Special Guest Blogger: Grigoriy Nelyubov

Since time immemorial there have been stars that have flown so high only to come crashing down to earth with all the grace of an American at a free buffet and i was literally an ace away from being one of the first few men who flew the highest because i was a Russian Cosmonaut at the time of when the Soviets were spanking the American's in the Space Race.
We had sent the first animal into orbit and the first human's in space in Vostok 1 and Vostok 2 and i was all set to pilot Vostok 3 until i had a problem with a drink, or rather the dozen of them i had drunk when returning from a weekend pass when i got into an altercation with an army patrol at a train station checkpoint and punched one of the guards.
I was a captain and pilot in the Soviet Air Force and while the Americans sought mature test pilots for their first spaceflights, the Soviets recruited young pilots with the intent of training them for a career as spacemen and out of 3,000 applicants, i was picked as one of the original 20 Cosmonauts for the Soviet Space missions and after all the tests and exams, it was Yuri Gagarin, Gherman Titov and me who were chosen to ride the first manned missions in that order.
Now the Soviet missions were very much seat of the pants stuff, the best most of us guys hoped for was a merciful, quick death and on the launch of Vostok 1 three press releases were prepared, one for success, two for failures but when Yuri circled the Earth in 1961, global housewives stopped a-cleanin’, dogs sat up in their basket, birds stopped a-twitterin’ and cow-milkin’-device-type-things stopped…cow milking and he came back safely to be a hero not just in the USSR but Worldwide.  
A few months later Titov went up and came down again a day later with the first photograph's of Earth from space and then it was to be my turn and a planned 3 day mission circling our Planet...until that train station incident and i was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.
The duty officer agreed to ignore the whole incident and not send the report if i apologised, but i got all 'Do You Know Who I Am?' which couldn't really be taken as an apology but i thought they won't kick me out, i'm off to the stars soon and even when they reported me to the authorities i was confident they would dismiss it but the only thing dismissed was me from the Cosmonaut corps.
I went back to flying planes while my former comrades blasted toward the stars and my own nation airbrushed me out of ever being part of Soviet Space history but missing out on global fame led me to drink heavily which is how i ended up wandering around drunk one morning and straight into the path of a speeding train, wiping me from history permanently.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Hades

The son of Cronus and Rhea, when the family fortune was divvied up, my brothers Zeus got the Sky and Poseidon the sea and i got handed the Underworld which wasn't a bad gig, although a dingy and dull place it was a very popular joint because since the dawn of man, there has always been evil or 'the absence of good'.
In the start there was always some hero nipping down to rescue someone or other so i told them that Tartarus or the Land of the Dead is supposed to be for the dead only you guys so i got my enormous guard dog Cerberus to keep watch on the entrance to the Underworld and nobody argues with him, less of a dog and more of a three-headed monster hound with slavering jaws really.
There are certain living people i did welcome though, including my wife Persephone who does cheer things up down here a little, if only for three months of the year but that is the deal we arranged with her mother Demeter and her father Zeus because i did sort of kidnap her while she was out picking flowers and her mum cast a curse on the land that it would stay barren and nothing would grow until i released her.
Being the nice chap i did exactly that, i even gave her a pomegranate to eat on the way back although i clean forgot about the rule that if you taste the food of dead you must return to our land for part of the year, that bit i forgot to mention which is why when Persephone is down in the underworld with me from December to February, when you living types then have winter as per her Mother's instructions that nothing would grow until she is topside again.
For someone who was reluctant to marry me, she had a jealous streak about my ex-girlfriends, she not only ripped Minthe to pieces but then trampled the pieces into garden mint.
The Roman's took a shine to me and although they changed my name to Pluto, they kept me as their own god of the dead and gave me the job of the master of ores and precious stones and all was good until the Christians took over and seemed to make Hades into some sort of torture chamber for wrong doers but worst of all was they replaced me with Satan who was just the furry little half man half goat Pan who was way down the league of minor Gods until they showed up. The cheek, replaced by a pervy old goat shagger.

Questions Being Asked Over Ukraine Support

As things stand, currently most people are behind the Ukrainians in their fight against Russian aggression but as prices increase and the credit crunch really starts to bite, already the question being asked is how much longer will people be willing to pay such exorbitant prices for things like petrol and heating before they start shouting enough?
Recent polling by the European Council on Foreign Relations suggests the increasing cost of living crisis is causing more concern than achieving justice for Ukraine with: 'a growing gap between the positions of many governments and the public mood in their respective countries'.
It doesn't help the cause in the UK as it is widely perceived that Boris Johnson is strutting around pretending to be a world statesman in order to distract us from the mess of his making in the UK and it is becoming a bit of a joke how he always mentions Ukraine whenever another of his never ending discrepancies are uncovered.
It has already been mentioned to me that that Moscow will not back down and supplying Ukraine with defensive weapons only enables them to hold the Russians off temporarily while they have very little chance of actually winning the war so people are already wondering what are we making sacrifices for?   
Support for the Ukrainian conflict is still high but at some point, probably in October when the new round of fuel price increases come along or even before when inflation continues upwards and the pay rises don't materialise, the few voices may well swell and it will become a chorus of sorry Ukraine but we just can't be squeezed anymore and the politicians will have a decision to make.

Special Guest Blogger: Hannibal Barca of Carthage

There are not many Tunisian military commanders in the history books but i'm in them and i an known as the one of the greatest military commanders in history with one of the greatest treks to fight a war.
My father started it, marching his army across Northern Africa and across the strait of Gibraltar to take on the tribes of the Iberian Peninsula and when he died in battle, my brother-in-law took over and made a deal with the Romans that we would not expand North into their domain if they did not expand south into ours.
We were merrily dicing and slicing Spaniards and Portuguese until he also died which left me in charge and i upped our conquest game which spooked the Romans who began claiming lands in our patch so i sent a delegation which said either get out or face war.
They chose the latter but i had a plan, turned out it was a massively stupid plan which ended up killing most of my army, but my plan was to sneakily attack the Romans from the Alps which was considered damn near impossible.
With 38,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry and 38 elephants, we started the march from Iberia over the Pyrenees and the Alps into Northern Italy but we got stuck at a narrow, snowy pass and my men were concerned that the elephants would trigger an avalanche and kill them all so i tried to demonstrate to them that it was perfectly safe to pass along.
I chose to do this by ramming my cane into the snow, which in turn triggered an avalanche, which wiped out almost half my infantry, a quarter of my cavalry and most of the elephants but the rest made it across okay and we went to Italy and even with my depleted resources, fought Rome in their own backyard for 15 years.
The use of elephants was a masterstroke, the Romans had never seen them before and sending one of those rampaging through a town and into the Romans ranks caused mayhem until one of them worked out that blowing a horn at the elephants would cause them to turn tail and run straight back at us.  
The Romans invaded North Africa and i had to return to defend my homeland but by time i got there the Roman's had taken over so i made peace with them but they heard i was plotting with the Greeks to kick them out so i ran off to Greece to act as a general in their own war against Rome but died from an infection after i cut my finger on my own sword whilst mounting my horse.
You may ask how someone who ended up killing more of his men than the Romans ever did and ended up being killed by an accident with his own sword can be considered one of the greatest strategists ever but i took on Rome with only half of my fighting force so if i had not accidentally killed them i would have taken Rome and history would be very different, the art, literature, laws and architecture would be a lot more Tunisian for a start.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek Goddess Aphrodite

Coming into existence from the foam of your fathers discarded penis could really screw up a young girl but i did manage to snag a Greek God as a husband, shame it was Hephaestus who didn't get hit with the ugly stick, he got hit by the whole damned tree.
As the goddess of beauty, passion and love, i was so gorgeous that there was a six month waiting list for birds to suddenly appear every time i was near so obviously having a husband who whenever he looked in a shiny surface, his reflection would look back and shake it's head wasn't ideal but there was no lack of hunky Gods ready to lend a hand and other more intimate body parts to me, Dionysus, Hermes, Poseidon, Zeus but especially Ares who would visit while hubby was toiling away in his workshop.
Everything was going well until Helios saw us and told Hephaestus who trapped us together in a net and dragged us to the God's on Olympus who demanded we never see each other again although considering that we had seven children together, that didn't happen although i did spread the love around including with mortals.
One of my children was Priapus who the Queen of the God's, Hera, cursed as she was jealous of my superior beauty. Her curse was for him to be born hideously ugly and with an oversized penis. Basically, what any man would accept and the sight of Priapus offended the small-dicked Greek God's who cast him out of Mount Olympus and lived on Earth and became adopted by the Roman's who had small statues built of him in their gardens which became the Gnome's still in existence in modern gardens today.
As for me, i created Pandora, yes that one, who released evil into the world but as the goddess of all things love, i did have a mean streak such as cursing all the women on the island of Lemnos to stink after they refused to sacrifice to me.
It started off well, all the men refused to procreate with them and started having sex with their female slaves but then the women murdered the entire male population of the island and well...my bad.
Just as my son was taken on by the Roman's, so was i and after a name change to Venus, i was also immortalized in stone in the Venus de Milo although for some reason i don't appear to have any arms which were broken off at some point but as i am considered the ultimate vision of beauty and i'm topless so i think most men wouldn't notice if my arms were missing, 7 foot long or bright purple with polka-dots.

