Thank's For The Bank Holiday Lizzie

I'm no Royalist but i will take the extra bank holiday for the Queen's 70th year anniversary as monarch, so thanks Liz and if you want to pencil in the day after as the day you pack up Buckingham Palace and end the Royal's then that would be much appreciated.   
In Britain we have 9 days when we get paid to sit at home watching TV this year but that still put's us way down the vegging in our pyjama's rather than being at work league with Myanmar having 32 and Nepal 30 opportunities to wake up midweek at midday.
A few people have mentioned that the Queen is 96 and has been ill recently so its a bit of a gamble waiting until June for the day off but we get a day off even if her clogs are popped before then but if she still with us on 3rd June, they are planning on changing the name from a Bank Holiday to a Thank Holiday where we say thank you Queenie for all she has done over the last 7 decades so thank you your majesty for allowing us to hand you hundreds of millions for you to live in one of your two Palaces or one of your three castles or two sprawling estates.
There is talk of making the 3rd June permanently a bank holiday but the grumpy Government have poo-pooed that idea straight away citing the loss of productivity as each Bank Holiday costs the economy £1.4bn but across Europe, us Brits lag far behind the rest with some European workers able to put their feet up for as many as 16 times a year. Even the workaholic Germans have 10 but the Swiss only have 5 official public holidays and any other depends upon how charitable the Government feel in any given year so that should make us feel a bit better.

Putin Following The Bush and Blair Playbook

A world power invading a country with no justification and being shocked at the resistance it received, we have been here before and it wasn't that long ago but there are many similarities between Russia going into Ukraine and America and Britain's horrendous misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For Putin read Bush and Blair, two men who ignored and suppressed inconvenient information or span advice to launch devastating wars in the name of Terror, surrounded by yes men who put out propaganda to try and justify their actions, Putin said Ukraine was run by fascists, Bush/Blair said Afghanistan and Iraq were run by terrorists and in Saddam's case, were armed with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, none of which were ever found despite Colin Powell's best attempts to show otherwise at the United Nations.
The narrative is that we should explain to the people of Russia what their Government is doing in their name and try to stop it but i was one of two million who marched against the Wars in London and our Government took no notice so why do they think Putin would and the Russian media is being hammered for supporting Putin but almost every news outlet backed Bush's and Blair's Wars in Britain despite the obvious illegality of them.    
Just like Putin, they expected a quick victory, Bush was overly keen to claim 'Mission Accomplished' but the invading troops were in Iraq for a decade, they were in Afghanistan for two decades and left both nations in a continuing worse state than they found it and killing over a million people.
Putin is being held up as a war criminal who faces a future trip to the Hague but the Bush and Blair administrations faced no serious threat of prison despite Abu Ghraib, far too many gruesome massacres, extrajudicial killings and numerous probes by the International Criminal Court of crimes committed by US and UK forces.
There are many direct parallels between the horrendous action of Russia today and what Britain and America did under Bush and Blair two decades ago and as Putin is being rightly castigated for his actions, he is following the playbook we wrote to illegally invade two nations although many don't seem to see it that way, it was us after-all but warmongering leaders are not confined to only Russia.

Awful, Awful, Awful

You have to feel sorry for the journalists who are political sketch-writers because no matter how hard they try to satirize the goings on in the Government, the Government just satirizes itself even more.
The saying is that the fish rots from the head and the fishy head of the current Government is Boris Johnson who has made a career out of bouncing one from car crash to the next, sacked as a journalist for lying, resigned as Foreign Minister but not before getting the the prison sentence of the person he was meant to be negotiating the release for extended and as Prime Minister broke his own laws and now has a shiny new police fine to show for it.
Poland is blaming him for getting their Russian gas supply cut due to him blabbering that Poland was training soldiers to fight against them but if it was just him who was blatantly inept at his job that would be bad enough, but it seems the whole of the benches sitting behind him are just as awful.
Only today the Tory MP (Massive Pervert) Neil Parish was suspended for watching porn on his mobile phone in the House of Commons and The National Crime Agency raided Tory Peer Michelle Mone's home due to her fiddling £200m in PPE contracts during the pandemic.
Last week it was announced that three of the cabinet members were under investigation for sexual misconduct and another one, Imran Ahmad Khan, was convicted of child sexual assault and that's just over the past few weeks, previously we had illegally proroguing Parliament, lying to the Queen, using the pandemic to channel billions of pounds of public funds into the pockets of their friends, Brexit, Northern Ireland, wallpapergate, cummingsgate and partygate and one of the highest Covid death tolls per capita in the world.
John Major's Government was always held up as the high water mark of corruption and sleaze but this lot make put that one to shame and unbelievably the Government are running at 31% in the current polls which is below Labour but 31% of people look at the shambles before them and say: 'You know what, i would vote for them again'. Mind blown!!

Special Guest Blogger: Le Petomane

Some people will tell you they have show-business in their blood or in their veins but mine was in my digestive tract because i was the world's most famous flatulist.
Working with hot air also played a part in my first career choice as i was a baker and my bran muffins were famous in Marseilles but that all changed one day at the beach when i took a deep breath to dive below the waves when i suddenly felt an icy chill in my abdomen. After some experimentation i found that i could suck in air through my anus and then noisily propel it again and with proper control, i could even make it tuneful.
I was conscripted into the French Army and my first audience was my fellow soldiers who loved my party piece and once my time was up i considered going back to my day job but people seemed to enjoy my talent so i began touring but i needed a name so called myself Le Petomane which is a blending of the words 'péto', meaning 'to fart' and 'mane', meaning 'maniac', literally A Fart Maniac.
After touring around a bit, i really became a star at the Moulin Rouge starring alongside the actress Sarah Bernhardt who appreciated that what i produced wasn't actually stinky methane farts but pure, although not so fresh air, i doubt if the audience would have stayed aroung too long if they were proper stinkers.
The 19th Century was a great time for acts which were really good at farting and i was propelled to the top of the entertainment world, performing for the Prince of Wales, King Leopold II of Belgium and Sigmund Freud and even had a contract clause which stated farting anywhere outside of the club constituted a breach of contract and instant dismissal.
My act was animal impressions, smoking a cigarette through a tube and playing songs and sometimes a flute or recorder, i got great at playing 'O Sole Mio' but it all went wrong when i tried to help out a friend by giving an impromptu exhibition at his market stall and the Moulin Rouge enacted the clause in my contract and fired me.
I tried to set up my own travelling show but with the outbreak of World War I, i retired from the stage and returned to my bakery job and opened a biscuit factory where i worked until i died but i was immortalised by Thomas Edison who recorded me with his new camera but sadly, there’s no sound so it's just a grainy, black and white film of a man with a flute up his butt.

Special Guest Blogger: Christopher Reeve

I guess i am most well known for the four films i made, all with Superman in the title but my story starts off at Juilliard where i met Robin Williams, and then when i interned at a Theater where i met Katherine Hepburn who cast me for the role of her grandson on Broadway’s 'A Matter of Gravity' and put in a good word for me at CBS for their soap opera Love of Life.
Being linked to a global megastar was a massive help and an agent got me an audition for a high-budget, fantasy film with Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman and i was up against Al Pacino, Clint Eastwood and even Muhammad Ali for the part so i wasn't too hopeful but lady luck was still smiling on me and they said i had the look they were after and offered me the role as long as i bulked up before filming started.
Lady luck was certainly working overtime on me because the gym i signed onto to undergo a two month intensive bodybuilding regime included David Prowse, the man who played Darth Vader in Star Wars trilogy.
The film and it's sequel were huge and got plenty of nerds excited and made me a star but the third film tanked and the less said about the fourth the better but i was in danger of being typecast so i became picky over films i did, turning down Romancing the Stone and The Running Man and starred in theater productions until the right film came along which it did, Anna Karenina.
I had to learn how to ride a horse for the role and i bought a horse and spent months practicing, even participating in Horse Trials but alas, my luck had to run out eventually. Unfortunately for me, luck ran out at the third fence of a dressage event when my horse stopped abruptly and i went over the top and came down head first on the top rail, fracturing my cervical vertebrae and leaving me immobile from the neck down.
My old friend Robin Williams put on fundraisers and charity events to pay for my medical care but maybe what i needed most was a pillow because i developed a pressure ulcer which led to Sepsis and a heart attack.
Despite the poor later Films before i died, i did hear there were plans for a new Superman Film where he and Batman do battle and i wish i had lived long enough to see how a man who can move super fast, is super strong and can fly as well being invulnerable to pretty much everything while able to fire lasers from his eyes can possibly lose against a guy who dresses up as a bat and wears a belt.

