Favourite Royal Award To The Queen

You can't turn around without risking your eye being poked out by a Union Flag as Britain gears up for the Queens 70th Jubilee celebrations and Johnny Rotten may have called it a fascist regime and the Queen ain't no human being but she is the nations favourite Royal according to  an IPSOS poll with 45% of Brits who were asked to rank the Royal family.
Next favourite is the Duchess of Cambridge Kate, or The Duchess of Cambridge as she is also known, is the second most popular family member, with 32% of the nation voting for her which will give her bragging rights in Buck House as she is ahead of her third place husband William, the Duke of Cambridge who polled 28%.
The next King, Prince Charles, got half as much as his eldest son with 14% but above his other son the Duke of Sussex with Harry scraping to 11% then Camilla the Duchess of Cornwall and then the other Duchess, the one of Sussex, who got approval from just 6% of her mother-in-laws subjects.
The Queen's other children, Edward and Anne polled under 5% and the numbers for Prince Andrew were not given but after his recent headlines, to quote the Sex Pistols again at him, no future, no future, no future for you.

Sometimes Conspiracy Theory Is Conspiracy Fact

The secret to a good conspiracy theory is that it has just enough of a grain of truth in it that it makes people go 'hmmm...i wonder' but it seems that the conspiracy theories doing the rounds these days are just too far out, 5G spreading Covid and the earth is Flat for example, that they are easily dismissed and nobody but the most gullible will wonder about them.
By and large most conspiracy theories don't get out of the starting blocks so the idea of the US Government spraying San Francisco with disease to replicate a biological weapon attack or deliberately putting poison in alcohol which killed over 10,000 people or even releasing 300,000 mosquito's infected with yellow fever into Georgia to test a new weapon are the rantings of a lunatic...or are they?
You may want to keep filling your bunker with canned goods and keep that tin foil close by because while most conspiracy theories are nonsense, there are a few that actually aren't theories at all but actual history because they actually happened.
The US Government DID spray Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria over San Francisco in 1950 in Operation Sea-Spray to determine how vulnerable the city was to a bio-weapon attack and this was duplicated by the UK Government but they went one better and mixed phenol and anthrax to their dosage when they sprayed it across south Dorset in 1971.
While the people of San Francisco were receiving treatment for urinary tract infections, South Georgians were fighting off the 300,000 mosquitoes infected with yellow fever which their Government, in Operation Big Buzz, had kindly dropped on them to test using the insects as weapon as war.
In 1920's America, the Prohibition laws were in full swing and the Government really wanted to dissuade people from drinking alcohol so they thought if some people got really, really sick the rest would stay well clear although they possibly got the mix wrong because at least 10,000 people did stop drinking permanently as well not breathing or actually living, killed by their own Government.    
At least the 6,000 babies they used to perform atomic tests on in the 1950's and 60's were already dead and snatched from hospitals without parental consent although the 300 men, women and children in a black area of Oklahoma were not until after the US Airforce dropped incendiary bombs on them in the 1920's when they rioted over a black man being accused of rape.
At least in the Gulf of Tonkin attack they left their own people alone and faked an attack on their own warships by the North Vietnamese to give them the cover to go to war with the Communists so next time that person in the pub mentions chem-trails or Bill Gates injecting us all with Covid so he can take over the world, it may be easy to laugh at them and congratulate ourselves for being smarter than they are, but sometimes the stupidest conspiracy theories might actually have more than a grain of truth in them.
The overwhelming majority don't of course, but occasionally...

Special Guest Blogger: Leo Fender

Of all the members of a band, the lead guitarist is the one everyone wants to be. It is very rare that anyone stands in front of the mirror with a tennis racquet pretending to play bass or bop their parents upturned pots and pans with a wooden spoon aspiring to fill Ringo Starr's shoes.
It is either the singer or lead guitarist the vast majority of people dream of being, the charismatic ones at the front of the stage fingering their fret board, grabbing their whammy bar and twanging their G-string, so to speak.
My influence on rock music is second only to hard drugs but if my name doesn't ring any bells with you then how about Ritchie Blackmore, Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Buddy Holly, David Gilmour, Jimi Hendrix, Mark Knopfler or Nile Rodgers who all used my guitar to make their hits.      
I didn't invent the electric guitar but i used my background in electronics to perfect it and it all began after i built a PA system for a band which led to other bands coming to me and asking for other things such as a way to increase the sound of their amplified acoustic guitars which were beginning to show up on the big band and jazz music scene.
In the 1950's big bands fell out of vogue to be replaced by small combos playing boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, country and western and honky-tonk and they prefered the electric guitar as they were loud, cheaper and durable. My real love was country music and it was with this music in mind that i set about creating my first electric guitars, wanting to provide better instruments for the cowboy songs about dead dogs and pick-up trucks that i loved so much.
Despite the fact that my new venture revolved around manufacturing guitars, i never actually got around to learning how to play them, relying on actual musicians to help him with the design of the guitars and we came up with the Fender Esquire that looked cool and was easy to hold, tune and play, then the Broadcaster and then Telecaster and then hit pay-dirt with the Stratocaster after musicians requested a guitar which made it easier to reach the upper registers.
It was just as Rock N Roll was taking off that i contracted a sinus infection that impaired my health and forced me to sell my company although i did form another company in the 1970s making guitars but we couldn't improve on my previous versions so we just tinkered with the original designs until i developed Parkinson's which got so bad that i had to while away my last days at home listening to other people playing my instruments on the radio.  
My success was down to knowing nothing about the thing i was creating and designing it purely based on what other people who did know were telling me to do which worked out well not only for me but also fans of long haired, shirtless men smoking a whole cigarette without removing it from their mouth while playing 10 minute guitar solo's on my Guitar and you won't see Rickenbacker playing Peter Buck of REM do that.

Tonight's Tau Herculid's Meteor Shower

Every August, between the 12/13th and 13/14th, my husband and i find ourselves sat on a hill in Exmoor watching the Perseid meteor shower although it usually takes the form of one of us saying 'Wow, that was a good one' to the other who was looking at a different patch of sky.
Usually, the Perseid's with it's 100 meteors per hour rate is the highlight of the year for stargazers but this May we have the Tau Herculid's Meteor Shower which has astronomers jangling their telescopes excitedly as it promise a once in a generation shower to rival the Great 1966 Leonid Storm which threw down 40 meteors per second.  
The Earth is set to plough through a particularly dense trail of debris from the romantically named 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann (or SW3) comet although there is some concern over how fast the particles are moving, the slower they are travelling the fainter the meteors will be so rather than the bright, colourful meteors of the Perseid's, they could be much fainter but if they are falling at 40 a second, more than enough will be visible or they would be if not for one quirk of fate for us on the British Isles.
In Britain, on the morning of 31st May, the Sun rises at 04:55am so at 06:00am when the Earth's spin takes us face first into the shedding SW3 debris, we will already be bathed in the bright sunlight of the new day which means no amazing Meteor Shower for us here but at least we still have the August Perseid's and a trip to a hill in Exmoor to look forward to, cloud cover permitting. 

Special Guest Blogger: Dick Whittington

I expect most people thought i was a fairy story or pantomime but oh no it isn't, i was a real person who the fairy tale was based upon although some artistic licence was taken and my story embellished slightly so i will try and put it right here.
The poor boy from Gloucestershire who set out for London to make his fortune accompanied by his cat was actually the son of a very wealthy family in Gloucestershire who sent me to London to work as a textile trader and it was just me, no cat accompanied me.
The bit where i met with little success and on the way back home heard the Bow Bells of London ringing and takes that as a message, i'm afraid that never happened and i was actually so successful in selling silk and velvet's to the nobility and Royals such as King Richard II who i actually loaned large sums of money to when he had a bit of a financial crisis.
As for the cat, in the original etching i was holding a skull for some reason (artists, what you gonna do) but that was later deemed a bit odd and eerie and the style of the time when having your portrait painted was to be holding or stroking a cat so the skull was replaced by a cat and somehow the moggy became became part of my story but i never owned a cat let alone loaned it out to sailors to catch rats.
I did marry Alice FitzWaryn and i was the Mayor of London three times, the first time offered the role by the King as a short term replacement for the previous Mayor who died and then elected twice by grateful Londoners who approved of me personally financing the rebuilding of the London Guildhall and creating a hospital ward for unmarried mothers, drainage systems, libraries, churches and a 128 seat public lavatory.
I died childless and left most of my money to charity when i died and as far as i knew that was that and i would be a footnote in the history of London but at some point in the 17th Century i became a character in an English story that was adapted for the stage as a play and then made into the pantomime everyone knows today so it was probably a good thing that the cat replaced the skull in my portrait because otherwise that would be a very different, and scarier, kids show each Christmas.