Economics And The Prince Of Aldovia

Things had taken a downward turn and the country was entering recession and there i was in the canteen trying to decide whether to enter 80p for the last Snickers Bar or just give the machine a good shake when the big, big, BIG boss walked in and said 'Ah, i'm glad i bumped into you'.
Immediately my mind went to 'Bugger, what have i done' and as my mind raced back over any recent indiscretions he said that due to the economic turmoil we were going to go big on Economics and as i was once the financial advisor to Prince Richard of Aldovia could i give a quick 30 min update on some of the terms and what they mean to the younger staff members.
Obviously my mouth said 'Of Course, no problem' but my mind went 'Crap. I knew that putting that fake entry using people from a Christmas Movie on my CV would come back to bite me on the arse' so i set about thinking how could i blag my way out of this because knowing anything about economics to me is like a diet sheet to Boris Johnson, never the twain shall meet.
I turned up to see about 40 fresh young faces waiting with notepads and pens poised, ready to jot down whatever pearls of wisdom i imparted so i shuffled my papers, looked at the clock and took a deep breath and began.
I started by saying that the most important thing was to pitch your efforts at the lowest of the potential audience, so think PE Teacher or Estate Agent, and avoid using long words like Stagflation, Deflation and Hyperinflation because it would only confuse them.
Happy that i had craftily avoided having to explain what they were as i had no idea, i looked again at the clock and saw i still had 29 minutes to fill so then went on to give some long, winding explanation of how the prices at the petrol pumps was a great example of how a shortage of a commodity means that the producer can charge more for that thing and because the demand is high, they can charge more for it.
A few hands went up but i managed to deflect by saying could they keep any questions to the end as we are pressed for time and i had a lot to get through and the hands, thankfully, went down again.
The clock said 15 minutes to go so i shuffled my papers while i desperately tried to remember the recent chat i had with a Financial Expert at the start of the year but all i could remember about that was her lovely, stylish red kitten heel shoes and coming out of the interview with the word 'Coat' scribbled down, damn my lack of attention and the ease which my mind wanders to a tropical island where David Boreanaz is serving me a Sea Breeze while dressed in only a pair of tight speedos and a glint in his eye whenever mind numbingly boring topics are mentioned.
With ten minutes to go i went for the good old fashioned blag, throwing in as many economic terms that i could drag forth from my brain so i said some people advocate Keynesian Economics that focuses on changes in the economy over the short run and as we all know short term planning can play havoc with everything, a good example is Leeds United. Under David O' Leary they paid top price for players and stretched the clubs finances too far and while they made it to the European Cup and recouped what they lost, when they missed out they were forced to sell those players to keep the club afloat and...10 minutes of talking Football and throwing about some random economic sounding words such as capital, deficit, fiscal and consumer goods, i saw it was half ten and announced the meeting over.
Eager hands shot up again and i explained that unfortunately the meeting had over-run and the boss would have my guts for garters if i kept them any longer but if they did have any questions, to email them to me and i would answer them.
Breathing a huge sigh of relief i shuffled them out the door and making a mental note to delete all emails i received today, went back to the canteen and the snack machine to see that the last Snickers had gone.
Oh how i wish i was back in Aldovia sometimes! 

Danger To Religion If Life Found Elsewhere

The Curiosity Rover found that ancient Mars had the right chemistry to support living microbes and the Perseverance Rover which has been trundling around the Martian landscape since 2021 has not only discovered proof that the rocks on the Red Planet interacted with water multiple times over the eons, but they also contained organic molecules.
The Perseverance Team are quick to temper expectations that organics is not a confirmation that life once existed and there are both biological and non-biological mechanisms that create organics and they won't know for certain until the samples are returned and studied here on Earth, in 2030, but it does throw up some very interesting questions, especially for those of a more religious persuasion.
For centuries the domain of the church has been chipped away at as Science challenged the events of the Bible, people such as Copernicus and Darwin, and religion has had to adjust itself to try and stay relevant but at some point in the future we will discover life on other planets, or it will discover us.
With advances in telescopes, space exploration and the discovery of even more exoplanets which could sustain life, it is only a matter of time before we find evidence of life elsewhere amongst the trillions and trillions of other planets which should prove uncomfortable for the God squad.
The likely answer would be the religious leaders would 'find' the answer written in their holy texts somewhere but if the other life is intelligent enough to have it's own theories how how and why they are there, it could get interesting.
Science has done its best to show religion for what it is, a man-made concept to explain things they did not know how to explain at the time, but the discovery of life in the other reaches of the Universe should be yet another body blow to religion on it's way to becoming something that future, enlightened generations will look back on as a curiosity.

Merry LEON Day!!!

Today is exactly 182 days since Christmas Day in 2021 and tomorrow it will be exactly 182 until Christmas Day 2022 which i think deserves some sort of celebration and as i found out last year there is, and it's called LEON Day which is very cleverly, NOEL backwards.
I found out about it accidentally a few years ago and ever since we have kept a Christmas Film on the TIVO Box to watch on June 25th and i have done my best to spread the word hoping that it will catch the imagination and grow into a thing, not the full blown second Christmas, but a more simpler, cut back affair.
As we all know, the Christmas Story is actually just a cheap rip off of Saturnalia with Jesus copied and pasted in to replace the Roman's Gods and i assume if it does grow into something, then the Churchy types will be busy finding someone to fill his boots in June and they already have a Saint who's feast day is today, William of Montevergine.
Looking at his Wikipedia page, his story includes a donkey and Kings and he also performed miracles, ordering the wolf that killed his donkey which did all the towing and other tasks and demanding the Wolf to literally do the donkey's work instead.  
He also turned down a prostitute who wanted to test his faith which may not be quite so easy to spin into a jaunty LEON's Day Carol the kid's can sing but we can let future generations worry about that as well as what bird will replace the Robin on LEON Day Cards and who will be the Santa replacement because we can't expect him to do the rounds twice in one year and the kids have to have someone to write to.
Ugly T-Shirts to replace Ugly jumpers, Strawberry Milkshake instead of Eggnog, pot plant palm tree instead of Poinsettias, the possibilities are endless so June 25th needs to be observed as it marks the point when this year’s Christmas starts coming closer than last year’s Christmas and that has to be worth celebrating.

Special Guest Blogger: Anne Bonny

As a red haired Irish woman of course i was known for my quick temper and fighting skills which were ideal qualifications for a career in piracy, a profession in which women were very much under-represented.
After my father moved his mistress, my mum, and i from Ireland to Carolina to escape his wife's family, we did quite well financially and ended up owning a plantation with servants, one of which i stabbed after an argument which my father frowned upon but not as much as the man i began dating and then married, a poor sailor and small-time pirate named James Bonny.
So frowny was pop in fact that he disowned me and kicked us out of his house which i subsequently tried to burn down in retaliation which is how we ended up in Nassau in the Bahamas, a haven for pirates and a financial opportunity for my failed pirate husband who became an informer to the local Governor which resulted in a multitude of pirates being arrested.
As i had got to know many of them in the taverns, i really disliked the work my husband had taken up as i said to Calico Jack Rackham one day who not only offered to pay for me to get out of my marriage, but offered to take me pirating on board his ship, the Ranger.
My husband refused so one night i packed my things and sailed off into the sunset with Rackham or at least as far as Cuba. I dressed as a man as nobody would know i was a woman although when i became pregnant with Rackham's child it was pretty obvious, despite spending their lives at sea, even pirates know enough biology to work that one out.  
After a quick stop off in Cuba again to give birth, i rejoined Rackham and continued the pirate life shivering timbers around the Caribbean and i was even named on the infamous 'Wanted Pirates' list but the life of a pirate generally ends in death or capture and it was the latter for me, caught while we were so drunk celebrating a capture of a ship that the Governors troops just walked on and clapped us in irons.    
Convicted and sentenced to be hanged, i was spared because i was pregnant again and received a stay of execution and then was released after my father pleaded my case and i returned to Carolina where i married, had children, and lived out the remainder of my life in peace and harmony.