Twitter And Free Speech

I don't know what Elon Musk's plans are for Twitter but it's his £35 billion so he can do what he wants with it but he has said that he is a 'free speech absolutist' so we can expect to see the likes of Donald Trump, Katie Hopkins and David Icke reinstated and back spitting out their nonsense.
The people on the right do seem to get incredibly angry about free speech, or rather the restriction in their ability to say whatever guff enters their tiny minds and take offense if anyone points out that what they are saying is racist, misogynistic or homophobic which is why i do not follow the Voltaire statement that he may not agree with you but he defends your right to say it, my line is i may not agree with you and you are a dick for saying it and you should be prevented from having a platform to say it on.      
I agree it is a slippery slope, who is the arbitrator of just what is offensive, i am sure that i have written some things which amused me but other people have found offensive but we do have a general idea of what is offensive, dangerous or deliberate misinformation and i am sure that the person doing the typing knows it also unless they are even more stupider than i give them credit for, and i really don't give them very much credit whatsoever.
So Free Speech isn't something i worry very much about and i have never understood how it is the cornerstone of Democracy so write feel free to write that all blacks being evil, that homosexuality is wrong or that pregnancy and getting pregnant is only the woman's responsibility as the right wing clown Quentin Smith did on his blog, it's them that come out of looking like bigoted jackasses and their defence of the right to say anything means we can call them small minded morons with an interesting assortment of issues.
Over to you Trump, Hopkins and Icke, i look forward to you and other right-whingers taking the opportunity to interpret free speech on Twitter as an opportunity to be complete bell-ends once again.

Special Guest Blogger: Egyptian Goddess Isis

To some, marrying your own brother and then recreating the body of your slain brother/husband and using a golden phallus in place of his lost genitals is a bit creepy but this was Egypt and we had no such hang ups about things like that.
My brother was Osiris, who was lord of the underworld and he warred with our other brother, Set, which led to Osiris being trapped in a wooden chest, which he coated in lead and threw into the Nile and declared himself King.
I searched everywhere for him until i eventually found hubby still trapped in his chest so i brought his body back to Egypt, where Set discovered the chest and, furious, hacked his brother into 14 pieces, which he scattered all across the Earth.
Transforming into a bird, and helped by my sister, Nephthys, I was able to discover and reunite the parts of my  dead husband’s body but there was one vital piece that i couldn't find because apparently it had been eaten by a fish.
I rebuilt him anyway and in place of the genitals, i used a golden phallus and gave him temporary life long enough for one last rite which was more fertility than funeral and make use of the golden phallus and get pregnant with Horus. It also gave me somewhere very handy to hang my towels on.
Set obviously came after Horus but i hid with Horus in the marshes of the Nile delta until my son was fully grown and could avenge his father and claim his throne but that wasn't easy, the place was full of snakes and scorpions.
During that final battle between Seth and Horus i accidentally got beheaded but i replaced my original head with that of a cow and cheered him on to kick his uncles arse and became the first ruler of a peaceful united Egypt.
I then settled down to enjoy royal life as the King’s Mother, supported my son and teaching the women of Egypt how to weave, bake, and brew beer.
I was one of the few Egyptian Gods the Greeks took a fancy to, and i even went through to the Romans and had shrines built for me but Cleopatra said she was the personification of me, and following the whole Cleo/Anthony affair, the Roman Senate did its best to rub me out and demolished all my shrines, but you can’t keep a good Goddess down and the Christians happily identified me as the Virgin Mary, the paintings of Mary and the Baby Jesus based on the paintings of me and Horus as a liddle baby. 

Special Guest Blogger: William Jardine

If you remember anything from history class, you know the British Empire was a great time for us Brits to sail into a foreign land, look around and say 'Nice country you got here, we'll take it'.
Quite unreasonably some countries didn't particularity like that and tried to resist but a musket to the face soon made them a lot more compliant but it wasn't all take, sometimes we even introduced things to Johnny Foreigner such as hard drugs which is how i found myself in charge of exporting tonnes of opium into China.  
I started out as a surgeon but trading drugs was far more lucrative so i took it up full time importing Opium in from India but when the Chinese Empire, our best customer, began to see the unfavorable side of massive, widespread heroin addiction, it made the choice of banning the drug and the Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 cases of opium that we had smuggled into China.
What the Chinese Commissioner failed to understand was that me and my company was making so much money that unlike their addicted citizens, we weren't going to take that laying down.
My attempts at negotiations with the Chinese were unsuccessful so i returned to London to try and persuade the Government that it was in its interests to force China to take more of our trade but the British Foreign Secretary at that time was the terminally stupid Duke of Wellington and he refused to sanction a war with China.
When i made it back to the far east, the Qing government had made greater strides in suppressing our drug trafficking and was regularly destroying the cases of opium as they arrived, we had lost 50% of our stock so when Wellington was replaced as Foreign Minister by Lord Palmerston, i tried again and good old Palmy was much more happy to slap the Chinese around and told them either they accept whatever the hell we threw at them or else the might of ther British Navy would land on their doorstep. Oh and by the way we want a convenient outpost to unload our hard core drugs for your hopelessly addicted populace, Hong Kong looks about right so throw in that and we got a deal.
China said WTF! and that's how a large fleet of British war ships appeared on the China coast laying waste to town after town with heavy cannon fire, until the Imperial Government, forced to surrender, gave in to our demands and even paid me compensation for all the opium they had destroyed.
Still, the British Empire wasn't all fun, ethnic cleansing, slavery, land theft, exploitation and forcing addiction on people, i returned to Britain and became an MP but it didn't last long as my health rapidly deteriorated due to colon cancer and i died just three days after my 59th birthday, one of the richest and most powerful men in Britain.
I was truly lucky to have been alive in the 19th Century when Britannia ruled the waves, a great time to be British or a Chinese Opium addict.

US Military Going Green

US President Joe Biden has announced a process is underway to make every military vehicle in the country 'climate friendly' which will come as a comfort to whichever nation America decides is ripe for an invasion in the future because if you are going to be killed by an invading nation, it is nice to know that they are doing it in as green a way as possible.
So the means of delivery may be 'greener' but the weapons will not be anymore environmentally friendly, the citizens of Iraq are still feeling the effects of the Bush/Blair non-WMD's war in 2001, twenty years later they are still dying from the depleted Uranium and 11 million pounds of toxic waste they left polluting the soil and water and is responsible for the large rises in cancer, miscarriages and birth deformities in Iraq since 2001 according to the Iraqi Health Ministry.
The United Nations Environment Program estimates that some 2,000 tons of depleted uranium spread across 1100 locations in Iraq and Cancers in Iraq catapulted from 40 cases for every 100,000 people in 1991 to at 1,600 today so making your tanks and armoured cars zero emission seems a bit of an oxymoron when you are then spreading cancer causing chemicals to all and sundry, those not killed directly by them anyway.
All in all a nice try though but probably the most greenest thing America could do would be to not send it's military to invade nations on spurious reasons in the first place and if they do, their tennis players will not be welcomed at Wimbledon because that will show them invasions in the 21st Century are not tolerated, unless it's by us obviously.

Right Wing Fail In France

It seems like the French have a bit more sense than to vote in right wing imbeciles to their Government as Emmanuel Macron retakes his seat in the Élysée Palace while Marine Le Pen slinks off to kick a refugee or whatever racist morons do.
Obviously taking a lesson of what a complete shambles of a Government Trump in America and Johnson in Britain run, they obviously didn't want to inlfict that on their own country and have given Macron the nod 59% to Le Pens 41% who has come away empty handed for the third time and is widely
expected to hand over her leadership of the far-right National Rally Party to some other knuckle-dragging muppet, Jordan Bardella who is the son of Italian immigrants so he may have a problem selling his anti-immigration loine although that never seemed to bother Priti Patel over here who is also the offspring on immigrants but has made a career out of pulling up the ladder for other immigrants.
The concern for France is that in the last election Le Pen achieved 23% of the vote and this time out has raised that to 41% and Macron is not particularly liked in France but he got the vote because the other option was even more disliked so his second term is beginning on the basis of him being the least worst option which isn't particularly a confidence boost for him but it doesn't matter, we will take one less right wing numpty in a seat of power of a major country.

Simple Solution To Lack Of Drinking Water

With what we have recklessly been doing to the planet now hitting home, one of the greatest threats we face is the lack of drinking water which for us humans, is pretty important.
It is estimated that 98% of the Earth’s water is too salty for drinking and one in 10 of the world’s population don’t have access to safe drinking water and almost two million people die from drinking unsafe water every year.
Of the 2% of water that is fresh water, two thirds is locked away in ice caps and glaciers while most of the rest is trapped in soil or underground aquifers which leaves a fraction available for us to use.
The answer so far has been desalination which is turning sea water into fresh water but the process is high energy intensive and very expensive and i have often wondered why the technology hasn't yet caught up with one of the greatest threats of our time and finally, news that it may have and it sounds so simple that i wonder how it has been missed, a sieve.
Scientists at the University of Manchester explains that water molecules are smaller than sodium chloride molecules and they have invented an ultra-fine sieve that allows water to pass but not the salt.
They say their sieve gets rid of 97% of the sodium chloride so part of me thinks brilliant, let's get these things made up and sent around the world while another part of me thinks hang up boffins, take another look because that sounds far too simple.