The Green Levies Lie

The rising cost of gas and electricity has prompted calls from those sceptical of climate action, to remove the part of energy bills that help pay for things like renewable energy projects or home insulation to help lower bills.
One Conservative MP was on TV this morning repeating the line that green levies make up 25% of energy bills even when he was told that actually the green part of the bill is only 8% but he wasn't going to be put off his point by something as trivial as facts and ignored them, continuing to rant about Environmentalists and whatever other bee he had in his too tightly tied bonnet about people wanting to save the planet.
A UK government spokesperson later explained that: 'Energy bill increases are due to record-high wholesale gas prices and not green levies which represent a small fraction of bills' but again, that doesn't sit well with the anti-green lobby who wing on about wind turbines ruining the countryside and how coal and oil is the only solution.
Renewable sources generate 40% of the electricity produced in the UK so what we should be doing is pushing even harder to increase this percentage, we obviously have the technology in place creating the power to our plug sockets and the more we generate from wind, solar and tidal power, the less effect the wholesale prices have on our fuel bills.
The Good Energy website states there are 8,600 onshore wind turbines and 2,300 offshore turbines in the UK along with 500 solar farms and two working tidal power stations so if the Government can double what we have, that would account for 80% of the energy we need and we won't need to be subject to the whims of the energy companies profit margins.
The sticking point is that of the billions of pounds the energy companies make, more than a million of it has made it's way to the Conservatives coffers since 2019 so obviously they are in no rush to produce our own power as it would impact on their funding from those same companies so expect to hear the 25% Green Levies lie repeated again and again because if you tell a lie and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. 

Why Boris Shouldn't Quit

If we found out anything from the Sue Grey report into Downing Street lock-down parties, it was that the half-arsed response to the Pandemic could be explained by most of the people responding to it were either drunk or hungover.
With WTF (Wine Time Friday's) and WTT (Wine Time Tuesdays), Thursday was the only midweek day when a decision could be made when the decision makers weren't either pissed or recovering from being pissed unless of course if someone was leaving that day and even Thursday's then saw the mini-fridge stocked up with alcohol from the local off-licence.
Anyone with any self-worth would have trudged off to whoever runs these things to hand in their resignation in disgrace but this Government doesn't do disgrace, Boris Johnson and the top Civil Servants who were photographed necking bottles of booze in rooms full of people while being in rooms full of people was banned for the rest of us, have refused to resign and are hoping to divert attention away with the shiny baubles of financial help with the cost of living.
If all it took for the Government to actually give a toss about the people it represents then maybe they should get caught out having even more piss-ups but the opposition parties are not taking it and are insisting that the Prime Minister resign but i say hang on Keir Starmer and whoever that guy is currently in charge of the Liberal Democrats, think about this.
Anger at Boris Johnson is everywhere, he is easily the most unpopular Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher in her Poll-Tax pomp and Tony Blair when he teamed up with George W Bush to invade Iraq so leave him in power because everytime he shows up on TV bumbling inanely about something or other, he is a constant reminder of how he and his gang partied while telling us the most important thing was to stay at home and protect each other and under no circumstances should we party.
More and more Conservative MP's are getting this and are saying how they can see their seats disappearing at the next Election so why would you want to remove a man who is continually punching his own people and the already discontent electorate in the face?
Just leave him there and let the sore fester and don't allow the Tories to say they have 'changed', 'moved on' or 'learnt their lessons' and come the next election, Boris won't be able to find a fridge big enough to hide from his enraged, now unemployed, colleagues and we can have some proper grown ups running things.

Relax About Monkeypox If Born Before May 1971

The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy put the number of Monkeypox cases at 226 across 21 nations and almost half of those cases are in Great Britain who has clocked up 106 although thankfully all cases have been mild with no fatalities.
Some more excitable people are declaring it a new global pandemic which will lead us back into lock-downs but they can be safely ignored because Monkeypox is not even in the same league as Covid-19 which has accounted for 6.3 million deaths Worldwide and counting.
Whereas Coronavirus is airborne and spread through coughs and sneezes, Monkeypox is contracted by contact with an infected person but most importantly we have a vaccine and most people would already have had it and are immune from most diseases which have the suffix -pox.
Anyone born before May 31 1971 in the UK would have legally have to have had a smallpox vaccine at 3 months of age, if parents of these children failed to comply with the legislation, they faced fines and even the possibility of jail time so if you are over 51 on 31 August 2022, congratulations you are protected by a vaccine with 95% effectiveness against anything which contains the word pox including poxy sheep, horses, fowl, cow, goat, swine and monkeys.
If you were born after May 1971 or your parents were in Dartmoor or Wormwood scrubs for an unexplained few months during your infancy, then you may need to be a bit more careful but for the rest of us pre-May 1971-ers, we can relax.

Mass Shooting...Guess Where

Whenever the newsreader starts a story with 'There has been a mass shooting...' you just know the end of that sentence is going to be '...in America' because like Mom's Apple Pie and pick up trucks, shooting kids while they attend school is a purely American thing as is doing absolutely nothing about it ever happening again because to some the right to own a gun is much more important that your kids surviving their education.
The usual statement from good ol' boys with NRA bumper stickers is that it is too soon to discuss gun control and that 'too soon' period seems to extend right up until the next mass shooting in which case the original 'too soon' period had lapsed and the next one starts.
Anyone with a few brain cells rattling around can see that it is blindingly obvious what America needs is someone to do something about the bat-shit crazy gun laws in their country, laws which make it perfectly legal for a kid on his 18th birthday to go buy a gun and ammunition in which to mow down 19 children and two adults in a classroom but they have to wait an unspecified amount of time to talk about it because
heaven forbid any new laws are made during a time of heightened emotions in the aftermath of yet another shooting rather than say on the anniversary of anyone burying their children who never made it into their teenage years.
From my reckoning, there is approximately a ten minute window between the armed shooter leaving his home with his killing machine and arriving at his targeted setting (school/workplace/supermarket) in which it is not 'too soon' and anyone wanting to discuss changing the gun laws can bring it up before the window slams down and the 'too soon' stopwatch resets as the first bullet ridden body of a student/colleague/shopper hits the floor.
In reality, what the sort of people who quote 'the second amendment' and parade around town proudly carrying military grade weaponry want is for the the window of opportunity, the window of actually doing something, closed before it has even opened which is exactly what happens and Joe Biden may say things like 'When in God's name are we going to do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?' but he knows the answer is never because despite everyone knowing what should be done, it won't be and the rest of the world will still be finishing that first line of the newsreader for many, many, many more mass shootings in the home of the second amender for decades to come.

Special Guest Blogger: Adam

So God has been there forever but it's anyone's guess what was he doing before he got to thinking, hmmm, what i need is a Planet to watch over and if i got any clay left over, i'll scrape myself together a human.
Things were actually quite sweet at the start, i had the whole garden to myself which was very pleasant and quiet and God told me to just knock about enjoying myself but then i went to bed one night and woke up with a sore side and a strange long-haired creature with a different shape looking at me.  
I asked her how the hell she got here and then how come she got extra bits up there but a bit missing down there and it seems that during the night God sneaked down like a thief and steals one of my ribs and from this stolen bone, which i'm sure i needed by the way, he makes a woman as my companion.
I told her this was the Garden of Eden and if she just kept quiet and still for a couple minutes at a time, we would get on fine but she looked around and said with all the trees and rocks and things it should be called the Park of Eden, not a Garden.
God came to tell us both that we can do what we want but he'll only tell us this once, don't eat the fruit from that tree, that tree there beside the rhododendron bush, the last one before the gate, yes that one right there, the tree of knowledge.
That was mistake number one, why call it that? Obvious we were bound to be curious. Call it the tree of deadly curses or the tree of stupidity but the tree of knowing things and then don't point it out which tree it actually is, that's just asking for trouble.
So Eve goes for a wonder and bumps into this snake and not just any old snake but a talking snake and he tells her if she eats an apple from that special tree she would know the difference between good and evil so that's mistake number two right there.
If you have the divine ability to make anything, why would you make a talking snake and why make it talk in English, if it had spoken to Eve in Swahili or even Chinese then we wouldn't have had a problem but God in his infinite wisdom gave it the ability to speak our language perfectly and it says have one of the apples and she says she shouldn't really as we were told not to but snakes are very persuasive and she ate one.
Right afterwards God comes thundering down, his face all red and angry and says right, i told you not to do that so you now know the difference between good and evil and because of that man must toil the field, women's punishment is that childbirth will be really, really be painful but the snake, the one who effed up everything in the first place remember, they must crawl on their bellies all it’s days. Their snake’s, crawling on their bellies are what they do so not really much of a punishment for snakes.
The upshot was that it is our fault that there is suffering in the world, God is not to blame so remember men, when you are breaking your back in the field or you women are screaming in agony from childbirth pains, that God loves you. Focus on that and not the icky business of the many, many generations of incest that followed Eve and i. Eeewww.

