us a magnetic field. Bonus!!
The down side is we will have to wait for the new and improved Moon to cool so we would have to go away, twiddle our thumbs for 60 million years or so and then once its cool enough we can start introducing life forms to photosynthesize a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere and in 175 million years or so
it will be ready and we can move in, stand in our Lunar Gardens and stare out into the night sky although we would have to redraw our sky-maps because Mars and Mercury wouldn't be there anymore, your standing on them.
All seems a bit of a faff to be honest so how about we just agree to stop making such a mess of the Earth and leave Mars and Mercury where they are?

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Augustine

In the late 6th century, i was pottering around in Rome just doing everyday religious things when Pope Gregory came up with the great idea of sending a group of us to England to convert the whacky Anglo-Saxons from believing whatever nonsense they believed in and start believing in our Christianity instead.
The 6th Century Europe was a great time, we had the shiny new Georgian Calendar, matches had been invented and we were making clothes out of silk so the last thing i wanted to do was travel to rainy old England to try and convert a bunch of smelly Anglo-Saxons so halfway there we got cold feet and decided to turn back.
We sent a messenger saying we were coming back and Gregory sent his own replying no you ain't and that's why two years after we left, we arrived in Kent and were met by King Æthelberht.
Before he could balance our heads on a pike, we held up a silver cross and a panel painted with the image of Christ and said we would bring peace to his land, please don't chop us up and he never, actually was nice about it and gave us some land in Canterbury to use as a base.
Still having a head was the first obstacle passed but we still had to go around and tell the people who built huts out of their own dung that Jesus was the guy for them so we came up with the idea of sneakily allowing all the old, heathen festivals and beliefs to remain intact, but superimpose Jesus and Christianity on them.
It worked a treat because when we rolled up saying you look like a decent British bloke, i'll park the old booties on you if that's okay all they cared about was they could still get drunk as newts and stuff their ugly faces at certain times of the year so they didn't care who it celebrated so gradually, the main heathen feasts became days honouring Christ or one of the Saints who we had ready for any eventuality.
Over several centuries, all the big piss-ups were converted to Christian festivals so Imbolc became Candlemas, Sam-hain on 31 October when the dead relatives popped back for a visit quickly became All Souls’ Night, followed by All Saints’ Day and the 12-day festival of Yule at the end of December became Christmas, the celebration of Christ’s birth although we had to fudge the dates a bit for that one.
However, one festival that was so ancient and so deeply entrenched in the pagan psyche that we didn't dare change the name of was Easter although it became less in celebration of the goddess Eostre and more about Christ being crucified and we quickly mumbled something about the eggs and bunnies being some Jesus related thing.
I did such a good job that i was made the very the first Archbishop of Canterbury and kickstarted the whole rubbing out the original Gods and pasting in our own guy thing.

Gihgihgi Dolphins in 2150

If there are time travellers in the future, they will be avoiding the start of the 21st Century because of the 22 years of it so far, it has been madness.
So far we have seen almost non-stop Wars in Africa, Asia and Europe, a global pandemic, terror attacks, climate Armageddon and a return to the Cold War and the very real threat of a nuclear war so any time machines owners will be looking at history and saying, you know what, i think we'll skip this period and go to the 22nd Century instead.
The worst part about it is that all the catastrophes that have befallen us are man-made, we did it to ourselves like huge numpties and i was going to say to anyone who is 22 and under, it wasn't always like this but on reflection, it was.
I grew up in the 70's and 80's and we had a thing called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) keeping us safe from nuclear war which was the premise that if anybody started flinging nuclear missiles around, then we would all die so nobody would and as insane as that was, it worked which was lucky because part of 80s schooling was Nuclear War Survival which was pretty much turn your sofa upside down and crawl under it as if a few inches of settee padding above your head would keep you safe from an Atomic bomb.
Pre-2000 we had wars going on everywhere, we left 1999 still cleaning up the debris from the one in former Yugoslavia and the IRA were setting off car bombs in terror attacks, some UK cities have still not replaced the bins which were removed at the time as a precaution.
Unbelievably there were people actually arguing against Climate change in the 80s and 90s which has not only come back to bite them on the backside but wash away their homes also and Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease and AID's were sweeping the world.
So with that said, we may all be moaning WTF NOW!! but we have been saying that since i was a kid so if you are reading this in the year 2150 or beyond, hopefully mankind has learnt the lessons of the past and if we haven't,  Gihgihgihgihgihgih gih gih gih to all the dolphins reading this.