Thank You For Travelling With Us

The transport secretary is deciding whether he can change the law to get agency workers deputise for striking rail workers in yet another ill thought out idea from the desk of Boris Johnson.
The RMT head pointed out that agency workers won't have the training or skills of the people they are replacing so being the helpful person that i am, i have written a note which they can pin to the front of stations.

'Thank you for travelling with South West Trains. This is the first time the driver has ever driven the Brighton to Cardiff route and no one else on the train or in the control centre has a clue what they are doing either so please bear with us and we’ll do our best to get you somewhere close to your destination without losing too many of you through accidents on the way. Thank you for your patience and travelling on South West Trains today'.

America Lacking Grown Up's

Stephen Fry has a brilliant description for America, he describes it as like the country you would get if there were no parents home which in many ways is true, Britain was its parent ready to guide it through those difficult first few hundred years but the young America threw a hissy fit and the Brit's said: 'pfft...you're on your own sunshine’ and buggered off to lavish its love on Canada instead.
Fast forward a few centuries and two stories in today's newspaper summed our former colony up perfectly.

Story 1: A vaping company has been blocked from selling e-cigarettes in the US after it was found to have played a 'disproportionate role in the rise of youth vaping' and showed a 'lack of sufficient evidence' that the products provided a net benefit to public health.
Story 2: The US Supreme Court has passed a significant new ruling for gun rights that people have the right to carry a gun outside their home.

Vaping, which to my knowledge has killed 0 in America is more of a threat to America's youth than Gun's which kills around 45,000 people in America each year and that's the decision made while they are still digging the bullets out of the classroom wall in Texas after 19 youths were killed in May.
Since that horrific day, there have been gun killings in 43 of the 50 US states resulting in 730 deaths, 23 of them children, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive
So vaping BANNED to protect the youth while guns...yep, if ever a nation needed a grown up.

Special Guest Blogger: Charles Atlas

I was born Angelo Siciliano in Italy but my story begins on a beach in America where i was sat with my girlfriend trying to impress her with my knowledge of the periodic table and English grammar.
Knowing how to use a subordinate clause (to complements a sentence's main clause) wasn't much use when a tough guy came over, called me a weakling and kicked sand into my face.
I could see my girlfriend looking at the scrawny pathetic 98 pound guy clearing sand out of his eyes and decided i need to do something so i wasn't forever avoiding sandy beaches but i couldn't afford the gym prices so i stood at the door and watched what they did and tried to copy them at home but i wasn't bulking out like i hoped.
I was at the zoo watching a lion one day when i noticed that this animal was a mass of rippling muscle but thought he hasn't got barbells or dumbbells, it's impressive physique is down to pitting one muscle against another and developed my own system of exercises that didn't need expensive equipment and it worked and soon i was entering strongman contests and getting noticed.  
It was after a contest in Madison Square Garden that i was approached by the Coney Island Circus to replace their strongman and soon people were coming to me for advice on how they can get a physique like mine.
I met Dr. Frederick Tilney, a British homeopathic physician and course writer and together we designed the 'Dynamic Tension' fitness course and i changed my name to something more American sounding and so launched the Charles Atlas Body Building Programme, twelve lessons supplemented with photo's of me demonstrating the exercises.
We advertised in comics and magazines with lots of pictures of me in my skimpy workout trunks and once it was used by people like heavyweight boxing champions such as Max Baer, Rocky Marciano and Joe Louis, everyone wanted to do it and we became famous all around the World.
I carried on building my body throughout my life and up until i was 80 when i got chest pains after one workout and keeled over from a heart attack so maybe i should i have quit earlier but if you are the type to get sand kicked in their face then buff up, put on a pair of too tight budgie smugglers and flex. Now, you're a real man!

Special Guest Blogger: Maori God Whiro

Anyone who has brothers and sisters will know how annoying they can be and wow were mine annoying. There was my Dad Papa and my Mum Rangi and my three brothers, a sister and more nephews and nieces then you could shake a stick at all crammed into one place so my brother Tane persuaded my Mum to separate from dad and head upwards to create the sky.   
He was the God of light so of course he loved all that new found space but i liked the darkness, i was the God of it after all goddammit so i headed down into the dark and dank underworld and ignored them all although i did take notice when he began creating the funny little humans to live on Dad's Earth so i made it my ambition to destroy them as quickly as he made them but i wasn't strong enough to languish too long on the surface, so i threw out all the badness i could into the World and retreated to my cave to wait and watch the fun.
I introduced all manner of wickedness to his human world including evil, disease and illness and finally dying and once they died they would come to my world where they would be promptly be eaten by me and each human soul i devoured made me stronger so that eventually i would be sufficiently powerful enough to break free of the dark netherworld, breach the surface, and just devour everything.
I even left the lizard as a visible reminder to the humans that i was still lurking around, just waiting for my chance.
Things were going well and i was playing the long game growing soul by soul until some berk came up with the idea of cremation and their is no nutritional value to ashes so it is unlikely i will ever gain the strength i need now but i think i did enough to ruin Tane's peaceful world as the lying, murder, adultery, theft, crime and general sin i put out there is not going anywhere soon and once cremations fall out of favour and people are buried again again, i'll be seeing you although there does seem to be a lot of psychedelic drugs around now, after eating Whitney Houston i sat down to check my mail and the next thing i know it’s three days later, i’m naked at the bottom of a river banging on a drum and somebody’s pierced my nose so if you are a druggie, i would appreciate it if you knock off the hard drugs a few weeks before you die, i would much appreciate it.

Who You Gonna Call? Kyiv Obviously

When there's something bad in your neighbourhood, who you gonna call? Well if you are Boris Johnson you pick up the phone to Kyiv and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the i newspaper had a brilliant piece where they logged every announcement of a phone-call pledging more aid to the beleaguered Ukrainian leader and by a huge coincidence, it just happened to be just after yet another discovery of an acute embarrassment for the British leader.

On 12 April Johnson when Johnson was fined by the Metropolitan police over Partygate, he called Kyiv.
On 16 April, when the UN savaged the Rwanda plan, Johnson called Kyiv.
On 23 April, when the Met issued fines over a bring-your-own-bottle lock-down party at Downing Street. Johnson called Kyiv.
On 30 April, when MP Neil Parish resigned. Johnson called Kyiv.
On 5 May, the day of the disastrous local elections results, Johnson called Kyiv.
On 6 June, after it was announced there was to be a vote of confidence in his leadership by his own party, guess who he called. Yep, Kyiv.
 
With every call more military aid to to go to Ukraine in their battle against Russia but last week things got really desperate when the Prime Minister suffered the humiliating departure of his second 'ethics' adviser, Lord Geidt, so that didn't require just a call, he dodged his own MP's and the Journalist's waiting with their sharpened pencils and hightailed it onto a plane bound for Ukraine.
It could be they are a great help and comfort to each other, Boris hands over weapons and Zelenskiy dispenses advice to Johnson on his domestic woe's but you can understand why Johnson is so popular in Ukraine, he is a walking disaster and whenever he is caught out, and he gets caught doing something shoddy on a weekly basis, Ukraine benefits.
Leaders discovered long ago that nothing boosts their popularity then a good old War but although Boris hasn't started one himself, he has found a decent one to hijack for his own purposes.

Special Guest Blogger: Jasper Maskelyne

The history of WWII is brimming with legends of incredible heroism, death-defying bravery and sometimes stories that are just too ridiculous or just too insane to be real, like winning the war with magic.
When WW2 started i was a stage magician but i offered my services to the military but although they accepted me, they were not really sure how they could best use my skills because we all knew that getting the Nazi's to pick a card and me guessing it wasn't going to make Hitler and his stormtroopers march back out of Belgium wondering how the hell i knew it was the seven of spades.
They considered using me as a troop entertainer but parading around the troops pulling rabbits out of hats while dressed in a spangly shirt didn't appeal so i performed an illusion to prove that i could be used elsewhere and floated a 16,000 ton German Battleship down the Thames, not the actual battleship, but the illusion of it using a small model and strategically placed mirrors but to everyone who saw, their was a freaking 610 foot German ship in the Thames.
Suitably impressed, the top brass decided that a military magician may come in handy after all and promoted me to major and gave me a team of the best artists, carpenters, electricians and criminals called the very cool 'A-Force' and let us take out act to the battlefield to use magic to trick Axis forces.
First up was freeing captured POWs from hostile camps who under the Geneva Convetion were allowed care packages from humanitarian groups and even the dumbest Nazi guard would notice hacksaw and chisel shaped packages turning up so we created a number of clever ruses to get the escape tools they required to them so we hid maps inside playing cards, saw blades inside cricket bat handles and shoelaces embedded with wire.
While the German guards were left wondering why the entire Old Boys Second XI hadn't turned up for their usual afternoon knock around, i had moved onto my next trick, disappearing the Suez Canal and Alexandria Harbour.
The harbour housed the royal fleet and naturally, the Axis powers wanted to destroy it but my mission was to make that not happen so i created an identical fake Harbour on a lake a mile away with plywood ships and buildings and placed revolving tin mirrors with spinning searchlights to disguise the canal and blind the bomber pilot and when the Luftwaffe came and for eight nights they bombed the wrong target.  
We repeated the ruse several more times with strategically important buildings which meant the Germans were bombing the hell out of building made of painted canvas and fake bricks but turned the dial up to 11 with the biggest and best illusion, creating a whole fake army complete with tanks, ammunition and all the other things which you would find in a war zone.
All we had to do was trick the Afrika Korps into thinking their attack was coming from the south, when it was actually coming from the north so me and the A Force concocted an army of 2,000 inflatable tanks in the South along with fake supply dumps, storage buildings, ammunition piles and railway lines.
Along came the Nazis who were looking South when the attack came from the North and the scene of pouting Nazi's tricked again.
After the war i resumed my magic career but appearing at the Bognor Conservative Club never had the same appeal after taking on the might of the German Army so i gave it all up to run a driving school and the only thing i turned anything into was a car into a driveway.