Special Guest Blogger: Leicester Hemingway

As anyone who has a more talented sibling will tell you, it is always a struggle to get out of their shadow and having the immensely famous Earnest Hemingway in the family meant that i really had to go big, so i founded my own country and called it the Republic of New Atlantis.
Now i didn't know if just creating your own country was allowed but nobody said i couldn't but then nobody said what the minimum size for a country was but some jealous people said a 8 x 30-foot bamboo raft anchored down by an old car engine near Jamaica was not a country, it was more of a raft, but it was deliberately placed in International Waters therefore no other nation had legal jurisdiction over it. 
To make it more official, i created a constitution which was the American one with the name scribbled out and Republic of New Atlantis written over it, a flag which my wife designed, stamps and a currency called the Scruple.
As the founder, i declared myself President and Jamaica was fine with it's new neighbour with its population of 4 as me, my wife and two daughters were not going to invade it anytime soon.    
For two years the glorious Republic of New Atlantis graced the World Stage and then it graced the beach of Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica when a storm blew it away but i had struck a blow for overshadowed siblings everywhere.
Although Ernest could never claim to be president of a country, i went from being a World Leader back to Ernest's little brother again so i did what anyone with a famous sibling should do, i wrote a best selling book about them called 'My Big Brother Ernest Hemingway' which was much easier than spending my days scraping barnacles off the bottom of my country.

Special Guest Blogger: Sultan Ibrahim

As the the youngest child of Sultan Ahmed I's eight children, it was unlikely that i would become Sultan anytime soon but the Ottoman Empire was at that time a place of incredible levels of violence and paranoia so when my father died when i was two, my eldest brother, Murad IV, was concerned that one of his siblings would overthrow him, so he confined me to a prison and just kind of forgot about me.
As i was still at the crying and wetting myself if i couldn't find my blankie stage, he didn't consider me much of a threat unlike all my elder brothers who he had executed but what that meant was when he died after 17 years in charge, i was legitimately the only guy left to possibly take the throne when Murad died.
He did try to order my execution as one of his very last acts while on his deathbed but my mother never passed on his instructions before he died so they had no choice but to unlock my cell door, plonk a crown on my head and start calling me Sir.
Now spending your formative years in a prison cell can have an effect on a guy's mental and intelligence well-being and i went from a cell with only rats for company to having anything i desired, and what i really wanted was for my Palace to be decorated ceiling to floor in lynx and sable fur and for my subjects to pay for it, which they did through raised taxes.
I also had a harem of women who were willing to do anything for me and i liked my women big, i would scour the towns for the largest women i could find for my harem but where some people would see an orgy, i saw a harem of very big women who could take me out and after one threatened to stab me with a dagger after i tried to rape her when she said she had a headache, i had 280 of them drowned because better safe then sorry.
I did not make a lot of friends or allies with my actions, my own mother plotted with the elite Ottoman guard to overthrow me which resulted in my capture and imprisonment.
Being the loving mother that she was, she took pity on me and agreed that i would not be killed and would instead be kept in prison but that promise only lasted ten days before she ordered my execution.
My story then ended the same way it started, me stuck in a prison cell and i am remembered by the title Ibrahim the Mad but considering i spent my entire upbringing in a cage, was it any wonder i was more unhinged than a badly put-together door?

Special Guest Blogger: Victor Lustig

You can call me Victor, Count Lustig or Robert Miller but my preferred title is the greatest con-artist of all time.
I truly was a master of my craft, and that craft was swindling mugs out of their money, skills i learnt early on in life with the greatest one being so big that nobody would suspect anyone to have the brass balls for it to be a con.
I started out in my home country of Austria and then moved around Europe and traveled back and forth between Europe and the United States where i pretended to be a Broadway producer and convinced New Yorker's to invest in new shows. These shows were, of course, not real but the clean pair of heels i showed them with their dough sure were.
My greatest moment came when i traveled to some Paris scrap metal dealers with some stationery i had knocked up made to look like i was from the French government saying that the Eiffel Tower was going to be pulled down and sold for scrap, and the dealers were invited to bid on the metal.
It was no secret that the Eiffel Tower was not intended to remain in Paris forever, it was only created for the 1889 World’s Fair, and by 1925, it had outlived its expected lifespan.
Six scrap dealers bid on the Tower and i congratulated the keenest, Andre Poisson, for his acquisition of 10,100 tonnes of scrap metal for £70,000 which went with me in my suitcase back to Austria.
I waited out the storm, keeping my eyes on newspapers in case Poisson reported the scam but of course those sort of people never do, they had a reputation to uphold and gullible morons hate it when they are shown up as gullible morons so he never reported it.
After six months, i went back to Paris to try the scam again but a couple of the dealers checked with the Government first, was told it was a con and informed the Police so i fled to the U.S. while i could.
The US may be the land of the free but it is also the land of the wonderfully greedy and stupid, i had a box i said would copy money and i would ask for a $100 bill, put it in the machine, and it would soon give two bills in return, both counterfeits, and i would keep the real money.
In the 1930s i came across Al Capone which seems like a good way to get killed quickly, but i tried it anyway. I asked Capone to invest $50,000 in a new company and a few months later, i returned to Capone and said that the plans fell through and was returning all of his money and gave him a sob story about losing all my money but i wanted to make sure he got all of his back and Capone so was touched, he gave me $5,000 to reward me for my honesty.
My luck run out when i used my money copying box on a Texas sheriff, who bought it from me for $1000 but once he realised he had been tricked he pursued me to Chicago where i told him it must be faulty and i gave him his $1000 back in counterfeit money and that's where my problems started.
I was arrested and after escaping from jail using a rope made from bedsheets, i was sent to Alcatraz where i died of 12 years into a 20 year sentence but it is nice to see that the Eiffel Tower is still being used to con people out of money, the French charge tourists 40€ to walk up it, now that's a con.

Special Guest Blogger: Pagan Godess Sheela Na Gigs

I was lewd, rude, nude and very crude so perfect to be a Pagan Goddess and i represented so many aspects and did it all with my vagina.
I was originally called Cecile in France and was popular for being a wise woman who people would pray to if they wanted to avert ill luck or were possessed by an evil spirit and i would chase away anything demonic or bad by showing them my Bajingo because we all know that woman's genitals are scary, it's not like men enjoy looking at naked women or anything.
When i came to the UK with the Normans during the conquest thingy, i was particularly popular in Ireland and they changed my name from Cecile to the Irish name 'Sheela' and 'Gigs' is English slang for lady parts and what amazing lady parts they were, hence why i was so famous for them.  
The Christians, not having a proud Vag showing diety of their own, adopted me and carved me into their Monasteries, Churches and other places of religion, placing my image of completely naked, legs open with private parts on display above doors and windows to ward off evil spirits but i also had a secondary role as a fertility Goddess and the Early Christians used my figurines at weddings and births, showing my wares to all and sundry.
So, what happened to this bawdy, sexually liberated, very wise—goddess?
Well over time i became a warning against the sins of lust, a reminder for churchgoers to keep their minds pure and firmly on Godly things and not on how much longer they have to listen to this guy banging on lust being hideous and sinfully corrupting before they can get back to doing some sinful corruption of their own.
At some point the Christians got their rosary beads in a knot and decided that having a naked female showing off her glorious foof alongside scripture images was a tad too much even for them, and remember that this is an institution which has more scandals than saints, so they decided they would take their chance with evil entering the building and began to remove me from their places of worship as un-Christian.
I doubt many people have heard of me now and i have gone the way of most Pagan deities but i like to think that i was a sacred symbol of women’s nurturing and a life-affirming reminder of female power...with a very nice Vag.