War is Hell, Don't Go

I always thought that a good military exercise should be that anyone who actually wants to go to war should be the very last person we hand a gun to and i couldn't believe the ridiculous comment by Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, that she backed Brits going to Ukraine to fight Russia and it was good to see it swiftly shot down by the Government as illegal and anyone who does make the trip faces prosecution when, or if, they come back much like those who went to fight with Kurdish militia forces against ISIS in Syria.
Hundreds of young Brits have journeyed down to the Ukrainian embassy including a dog care businessman who told reporters: 'We're young, strong, fit men and we can help, so why not?'
Christ, where to start with why not?
One, you have no military experience and will most likely blow your own stupid foot off first time you fire the gun, secondly, you can't speak the language and can't even read the road signs so how are you going to understand what the hell is going on, thirdly, you are going up against one of the best equipped, most powerful armies on the Planet so there is a very high probability that your trip will be one way and you will die.
War isn't a game, it's appalling and dirty and hideous, it isn't Call of Duty and anyone you do manage to shoot will be dead and that will be on your conscience for the rest of your life, that you actually killed a fellow human being.
It may seem a valiant and noble idea while you are sitting in leafy and safe England but ask anybody who has been to a war zone, seen bodies ripped apart by bombs, bullet or shrapnel, seen dead kids and the distraught parents burying their children, it is horrendous, you cannot unsee those things and it changes you forever.
For the sake of your parents, siblings, friends or just for yourself, don't go, don't be so damned stupid!!

Special Guest Blogger: Hindu Goddess Chinnamasta

When you are a Goddess you can do cool things like grant wishes, create earthquakes or chop off your own head and parade it around while your attendants drink the blood which spurts from the neck stump.
I was the fifth of ten goddesses, the Mahavidyas, from Parvati, the Hindu Mother goddess, and i am usually seen standing on a divine copulating couple holding my own severed head with three jets of blood spurting out of my bleeding neck and being drunk by my own head and two attendants which sounds gruesome but let me explain how that came about.
The Mahavidyas arose when my Mum and Shiva my Dad had an argument and Dad tried to leave but Mum created us ten kids to prevent him from going and we surrounded him in all directions and he was unable to leave.  
My tale begins when i was bathing in a river with two of my attendants but i took so long, Godliness is next to Cleanliness after-all, that we missed dinner and my attendants were going on and on about being hungry and they were not having that i would sort them out food when we got back home so
to shut them up i did what any merciful goddess would do and beheaded myself with my long nails and gave them my blood to satisfy their hunger.
It resulted in my legacy but also being able to hold your own head in your hand without it being joined to your neck is a pretty good Halloween party trick but i came to represent so much more than headless people.
I am used to symbolise the start and end of life as well as sexual self-control as i am standing over the love-deity couple of Kamadeva and his wife Rati who are engaged in copulation, but other religions have tried to muscle in on the headless deity theme but it's mine and i can get quite pissy about and you don't want to mess with someones who other name is Prachanda Chandika, or 'she, who has chopped off her own head'.
I may convey the universal message that life, death, and sex are interdependent and life feeds on death, is nourished by death, necessitates death, and that the ultimate destiny of sex is to perpetuate more life, which in turn will decay and die in order to feed more life but worshiping me comes with a warning that only the very brave or very foolish should do it.
I can bestow upon you everything you ever desired but if i believe that you are not worshiping me properly, i will behead you and drink your blood but give it a whirl because you never know and there's a saying amongst us Mahavidyas that if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. If it's not worth doing, give it to Muhammad.

Special Guest Blogger: US Emperor Joshua Norton

Before politicians who believe that drinking bleach is a good idea, it was fair to say that the American Democratic experiment wasn't going well but they decided quite early on that they didn't want a monarch but they got one anyway, me, the United States' first and only monarch.
I was English and started up a business in South Africa but it flopped so i got on a boat bound for the United States and moved to San Francisco where i began to make a fortune in the real estate market and hearing of a rice shortage in China, put all of my money into rice farming and exportation just as the rice famine in China ended which resulted in my bankruptcy so unable to convince the American courts to give me back my money, i took the obvious step of not letting the pesky rice markets ruin my finances by donning a military uniform with a beaver skin hat complete with a peacock feather and declared myself the Emperor of the United States.
I submitted edicts and proclamations to the newspapers such as the United States' dissolution, bridges to be built, streets to be repaired, equal rights for Black Americans and proposed the establishment of some sort of league of nations, decades before the rest of the world came around to the same idea, that sort of thing, nothing was too good for The Empire of Norton I.
Business owners invited me into their establishments and let me eat for free and tailors fixed my regal uniform and Shopkeepers even let me pay in my own imperial currency which was basically a slip of paper with a happy face drawn on it.
My reign as Emperor was tragically cut short after only 29 years when i collapsed and died in the street and some people will argue that i wasn't a real monarch but that's not what my headstone says, reading: 'Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico'.
Oh yeah, did i mention that i decided to be the 'Protector of Mexico' also? Well i was.
I wasn't a terrible Emperor, actually, i was the best one America ever had.