Just Keep Your Head Down Tiffany Trump

It is doubtful if much will come of the current probe into Donald Trump and his actions in the Washington riots currently being undertaken in America, far too many gullible Republicans willing to back him for much to happen but while most of what he did in office ranged from laughably awful (bleach drinking Covid cure) to manically deranged (pulling out of Paris Accord), something i always found just plain weird and creepy was the way he talked about his daughter Ivanka.
He does have another daughter, Tiffany, but she must not be as hot as Ivanka because when he said 'Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right? he wasn't talking about her, nor when he said she was one of the great beauties of the world and 'She's got the best body'.
The self confessed sex-offender who once said he grabbed women by the pussy called Ivanka 'a piece of ass' and thought it okay to proudly announce that 'if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her'.
A thought that was obviously bobbing around in that empty head of his because he said it again in a later interview saying 'If I weren’t happily married and, you know, her father...' We maybe shouldn't ponder too long what he was going to end on.
Very weird and creepy but it gets creepier because when asked what two things Ivanka and Donald had in common, Ivanka said 'real estate and golf' but Trump said: 'Sex' and he did say that he kisses Ivanka 'every chance I get'.
Donald Trump was never a stranger to grabbing headlines, and we know that headlines wasn't all he grabbed, so Tiffany probably shouldn't get too upset that she doesn't get as much attention from her father as her older sister.

The Truth Is Out There And It's On It's Way Here

I'm not one to believe in Conspiracy Theories but there is definitely something fishy going on as Canada become the latest country to step up research into unidentified flying objects following actions taken by the United States, Russia and China this week.
The United States announced the formation of a team to 'to identify aerial phenomena' while
China said it has received some 'interesting signs of activity outside of the Earth' and Russia scientists said they were 'ramping up research into potential UFO sightings'.
Now Canada has agreed to take part and share information into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP's) with the United States so when the nations with some of the Planet's largest airspace agree within days of each other to increase their efforts into UFO's i think...hmmmm.
Now i'm not trying to start a panic, i don't think that one day, probably while you are watching TV, an alien will arrive unannounced in your living room and before you know it you will be face down on the dining table with a probe being inserted somewhere that doesn't see too much sunshine, but i'm not saying it won't happen either.
Obviously something happened to spark them all into reacting and thinking about it reasonably, the only logical conclusion we can reach is that they got wind of a massive alien armada making it's way to Earth demanding to see our leader which poses the problem, who exactly would we take them to?
We'd better sort that one out soon because if the Aliens are on their way travelling at light speed, and they are just passing Pluto 4 billion miles away, then they will be arriving soon which should give you enough time to move the fruit bowl off the dining table, y'know, just in case.

Special Guest Blogger: Alfred Dreyfus

I was 10 years old when the Franco-Prussian War broke out and being Jewish, we had to move after the Germans annexed my home town which made me determined to join the military when i was old enough and on my 18th Birthday i enrolled in military school and three years later graduated as a sub-lieutenant in the French army and was assigned to the First Cavalry Division.
Life was good, i was in my chosen career and married the local beauty and then i was being truly smiled upon because i was chosen as a trainee in the French Army's General Staff headquarters, and after passing my exams, only had to have my job rubber stamped by the panel and i was a General although one of the other Generals refused to admit me, saying that i was Jewish and therefore unlikable and not desirable to have in his French Army and lowered my grade so i was beneath the cut off to be accepted.
Obviously i protested but was told it was out of their hands and that protest would come back to haunt me when a torn-up handwritten note containing French military secrets was found by a cleaner in a wastebasket addressed to Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attache in Paris.
The Generals concluded that it had been written by a spy in the French military and suspicion fell upon the disgruntled, unlikable Jewish trainee who had been recently turned down for promotion.
I was arrested and convicted in a court martial where the main evidence was that my handwriting was different to the hand writing on the note which proved i had forged it (so much for French military intelligence) and i was stripped of my army rank and after having the rank insignia and braid cut from my uniform and my sword broken, i was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island in French Guiana.
For five long years i pleaded my innocence until the French military intelligence discovered that the real spy was Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy who fled to England before he could be arrested and safely out of the French reach, confessed to a Newspaper that he wrote the note and therefore i should face a retrial.
I did get my retrial and was again found guilty of treason despite the evidence of my innocence as the military did not want to admit they had got it wrong but the public uproar forced the President to pardon me which set me free but meant that i had to accept guilt and remained  a traitor to France.
While at a funeral of one of my most vocal supporters, i was wounded in the arm by a gunshot after a failed assassination attempt by a right-wing journalist but i was finally found innocent and readmitted into the army just as World War I broke out and after serving throughout the war, i retired due to my ill health from my time in the prison and died aged 75 in Paris, a few years before the Nazi's invaded and installed the Vichy government with it's delirious antisemitism and demonising Jews which, to France's shame, was only slightly more Jew hating than the Government it replaced.

Right Call On Transgender Swimmers

In any other walk of life i support the rights of anyone Transgender, but when it comes to sport i am completely in the camp that say's athletes who were once men should NOT be competing against women so i am firmly in agreement with the Swimming's world governing body FINA who has voted overwhelmingly to ban transgender athletes from competing in women's elite races.   
It will require transgender competitors to have completed their transition by the age of 12 in order to be able to compete in women's competitions.
A statement from FINA said that in order to protect competitive fairness male-to-female transgender athletes will be eligible to compete if: 'they can establish to FINA's comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 (of puberty) or before age 12, whichever is later'.
FINA will explore establishing an open category for any male to female athlete but Athlete Ally, an LGBTQ athletic advocacy group responded to the announcement and said the eligibility criteria is: 'discriminatory, harmful, unscientific and not in line with the 2021 IOC principles. If we truly want to protect women's sports, we must include all women'.
Now i'm no biologist but a male physiology is very different to a females and it would be very unfair that women could be competing against other athletes with such a biological advantage of having a male body that no amount of training will be enough to overcome the physical advantage and that isn't fair.
I understand the argument that transgender athletes should be able to identify as male or female and more power to them, they can be who they like, but not in a competition, where some athletes take drugs for just a tiny advantage, a male body is just too much to advantageous to overcome for female athletes who, if reversed, would be left treading water if they competed against males.

Sign Them God's Up!

The Security Guard at work is an Arsenal fan and we generally discuss the trials and tribulations of being a Gooner when i pass him on the way in and out of the Office.
Now i knew he was a deeply religious guy, often i see him knocking around outside the Prayer Room and as a Muslim he goes in and out quite a bit so when he said he was excited about us signing [Gabriel] Jesus, i immediately went to a joke and answered that if we can also get Mohammad, Buddha and that Indian one with all the arms to play in goal then we could have enough miracles to finish in the top 4 next season.
Obviously he didn't find that as funny as i did and he hasn't mentioned it since but it's a no-brainer, the Indian Goddess (i googled her and is called Durga), has 10 arms, she would be unbeatable in goal.
Another Indian God who would be a good signing is Ganesha, the man had the head of an elephant, stick him in the back four and with his thick head any clearances would sail away over the terraces or set the Greek God Hermes away down the line, the man had wings on his boots, he would make Usain Bolt look like he was running backwards.
Another Greek is the God Kaos, who appeared in a void before their was anything so he is used to being in a place with no atmosphere so ideal for those away games at Tottenham, West Ham and Manchester City.
As for Jesus, a regular saying is that Jesus Saves so he could be a handy back up Goalkeeper except for what i remember from my religious Education at school...all together now...he wasn't great on crosses.