Special Guest Blogger: John Kellogg

The Middle Ages had the Black Death and 1918 had the influenza epidemic but the scourge sweeping the land at the end of the 19th century was masturbation and excessive sexual intercourse.
I was a Seventh Day Adventists and as well as requiring us to adhere to strict guidelines for hygiene, diet and chastity, we considered the spilling of the seed not in the act of creating life as sacrilegious and as a semi famous doctor and medical spa owner, i took it upon myself to launch a crusade to keep men and women from the unholy act of masturbating and i did it with bland food.
My first considerations were electric shocks, sewing the foreskin shut or circumcision for boys and dripping carbolic acid on the clitoris of girls but instead i plumped for creating an entire segment of the food industry, one without excitants known to fire the blood.
The most blandest foodstuff with the bonus of providing nutrition without any hint of stimulation that i could think of was thin flakes of corn arguing that eating bland foods would not incite passions, whereas spicy or well-seasoned foods would cause a reaction in people’s sexual organs that incited them to masturbate.
I was happy to let my Cornflakes take care of those sexual urges and cared more about my religious mission than making a profit but my brother was a businessman who marketed the product by adding sugar and sweetening the corn flakes which completely negated my idea to stop people self abusing.
He also patented Peanut Butter and Soy milk while i was writing my book 'Plain Facts about Sexual Life', four volumes and 900 pages of how touching yourself intimately was a one way ticket direct to the insane asylum and Satan's pitchfork up your backside.
My idea of deterring masturbation never took off and nor did my idea of eugenics where people of good pedigrees were encouraged to procreate exclusively with those of a certain standard of racial hygiene, or to put it another way, not those damned blacks.
So because of my brother changing my recipe, everybody's still doing it, some people do it a lot. Some of you reading this are doing it right now but i am much more relaxed about it these days, just keep one hand free to scroll through the page and you might want to give the keyboard a wipe afterwards, nobody likes a sticky space bar.

Special Guest Blogger: St Margaret Clitherow

At the start i had just about everything on life's menu going for me, a steady job in my fathers wax candle shop, a lovey home overlooking the picturesque Pennines and was engaged to a rich butcher but something was missing, raised a Protestant i had a deep yearning to be a Catholic.
It was the time of Elizabeth I and the Church of England’s breakaway from the Catholic Church due to the Queens randy father and being Catholic was a big no-no, punishable by death but when my father died and my mother remarried i decided it was a good time to step out of the religious closet and announce myself as a Catholic.
One of Elizabeth's laws was everyone had to attend parish church services but as i considered them to be heretically Protestant, i refused to go and pretty soon i was on the list of non-attenders, the neighbours having noticed the empty pew space next to my husband who did attend.
I was summonsed to appear in court and was sentenced to York Castle Prison for 3 months along with several other Catholic women who were also found guilty of non-attendance of church.
My step father was one of the local municipal assembly alderman and he did his best to keep me out of prison when i still refused to go to the services but when my mother died he changed his tune and decided that his troublesome Catholic stepdaughter was not his problem anymore and i was arrested.
True, when they turned up they did find a load of Catholic priests holding Mass in a secret room in my house so when i was in the dock in front of the judge, when he asked me if i was guilty or not guilty, i just shrugged.
The judge sentenced me to strong and harsh punishment, or in his words: 'Stripped naked, laid down, with a sharp stone placed beneath your back, with as much weight laid upon you until you are pressed to death' which satisfies the pretty strong and harsh condition i think you will agree.
My family first claimed i was pregnant and as it was illegal to harm an unborn child i should not be squished to death but the judge ordered an examination which in 16th Century England meant a doctor asking 'Are you pregnant?' Again i shrugged and the death penalty was upheld.
A few Protestant preachers tried to convince me to renounce Catholicism but i said 'Nah' so that's how i found myself naked, on a stone with a heavy wooden slab on my body.
There was a brief moment when the Sheriffs men refused to place the heavy weights onto my body but the Sheriffs rounded up beggars and got them to do it instead and that's how i became one of 300 executed in England for not attending a church full of ignorant Protestants who had yet to realise that the only reason they are not Catholic anymore is because their founder wanted to slip it to his wife's hot, young friend.

Special Guest Blogger: Dom Pérignon

As the son of a local vineyard owner in the Champagne region of France, when i entered the Benedictine Order i was asked to help out with their wine which to be polite, was awful tasting stuff and as they sold it to finance the Monastery they were in the right place because it would take a miracle for them to make any money from it.
First up was modernising their grape press and i came up with a method to make a clear white wine from black grapes and reintroducing the cork as a more effective seal and using English glass which was stronger and better able to withstand pressure due to the secondary fermentation process which would make the bottles explode when the CO2 built up.
All well and good but it still tasted like sewage water but the problem was the fermentation method which continued once the wine was in the bottle so i told them to harvest in cool conditions and blend the grapes before sending them to the press.
Some of the locals were invited to taste it and the wife of a influential wine seller was invited and she was a very buxom lady and took a huge gulp and almost chocked as the bubbles lodged in her chest which wasn't surprising as there was plenty of room for a couple of lodgers in there.
The wines not only tasted better and sold so well locally that the monastery’s began selling the wines further afield, such as Paris and London, soon we were sending barrels of the stuff all over and i had the business sense to name it after myself.
The monastery wine process was taken over by Moët & Chandon and became one of the most highly prized sparkling champagnes in the world and i worked as the cellar master until i died.
So i never invented Champagne, i just made it taste better for the sort of people who wear name-tags at parties.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Prometheus

Other, lesser religions have their own spin on how we got here, but despite what they say there was only one visionary creator of mankind and that was me with a bit of help from my pal Athena.
I was making man out of clay a long time before the Christians decided they needed a similar story, threw in a talking snake and some apples and put it in their newly written book but they missed out the bit where the creator gave the humans fire and was chained to a rock with an eagle tearing at his liver which grew back everyday.
I was constantly pursuing my own private projects, attempting to stamp my genius upon the Universe and finally coming up with the controversial but strangely popular homo-sapiens which were made in the likeness of the gods and Athena breathed life into them.
As protector of mankind i was always keen to do the best for them but Zeus disliked the creatures, but he couldn't uncreate them. He did, however, confine them to the Earth and denied them immortality. I felt sorry for the humans, so i stole a spark of fire from Hephaestus's kiln and gave it to them and taught them various arts and skills which was much appreciated by the poor huddled mortals as life was extremely tough down there on the hard cold Earth.
Zeus’s said only the God's can have fire and dished out the punishment which ends with an Eagle wiping liver off its beak every day.
The punishment was supposed to last for all eternity but after a thousand years Zeus got fed up with the other Gods harassing him over it so Zeus offered me my freedom if i could reveal a secret. Now i knew that he had the hots for the sea-nymph Thetis so i told him she would have a child that would become greater than his father so he arranged for her to marry a mortal so that her son would not pose a challenge to him.
For this information he sent Hercules to shoot the damned eagle that tormented me and break the chains that bound me so next time someone is trying to tell you how you humans got there, remember me enduring the endless torture of having an eagle tear out my innards every single day meaning i i died multiple times for a thousand years not for your sins but for your fire, and fire is much more useful than sins.

Fruit Farms: Travelling To, And Back Home Again, With No Wi-Fi

OptinMonster has a list of the Ultimate List of Blogging Statistics and Facts which they say will 'give you some insight and help you make healthy decisions for your blog’s future' so not sure if they have looked here and are hinting at something but let's dive into their Facts and Statistics and see what we can learn.
Each month, approximately 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog pages with Wordpress being the most popular with 60 million posts being published each month by WordPress users. Blogger is the 2nd most popular in the US and UK with 1.2 monthly users.
The average blog post takes 3.5 hours to write, contains 1,151 words and most bloggers publish new content a few times per month written in English with the most successful posts having titles with between 6 and 13 words, and having a hyphen or colon in the headline increasing readers by 9%.  
Articles with images get 94% more views as opposed to those with no visuals.
Most blogs are read in the summer months of June, July, and August and most readers are fellow bloggers with the top blog topics being Food, Travel, Health and fitness, Lifestyle and Fashion and Beauty.
There you go then, just spend an entire afternoon creating a 1,151 word post in English about travelling to a fruit farm in summer using some nice pictures of fruit and give it a title with something like 'Fruit Farms: Travelling To, And Back Home Again, With No Wi-Fi' and you will have a massive hit on your hands.