Special Guest Blogger: Shiro Ishii

Before the Pearl Harbour attacks, for most in the West, Japan was of little consequence but by 1942 we had been fighting China in a war for 7 years and when hundreds of Chinese found the skin on their faces turning black and their bones crumbling, they knew they had been a victim of a certain Japanese scientist named, well...me.
I was a big advocate of biological warfare and while WW1 wasn't much fun for many people, it fascinated me and when i was made a military surgeon for the Imperial Japanese Army, i toured the West for two years collecting information for the creation of a Japanese bio-weapons program and was put in charge of Unit 731, the biological weapons team.
Just as you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, you can't experiment on the effects of biological weapons without breaking some humans and after the deaths of 10,000 Chinese Civilians and Prisoners of War, i got pretty good at it.
On my command, we encased bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, anthrax and other nasty diseases into bombs which were dropped on Chinese combatants and non-combatants but after Pearl Harbour and the introduction of the United States into the War, the Commanders came to me to ask if i had any plans to help kill as many Americans as possible.
As it turned out i did have some but the first idea of dropping 150 million plague infested fleas on American troops in the Philippines stalled when America surrendered before we had chance to load the plague bombs on the planes.  
Undeterred, during the Battle of Iwo Jima, i planned another biological attack using gliders full of an unhealthy mix of diseases to be dropped on American troops but the gliders crashed on their way to the airfield so i decided to not faff around anymore and go straight to infecting America the country.
I called the plan Operation 'Cherry Blossoms at Night' which entailed launching 9,300 incendiary and antipersonnel bombs laden with millions of plague contaminated fleas carried by balloons which would be swept eastward by the jet stream.
The few experimental ones we released were successful, six Americans died in Oregon from them, but the Government decided that submarines delivering the payload would be more successful but they had to build them first but they took so long that by the time we were ready Japan had surrendered and the Americans confiscated the subs.  
I destroyed my labs and released the cages full of plague-bearing rats into the Chinese countryside causing an epidemic that killed 20,000 people but i was just in a hurry to get back to Japan but the Americans were waiting for me.
Now you would think that being responsible for the deaths of half a million people and planning to kill even more in their country would mean the Americans would do all sorts of things to me, well they did, they gave me full immunity in exchange for all my bioweapons research for their own biological warfare program.
They even gave me a nice place to live in Maryland so i could advise on the bio-weapons for a few years and then i went back to live in Japan where Karma came knocking in its full, beautiful splendour and i died of throat cancer in a warm, comfortable hospital bed aged 67.
I can only assume those hundreds of thousands i was responsible for killing deserved it, go figure.

Conflicted On Loren Allred On BGT

As a rule i avoid Britian's Got Talent like Boris Johnson avoids diet food but i got a vague call from my daughter last night saying that woman singing that song you bang on about was on BGT tonight and it turns out the woman was Loren Allred and the song was 'Never Enough'.
Immediately on watching it later i went through 'Wow, she's amazing' to 'what's she doing on BGT?' back to 'Wow, she's amazing' again and finally onto is it fair to put a woman who sang one of the greatest songs ever and we know has one of the best female vocals i have ever heard to be competing against pub singers and amateurs looking for their big break?
My conflict therefore is should she even be there? On one hand she has already had more success than most and her song will be up there with Whitney Houston's version of 'I Will Always Love You' when any list of greatest female vocals is wheeled out so being a successful, professional singer seems a bit unfair on the man with a guitar who wrote his own song about his daughter putting on her mum's make up which preceded it.
Then i think, she probably didn't get the recognition she deserved from the Greatest Showman film and she has an amazing voice so she should get her face out there and get all the plaudits she has coming so go for it girl.
Then, i go back to if i was on BGT i would be mightily annoyed if after my turn the woman who sang 'Never Enough' was introduced next so i'm back to its unfair again but then...she's amazing so arghhh!!!
I'm 70% in favour of her belting out epics and becoming rich and famous in her own right but i'm bias because she's that woman singing that song that i bang on about but then that's the exact same reason for the 30% against also.

Special Guest Blogger: Anglo-Saxon Godess Eostre

The story of Easter is less well known than Christmas, something to do with the Easter Bunny coming back to life is my understanding of it all, but while many Christians believe that the Easter Bunny died for our sins, originally it was a pagan festival in honour of me, the Germanic Godess Eostre, as i was very popular with the Anglo-Saxon pagan brigade who worshiped me as the Goddess of the dawn and the month of April was called Eostremanod – or Easter-month and kicked off the whole Easter business without a Jesus in sight but there was eggs and cute bunnies.
While desperately grafting their own story to replace me, the Christians lazily kept the eggs, which was my symbol of fertile purity and were painted and eaten during my celebrations but they just said eggs represents Christ's rebirth.
The bunny which was my sacred animal and symbolises fertility as we all know that bunnies get pretty busy if you know what I mean so they are a perfect animal to symbolically represent the fertility of springtime.
Hoped that cleared up what chocolate eggs and bunnies have to do with crucifixion and resurrection, the answer is absolutely nothing.
So over time the Spring Goddess of Fertility and the very first bunny girl's feast was pushed aside for a man with a big wooden plus sign and it's not just members of the KKK who loves a hot cross, they are now on top of buns also.
Despite being told Easter is the more important date on the religious calendar it's not celebrated that much so until songwriters manage to find a way to make a catchy ditty about crucifixion and resurrection, it it is always destined to be the poor relation in religious holiday but you do get a 4 day weekend so if you plan to spend Good Friday getting as hammered as Jesus but in a different way, you have 3 days to get over it. Enjoy.

Top Professions To Avoid Marrying

With the introduction of no fault divorce, a couple can now get divorced without one person needing to lay blame on the other and divorce lawyers are rubbing their hands as it now makes divorce easier but probably the best way to avoid a potentially messy divorce is to make sure you don't marry a wrong'un to start with and that's where i can help because i have a list drawn up by Divorce Lawyers of the top 5 professions to avoid walking up the aisle with.
With the 1980's Top of the Pops theme tune in my head...in at 5 it's Fireman, and number 4 Police Officers, straight in at number 3 it's any military personnel, still at number 2 it's Surgeon's and at number 1 it's pilots.
'All these careers come with authority, responsibility and you are treated with respect' so say the lawyers 'Then you come home, and all of a sudden someone is asking you to take out the bins and that's a difficult transition to make'.
Obviously there are many exceptions to the rule and many people from these careers have very happy marriages but if you are engaged to a pilot who dabbles in firefighting and is thinking about becoming a military surgeon or joining the police, you might want to reconsider but if they are the ones to avoid, who are the ones to say 'I Do' to?
Luckily, the lawyers also have a list of them so if you are betrothed to either a Camera Operator, Religious Workers, Pathologists, Dentist or Management Analyst then congratulations and enjoy the happily ever after.

Dead Cat Job Done Perfectly

Of course the plan to send refugees who turn up in the UK to Rwanda is awful but it was always a badly thought out half plan which was rushed out to deflect the uncomfortable partygate fines handed out to the Prime Minster and Chancellor.
They knew that it would play well with the frothing at the mouth right wingers who support the Conservatives, kicking refugees is always a well loved right wing sport but it also had the effect of the dead cat on the table, notably people would get angry at this and not angry at the top two people in Government breaking their own lock-down laws and mission accomplished, it has done that also.
With everyone from the UN to their own Home Office Civil Servants speaking out against it, it is unlikely it will ever happen, the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, had to issue a 'ministerial direction' to force her plans through due to her own Civil Servants refusing to accept it and now that they are talking strike action over it, it seems she will have a fight on her hands to implement it.
The Lords are also threatening to kill it and some of the Tory backbenchers with a shred of morality in them are questioning how it will be cost effective when it will cost an initial £120m and then £30,000 to send each refugee to the African country.
Human Rights lawyers are also stating it will be contested in the law courts so it is highly unlikely that it will, quite rightly, ever see the light of day but that was the point in announcing it, it has deflected the attention away from Johnson and Sunak's Partygate fines and changed the Newspaper front pages and that was the raison d'être, that is the dead cat strategy the Conservatives always use when things get sticky.
It will fall away just like the announcements to order Navy patrols to push refugee boats back and the incredibly stupid 'massive fans' idea but by then weeks would have passed and the anger would have subsided, so they knew the Rwanda idea was always a non-starter and Priti Patel doesn't care that it makes her look a heartless bitch, she actually relishes that well deserved reputation, so job done.

Special Guest Blogger: William Walker

In today's language a filibuster is a politician who waffles on and wastes even more time than usual but in my day filibuster was the name given to daring adventurers who attempted to seize control of territory without the approval of the U.S. government.
I was a lawyer and it wasn't that we were arrogant, it was just because we were better than everyone else so i was a strong believer in Manifest Destiny which is the idea that the United States was meant to expand and bring civilization to the World and i started with the border regions of Mexico which they were struggling to maintain but it was frowned upon to invade a country with whom the U.S. was at peace with and although my original ship was confiscated by the authorities, i rounded up 50 men and found a ship to sail to Baja California in Mexico.
I captured the state capital of La Paz and proclaimed the region the Republic of Lower California and made myself President and invited Americans to come stay in the new country.
With this success under my belt, i began looking elsewhere to expand into but the problem was the locals were happy being Mexican for some unfathomable reason and didn't want me forcing civilization on to them so they we were pushed out and retreated all the way back into the U.S. where i was arrested for breaking the neutrality act and put on trial however i was found not guilty by a jury because i may have violated the law, but i was a hero to many.
I therefore naturally decided that the natural thing to do was to go back to filibustering but Mexico was out so instead me and 57 armed men headed for Nicaragua and joined in their civil war and although i was on the winning side, they booted me out but my arrival back in the US was greeted with a fanfare, god bless that arrogantly sweet Manifest Destiny fever still sweeping the nation.
Not one to give up i next washed up in Honduras and was promptly captured by British forces who handed me over to the Honduran government and was executed but after the American Civil War unauthorized invasions by citizens never picked up their popularity again, instead it was let to the Government to go into other countries and kill all their people and then come back twenty years later and make a movie about how killing your people made our soldiers feel sad.