Assange Treated Harsher Than Murderer's He Exposed

The UK government has approved the extradition of Assange to the US, where he faces espionage charges and we all know if he does end up on the other side of the Atlantic how that will end, we only have to look at where Chelsea Manning found herself to see how America treats whistleblowers.
The espionage charges are a bit confusing as Assange was not a spy handing information to another nation in 2010, he exposed the US Government for what it was during the Iraq and Afghan Wars.
We learnt from him about the torture manuals for Guantanamo Bay and the extraordinary rendition campaign but most shocking was the footage of US forces shooting and killing civilians on the streets of Baghdad from an Apache attack helicopter and evidence that U.S. troops executed Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi.
All what Assange exposed was initially strongly denied by the American military until it was uncovered and the following investigation into the chopper incident resulted in one soldier being exonerated and the other being suspended without pay for a month.
That the person who revealed all this barbarianism is going to be treated harsher than the murderers who perpetrated it says much about the woeful state of where we are today where exposing the criminal war actions of the military is the greater crime.
Assange should be hailed as a hero and the chopper pilots and the animals who shot a 5 month old Iraqi baby in the head while he slept in his cot the ones rotting in a prison cell.

Summer Of Discontent

When the 5th largest Economy in the World can spend £133 billion on nuclear weapons whilst NHS figures showed illnesses linked to Victorian poverty and lack of food were making a comeback, with cases of scurvy and malnutrition doubling since the Conservatives came to power, you know the people making the decisions are not doing the best job they can.
The same people who told NHS staff that a 1% payrise was all they could afford while just writing off £11 billion of illegitimate Covid loans and burning £4 billion of PPE which they purchased but was unusable are now trying to say that the Train Staff who are striking next week are  'hurting the nations workers'. Not as much as you spaffing our money away it won't says every UK taxpayer.
As much as they want to keep the focus on how much a train driver earns compared to everyone else, therefore pitting workers against each other, the strike is also about safety as job cuts hit and the reduction of the terms and conditions in their contracts but it isn't just getting on a train which will be tougher this summer, so will travelling on a bus or plane and getting your bins emptied as the UK Summer of Discontent takes hold.
The list includes rail strikes along with tube and tram services and British Airways airport staff are being balloted on industrial action with Ryanair and easyJet already agreeing to walk outs as have Arriva buses which affects most of the northern half of the country.
Post Office staff have firmed up their dates for upcoming strike action and waste is piling up on some streets as Bin workers across the country are set to continue their strike in what they are calling the 'summer of stink'.
Civil Service Union, PCS, is balloting members on a striking for three days over job cuts as are the unions for BT, Openreach and EE staff so things could be about to get very uncomfortable, and smelly, very quickly.

FOAB Top 5 Saints Posts

The Special Guest Bloggers posts will be coming to a pause in the next few weeks as my writing partner is spending the summer away doing something religious because he is a vicar/priest/canon/bishop and he is the one who comes up with the religious people.
We have an agreement where he supplies the basic outline of a Saint or other suitably religious person, i write it up and enter the jokes and flippant bits and he nicks the usable bits in his sermons on a Sunday so i only have to do half the work and he doesn't send his congregation to sleep every time he pokes his head up in the pulpit.
As i am less than respectful, he obviously disowns them and threatened to forcibly lodge a King James Bible somewhere if i named him so i'm not about to out him but he often asks which of the Saints is the most popular so he knows which of the many, many, many Saints there is so they can get an extra Sunday mention.
Therefore, in the best top of the Pops tradition...AT 5 is the Patron Saint of comedians Saint Genesius who is comfortably edged out AT 4 by a man sitting on a rock or as he prefers, Saint Symeon the Stylite.
AT 3 we find Saint Cyprian of Antioch who was a bit of a demon with the ladies or rather used his demons to find ladies and just missing out on the top spot is the flying Holy man, St. Joseph of Cupertino.
AT 1 is the man who called himself 'the only Saint who ever who died of the squirts on the way to war' Saint Louis of France so he is the name to drop into a sermon about cheek turning or not covering your neighbour's ass although there was a certain Mr. Satan with the 4th most hits but you might want to read the room before using that one.

Political Transfer Season Open's

The football transfer season has opened with my team throwing money towards Portuguese and Brazilian teams for a couple of players already but what if we could swap out not just our footballers but our politicians as well.
Boris Johnson is as popular as a bout of wind here and the Ukrainians seem to like him so they could have him on a free transfer although i'm not sure what Volodymyr Zelenskyy's position is on fiscal policy or environmental issues although to be fair he has been rather busy with other problems recently so it wouldn't be a straight swap so we would have to look around to see which Nation's leader we could make an offer for to replace Johnson.   
Joe Biden of America always looks like somebody had just woken him up and could drop back off to sleep at a moments notice so he's out as is any right wing leader, we have had enough of those ballsing things up thank you so don't call us, we will call you Brazil's Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Orbán, Lukashenko of Belarus, Poland's Morawiecki, Erdoğan of Turkey and Italy’s Sergio Mattarella.
Warmongers such as Israel and Russia, you can keep your guys and religious nutters need not apply so all you Middle Eastern johnnies, don't sit by the phone because it isn't going to ring.
Xi Jinping of China look's kinda cuddly but is not a big fan of a free media so my job would become much more harder so from what i can see our list is down to three, Macron of France, Trudeau of Canada and Ardern of New Zealand.
As easy on the eye as he is to look at, Trudeau has that black mark on his book from when he had that black stuff on his face and i like Macron but it has to be Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, her reaction to the shooting in Wellington and the Covid pandemic left us admiring what a proper World Leader should look like so we should open negotiations, offer her a decent remuneration package and get her to sign a 5 year contract and if she passes the medical, install her in number 10 immediately.

Stay Cool With Internet Tip's

I know summer is meant to be all about long, lazy days and sultry, sexy nights but let’s be honest, it’s actually about wasps, sunburn, and the smell of sweaty armpits in the lift but as we can't stop the Earth orbiting the Sun we are stuck with Summer each year and if the start is anything to go by, this one will be a doozy which is great if you are a mosquito but not so good for pasty skinned humans.
As Britain has officially become as hot as the surface of the Sun, it has become difficult to get a decent nights sleep but luckily there are lots of people on the Internet willing to give tips on how to cool down and not just lay there flipping around the pillow trying to find a cool spot.
A fan would keep you cool but you then have the drone of the fan keeping you awake and if you throw open the windows you wake up with an insect party in your bedroom.
Something i have done for the past few summers is put my pillow in the fridge an hour before i go to bed (or just the pillowcase if the fridge isn't big enough) and that works fine if you drop off in the first 30 minutes or so.
Other helpful tips from around the Web is to not strip off but wear loose-fitting cotton or silk nightclothes as natural fibres wick away moisture from your skin.
Leaving blinds down or curtains closed during the day will keep the sun out and not heat up the bedroom and running your wrists and hands or feet under the cold tap for a few minutes will bring down the bodies temperature as will hugging a hot water bottle filled with cold water.
Putting the mattress on the floor supposedly helps as that is where the coolest air is as the warm air is lighter and will rise leaving all the cold stuff lower down.
Standing under a freezing shower might sound like the quickest way to bring your temperature down but apparently your body will react to a dramatic change like this by trying to preserve heat by shutting down the blood flow to the skin and trap the heat inside rather than let it escape. A tip is wring out a flannel with cold water and sleep with it on exposed skin or go to bed with damp socks on.
Finally sleeping on your side exposes more body surface and gives off more heat so lots of good ideas for keeping cool in the heatwave which are more useful than my usual method which is laying there with my hair stuck to the pillow and whining 'IT'S TOO HOT' every couple of minutes.

No Need To Wait Until 2050, It's Here Already

There is an amazing and worrisome video from France with a weather-girl, Evelyne Dheliat, showing a temperature map she used in June 2014 which shows the projected temperatures in France in June 2050 due to climate change.
June 2050 is still 28 years away and yet, a look at her map for temperatures in France in June 2022 and her prediction has already happened for many.
Temperatures in the UK topped 33C today and other parts of Europe such as Spain are also experiencing intense heatwaves, with cities in southern
Spain seeing highs of 43C.
Climate change is happening and only the most stupid or selfish people can deny it. Sadly, there remain a few of them with their ignorant views but although the planet will survive and recover, it's us who won't.