Choose One Social Media And Reach Most Of Them

I haven't been very quick to embrace social media, before Blogger i messed about on several platforms but found Blogger the most reliable and easiest to use so pitched my tent here.
I have a Facebook page which is meant to update whenever i post here but that only worked for a few months and then just fell apart and then my Special Guest Blogger writing partner suggested we go elsewhere after Blogger threatened to remove us for our Saint Dymphna post resulting in the loss of the 5500+ posts here and after reaching a compromise, that is how come the Special Guest Blogger posts have ended up here, on Substack and on Wordpress.
So my total Social Media footprint as LucyP is Blogger, a Facebook page, Substack and Wordpress (which i don't deal with or update personally so aim any criticism elsewhere) although they are all just a repeat of what is here at Blogger so seems a bit pointless really (and Linkedin IS NOT ME so don't bother asking to be added) but repeating the posts elsewhere was the compromise just in case Blogger gets all uppity again.
The reason i am mentioning this is because analysis from Dataportal shows that there are 4.65 billion social media users around the world and the most used is Facebook (2.9 billion monthly users), Youtube (2.5bn), Whatsapp (2bn), Instagram (1.4bn), WeChat (1.2bn), TikTok (1bn), Douyin (613 million), Snapchat (589 million), Telegram (550 million) and Twitter (465 million).
That looks straight forward but hang on, it goes on to say that the 4.65 billion users makes use of a variety of different social platforms each month so of the 2.9 billion Facebook Users, 78% also use Instagram and 75% also use Youtube and of the 2.5bn Youtubers, 79% use Facebook and 78% use Instagram so if you are after audience reach, you just need to focus on just one or two of the larger platforms and you’ll already have the potential to reach the majority of social media users. Job done unless you want to chase the 25% or so who only use one platform but to be honest, that seems more faff then it's worth.

Bush Slips Up And Admits To Being War Criminal

 If Vladimir Putin is looking for examples from history of how to reboot his reputation after an illegal invasion of another country, he should look towards America where somehow George W Bush has had his reputation so whitewashed into that of a cuddly grandpa figure that even when he accidentally confessed to being a war criminal, the crowd just laugh and say silly George.
During a speech in Dallas this week, the former President condemned: 'the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq'. A real whoops moment which he quickly brushed over with 'Ukraine. I mean of Ukraine' as laughter filled the room at the thought of an American President admitting to war crimes indeed? Ha! Ha! Ha!
Those of us covering the war at the time didn't find it so funny and i don't remember too many Iraq's chuckling about it either, far too busy burying their dead family and not being shot by invading American troops or buried under their collapsing homes courtesy of a cruise missile for too many guffaws i suppose.
I doubt if many of the innocent people violently tortured by US and UK troops found it particularly funny either and you won't hear much chortling or tittering in the maternity wards when mothers deliver babies with gruesome defects and disabilities from the depleted uranium the Brits and Americans left littering their nation
The ICC never so much as broke a smile when they described war crimes committed by the invading UK and USA troops such as wilful killing, torture, inhuman and cruel treatment and rape but this was done by the West, the former alcoholic good ol' boy so no consequences for him, no sanctions or global vilification, no just a quick rewrite of the war and it's origins so that we can have a chuckle about it later.
There you go then Vlad, give it a couple of decades and slip up whilst give a speech condemning the wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Ukraine by one man and everyone in the room will crack up. It worked for Bush. 

Aussie's Voting Out The Flamin' Galah

As they are on the other side of the planet and they are awake when we are all asleep, Australia is often the forgotten nation which is why their election is not making much news this side of the Equator.
After nine years out of power, the Labor Party is expected to take the big seat as it appears Australia went down the same route as the UK and America and voted an imbecile into Government and then found out that if you do that, you end up with an imbecile running the nation.
Hopefully that brief experiment the world has gone through where we vote wholly inappropriate people to the top office has lost its appeal and we get some proper grown ups in charge although that doesn't necessarily mean things will be much better, it just means if they eff it all up its because they are incompetent at their jobs and not because they are incompetent as human beings.

Monkeypox Not A Gay Virus

Covid hasn't even left the building and we are into the next potential pandemic with Monkeypox now being talked about with 11 countries confirming cases and 20 detected in the UK.
Monkeypox can be spread when someone is in close contact with an infected person and the virus can enter the body through broken skin, or through the eyes, nose or mouth which doesn't necessarily lend itself to being a sexually transmitted infection but in a chilling throwback to the 80s and AID's, it is being reported that the cases in the UK are amongst the gay or bisexual community and the UK Health Security Agency has issued a warning to to encourage men who have sex with men to be aware of any unusual rashes or lesions.
Obviously the hard of thinking will use this as an excuse to bash homosexuals as they did with AID's because they don't need much of an excuse and their ignorance will make sure that they just hear that homosexuals are currently the affected group.
The good news is that the smallpox vaccine offers good protection against the virus as the two viruses are similar and the monkeypox variant is generally mild with fever, headache, muscle aches, backache, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion with a rash that often begins on the face before spreading to other parts of the body.
After 11 new cases were announced on Friday, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said that the UK was stocking up on smallpox vaccine doses and the World Health Organization is convening an emergency meeting with experts about the spread of the virus so hopefully the lessons have been learned from the pandemic were have just gone through and nations this time listen to the medical experts and act on their advice before things get out of control and just for those doltish Trump supporting Americans, put the bleach down, it won't help.

Why Did We Get Worst Of Both Options?

During the Covid pandemic, something we heard repeatedly was we couldn't continue to lock down the country as it would have an adverse effect on the economy so it became a toss up between a higher death rate or a saved economy and the Government went with saving the finances of the nation by being one of the very first to throw off the protective blanket and open up the country again.
As expected, part A happened and the infection and death rate rose but somehow part B never so how did we get the worst of both worlds, one of the worst death rates and the economy still going all wrong?
The UK sits uncomfortably towards the top of the Worldwide deaths league table with 177,977 but the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED) have announced the UK as the worst performing economy of all the major economies so what happened?
As the pandemic was global, our high death rate can only be down to the Government decision making which we know was dangerously faulty from the start but as the financial fallout is also global, why are we seeing a 9.9% slump, the biggest contraction since 1709, while the decline at the other major economies in the G7 was 3.5% in the US, 5% in Germany and Canada, 5.6% in Japan, 8.3% in France and 8.9% in Italy.
The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, tried to explain it away by saying it was down to the pandemic but that wasn't only the UK, the rest of the G7 suffered it as well.
As 10 Downing Street was the most Covid law breaking place in the nation we can see just how come the Coronavirus response turned out to be such a shitshow and resulted in such a shocking death toll but the financial crash must be down to good old fashioned political incompetence.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Bertha of Kent

When Ethelbert proposed to me he asked me if i wanted to help him rule over England and my first reaction was to say hell no, i'm a sophisticated French woman and your people live in huts made from their own dung and they pray to trees and things and would the occasional bath kill them but when he explained that he was only the King of Kent which is a small bit of it on the side, then i agreed as long as i didn't have to do any of that pagan nonsense and could stay Christian and have my own Church to pray in.
I was therefore the first Christian queen of England and hubby gave me a former Roman church in the City of Canterbury although it was only mine for a short while, a visiting Priest from Rome sent by Pope Gregory to bring Christianity to England took it over.
The Anglo-Saxon period followed the Roman withdrawal which left UK with a power vacuum that was filled by warlords with violence, foreign invasion and occupation and Pope Gregory expected me to not only convert Ethelbert but introduce Christianity myself but i said i'm not going into their dung houses, ugh, how disgusting. A commoners doody on the sole of my boot. I shall have to find a patch of grass to wipe it on! Probably get shunned in the Palace, sorry about the pong you fellas, trod in a peasant house and couldn't get rid of the whiff and anyway, the place is swarming with Anglo Saxons with massive battle-axes so i'm not doing it.
So he sent monk Augustine instead and i persuaded hubby to meet him and not immediately shove a sword into his stomach and he gave him the freedom to preach and live in Canterbury, in my church.
I did get the hump but then Pope Gregory wrote to me personally to thank me for my actions in giving him my church and not allowing my husband to gut Augustine as soon as he stepped off the boat and i was all you're very welcome, it was only a Church etc etc.
He did have some clever ideas about how to do it, allowing the Pagans to keep their weird festivals but changing the name and slipping in  Jesus instead of their pagan Gods but they never really noticed, too high on the fumes from their own dung houses probably.
As England went on to become a Christian country, i started off events which fundamentally altered the course of history in the British isles although i have since been canonized as a saint, they still haven't sorted out a feast day for me which is pretty shoddy seeing as i have been dead for over 1500 years.