Jupiter and Neptune In Your House

Jupiter and Neptune transitioning through Pisces doesn't usually get a mention here but it only happens once in a long while and astrologers have got there planetary positions in a flap because it means that we are on the cusp of great wealth and fortune for the next few months which is perfect timing if you just got your energy bill or went to fill your car with petrol.
The last time it happened was in 1856 and there was an astrologer on TV tonight who had obviously prepared for the question of what happened in 1856 and proudly announced that the Treaty of Paris was signed which ended the Crimean war so can't argue with that.
So don't worry, everything is going to be alright for the next few months at least and if it isn't, well the next Jupiter/Neptune Pisces transition will be in 2188 and everyone one of us will be dead by then so that's a stroke of luck as we wont have to listen to newsreaders talking to Astrologers as if they are not completely nucking futs, or maybe that is me being cynical. Typical Aries.

The Not So Honourable Prime Minister

Only last week, Richard Harrington, the refugees minister, was asked if the government had any plans to send refugees over 5,000 miles away to Rwanda and he replied with an pretty unambiguous No, he didn't know where such an idea had come from and nobody in the Home Office was discussing anything like this and it was a non-story put out by liberals.
Shift on 10 days later and there's Boris Johnson in Kent beginning a speech about Britain’s fine history of openness and generosity to refugees before announcing the Government was going to start sending refugees to Rwanda and the cynical amongst us may consider the timing of the announcement a bit suspect coming as it did after days of bad headlines regarding the Prime Ministers police fine for breaking his own lock-down laws, not that he will be paying it, that's what Tory donors are for.
Apparently, so say the Conservative MP's, a time of war is not the time to change our Prime Minister but if Britain was at war i'm sure i would have noticed so as i failed to see any cruise missiles sailing over my head today, i assume they mean the one in Ukraine which we are not fighting in, just providing the weapons for someone else to do it.
Boris won't be going anywhere unless he is kicked out by his own MP's who seem to be fine with him lying to them but Minister's have resigned for less,believing that no honourable member of Parliament would attempt to stay in office after having done something so wrong but unfortunately, when it comes to Boris, we can see the flaw in that argument straight away.
Still, he today did what really matters to the nasty party supporters, he was horrible to asylum seekers so that will soothe a few furrowed brows.

Special Guest Blogger: Roman God Sterculius

Romans had an almost uncountable number of gods to be bribed or flattered if life was to proceed smoothly. Virtually every action, event, or object in Roman life was governed by some god or other, we had Spiniensis who presided over the clearing of thorns from gardens, Cardea the goddess of door hinges and Robigus who was the go-to guy for mildew and rust but i was the God of what i liked to call organic fertilization...or poo.
It may seem a strange career choice for an eager young deity so while being the emperor of excrement may not have been a very prestigious gig and you might have even gave a little chuckle that it was what i was in charge of but then did you enjoy your cereal this morning? That stuff literally grew in manure so in the nicest possible way you can eat shit along with the unholy chemicals and pesticides.  
Rome was a very agricultural society and when everything was organically grown good quality fertilizer was essential and extremely important to farmers who valued my blessed fertilizer above all things.
Along with my son, Picus, i taught the use of manure in agricultural processes but the Gods decided that being the son of the Grand Poobah of Poop was not so dignified so the Roman's rewrote our family tree to declare their boy the son of Saturn although personally i would have gone with Caelus, he was called Uranus originally.
Sure it was a dirty, (and smelly) job but someone had to do it if we wanted ripe crops but i always taught farmers at the beginning of their career that agriculture is very much like the manure production and you only get out of it what you put into it.

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas Sullivan

Howdy Limeys, now i know that drinking Tea is your thing so it must really annoy you that it wasn't a pasty faced Brit who invented the tea-bag but a yankee.
Now you may know that way back in the late 18th Century, demonstrators boarded British ships in Boston harbour and threw the cargo of 342 chests of tea into the sea. The British government responded by not allowing America to be part of your empire anymore (Boo Hoo) so you would assume that ever since Americans have an aversion to drinking tea as it is associated with Boston, King George and the dastardly 18th Century English shooting at them.
We did have Iced Tea before tea bags, you may think that Iced Tea was one of those things that just happened to sound like it was made from cold tea, like Dr Pepper isn't actually made by doctors or contain peppers, and that's true but we add lemon slices and fresh mint to the cold tea and believe me that's better than the piss weak stuff you limeys serve but anyway, i'm here because in 1908 i accidentally invented the tea bag.
I was a tea and coffee exporter and at the time tea drinkers used a removable device to easily make tea in a mug such as tea eggs and tea balls which were perforated metal containers which were filled with loose leaves and immersed in boiling water, and then removed using an attached chain.
Needless to say, us American's are a lazy bunch and to keep the tea samples i sent out from leaking everywhere, i began to send samples of tea to my customers in small silken bags and some assumed that these were supposed to be used in the same way as the metal infusers, by putting the entire bag into the pot, rather than emptying out the contents.
Customers complained that although the new tea-bags were great, the mesh on the silk was too fine and it was hard to get out of the cup so instead of rolling my eyes and calling them dumbasses, i had the idea of developing bags with less fine mesh and added a string so they didn't burn their stupid fingers and tea bags were born.
I then sold my tea-bag idea back to you Brits where you can enjoy the convenience of tea making with more time for arguing over whether the milk or water goes in first and then over stir the liquid, not that it does anything to the flavour of the tea but it seems you Brits do like the constant chinking of the spoon against the cup which is just really, really annoying to everyone else but it's your thing, you do what you like.

Special Guest Blogger: Queen Olympias

Admittedly at first read i may come across as a tad cunning, brutal and bloodthirsty but i not only gave birth to the mighty Alexander the Great, but i also taught him everything he knew and anyway it didn't end quite so well for me anyway in what was a brutal and bloodthirsty time.   
As the daughter of the King of a Grecian tribe in Epirus, everything was sweet until he died and my Uncle Arymbas took over and shored up his power by marrying me off the new King of Macedonia, Philip II, and his royal household was already crowded with three other queens so as Queen number four i had my work cut out to stand above the others which i did by joining him in the Ancient cult of Cabeiri, which sounds kinky but was more to do with celebrating the Great Gods of Samothrace.
That ingratiated me to him and when i gave birth to a son and heir, that would be Alexander, and then we also had a daughter named Cleopatra, but with a son i was almost the main Queen but the issue i had was that their was another male in line for the throne before him, Arrhidaeus.
I kept a watchful eye on Arrhidaeus and as luck would have it he stupidly ate something someone carelessly slipped into his meal which gave him brain damage and dropped him down a few rungs in the inheritance chain but my husband decided why have 4 wives when you can have 7 and i really didn't like sharing my hubby with younger, more fertile women and the seventh was a native Macedonian and Philip's courtiers began circulated that any sons she bore Philip would get precedence over my liddle Alex.
Philip agreed and after a big bust up i left him and took Alexander and Cleopatra back to Epirus where my brother Alexander I, was now ruling but my husband was a douchebag of the highest order and signed a marriage deal for Cleopatra with none other than King Alexander I of Epirus, Cleopatra’s Uncle.
I bided my time and when everyone who was anyone gathered to celebrate the nuptials of my brother and his niece, the happy father of the bride could see that i wasn't happy and if my evil glares didn't show it, the guard i paid to stab him between the ribs certainly did.
Immediately after hubby demise, the Kingdom pondered if my Alex was the rightful heir as the next king as wife 7 had two babies who could argue the case, or they might have if they hadn't been brutally murdered by a certain mother and son team and wife 7 was so grief stricken she killed herself so with Alex now undisputed King and me the official Kings mother, i could kick back and relax as Alex got married to a lovely girl called Roxana who had a boy they called Alex junior, but i wasn't ready to embrace a lifestyle of idly sitting on my arse talking gossip with the neighbors so i just caused more mayhem.
As Queen Mother to Alexander the Great, i kept telling him to sack his regent Antipater and i would do his job but then during Alexanders Babylon campaign, things went horribly wrong.
Alexander perished and seeing my cushy job slipping away as the country tried to decide between crowning Alexander’s baby heir or his dullard half-brother Arrhidaeus as the next ruler, the decision was to be made by my old pal Antipater's son, Cassander, and he picked the brain damaged Arrhidaeus to be the new king.
I did what any self respecting ex-Queen Mother would do and marched into Macedonia with a few heavilly armed friends and gave Arrhidaeus the respect his role afforded by executing him but his wife, Adea Eurydice, i offered a choice of dying by poison, hanging or stabbing herself with a sword.
She chose the noose and then i went after Cassander but he was in hiding so i captured and executed his brother and in return he kidnapped both my grandson Alexander Jnr and Roxana and then drove the knife home by executing them both.
He swore he would spare my life if i surrendered and to be fair he never killed me, instead he rounded up the family members of all the people i had hurt while in power, and they were all too happy to stone me to death and wipe out the line of Alexander the Great.
So if anything, my tale should be a warning for two of life's great truths, the first being to not let your sex stand in your way of fighting for what you believe and secondly it is a really good idea to avoid marrying people you could go halfsies with on your relatives birthday presents.