Special Guest Blogger: Christian God

If i had an address it would be everywhere and nowhere, present in space and time which may a bit confusing but it stops all that advertising crap coming through my letterbox.
Out of all the things bright and beautiful i put on your planet, it's only you human earthlings who complain, it's not the other creatures down there complaining about the state of the Earth.
I made several billion other planets at the same time and they don't have problems with earthquakes or volcanoes although granted Earth was made in in six days which is less than the standard turnaround time for a new planet but still plenty of time for adequate safety checks to be carried out and anyway each comes with a 100 million year guarantee with optional after-sales service but beyond that date, me, nor any of the employees of God PLC limited, could be held responsible if the inhabitants didn't follow the manufacturer's instructions.
If you are going to stuff the air with pollutants and the sea with plastic then don't come praying to me, it's your mess, you clear it up.
Also, don't come to me for help in all your holy wars, it's a bit of a liberty to be honest i have enough on my plate already what with answering prayers, blessing America and saving The Queen, i just haven't the time to co-ordinate all your many Holy wars as well.
I'm not against praying in general but some of the things i get asked for is just ridiculous, have you any idea how difficult it is to arrange for one person to pass an exam or something, and when you don't pass i get blamed for ignoring you or screwing you over as if it's nothing to do with skipping all those lessons or failing to revise.
If you are not happy with me, you could always try one of the other deities next time, there are thousands of us and Muhammad seems to do quite well for his lot so maybe he has an opening for someone in the O Level Geography Class. Might be worth a try.
Lucky for you lot that i'm a lot calmer these days, i had a real temper as a young man and almost killed everyone on Earth with floods but i have calmed as i have got older and use less weather phenomena to demonstrate my wrath on  my planets inhabitants when they displease me.
That said, there has been a giant storm raging on Jupiter for over 500 years but there are an awful, lot of gay aliens on that place and i think i clearly set out my position on gays, i'm not a fan but that is all set out in the Bible's small print of the terms and conditions.
I know some people don't believe in me and sure there was a flurry of activity 2020 odd years ago which included impregnating teenagers, setting fire to bushes, parting the seas and issuing tablets of stone but nothing since except an occasional appearance as a smudge on someones toast but i say to the Atheists if i didn't exist there would be no Atheists but as there are Atheists...Amen as they say in my many houses.

Drink Beer And Be Healthy Say's Aussies

If ever a nation was going to find that Beer is good for you, it would be the Australian's and sure enough, the NOVA University Lisbon has issued a report that found that men who drank a bottle of lager each day had healthier guts.
The report was written in Australian by probably the only sober person available, and remember this is Australia so by sober they actually mean the only person still capable of typing, so i will translate it.

G'day Sheila's and Bloke's (Hello Ladies and Gentlemen)

Us Dag's at the University of Lisbon down here in Straya (The scientists at the Lisbon University in Australia) have been Flat out doing experiments on Stubbies (working hard on beer experiments) to find a reason to drink beer.
We downed a few slabs (experimented on several alcoholic beverages), no Bludger's here mate (we work very hard), and discovered that Crikey, (Wow) a cold one each day (a bottle of lager) increased healthy bacteria in the gut by 7%.
We did it again to make sure it was Fair Dinkum (honest and true) and was as stoked as a dingo in a billabong (happy to notice) it was true so Fair go mate, Fair suck of the sauce bottle. (we were very satisfied with the results)
So don't bother with the Billy (teapot), throw a snag (Sausage) on the barbie (BBQ) and you and a few cobbers (friends) grab the coldies (lagers) from the Esky (coolbox) and down a few (drink responsibly) and remember, if the betta arf (wife or girlfriend) is sook at ya (not pleased with her partner) at you downing a stubby at Brekky (drinking alcohol at the morning meal), tell her your not getting bugged (inebriated) earlier than usual, your just increasing your gut health.

Hooroo Cobbers. (Goodbye fellow colleagues)

So what that all means is that Australians now have another reason to drink alcohol which to be fair, in a country where they spend most of their time trying to not be murdered by the wildlife, seems fair enough to me.

Special Guest Blogger: Constantine the Great

You do have to be careful with which religion you choose, there are thousands of them and choose the wrong one and apart from a lifetime of depriving yourself of bacon sandwiches and going without a foreskin, pick the wrong one and when it all ends it's too late to swap sides so i gave a lot of thought to my choice because as the Roman Emporer, what i chose would be imposed on all of my citizens so i based it on thought, logic, reasoning and the beardy sandal wearer that i dreamt about one night.
Plumping for Christianity was a tough choice because we had spent the last few decades persecuting them and pulling down their churches, making a bonfire out of their scriptures and imprisoning them but it was on the eve of a huge battle with Maxentius that Christ appeared in a  dream telling me that i should put a cross on my shield to ensure victory.
I also dreamt that night that i was playing cards with a tiger and a talking marrow but i went with the cross thing and kicked roman arse so i decided Christianity was the way to go and set about replacing the pagan Gods with the Christian one but not completely, i hedged my bets slightly and kept worshiping some of the original Gods such as Victoria, Apollo, Diana and Hercules just in case.  
I wrote the Edict of Milan which declared that we shouldn't be beastly to the Christians anymore and called a meeting in Nicaea to lay out the rules for Christians and bring together all the different factions under one.
Along with the bishops of all provinces, we came up with when to celebrate Easter, how Jesus as the Son of God fits into the whole Christian thing, the rules around repentance and penance and that God had always been there, just overshadowed by the believers of the louder, more showy pagan Gods. We also agreed on Chi spelt X being a shortened version of Christ so the plebs only needed to know how to spell X in order to write his name.
With the Christian thing rubber stamped, i returned to Emporering and the first thing i did was have my eldest son put to death by forcing him to drink posion for having an affair with his step mother, my wife, who i ordered to have a hot bath, a very hot bath, so hot in fact that it killed her.
So apart from starting the whole Christian bandwagon rolling, founding Constantinople and uniting the Roman Empire, i also gave us the word Xmas which came in very handy long after i died and someone finally remembered that Jesus was born on December 25th.

Special Guest Blogger: Mesopotamian God Pazuzu

You could probably name the Mesopotamian Gods on the finger of one hand but though my name may not be familiar, you do you know me, i'm considered a bit of a celebrity in the Deity world after starring in a blockbuster movie and as the 5th member of a pretty well known band.
My origins are a bit less auspicious, i was created as a counter to Lamashtu who was the most terrible of all the female demons. She preyed on women during childbirth, kidnapped their newborns while they were breastfeeding, and then slew the babies to eat their flesh.
As vile as eating children was, she also handed out the nightmares and caused pregnant women to miscarry, and brought disease and sickness.
My father, Hanpu the Pervert, (don't ask) created me to protect expectant mothers but rather than give me special powers or something cool, my gift was to be so hideously ugly that i would scare away her and any other demons that were hanging about.
I had a scaly body, birds talons for feet, wings and a scorpion's tail but it's the face which is where the money is, gazelle horns, human ears, a dogs muzzle and bulging eyes.
I was also responsible for the west wind so i was often kept busy so the soon to be mothers were told to hang an amulet with my face on it around their neck and when Lamashtu saw it, she knew this one was under my protection and leave her alone.
So successful was my fugly face that people began hanging the amulets in their homes to repel other demons and keep their homes safe so i was actually a decent type of God, sure i sometimes got carried away with the wind bit of my job and blew away villages but they were only there because i kept away
the real bad guys so cut me some slack for that.
I was pretty famous in my day but my big break was when i was asked to appear in the Exorcist, that woman with the swiveling head and shooting pea green vomit everywhere, that's me possessing her but being a God i didn't take any wages so everyone else got a much, much bigger cut of the film's profits, pretty much all of which must have been spent on therapy.
Then the Gorillaz decided what their band needed was for an ancient, really ugly wind demon to appear in their video's. Yep, that's me on Russel Hobbs drum kit so if you was imagining Stephen Tyler's face with Martin Feldman's eyes, you wouldn't be far off.

Special Guest Blogger: Prince William Of Gloucester

No i'm not that Prince William, as far as i know he is still amongst the living and going balder every day, no i was the other one, the one the Press gave the nickname the James Bond Prince because i was flying planes, dating models or trekking through the Sahara Desert up until it all went up in flames.
I was fourth in line to the British throne and had no real chance to ever become King so after finishing school i lived it up which the tabloid's loved hence the nickname but i did like a daredevil pastime such as riding around in hot air balloons, flying airplanes and dating beautiful women but i had to get a proper job so went to work at the Commonwealth Office in Tokyo, Japan.
In Tokyo, i was far away from the prying eyes of my royal relatives and obligations and met Hungarian Revlon model Zsuzsi Starkloff who was face meltingly beautiful and we moved in together but my family, Prince Philip inparticular, were not so in love with her as i was, they sent Princess Margaret to have a word and end what they considered to be a scandalous romance because i was technically in the line of succession, i needed the Queen’s approval to marry and she wasn't about to let me marry 'a commoner'.
I decided to ignore them and just get on with it but then my father fell ill and had to relinquish some of his royal duties so i was summoned back to stand in for him at events like gala's and charity balls which was very boring and my family were going on to me to find a suitable wife but i still wanted to marry Zsuzsi it would just take the Queen and her husband to both have strokes or something.
I still kept up my flying and turned up at the International Air Trophy event, piloting a Piper Cherokee and it all started very well then the plane banked suddenly to the left, a wing clipped a tree and hit the ground in a ball of angry flame.
I was so badly burned that they had to use my dental records to identify my body but cousin Charlie named his first-born son with the Lady Diana Spencer after me so see? I was the original Prince William only with more hair.