Special Guest Blogger: Norse God Loki

Not all Gods are either good or evil, i was in it for for the chuckles but that got me into a lot of trouble but i came to the Gods attention when they were struggling to build Asgard and needed a large protective wall to keep the riff-raff out.
I suggested getting a hill giant to build it but as for payment, the Giant asked for the Godess Freya’s hand in marriage and i told the other God's to set a deadline of the first day of summer, he’ll never manage it on his own and the deal will be off but you still get the wall.
Unfortunately he had a huge stallion called Svadilfari, which could haul boulders like nobody's business and with 3 days to go Freya came at me and made a few suggestions of how she would wear my testicles as earrings if i didn't fix it so feeling partially responsible, and being a god that can transform into animals, i changed myself into a mare and seduced the Giant’s stallion and led him off into the woods.
With his horse missing, the Giant knew he wouldn't make the schedule and tried to take Freya by force but Thor cracked his skull with his hammer. Thor could always be relied on to supply the muscle when corners became too tight for trickery.
Meanwhile i was having a fine old time frolicking in the fields. In fact i became pregnant, and gave birth to a fine baby boy stallion with eight legs i called Sleipnir and gave to Odin.
Odin loved him and i was well in with top God and his son Thor and i assumed Thor would find my cutting off his wife's beautiful long hair while she slept as hilarious as i did but he wet his big boy pants and threatened to kill me so again, feeling partly responsible, i went to the Black Elves and got them to make a replacement wig out of pure gold.
As an extra sorry, i got them to make a spear, a magical ring and a Boar for Odin, a ship for Freyr and a war hammer called Mjölnir for Thor.
I had many run-ins with the dwarves and one time they really stitched me up. Literally, they stitched my mouth shut, which kept me quiet for quite some time.
Such was my reputation that when Freya’s precious necklace Brisingamen went missing and a flea was seen leaving the scene, fingers of suspicion were pointing at you-know-who but i was on a mission from Odin himself, the necklace was a present from the dwarves after she had sex with all of them. Odin ordered me to retrieve the necklace as proof of her affair.
My tricks came to an end after causing the death of the goody goody Balder. His mum made a deal so nothing would hurt him except mistletoe so i made a mistletoe spear and gave it to his blind brother to throw at him. He was blind! How was i to know he was such a good shot.
He died obviously and i was pinned against a pile of rocks and bound with the entrails of my son, Nari, and a poisonous snake now drips venom onto my face and that is penciled in to go on until Ragnarök rolls around.
That's when i escape and hijack a ship made of dead men's toenails before awakening the World Serpent who rises from the oceans and spews poison across the lands and skies until Earth sinks into the ocean leaving just two humans to repopulate what's left of the Earth which should be an interesting day.

Special Guest Blogger: Mary Magdalene

I may be only the second-most famous Mary in the Bible but i wasn't Jesus' only female disciple, there was also Joanna, the wife of Chuza and somebody named Susanna, so for a man with facial hair and sandals, Jesus was actually pretty popular with the ladies.
Obviously all of us women were overshadowed by the men but i seem to have morphed into a prostitute whom Jesus forgave, and i proceeded to follow him around, washing his feet and redeeming myself from a life of sinful whoring.
I was always Christ's favorite but the myths surrounding my life came about when people started confusing me with other people, on account of the fact that there are just too many damn women in the Bible named Mary, me, his mum, Mary of Bethany who cooked Jesus dinner because it seemed the polite thing to do after he resurrected her brother, and a woman who lived a sinful life who may or may not also have been named Mary, and whom Jesus forgives to the confusion of his apostles who are aghast that he let her filthy mitts touch him, dumping perfume on his feet and wiping it off with their hair, which was a thing people did back then.
The medieval Catholic Church, deciding that there were just way too many Mary's in the Bible and that people were likely to get confused by them all so the Pope made an official decree that all three of us were the same person, called Mary Magdalene.
It all comes down to good old fashioned sexism because being the owner of a pair of boobs made you a lesser human in the World of the Church and they didn't want a woman being the equal of the men and they really hated that it was me there at all the big events including his crucifixion and resurrection.
It has really stuck in their craw that out of all the disciples and holy men, it was me who Jesus came to after he was resurrected although at first i thought he was the gardener and ignored him when he called me over.
He sent me to tell the other apostles the good news of his resurrection although they never actually believed me at first, Peter especially but then he was always jealous because Jesus would speak to me more than him.
The church retracted the claim in 1969, but because most people don't keep themselves up to date on the minutiae of Catholic dogma, the myth remains in Western cultre that Mary Magdalene is the 'sinful woman' who scrubbed Jesus' feet with her hair.
What did happen was my original statues and paintings had me all covered up in robes and looking Saintly but after the mixing me up with the other Mary's and my new job title of prostitute and sinner, my image began showing my naked body so i'm probably the only one of Jesus's disciples who's boobs you can look at although the chubby Peter had a fine pair himself so although he called me the bitch with tits, the only difference was i was supposed to have them, you wasn't Petey.

Special Guest Blogger: St. Abraham Kidunaia

As a young man i had everything i could ever want, a wealthy family and an excellent education and a beautiful girlfriend but what i didn't have was any damned peace and quiet and so i said to my girlfriend look, you're a lovely girl and all that but i want to go live in a cave, stay a virgin and dedicate my life to God.
My bride accepted it a little too easily but i took my things and found a nearby building and blocked up the doors and windows, leaving just a small hole for food to be passed to me by my family.
Ten years later my peace was shattered by some neighbours who informed me that my parents were both dead and i had inherited immense wealth and their estates but i patiently explained that i lived in a bricked up building so what good was that to me and told them to give it all away.
Not long after there was another rude interruption to my peace when a bishop from the local diocese came for my help with some hoodlums in the area causing trouble so i reluctantly went and told them to stop being such sods and then prayed that God would send the village a decent pastor and returned to my solitude.
Finally some decent me time i thought but oh no, my niece had gotten herself into some trouble so off i went again and tried to convince her of the the error of her ways and convert her to change her life but she wouldn't so i dragged her home and built a cell near my own but far enough to not hear her wailing about being locked in a bricked up building and returned to my own.
So i said right, i don't care who dies, which relative is in trouble or if the town gets overrun by demons, don't disturb me and you know what, they never did and the next time i left my home was to go to my own funeral.

Weather Explained To A 5 Year Old

As we watched the weather forecast which was talking about thunderstorms to hit our part of the South Coast tonight, my young niece turned to me and asked me what was a thunderstorm.
I smiled at her, and looking down at her face full of wonderment and then in dread at her hands full of chocolate and fearing for my cream coloured sofa, i decided it was time to explain to her the meteorologically correct reasons why we get different types of weather.
I began with Thunderstorms seeing as that was what she asked about and explained that Thunder was the clouds banging together and lightening was God or sometimes Jesus using a torch to check that the clouds were not damaged.
I then went on to rain which is God, being a man and having the inherited man disease of being unable to aim his wee the 2ft from his midriff to the toilet bowl accurately most of the time.
Snow is God going a bit mad with the Holy Talcum powder after his bath and you know that song about Beans being the musical fruit and the more you eat the more you toot, well God does like his beans on toast and i mean he really likes his beans on toast.
Fog is God having his early morning cigarette which he does on the sly sometimes before Jesus gets up which is why you mostly see it in the morning and finally, sunshine is when God is just chilling watching TV or something, so the big galoot isn't doing anything to effect us down here.
She seemed happy with that and returned to her chocolate bar and then turned back to me and asked why did God make wasps?  
Ah, your uncle is the animal expert and he's in the kitchen so go ask him i said, and don't touch anything on your way out.