Special Guest Blogger: Chevalier d'Eon

You know how some guys grow their hair long and they look like rockstars, and others they just look like ugly girls? Well i looked pretty damn feminine which is how i got enrolled by King Louis XV to his secret spy network, the Secret du Roi.
I was an excellent student, graduating in civil law and canon law and became secretary to the intendant of Paris, serving as his secretary when the spy network came knocking with a secret mission to meet the Russian Empress Elizabeth and conspire with the pro-French faction.
At that time the English and French were as usual at war, and the English were attempting to deny the French access to the Empress by allowing only women and children to cross the border into Russia so i changed my name to Lady Lia de Beaumont and the English didn't look at me twice and i served as a maid of honour to the Empress.
I became the assistant to the French ambassador to Russia and served in that role for 4 years until the Empress died and then i returned triumphantly to France where i ditched the petticoats and was sent to London to draft the peace treaty that formally ended the Seven Years' War.
I stayed in London and spied on he English for the King and then a new Ambassador, Guerchy, arrived and that is where my story really starts.
The guy really didn't like me and tried to get me deported and when that didn't work he tried to poison me so i published much of the secret diplomatic correspondence about my role under the King an bitched about Guerchy and the French Government came gunning for me but i had held back the juiciest documents and threatened to release them if they didn't allow me to return to France as a free man and with a pension for my service.
The French had a law where women are pardoned for most misdemeanors and we came to an agreement that if i was to resume my role as a female, everything would be pardoned so i agreed if they threw in expenses for a new wardrobe of women's clothes and spent the rest of my days living as a female, saying that i felt free to let out my big secret that i had been a woman all along and had only pretended to be a male. I even wrote my memoirs explaining it all.
When France began to help the rebels during the American War of Independence, i trying to start up a division of women soldiers but the Government refused the offer and then my pension was ended by the French Revolution and i died in poverty and at my post-mortem they found out i had a penis the whole time which left everyone thoroughly confused.

France Should Learn From Other Right Wing Governments

Something we know from history without doubt is that right wing governments are all sorts of terrible and a favourite saying of mine is that not all right wingers are racist, but all the racists are on the right wing and France has a massive racist bidding to pitch up in the Élysée Palace in the shape of Marine Le Pen.
It was expected that the current French President Emmanuel Macron would win comfortably and carry on ruling the French roost but the latest polls show that his lead has evaporated before Sunday's first round of voting and now stands at 27% with Le Pen closing in on 24% which is within the margin of error.
Blaming his drop on his attention being on the war in Ukraine rather than campaigning for is re-election, Macron is now frantically trying to paint Le Pen as the racist she is, pointing to her links with Russia's Putin and her latest anti-immigration speech where she pledged to ban the headscarf in all public spaces and make it enforceable by law.
The political talking heads are concerned that although Marine Le Pen won't attract many new people to her cause, Macron has lost many of his own supporters and they won't come out to vote which will allow Le Pen to sneak through.
The French voters only have to look across the Channel to see what a right wing government looks like and how they are dragging us down or look across the Atlantic to see how electing a racist into power divides a country so Macron may not be great, but he is easily their least worst option.

Trump The (Awful) Businessman

We know what the first two fattest Presidents of America have been doing recently but we haven't heard much about the third fattest but he has been busy setting up a new Media outlet called 'Truth Social' which as expected, has turned into another failed business venture to go with all his other failed businesses.
How a man who has been declared bankrupt on at least five occasions can pitch himself as a great businessman is a mystery but it appears that it isn't about to become the 'media powerhouse' as promised, it will enter the history books alongside his other great failures such as Trump Airlines which defaulted on a $245 million loan and surrendering ownership of the airline to his creditors.
There was also Trump beverages (abandoned before making it to market), Trump: The Game (discontinued after poor sales), Trump magazine (folded after 2 years), Trump Mortgage (defaulted), Trump Steaks (pulled after two months for poor sales), Trump’s travel site (folded after 12 months), Trump Communications Company (abandoned before launch), Trump Tower Tampa (collapsed after being sued by buyers), Trump University (shut down and facing lawsuits) and Trump Vodka (abandoned after poor sales) Trumps Cologne (discontinued after poor sales).
The ultimate business failure has to be Trump casinos which should be a licence to print money but ended in £3 billion debt and bankruptcy  so the theme seems to be if something has the name 'Trump' on it, avoid it because it's a dog.
As a businessman he wasn't great but as he took a $19.9 trillion when he took the Presidency and increased it to $27 trillion when he left office, he wasn't any great shakes at national economics either but as his weight went from a hefty 16.9 stone (244 pounds) at the start of his Presidency to a morbidly obese 17.4 stone (244 pounds) when his morbidly dense supporters rioted 4 years later, he was good for the profits of fast food outlets as well as spray tan vendors.
The fattest President was 340 pounds or 24 stones of William Taft followed by Grover Cleveland who broke the scales at 280 pounds or 20 stones but if we suspend belief and Trump does become the 47th President, he may yet have a success and be the fattest President ever to go with his successes in already being the dumbest and most perverted.

Who We Are Arming In Ukraine

I don't know how supplying Ukraine with weapons to fight Russia with is not an act of war, it seems that if it isnt a British person in the tank or firing the weapon it doesn't count as us being involved but we are sending £100 million worth of rockets, guns and artillery to Ukraine to aid them in their fight against Putin's invading hordes.
As we have seen many times before, the problem with supplying weapons to a nation is that those same weapons can easily be turned against us as we found out with the Taliban who benefited from a decade of us shoving weapons at them only to see them forcibly shove them back at us when we fell out.  
The US Government estimated that between 2003 and 2016, the US unloaded 358,530 rifles, 64,000 machine guns, 25,327 grenade launchers and 22,174 Humvees to the Afghan forces it fought alongside, much of which ended up in the hands of the Taliban and ISIS which they used to bring such ruin to Iraq and Syria.
Obviously Ukraine is different to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan but there is evidence that one of the recipients of our military hardware is units like the card carrying Neo-nazi white supremacists Azov Battalion and Social National Assembly who said their mission statement is to: 'lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against Semite-led inferior races'.
Pre invasion, they were vilified for physically assaulting migrants, gypsies, the LGBTQ community and anyone who opposed their nationalist views and a report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHA) accused the Azov regiment of violating international humanitarian law but despite that they were drafted into the national Army to repel the Russian invaders although they were asked to remove the Nazi symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia from their uniforms.
The question to ask is when the war ends, and we all hope that will be soon, what happens to those powerful weapons which we have poured into a war-zone and is now in the hands of far right Nazi sympathisers?
Unfortunately, we have recent history to look at to see the horrendous answer to that question.

Nuclear Reactor Coming To A Town Near You

It has become obvious that Britain needs to generate more of its own power and on a windswept island surrounded by sea which would make it perfect for wind or wave generation, the Prime Minister has decided instead to build a nuclear reactor each year which will lead to: 'greater energy self-sufficiency with cheaper bills'.
They have already had a hell of a time finding sites for the nuclear reactors we already have as the locals protest about having a reactor near them not helped by a number of reports which concluded that there is an association between proximity of reactors and cancer risk and then despite all sorts of financial incentives, no council was willing to host the millions of tonnes of toxic radioactive waste from nuclear power stations which remains deadly to humans for hundreds of thousands of years.
Like most of our problems, the lack of energy problems go back to Margaret Thatcher and her right wing zeal to privatise the energy market and records show that since 1996, the furthest the records i could find go back, the average electricity bill has gone up by a third while the gas bill has gone up by just over a half but the real story is when we look at the average profit margins of the big six energy suppliers.
In 1996, the profits they made was just under 1% but in 2017 it was as much as 8.5% as a look at your gas and electric bill this year proves that when we were told that energy privitisation would 'Benefit British consumers and the competition would reduce prices and improve service quality' as Thatcher said hasn't turned out to be true.
The privatisation experiment has blatantly failed as it is obvious that it increase costs and lowers the quality of services because it is impossible for the private sector to deliver the same service for less and still make a profit and making a profit is the bottom line for businesses, the bloated increase in the profit margin of the big six shows who is benefiting and it isn't us but that's privatisation for you. Crap 'innit but still, you may get a shiny new nuclear reactor in your town, i just hope that the constant ticking of the Geiger counter doesn't keep you awake at night.