Take Care As Covid Rates Increasing Again

For many people, Covid was so last year but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has warned that the pandemic isn't done and dusted just yet and the amount of infections in the UK is climbing again and even more worrying is that the increase is being driven by the 4th and 5th versions of the virus which have evolved to include a high rate of 'immune escape', meaning even the vaccinated immune system can no longer recognise or fight the virus.
Medical experts are keen to point out that these Omicron variations are not more severe but of course, it would be better to avoid getting Covid-19 at all, it is still potentially a killer and there are the negative health outcomes the disease is linked to such as long Covid.
It is highly unlikely that the UK Government would enter a lock-down scenario again and even if they did any health messages by the Government would be largely ignored, Boris and his lock-down partying means that that particular ship has well and truly sailed.
Seems then that we are going to have to live with it so the new solutions are the same as the old solutions with vaccines, masks in indoor settings, better ventilation and getting rid of the god-awful Tories.

Special Guest Blogger: Yoruba God Olorun

Where with most Gods you just have the one, with me you get your money's worth because i'm three gods OLORUN the Lord of Heaven, OLODUMARE, the Ultimate Creator and OLOFI the Messenger which you must admit is Excellent value.
In OLODUMARE mode i saw that the universe consisted only of sky and a formless expanse of marshy water so i had some wonderfully ambitious blueprints for planet Earth which included some solid land, fields and forests, hills and valleys, and various living things to populate it and i prudently decided to delegate the job to my son Obatala and told him to get on with it as it just wouldn’t do for the Master of All things to get his majestic hands dirty.
Now Obatala did like a drink or two which is not a good thing when you have a holy mission to perform and on his way he gatecrashed a God-party and spent the rest of the evening roaring drunk but my other son, Oduduwa, spotted an opportunity and stole the holy building materials and did a little planet-constructing himself and to be fair, he did such a good job of it i promoted him to God of the newly renovated Earth.
As for the drunken muppet Obatala, he was punished with the tedious punishment of making men and women and he built some little clay figures which i breathed eternal life into and made them into humans but they kept multiplying and growing bigger and bigger after which they shrank into feeble old people. Because there were so many of them creeping around, they begged for me to free them from such a long life so i introduced the idea of death so the old, wrinkly ones died.
The water goddess Olokun wasn't best pleased that i had taken over the planet so she kept trying to flood the land to regain the area she had lost and we held a winner takes all weaving contest which obviously i won because you are not all living on houseboats.  
All in all the Earth isn't exactly what i had planned but it will do and it's a damned sight better than it would have been if a drunk Obatala had done it with his fumbling alcoholic fingers although i do sometimes look at some creatures like the penguin, duck billed platypus and hammer head shark and wonder if Oduduwa wasn't partial to a drop himself.

Some Victims Deserve More Sympathy Than Others It Seems

The general reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been brilliant, one of the World's most powerful militaries invading its much smaller and weaker neighbour in order to subjugate and take over it's land and although the military might of the Russian's will probably win out in the bitter end, the willingness of the Ukrainian's to fight back against the invader has been much admired which throws up the question, why is that willingness to applaud the brave Ukrainians not replicated when other nations are invaded?
The most obvious place is Palestine who have been fighting back against the invading Israeli's who have been killing them and stealing their land for almost 70 years, they are castigated for daring to fight back when the Israeli military swoops in to pull down their houses, break all sorts of International and Human Right's to kill, evict and steal their land.
The likes of Syria and Iran are vilified for supplying the Palestinians with the rockets to fight back against their murderous oppressors who launch the weapons supplied to them and paid for by the West, mostly America who financially back the Israeli forces.  
It as the West who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq but there was no rush to support the unfortunate victims of America and British weapons and the refugees fleeing the war-zone we created were not welcomed with offers to house them or heart tugging reports of scenes of devastation, if anything they were told in no uncertain terms that we didn't want them here.
So why was Benjamin Netanyahu and now Naftali Bennett not being compared to Hitler and why have no Israeli athletes been kicked out of International sports Tournaments or the entire nation under sanctions like Russia? After-all, they have done and continue to do exactly what Russia have done and have been doing it for decades? The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs put the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces at 6,050 with 138,114 injuries since 2009 and 49,532 Palestinian structures destroyed since 2019.
It is uncomfortable to answer why this is acceptable and endorsed by the West while the fate of Palestinians, Iraqi's, Syrian's and Afghans is largely overlooked, and that was answered by Western journalists at the very start of the conflict, before they were slapped down and told to begin choosing their words more carefully.
From CBS, 'Ukraine is a relatively civilized, relatively European city where you wouldn’t expect that it’s going to happen' and from the former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine: 'It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed every day' and in France, BFM TV stated: 'We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives'.
Writing in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan explained: 'They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking' and that is it in a nutshell, they look like us and the implication is crystal clear, when the war victims seen are white 'civilised' Europeans we feel sympathy, when they are African blacks or Muslim browns then, well, they are not 'like us' are they and deemed not quite so worthy of our sympathy aka good old fashioned racism.

Losing Our Ping Pong Balls

Anthropologist's at Dartmouth College have made a discovery after been digging around inside the skull's of humans who have died over the last thousands of years and found that we may be the most advanced civilisation ever exist on Earth, but we are doing it all with smaller brains.
They found that around 100 generations ago, our ancestors had larger brains and you may look around at some of the knuckle draggers walking around today and say 'no shit Sherlock' although another report from Norwegian researchers found that IQ scores have been steadily falling since the 70's.
Obviously brain size does not mean a higher IQ, on average the male brain is 10% larger than the female brain and look at the bang up job they have done but back to the Anthropologists who decided to use the medium of ping pong balls to explain the volume of grey matter we have lost since our great, great, great, great...x100 strolled around with their massive brains.
Apparently the amount is four ping pong balls worth and as i am not up to date with the exact International Table Tennis Federation's rules on ball size, i googled it to find that one ball is 40mm so the volume lost is 160mm which is quite a bit from a 1500mm brain today.
So what happened around 3,000 years ago to mean that we needed an extra 9% of our brains volume?
It could be our diets changed or the increased interaction with other humans as civilisations began to come together but basically the men with the trowels and dirty knees didn't know but they are certain that brain size does not matter and i would agree, the Sperm Whale has the biggest brain of any animal species, 800,000mm or 20,000 ping pong balls, and they haven't invented anything.

Fly Me To The Moon (One Day Maybe)

I had always assumed that by now we would have at least a moon base but it seems we have just given up since 1972 and apart from a few landers, the Moon has been free of humans bouncing all over it although there have been tenuous mentions of one of the big three, USA, China and Russia doing something but none have any firm plans which is disappointing.
The Chinese and Russians have announced a joint plan to build a base by 2035 and the Chang'e 7 lunar mission is planned to launch around 2024 and will survey the moon for a prime piece of Lunar real estate to build it but my hopes were on NASA who said a while back that their Artemis program planned to return humans to the Moon by 2025.
That has now been put back to at least 2028 due to a cock-up with the launch tower needed to launch the crewed missions to the lunar surface as the company already paid $16.8 million to build it at the Kennedy Space Center have announced the $16.8 doesn't quite cover it after-all and will need NASA to throw a few more tens of millions their way in order to complete it.
I don't know why America, Russia, China and the European Space Agency don't pool their resources and do it as a joint effort for mankind rather than try and do it alone, national machismo i guess, but it leaves me banging my head on my desk in frustration that we could do so much more in everything, not just space flight, if we put aside our differences and just did things together.