Special Guest Blogger: Timothy Dexter

We all have moments where we are lucky, you might find a tenner you forgot about in the pocket of your old coat or get 10 chicken nuggets instead of 9 but some of us have more luck than others but it seemed that lady luck wasn't so much smiling on, she was having a full on affair with me.
Falling into the leather-working trade and i got really good at stripping the skin off cows and met and married the very wealthy Elizabeth so i decided as i was now stinking rich, i could give up the cow skinning business and moved into Boston's wealthy Charlestown neighbourhood although my neighbours thought i was a bit common for them.
To be accepted as a man of business i hit on the idea of buying tens of thousands of the Continental Dollar bills for a few cents and hoarded them speculating that it would one day be reinstated as the dollar of choice for the new country though, of course, it never happened, but i was allowed to trade-in all the bills for 1% of face value and, overnight, became even richer.
My new wealth still failed to impress the stuck up neighbours so i became a land owner and built a massive 20 room mansion complete with a a statue of me on the grounds but shockingly, the neighbours didn't take a liking to it and nor did my wife who packed a bag and left.
With my wife out of there, i figured being rich and single would attract women and it did and while i was humping sex-workers, the locals unbeknown to me, came up with the idea of bankrupting me to get rid of the interloper and they gave me news of a shipping fleet that was up for sale so i bought them and on their advice, my first tip was to load up my shipping vessels with heating pads and send them down to the sweltering West Indie islands.
Far from bankrupting it made me even richer because although nobody needed heating pads in the tropics, they were perfect for the large molasses plantation scene and i made another financial killing.
Now even richer the neighbours tried again to feed me a second shitty tip, selling coal to the mining town of Newcastle. It turned out that Newcastle had just undergone a massive labour strike, and the people there were ready to give up just about any price for coal and i just happened to have several ships full of the stuff. Kerching!
I now had so much money i but still no acceptance and recognition that i was after from my peers so i did the natural thing anyone in my situation would do and faked my own death and held a service at my estate to see what the turnout would be like.
I planned to jump out and yell 'surprise' after all the nice things but the nice things were never said and when i jumped out people just shrugged, not caring whether i dead or alive to begin with.
When i did finally die the city had a problem with the elaborate tomb i built and stuck me in a standard cemetery like everyone else so my tale is to not worry about what other people think of you and you don't need a fancy degree to be wealthy, being a lucky bastard with no real discernible skills sometimes works just as well.

Why No Windfall Tax?

During a bleak time when fuel bills have more than doubled and the choice between heating or eating is a real life choice for many people, this isn't the best time for the energy companies to announce their massive profits but announce they did and it is nice to know that someone isn't tossing up between turning up the radiator or microwaving the kid's Tesco Value range Lasange.
Shell reported this week that its profits in the first three months of the year hit a record breaking £7.3bn in the first three months of this year while BP flourished a profit sheet with more than £5bn on the bottom line, more than double last years profit.
BP’s chief executive, Bernard Looney, let slip last November, when Brent crude hit $85 a barrel, that the business was 'a cash machine at these types of prices' and as it sits today at $111 a barrel, that sound you can hear is the cash machine overheating.
Strangely, the UK Government have been against a windfall tax on these huge profits to help the struggling population and originally collected around the 'more profits mean more investment projects' excuse although they went silent on that after a journalist asked the BP Chief what projects would he would cancel if a windfall tax was imposed on the firm’s profits. None, he replied.
'Ah yes' they said, 'but a tax on BP and Shell would hit pensions' which again came up short when the pension people said actually, UK pension funds own less than 0.2% of Shell and BP shares so a windfall tax would have a negligible effect.  
The idea, which would raise £2bn for the Government's rapidly emptying coffers, has now been kicked into the long grass with a grudging 'we'll give it some thought' comment from the Government but why are they so reticent to tax the fuel sector which is raking in obscene profits while the rest of us are starving, freezing or possibly both?
OpenDemocracy have looked at the list of Tory donors and noted that the Conservative Party has accepted more than a million pounds in donations from the energy sector since the last election, including £25,000 from oil firm's EnQuest, £180,000 from Abbot Group, £200,000 from Balmoral Group Holdings, Aquind has handed over £112,000, Tratos have given £56,000, Scottish Power has given £8,400, £58,000 from Bayford and Co, Motor Fuel Group has given £30,000, while Murex Energy has coughed up £25,000.
£50,000 was donated by Access Industries owned by Russian oil tycoon Len Blavatnik and suddenly it becomes a little clearer why the Conservatives are reluctant to hit the profits of the very people who donate so much to them, therby possibly hitting their generous donations.
Makes sense now why they would rather sack 91,000 Civil Servants instead.

Yet More Thoughts And Prayers

It turns out that guns do kill people, and the best way to kill lots of people in the shortest space of time is to use a rapid fire assault rifle so after the mass shooting in New York, time to pull out the Gun Massacre Template as there are so many gun massacres in the USA it is hard to keep finding ways to express the shock and horror that in a country awash with guns and whack-a-doodle gun laws, the occasional loony tune goes on a rampage and shoots lots of people so to save time i designed a template to copy and paste each time.

America, we are shocked and stunned that there has been yet another mass shooting, this time in [New York] where a mad [man] with access to high powered weapons brutally gunned down [10] and wounded [4].
Gun owners will say that this isn't the time to talk about gun control so close to [10] being killed in [New York] but i am pretty sure that this time your Government will finally pay attention and look into gun control and your utterly bat shit crazy gun laws.  
Failing this, i am sure that the gun-nuts will be out in force putting forward the argument that what is needed is more of the weapons that were used to massacre [10] people as they went about their business in [a supermarket] but that is the argument of [morons] whom put their right to bear arms above the right to not be violently blown away in a [supermarket], the [insert name for male genitals].  
As always, thoughts and prayers have been offered by the President [Joe Biden] which will not do anything to ease the pain of the [14] sets of relatives but it is better than doing nothing, which is exactly what they will do.

UK's Second Is Really First In Eurovision 2022

As expected, Ukraine won the Eurovision song contest despite having a song which would in normal circumstances see them finish the night on the right hand side of the final scoreboard along with the UK so we can legitimately look at whoever finished second as the 'real' winners and if we look real hard, rub our eyes and pinch ourselves that it isn't all a dream, in second place sits the United Kingdom.
Our entry, 'Spaceman' by Sam Ryder, was a decent song and Sam never stopped smiling and thanking everyone and came across as a genuinely nice young man but what comes across with clarity is that if we enter a decent song, Europe will vote for us.
I never went along with the we-get-nil-points-because-Europe-hates-us nonsense, it was purely down to the songs that we have entered have been dour and boring and that good old British arrogance that we are right and it's a British song therefore brilliant and how cloth-earred are you Europeans if you don't just hand us the trophy every year. WE GAVE THE WORLD THE BEATLES AND ADELE FOR CRIPES SAKE!!!!
I hope Sam goes on to have a successful career and keeps smiling and congratulations to Ukraine, you may no have won the Jury vote (we did), but you won the public vote which pushed you past us to the top although as it turns out, we may be hosting it next year anyway due to Kiev being not the safest place to host a song singing competition at the moment.
The rules are if a nation is unable to host the contest, then it goes to one of the big five which are Italy, Spain, Germany, UK, France and Italy have made no secret that as they hosted it this year, they don't want it again next year so it is a fight out of the other four and the BBC were fast out the blocks with 'We'll do it' so we could all be in London next May anyway and as London is full of Russians, in some ways, it would be just like Ukraine anyway.

Rebekah Vardy Not The Brightest

As there hasn't been much going on in the world of news recently, it would be a good time for a celebrity court case so luckily we have Rebekah Vardy suing Collen Rooney for libel after she accused her of leaking private information she obtained on Instagram to the Sun.
For those not up with the story, (and where have you been?) Mrs Rooney carried out a sting operation to find out who had been passing private information about her life to the media and wrote made-up tales on her Instagram account such as a trip to Mexico for gender selection and how she was in talks to do Strictly Come Dancing and restricted who could read them and waited to see if they would appear in The Sun. Sure enough they did until only one person was left able to read them, Rebekah Vardy.
It must be said that Rebekah has not been well advised by those around her, nobody seems to have whispered that legal proceedings may not be in her best interests but she carried on and here we are, and as expected, it is Rebekah Vardy being made to look rather stupid.
Her agent unfortunately dropped her phone containing potentially incriminating Whatapp messages over the side of a boat days after being ordered to hand it over for a forensic examination by Mrs Rooney's legal team and had 'forgotten' the password to another potentially incriminating lap top.
Vardy has now thrown her agent and friend, Ms Watt, under the bus by saying she accepted that Ms Watt was the source of leaked stories but in another bout of fortune, Ms Watt and has been deemed medically unfit to testify.
With no evidence to prove that Vardy was leaking stories to the press via Ms Watt it would appear Vardy is in the clear, or it would be if she didn't admit to doing exactly that about footballer Danny Drinkwater being arrested for drink-driving to the Sun but she said that was a one-off and the message to her agent that 'I want paying for this' was a joke between them.
The gavel has not yet come down in the court but Vardy seems to be relying on there being no evidence, what with it being at the bottom of the North Sea and locked away on an defunct laptop but it is ironic that she is suing for libel, the publication of a false statement that is damaging to a person's reputation because admitting spying on her husband’s friends and trying to sell their stories to papers isn't doing much for her reputation at the moment.