The Rishi Sunak Comedy Show

If i submitted a script of the going's on with the current Boris Johnson Government it would be returned as too unbelievable but over the last couple of years unbelievable is exactly what it has been.
We are still in the throes of Boris and his cohorts not following the Covid rules they imposed upon the rest of us and now we have a Chancellor and his family, the guy responsible for imposing tax laws upon us remember, not following them themselves.
With Boris hanging on by his fingertips as we wait for the MET to do their thing and issue him his fine for breaking lock-down rules, the Chancellor was seen as the natural successor but this week has blown any idea of him swapping number 11 for number 10 clean out of the water.
In what is beyond farce, the hapless chancellor just couldn’t get anything right this week with regards to his wife's legal, but highly unjustifiable, tax arrangements when it was revealed that she does not pay taxes in the UK on her annual millions due to her holding non-dom status.
That is to gloss over that some of her millions coming from Russia which the UK Government is sanctioning but the meat of the scandal is that she pays £30,000 per year to retain her non-dom status which means she doesn't have to pay tax to her husband in the UK.
Last week the gloves came off when he gave a mini-budget which he insisted alleviated the worst of the cost of living crisis but was immediately trashed by experts as not doing anything like it and then going to a petrol station and filling up someone else’s car, then tries to scan his card on the barcode reader.
Laughably bad for someone trying to appear in touch with the common man but worst was to come when it was revealed that the mega-rich chancellor persuading ordinary British people to do difficult things but couldn't even persuade his own wife, who is richer than the Queen, to pay her fair share tax.
To start with Rishi defended his wife saying that it is: 'how the system works for people like her who are international who have moved here' and then stated that it was unfair for the media to target his wife and compared himself to a certain Hollywood star, saying 'Both Will Smith and me, having our wives attacked'.
Then it revealed that both him and his wife held US Green Cards meaning they must pay US tax on their worldwide income and pledge that the US is their forever home, Rishi holding his for a year while he was employed as the Chancellor meaning he wasn't even paying UK Taxes while making the rules up for those of us who were.
Mrs Sunak has now said she will pay her fair share of taxes here going forward but too little too late because the Sunak family has united both the left and right against them, the left who object to her obscene personal wealth and using tax laws to avoid paying tax and the right who are frothing at the mouth racists at the best of times but even more now that they found out that she is not a British citizen but is Indian and paying her taxes either there or in the US (that's still not clear) and not patriotic enough.
At least with everyone getting so hot under the collar, it means people will use less heating so maybe we wont need that £200 loan the Chancellor is thankfully foisting upon us to pay our increasing heating bills.

Special Guest Blogger: Norse God Baldr

As Odin and Frigg’s son, i was a champion of goodness, innocence and forgiveness and was loved by everybody except Loki who really didn't like me and actually killed me although i was meant to be invulnerable.
I had a dream of my own death and my mother had the same dream so she came up with the idea of going to every single living thing in the Nine Worlds and have them each promise not to harm me, thus making me completely indestructible.
In fact, i was so impervious to injury that at banquets the Gods would amuse themselves by hurling sharp objects at me, not dying horribly was my hilarious party trick but Loki, who hated seeing anybody having fun, managed it.
When everything in all the world was promising not to hurt me, there was an exception. Mistletoe. Yep, mistletoe which was so insignificant and nonthreatening that mum didn’t even bother to ask it so when Loki found out and saw a chance to spoil the Gods fun, he made a spear of sharpened mistletoe and gave it to my blind brother, the god Höd, who threw it at me, killing me.
There was a resurrection clause, the Goddess Hel who ruled over the underworld realm, said that if all living things on Earth mourned me, I could be brought back to life but no, the old hag Thökk, refused to weep, saying i never did anything for her so why should she.
The old hag turned out to have be Loki in disguises and when my parents confronted him, he tried to escape by turning into a salmon but he was not slippery enough to escape and is currently chained in a cavern having snake venom dripped onto his face and bound by the entrails of his sons who the Gods disemboweled for the job.
My funeral was a grand affair, all kinds of beings from throughout the Nine Worlds attended the ceremony, there was gods, giants, elves, dwarves, valkyries and others and together they stood and watched as my body was placed on a mighty ship which was everything i could have wanted so they
set it on fire but it was so big and heavy that they had to get Hyrrokin, a giantess, to push it out to sea.  
There are vague plans for me to come back at some point in the future but until then i am spending my time in Hel and it isn't as bad as it's cracked up to be if you ignore the damp and dark conditions and ignore the howls of terror from people being murdered by serpent venom and dragons sucking the blood from their bodies. Apart from that it's okay really.

Special Guest Blogger: Pachacuti

My name means 'he who shakes the earth' and i was the ninth Sapa Inca of the Kingdom of Cusco which was little more than a small hamlet which i transformed into the Inca Empire complete with the Inca site of Machu Picchu.
I did that by taking over from my brother, Urco, after he ran away from an invading army of our arch-enemies, the Chanka, but i took charge, beat them and took the crown. I captured many Chanka leaders and presented them to my father Viracocha for him to wipe his feet on their bodies, the traditional victory ritual.
I was much more ruthless and conquering than he was and had a vision to expanding my dominion from the valley of Cusco to nearly the whole of western South America and i set out conquering many ethnic groups and states and engineering a reputation as an exceptional leader, the Incan's even began calling me the son of the Sun.
I ran massive programs displacing hundreds of thousands of people and resettling them to colonise the most remote edges of our empire but my most successful tactic was being such a nut that nobody would dare take me on.
I'd behead them and drink from their skulls, pull out their teeth and wear them as charms and make flutes out of their bones but i had a special punishment for any rival chiefs we captured.
I would disembowel them, stuff them full of straw like a gross scarecrow and then rest their fingers on the stretched skin of their belly so in the breeze they'd tap that belly like a drum.
My reputation meant that rather than going through the whole hassle of invading, i would just send a message to other leaders inviting them to join our empire and most accepted peacefully rather than become part of the thigh bone flute orchestra.
I don't know if the rest of my family had a defective gene or something but my other brothers were terrible at the whole conquering thing, honestly some people are natural leaders and bravely explore uncharted territory while other people are lucky to get their loin-clothes on in the morning without serious injury, so i had no choice but to have them killed and two of my three sons turned out to be from the same side of the gene pool so they ended up a bit dead also.
My eldest son was a chip off the old block though and he succeed me when i died and the mighty Incan empire lasted for years and could have kept going if it wasn't for the disease riddled Spanish turning up determined to drag as much of our gold back to Spain as their galleons could carry and sneezing all over us.

Special Guest Blogger: Frank Worthington

The Seventies were football's Sixties and i was part of the generation of rock n roll footballers, a bunch of footballing gypsies, travelling from club to club, rarely winning trophies but having a hell of a time.
In my career i played for 24 clubs in England, the US, Sweden, South Africa, the Republic of Ireland and Wales and despite being described by the England Manager Joe Mercer as one of the best centre-forwards of all time, i only got 8 caps because Revie and Ramsey never fancied me, Ramsey never forgave me for turning up to an under-23 trip in high-heeled cowboy boots and Don Revie played me for 87 minutes across his first two matches before giving up on me because he didn't like my off pitch behaviour which he thought was unbecoming of an England player.
Then there was the hair, the clothes, the women, the fast cars which saw me make four court appearances for driving offences within a single year and i could be a bit stroppy, falling out with one club manager after refusing to go on an outing to a vineyard and with another when i was not allowed to play my favourite Elvis cassette on the team coach but my most enduring moment was my almost move to Liverpool.
Bill Shankly was desperate to sign me but i failed the medical for high blood pressure and Shanks sent me away for a week of relaxation in Majorca before retaking the medical.
Seven days of carousing, which involved two Swedish blondes, a night with Miss Great Britain, a casual encounter at the airport with a woman whose name i didn’t catch and a night with a young Belgian beauty, i came back and retook the medical and my blood pressure was even higher.
The Liverpool transfer therefore never happened so i moved to Leicester instead, and spent the following summer on holiday in Mallorca with George Best where i met the former Miss Sweden Birgitta Egermalm.
By the time we returned she was pregnant and we were engaged leading to an attempt at domestic life that was so unsuccessful Leicester eventually paid to move me out of the family home and into a hotel.
I did promise Leicester i would attempt to settle down a bit and i did, instead of going out seven times a week on the lash, i only went out six so it was a great time to be a footballer but over the years my fellow football wild-men, guys like George Best, Rodney Marsh, Peter Osgood, Stan Bowles, Charlie George, Tony Currie all died and i carried the coffins of many of them although to be honest, that wasn't easy to do one handed while keeping the other free for a fag/ champagne flute/ betting slip/ comb/ Miss World or keys to the Ferrari.
I went to the great changing room in the sky aged 72 after Alzheimer's did for me but there won't be many from today's footballers making it into football's rock'n'roll hall of fame, they all try too hard, aren't pretty enough and there isnt a decent pair of sideburns amongst the lot of them.