Go Away Foreigners...Then Come Back Please

The 52% of Brexit voters have always argued that they knew exactly what they were voting for in 2016 so they must be delighted at the massive queues at NHS hospitals due to staff shortages.
The majority of 1.35 million NHS staff in England are British but around 15% or 190,000 were not and quite rightly, they decided that living and working in a country which has said they should leave wasn't the best use of their skills and packed up and went elsewhere leaving all those Brexiters to wave them off and then admire that the Staff may be exhausted, but it fills their heart with pride that they are British people exhausted.
The Government, realising that forcing out non-Brits who did the jobs such as delivering petrol and picking our fruit and vegetables led to petrol not being delivered and food rotting in the fields decided that maybe we do need some foreign workers here afterall and have been quietly attempting to bring them back, quietly because they don't want to upset the people who voted for them to Get Brexit Done.
So after the NHS announcing they had a staff shortage of 110,192 staff following an exodus of foreign staff after Brexit which is leading to longer delays to a backlog which already sits at 6.1m, the Government have a plan to try and fill these positions, poaching trained staff from abroad.
How the other nations we are poaching them from feel about it is probably easy to guess, they pay for the training and then they bugger off abroad with their certificate and use the skills they have learnt on the people of other nations which is why the World Health Organization code of practice states that 'member states should discourage active recruitment of health professionals from developing countries' although that page must be missing from the Governments copy.  
Brexit seems to have become right, you all got to get out followed by sorry, but can most of you come back but keep it quiet because you know, the racists and little Englander's are our core vote, appreciate it.
Next week, how reducing the Civil Service by 90,000 personnel won't end in delays in getting your passport, tax refund or driving licence issued.

Room For Improvement

After surviving the attempt by his own MPs to throw him out on his ear, Boris Johnson has been repeatedly talking up his successes since he took over from Theresa May in 2019 which seem pretty thin on the ground but when you actually look at what he promised and what he has delivered, they are even thinner.
The 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 more GPs is actually 24,295 more nurses and 1,147 more GP's and the promise to build 40 new hospitals stands at 1 but any usual definition of 'new hospital' but the Government have changed the definition to include any new clinical buildings or a new wing of an existing hospital or a major refurbishment.
The 20,000 more police is so far an extra 13,576 police officers recruited but those of us with long memories that they are replacing the 21,000 who they deemed 'surplus to requirements' previously.
300,000 new homes a year was 242,000 in 2019-20 and 216,000 in 2020-21 so not so hot there as the
former Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick told MPs: 'The government will miss their pledge by a country mile'.
His big pull for 52% of the nation was the promise to 'Get Brexit done' but as the Northern Ireland border rumbles on, the lack of trade deals leaving a 15% deficit in imports and exports and the severe worker shortages, it is hard to say that Brexit is done and dusted.
No rise in rates of income tax, National Insurance or VAT turned into a 1.25% rise in National Insurance and the largest rise in the tax burden since the 1940s.
As for Keep the triple lock for the state pension, that quickly became suspend the triple lock and just as quick to go was was the pledge to keep spending 0.7% spent on International Aid which went down to 0.5%
It wasn't a pledge but one of Boris's ofte repeated lines this week has been that under his leadership, the UK has the fastest growing economy in the G7 but according to the OECD, of the G20 nations, only Russia keeping us from being 20th in the economy growing league.
All in all, not great and although Boris has been proven to be untruthful, let's be charitable and mark his card as plenty of room for improvement.

Special Guest Blogger: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey

You may think i was pretty bitter over what King Henry VIII did to me but nothing could be further from the truth.
So what if i was the second most powerful and one of the wealthiest men in England, he was the King even if he never really had the temperament for it and changed the nation's religion just so he could get his leg over, that's his business, not mine.
Twenty years of service i gave him, as Chaplain, then as Cardinal and Chief Advisor getting him whatever he wanted and helping him to run England successfully and prosecute anyone who annoyed him such as his ex-mistress, Anne Stafford, but it another Anne who turned the King's bright ginger head and bought about my downfall.
Anne Boleyn had been involved romantically with one of my pages, Henry Lord Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, but i knew the fat monarch was interested in her so i put a stop to the romance by dispatching Percy far away which annoyed Anne enormously so she vowed to see me destroyed but i knew that as long as i was in the King’s favour i was untouchable, even though she tried many times to bring me down.
I also knew despite him being a complete jerk, he had an eye for the ladies and he may have been a man with the stomach for a fight but he showed a woeful lack of self-control in the face of a pretty face and a heaving cleavage so i would have to be smart when Anne Bow-legs-lyn began flirting and making demands of him.
First she said that my home in Hampston Court was far too good for a mere Cardinal and he agreed but left me living there for the moment and then he asked me to arrange a marriage between his daughter Mary and the most powerful man in Europe, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but that proved tricky to arrange as he was 21 and she was only 6 so he married another princess which the red haired git blamed me for.
My final error was my failure to gain the porky Henry an annulment from the Pope from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boelyn and Henry cast me out of Hampston Court, giving it to Anne Boleyn, charged me with high treason and ordered a trial.
Obviously the head choppy nutjob was going to have me executed but i beat him to it, dying of natural causes in my cell first so up yours fatty, too slow.

Special Guest Blogger: Tanaka Shinbei

When your nickname is Heaven’s Punisher you know people think of you as some sort of badass but i was destined for a life of farming until i was introduced to martial arts and especially Jigen-ryu which shows you how to kill your opponent with one blow of your sword and if you take two or three slashes at them, it makes you some kind of pussy.
I was a natural and got real good real fast so nobody ever actually needed to called me a pussy, instead i got enrolled into the assassination group of the royalists and after performing my first assassination for them, i became a Samurai, and many other people quickly became corpses with the most confirmed kills of the Royalist assassins.
I took out politicians and pretty much anyone who got in my way but my most famous assassination was that of Ii Naosuke, the person who signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States when the Yankees turned up with their navy on our shoreline and said 'howdy, it would just be super swell if you guys ended your 250-year-long isolationist policy and opened up your ports to us or else'.
I wanted to reply to their order for Japan to trade with them with an 'or else what?' by introducing them to my sword and driving them right out of Japanese waters with their tails between their legs, or at least those of them who had somehow retained the use of their legs, but Naosuke turned pussy so i got all murdery on him and turned him into bite size sushi chunks.
Eventually, all the assassinations led to the creation of the Shinsengumi, an elite military police force tasked with capturing us and restore law and order which they did and i was arrested on put on trial and exhibit number one was my sword.
I asked if i could see it and the idiots actually handed it to me so naturally i took the noble action of cutting my own throat and died but for all my killing, i was doing what i thought was best for my country, just that while many roads are paved with good intentions, i left ours paved with gruesome bits of body parts.

Special Guest Blogger: Alessandro Volta

There isn't many jobs when you can break wind with abandon but when you are working with methane you can let rip like a goodun' and nobody bats an eyelid and as i spent most of my days with the foul smelling stuff, i was passing wind like a brass section of the orchestra but it was all in a good cause because i invented batteries.
Back in the 18th century some people still suspected that the strange ghostly lights above swamps were caused by fairies but as a scientist i wasn't having any of that supernatural mumbo jumbo and visited Lake Maggiore, where i noticed bubbles after i stirred the mud beneath it. I collected some of the gas responsible for the bubbling to study in my laboratory found it was methane and as schoolboys with lighters everywhere knows, it was highly combustible.
I came up with a piece of apparatus that allowed an explosion to be sparked in a closed environment, this went on to become the predecessor of the internal combustion engine but i used it to gauge the force of gaseous explosions.
I concluded that the gas was rising up from dead fish and plants languishing in the bog which combusted in mid-air and that the ghost lights were the result of lightning mixing with the gas and was not fairies just hanging around European swamps.
As i was busy messing around with farty smelling gas my colleague, Luigi Galvani, was messing around with dissected frog legs and discovered something he named, 'animal electricity' when two different metals were connected to a frog's leg and they would twitch when he touched a steel scalpel against a specimen hanging from a brass hook and concluded that electricity was naturally present in the tissues of frogs and other animals.
I wasn't convinced so did my own experiments using different types of metal and found that the legs were not twitching because they had electricity in them but because the electric current was being transferred through it by the two different metals and discovering zinc and copper were the most effective metals, created the voltic pile, or electric battery,
I wrote it up and published a work describing a new type the electrostatic generator i had built which generated and stored an electric charge and one of my biggets admirers was Napoleon who invited me to Paris to demonstrate the pile to prominent French scientists. Duly impressed, Napoleon bestowed many honors on me including a gold medal, a pension and appointments as a cavalier, senator and count.
The unit of measurement regarding the strength of an electric current became known as it's Voltage in my honour and after becoming the chair of the University of Pavia, at the age of 74 i decided it was time to hang up my capacitors and voltaic piles and retired to a country house to spend time with my wife.
She looked after me after a stroke until i died four years later but i lived my life like one of my batteries, i was quite positive but i also had my negative side. Ba-dum-tss.