Special Guest Blogger: Bushongo/Kuba God Mbombo

Most creation stories start with one all-powerful individual that is responsible for creating all things in the universe, but few versions begin with a massive amount of puking.
In the beginning, there was just me, the darkness and a lot of water and it was very, very lonely and all that solitude made me sick to the stomach, literally because it gave me a bellyache which got worse and worse until i just began vomiting everywhere.  
First out, along with my breakfast was the Sun which sorted out the darkness and then i up-chucked the Moon, the stars and then finally the Earth and a pile of diced carrots which was weird because they hadn't been created yet and i had eaten cornflakes for breakfast.
The heat and light soon sorted out all the water which evaporated creating clouds and hills and mountains emerged from the water.
I was feeling a lot better thank you for asking but after another shorter stomach cramp up came a leopard, eagle, crocodile, a fish, tortoise, heron, scarab, a goat and a black leopard-like animal and three male and one female humans, my kids.
These nine animals went on to create all the world’s creatures and the human's multiplied nicely and the male kids helped out by vomiting up ants to turn over the soil and plants and trees and things but my daughter discovered lightening and wreaked havoc with it so i considered sending
her to her room but instead banished her to the sky which wasn't very clever of me as she now threw down thunderbolts and things at us.  
Problem was she was responsible for fire so i showed the humans how to make it from trees so they could still make tools, weapons and cook food with it.
Once the creation was complete and peaceful, i felt much better and the indigestion seemed to be under control so i stepped back and told my eldest son Loko Yima to keep an eye on things and retired from the Universe building game.
I do look down every now and then just to see how everyone is doing and it seems to be going okay considering your inauspicious start especially as a dodgy guts can go up and out the mouth or downwards and out of another place and your planet may have been very different place if you had been created by me having the squirts that day.

Special Guest Blogger: John Smith

All 16 year old boys have a need to explore and visit new countries and 16th Century England was great for that because we were involved in battles all over so i visited many battlefields all over Europe starting with the Netherlands, fighting for them in it's war of independence from Spain.
When the dust settled on that one i trotted off to the Mediterranean and after a spot of pirating, fought against the Ottoman Turks in Hungary where i was captured but escaped by beheading my captors and returned to England and that's where my story really starts.
Plans were being made to exploit the New World and i attached myself to a group of 100 adventurers preparing to establish an English colony in North America and i was named the leader as i had exactly what a new colony would need, a lack of compassion for whoever was already there.
After five months of puking over the side of the ship, we arrived at the Chesapeake Bay, and disembarked at what was to become Jamestown and i planned to trade for corn with the local Indians but one day i was were ambushed by members of the Powhatan empire who took me to their emperor, Big Chief Powhatan.
I never spoke Powhatan and they never spoke English and i did the English thing of speaking English even louder but they still didn't understand me and they were about to be put me to death when the chief’s young daughter placed herself between me and my executioners.
The Chief summoned his shamans who checked with their big totem pole thing who obviously said i was a good guy so they agreed not to gut me horribly.
With my head still attached to my shoulders, they sent me away and i set about making Jamestown the best town in the New World or it would have been if the colonists didn't keep dying and they didn't stupidly burn the place down, we spent one winter living in the charred ruins but the local Indians bought us some food as the leaders daughter acted as a intermediary between us.
I did hear she married an Englishman and went to live in England but she did help make sure Jamestown didn't gain a reputation as the settlement where everybody went to die, like Eastbourne is today, but while out hunting in a canoe, i accidentally set off a powder bag which was in my lap so i took my charred nads back to England for treatment.
With my love plums all patched up, i returned to different parts of the New World and explored and named the places so for example the first place i landed was a christened New England because it was green and pleasant, a stinking bog was obviously named after Boston in Lincolnshire and the disease ridden hell-hole on the coast was perfect to become the New Plymouth.

Kiev For Eurovision in 2023

It's Eurovision week and where usually it is anybodies guess who will walk away with the glass microphone trophy, its a foregone conclusion this year because it's going to Ukraine which wouldn't be so bad if their song wasn't so terrible.
For once the United Kingdom's song isn't awful, i never bought into the reason we always did so bad was due to everyone in Europe hating us, it is purely down to our entries being so instantly forgettable, a box of red, white and blue face paints to you if you can name the singer and song of last years UK entry without googling it.
The nations i put a little tick next to in the first semi-final (Croatia, Bulgaria and Denmark) are already out making me wonder if the people voting had the volume turned up on their TV's because we have The Netherlands, Greece and Lithuania gracing the final and to be polite, their efforts are as dull as dishwater although i was glad to see those wacky Moldovan's make it even if the presenter introduced them as coming from Moldovia.
Still, the whole point of the Eurovision is that it's a bit mad, a bit trippy and more than a bit gay where the best song doesn't always win as Ukraine will prove this year so i will see you in Kiev next year...if it's still there.

Special Guest Blogger: Sir Basil Zaharoff

You know you have achieved something in life when you get given a knighthood and i was very good at my job, just that my job was selling arms to many nations to fight wars that i had a hand in starting.
My first job was as a tour guide in Turkey and then i became a tout for a brothel but far more lucrative was my next line of employment as a fire man, not a fireman as in someone who puts put fires, but a man of fire as in a professional arsonist burning down mansions of the wealthy so the Constantinople Fire Brigade could extort rewards from their owners for saving the valuables within.
It was by luck that i met with a Swedish captain who was about to leave his job as an agent of arms manufacturer Thorsten Nordenfelt so i applied, and got his job and so began my spectacular career just as the political and military instability in the Balkan states, Turkey and Russia hit its height.
As any salesman will tell you, the best way to make a living selling anything is to create a demand for it and when it is weapons you are selling, trying to starting a bunch of wars is the way to go so that's exactly what i did.
After selling the world's first submarine to the Greeks, i went running to the Turkish government to tell them their enemy Greece now had a submarine and persuaded them to buy two of their own.
Then i went to Russia and explained that as Greece and Turkey now had submarines, they were such a threat to Russia it would be madness not to have a few of their own and they ordered six.  
To balance things up Thorsten Nordenfelt produced a range of anti-torpedo boat guns but it turned out that the subs were actually useless and fell apart as soon as they tried to fire a torpedo but by then they had been paid for and i had moved on to hawking the first automatic machine gun.
It was the first but there was a better version being offered around at the same time by a rival firm but i managed to not only sabotage the presentation but be stood next to the potential buyers when it failed and just happen to mention that as luck would have it, i had machine gun they could buy.
After the turn of the century i held many sales meetings with the Germans who were concerned by the British Empire and then went straight from Berlin to Paris to tell the French that the Germans were rearming and they really should get themselves some decent military hardware to meet the threat posed by Germany.
World War 1 came and my profits from selling weapons to multiple nations on both sides of the conflict exploded like a British House hit by a bomb i had sold the German's during the blitz and i was asked by the British to negotiate to drag Greece into the war on their side and to persuade the Ottoman Empire to defect from the Germans.
I agreed as long as i was rewarded with a Knighthood for my services so i could call myself Sir. Despite my best efforts to prolong it indefinitely, World War I did eventually end, and i spent the remainder of my years working at a Monte Carlo casino but unfortunately dying before nuclear weapons were a thing, the money i could have made selling those things to everyone!

Special Guest Blogger: Harvey Ball

After serving 27 years in the military, and then another six in the Army Reserves, i was pretty fed up with war so i retired from the service to become an advertising artist and started up my own business and i was pretty good at it, so good in fact that i was approached by the State Mutual Life Assurance Company who asked me to come up with a design to make into a badge to cheer their miserable people up.
Within ten minutes i had designed a simple bright sunny yellow smiley face with narrow oval eyes with the one on the right slightly larger than the other and a slightly off center mouth.
The executives loved it and paid me $45 for my creation which they turned into 100 badges and handed out to their staff and soon other people wanted the smiley badges too after a New York City radio station WMCA began giving away t-shirts with my cheerful design on it and in 8 years 50-million of the things had been sold and it had become an international icon after the French adopted it and started to use it and it appeared on t-shirts, hats and mugs and became known as a 'smilie'.
So you would probably assume i made a fortune and lived out the rest of my life driving speed boats and living in a mansion? You would assume wrong because of the tens of millions it generated, i only saw that original $45 as i never trademarked or copyrighted it but as the inventor of the original smiley face i couldn't be to upset about it.
A British company called The Smiley Company now holds the rights and has an annual turnover of $167 million but i died of liver failure in 2001 so i saw my icon become the basis for every emoticon on the Internet but that poo one had nothing to do with me.