Special Guest Blogger: Emperor Maximinus Thrax

Growing up, you will be told that to be a success you must try hard at school, get a good education and try your best but sometimes growing into a a huge lump is all you need, well that worked for me.     
Coming from Barbarian stock and knowing about 4 words in Latin and two of those were swear words, ending up as Emperor of the Roman Empire was unexpected and it all started off when i approached Emperor Septimius Severus and asked if i could compete in the military games that he was holding.
He said why not and 16 beaten opponents later, he was impressed enough to offer me a job as his personal bodyguard.
I protected his body so well that when he died i became the the next Emperors personal bodyguard as well, then the next one, then the next one also and was made Tribune of the Fourth Legion, and was given a legion to train.
Eventually Emperor Alexander made me the commander of the entire Roman army, which didn't turn out well for him because that army rose up and executed him and the soldiers declared me Emperor.
The Senators were not pleased, we can't have a barbarian running the Empire they said but the army had spoken and they didn't want to argue with a few thousand men armed with swords so they begrudgingly accepted and it was all hail Maximinus!
Things began pretty quietly, i made a lot of cuts and put up taxes but i fixed the roads and infrastructure and even led a successful campaign into Germania but Rome was a very murdery place and i was always waiting for the Senators to replace me and after an unsuccessful coup, i got in first and began executing them.
Killing them didn't go down well with the surviving Senators who decided to not bother trying to kill me so when i was away in Gaul, they planned to just crown a new Emperor so they picked Pupienus and Balbinus, two of their own members, as co-emperors.
I said i wasn't haven't any of that and marched back to Italy to reclaim my rule, but when i came to Aquileia, i found the city gates closed, appears putting up taxes and cutting food really ticked off the citizens and they showed it by firing Sulphur and fire at me and my soldiers outside the gates.
The siege dragged on, the army ran out of provisions, and i blamed the soldiers and had the generals executed which united the soldiers, unfortunately united them against me and a group of them stabbed me in the head with their spears several times while i was sleeping which by some freak chance proved fatal.
They mounted my head on a pole to show the people of Aquileia i was dead and then sent it on to the Senate but as 238ad became known as the year of six emperors, i guess the next five didn't fare any better.

Pagan's Approve Of Your Easter Tree

A Jehovah Witness, Muslim and a Christian sounds like the start of a joke but it is the three people i said 'Nah' to today when they tried to hand me something and engage me in conversation about their flavour of religion but with Easter coming up, this is their time to shine or it would be if anyone but them really gave a stuff or even knew what Easter was about apart from eating your own weight in chocolate.
Easter with it's bunnies and bonnets has always been the poor relation to Christmas with its twinkly lights and decorations but walking through the town center shops this weekend i saw something new in the shape of Easter crackers, Easter wreaths, and even an Easter tree.
Obviously the Christian's and the shops are hoping that the long bank holiday weekend will begin to look a lot like Christmas with special Easter decorations in the shape of bunnies, chicks and eggs to hang from the twigs of the Easter tree which means we have gone full circle back to the Pagan Fertility Goddess Eostre who had all that and more in her Anglo-Saxon period celebrations.
What the Christian's are hoping is that everyone has forgotten that almost every Christian festival is taken from other older religious festivals and it was Saint Augustine who was responsible for the whole rubbing out the original Gods and pasting in his own Christian guy thing but he obviously got lazy with Easter and didn't change the name enough to disguise the origins of Eostre so decorate a tree, hang a wreath and enjoy looking at the liddle bunny rabbits and remember what Easter is all about, a celebration of a Pagan Goddess and nothing whatsoever to do with a guy and a cross.  

Tory Hat-Trick For MP David Warburton

Conservative MP David Warburton was little known outside of his constituency but the married father of two has found himself catapulted into the headlines when a picture emerged of him next to four lines of suspicious looking white powder, several women reported him to parliament’s harassment watchdog for sexual assault and the parliamentary commissioner for standards is investigating a £100,000 loan from a Russian businessman, Roman Joukovski, without declaring it.
One former aide says Warburton coerced her into returning to his flat and then touched her inappropriately and the second was taken to his flat, touched her against her will and physically stopped her from leaving. Both women struggled to get a hearing due to his wife being the parliamentary aide responsible for reporting it is his wife.
Following the Tory MP hat trick of sex and drugs allegations as well as trousering Russian money, Warburton has had the whip removed and insists that he has 'enormous amounts of defence, but unfortunately the way things work means that doesn’t come out first'.
The ever dependably ridiculous far right Daily Mail journalist Sarah Vine thinks that the MPs alleged sexually assault, snorting cocaine & receiving Russian money is a sign of a midlife crisis and she may have a point so to all you people pointing fingers, let he or she who has not been accused of alleged multiple sexual assaults, photographed with lines of cocaine and loaned £100,000 by a dodgy Russian businessman cast the first stone.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do (Except in January, March, November Or December)

The old expression claims that it's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all but if you have found yourself suddenly single, always remember there are plenty more fish in the sea although whether a relationship with a Halibut is a good idea is your own affair but as we have just moved into April, your relationship is probably okay for now because it isn't one of the five times in the year when the population of Dumpsville increases.
Using facebook data as a guide, it has been calculated that the most break-up-iest times of the year when relationship implosions happen are January 1st when one partner decides the start of a new year is time to reflect on their life and they want to begin the new year with a fresh start.
Make it past the New Year and the next danger date is February 14th as Valentines Day as all that talk of love and relationships forces any cracks in your relationship to show but the next danger date comes around before the cards and chocolate wrappers are still in the bin as Mid March brings sunshine, more time outdoors and the realisation that being cosied up at home in Winter is very different to the soon to be
here long, sultry nights.
So you make it through Summer and the sight of each other in bikini's and budgie smugglers and then the Calendar pages turn to November and the Christmas things are in the shops and thoughts turn to the opposite of the mid-March period and whether one partner really wants to be holed up with the other person for the next five months.  
The final time to navigate is early December when Christmas is steaming at us over the horizon and that focuses minds on whether they want to spend money on a present and stuck with someone they are not all that into over the fun Christmas and New Year's Eve periods.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that all things happen for a reason and now that he or she is out of your life you can find someone that isn't an absolute douchebag because lets face it, if they dumped you because they didn't want to buy you Christmas Present, they are complete douchebag's and it wasn't you, it was 100% them.

Vampire Appliances

Unless you are multi-millionaire, don't even think of looking at your Utility bill or your ceiling because the first would have gone through through the second after 1st April and as much as the Government are trying to blame Russia invading Ukraine for it, they were on their way up long before Vladimir Putin decided that what Ukraine needed was a lot more missile craters.
My nan had a thing about going around turning off everything electrical at the wall before she took out her teeth last thing at night because as she said 'I'm not paying for something i'm not using at night' which could apply equally to her teeth or the TV but the wee small hours is when i charge my mobile phone and my vape batteries and when i turn off the living room light their are a number of little orange glowing lights of things on stand-by so was nan right and should things be turned off at the wall at night?   
A recent study by the UK's largest supplier of electricity says too right we should as as much as 25% of our electrical usage is down to what they called vampire devices sucking our power during the night even when we think they're switched off.
I always assumed that once my phone, Kindle or vape batteries reached 100%, they just stopped but apparently all chargers draw energy constantly, even if they're not charging.
TV's use power constantly unless switched off at the mains, anything with an LED display or a stand-by light does also such as the microwave, oven and thermostat, stereo and DVD player, wifi router, printer and Sky box, dishwasher and washing machine I begin to count the number of chargers in my house that i never bother pulling out of their sockets and all the vampire appliances i leave on stand-by and doing some quick mental calculation based on my latest reading, it comes to approximately a billion pounds a year i am wasting which means i either have to bang a wooden stake through the Sky box or just remember to switch it off at the wall.