Special Guest Blogger: Shi Pei Pu

I grew up in Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan, where i learned French and attended the Yunnan University, graduating with a literature degree and then become an actor and singer where i met the Frenchman assigned to the job of accountant at the French embassy in Beijing, Bernard Boursicot, and the Chinese said, hey, he isn't the brightest cookie, maybe we could pump him for French secrets.
I first met him at a Christmas Party and he told me that he had only been with men and wanted to go with a woman so despite being dressed in a suit, i told him that actually, i was a female Beijing opera singer who had been forced to live as a man to satisfy his father's wish to have a son.
Amazingly he believed me and with Boursicot convinced that he was with a woman, we quickly developed a sexual relationship, maintained in total darkness and with things tucked neatly away so he never realised that his lover never actually had a vagina.
I also convinced him to pass French secrets to me which i handed to the Chinese Government and even when he was posted in Mongolia, he kept up passing me the secrets but i had a plan to keep him from straying, i told him i was pregnant and next time he came to visit, i presented him with his 'son', or more accurately, a boy i had purchased from a local doctor.
Boursicot bought me and his son to Paris because he wanted to be responsible for his 'son' and the 'mother of his son' and the Chinese government basically had already got all the secret documents they could hope for from the diplomat but he bought us into contact with less stupid French people who got a doctor to have a good look at my private parts and i was revealed as a man and Boursicot was arrested by French authorities for passing on secrets to the Chinese but the French President, keen to avoid any tensions between France and China, pardoned me.
Upon discovering the truth of our relationship, Boursicot attempted suicide by slitting his throat to escape the humiliation but survived the attempt and i returned to performing but rather than the episode be forgotten, it was turned into one of the most famous plays of all time, Madame Butterfly, oh well. 

Beergate And Partygate

Keir Starmer's joy at thumping the Conservatives at the local elections must have been numbed slightly after the announcement that he is being investigated by Durham Police for a possible break of lock-down rules in April 2021.
As the Conservative Party came out to support Boris Johnson when he was being pilloried for breaking the law, the Labour Party big-wigs have been out in force to explain how a beer and a curry with his colleagues while on the campaign trail is very different to what Boris got up to and they do have a point, but if Keir is the latest recipient of a Fixed Penalty Notice for breaking Covid rules, he has to go.
While it was Boris who made, and then broke, his own rules, Keir voted and supported them and has been making almost daily calls for the Prime Minister to resign after the Police delivered his fine which puts the Labour man in a very awkward position if a buff envelope lands on his own doormat shortly.    
The Police may yet come down on Labour's side of the fence which is that Keir merely had a drink and shared a takeaway meal with party colleagues as allowed for 'work purposes' or they may go along with the Tory MPs and right wing press claiming that this was a social gathering or party for 30 people and not work.
I like Keir, he is not a bundle of laughs but we need a serious and a tad boring person in charge but while part of me feels he is being stitched up by the Tories and right wing as a way of diluting Boris's own partygate scandals, another part of me see's this as a chance to install the formidable Angela Rayner as Labour leader.
As the police investigated previously and found no case to answer, it is stated that they have reopened the case after new evidence came to light and Keir has already been shown to have made an 'honest mistake' when he stated the aforementioned Mrs Rayner wasn't present when she was which could put a crimp in her own leadership prospects but for now, the Tories have 'Beergate' to throw at him whenever he brings up their failings at keeping to their own laws.

Ireland For The Irish?

Amidst all the fun of seeing the Conservative Party getting their arses handed to them in the local elections, a more serious story was developing in Northern Ireland where Nationalist Sinn Fein gained the most votes raising the specter of a referendum for Northern Irish to leave the UK.
As the Liberal Democrats and DUP have now discovered, throwing your lot in with the right wing side of British politics is not a healthy choice for your long term politics prospects after the party swallowed Boris Johnson's promises that he would not countenance a border in the Irish Sea and backed his Brexit Leave campaign only to be thrown under the bus when he not only countenanced it but gave it his full backing.
The DUP imploded and went through three party's leader's in the space of three weeks and now find themselves behind the Party whose aim is to unite Northern Ireland with the Republic and to anyone of a certain age, is remembered as the political voice of the IRA during the troubles when the paramilitary group was carrying out bombings and shootings.
The Sinn Fein vice-president Michelle O'Neill is now entitled to the first minister role and has stated that it will not call an immediate 'border poll' but will bide it's time and widen support for a referendum by first selling its vision of what a united Ireland would look like to make sure it has enough support before even considering it, knowing that Sinn Fein in the Irish Republic is polling ahead of any other party and any border poll would need to be voted on in both parts of the island.
While the future of the United Kingdom has been focused on Scotland, the future of Great Britain is now at threat which makes Boris Johnson's current headache even worse as despite everything else the history books would show, it would underline his name as the Prime Minister who oversaw the breaking up of the four nations proving that Brexit, as expected, is the awful gift that just keeps giving.

Winning With Lucy

A colleague has been trying to get me to join her in buying some stocks and shares but i generally balk at the idea of putting money into something i know nothing about but armed with 5 companies that someone in the know slipped our way (not guaranteed but as close to a sure thing as it gets apparently), we did look at a couple of apps like eToro but we didn't understand it so we let the idea drop and had a discussion about Johnny Depp and James Franco instead although i still quite fancy the idea i just have no idea how to go about it.
I am on safer ground doing my football bets although my rapidly dwindling Skybet funds may suggest otherwise but i do have a system which is never bet against the team in red.
For some reason football teams in red always seem to be more successful which is why i am backing the red wearing Liverpool to pip the blues of Manchester City to the Premier league title although i am dreading the inevitable harping from the far too many Liverpool fans i know.  
My team Arsenal are playing Tottenham on Thursday which is almost a play off for the final Champions League place but as Tottenham are at home that means Arsenal will be playing in their away kit which isn't red so i fear facing Friday morning avoiding all Spurs fans.
Relegated are Watford and Norwich who both play in yellow and will be joined by white Leeds or blue Everton and they are being replaced in the top league by Fulham (white) and Bournemouth (red) so another red team to lose my money on next season.
I'm not sure how they decide who is the 'home' team in the UEFA European Cup Finals but in the three finals we have the red Liverpool beating white clad Real Madrid and all red Roma beating half red Feyenoord but as Eintracht Frankfurt wear black and Rangers wear Blue, that one is heading for a boring nil-nil yawnfest and the Germans winning on penalties.
So until i manage to navigate the stock market and fling money at those 5 (not guaranteed but as close to a sure thing) companies, i say get to the bookies and fill out the betting slip with Liverpool, Roma and Frankfurt, you know it makes sense.

Disclaimer: The author of this blog cannot be held responsible for any losses resulting in filling out betting slips with Liverpool, Roma and Frankfurt and if you knew how often she fails to win on her football bets, you would have to be stark raving insane to listen to her.

Too Funny But Tories Not Laughing

The voters of England didn't just give the governing Conservative Party black eye, they bundled them into the back of a van and beat the crap out of them with cricket bats as with a few results yet to come in, the loss is expected to exceed 300 seats.
If the local election results were replicated at a general election the Government would not only lose their stonking great 80 seat majority but would be 48 short of an overall majority so would be scrambling around for someone to partner with which after the previous Lib Dem coalition, nobody would would touch which would allow the Labour and Liberal Party's to pick out the new Downing Street curtains.  
It was a heart-lifting sight to see a very dejected looking Boris Johnson on TV this evening saying it was 'a tough night' which is not what the local Tories who lost their seats said, they laid the blame squarely at the door of number 10 and the law breaking Prime Minister, the newly unemployed ex-leader of Carlisle city council said it all when he explained the loss as: 'Basically I just don’t feel people any longer have the confidence that the prime minister can be relied upon to tell the truth'.
He is now pondering calling a general election but that isn't only to save his skin because the plotting is now going full steam ahead behind him to replace him as Tory MP's fear what happened to their local representatives will happen to them soon enough as waiting in the wings are more Fixed Penalty notices, the Sue Gray report and the privileges committee inquiry and none of them will improve the mood in Tory HQ.
I took the rest of the country a while to catch on to what a disaster Boris and his motley crew of imbeciles have done but i can't say i'm not enjoying it, i just hope he hangs around for a while yet and acts as a constant reminder to voters just how awful the Tories are so at the next election, they not only lose but are reduced to the edges of our Democracy where they belong.