The Maths Of National Insurance

The Taxpayers Alliance have issued a report which shows that over a lifetime, an average earning employee will pay £107,045 in National Insurance Contributions (NIC).
NIC goes towards state benefits such as unemployment benefit but mostly it is for your state pension and you have to pay in for 30 years to get the full state pension which is currently £185 per week.
Now i hold my hands up here of my Math's goes wonky but the retirement age is set at 67 and the average life expectancy in the UK is 81 so that's 14 years or 579 weeks of State Pension which amounts to £134,680 so if you blow out the candles on your 81st Birthday, you are receiving more than you paid in.
If you make it to 78 before running down the curtain and joining the invisible then you will receive back everything that you have paid in but go to push up the daises before 78 and it goes into the big pot named Government Coffers to spend on whatever they want.
The VividMaps website shows that 13% of the British population die before reaching retirement age so of the approximate 65 million, which is about 8.45 million people so in conclusion...that's where my brain screams enough and the maths breaks down so i am still unsure whether the Government make out of our National Insurance Contributions or not.

Boris Bigging Up His Record In Government

There are rumour's going around that Boris Johnson may have resigned as Prime Minster but he will remain an MP because as she was not even the choice of her own colleagues, Liz Truss is not expected to last until the next Election and he will be handily placed to step back into the breech once again, pending everyone forgetting just how awful he was the first time.
He hasn't even left yet and he is talking up his record in Government so maybe we should take a bit of a closer look at exactly what he done compared to his 2019 Manifesto promises.
First up is the 20,000 extra police officers to replace the 21,000 his predecessors cut which currently stands at 13,790 so we can't tick that one off  so not a great start.
What the NHS is crying out for is new Hospitals and Boris promised 40 new ones so with only 3 being built, only another 37 to go although he did change the definition of what he meant by 'new' to also mean a refurbishment but even with the new meaning of new, it's still only 22 so maybe just as well he hasn't got anywhere near the extra staff he promised of 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 more GPs as it is 23,753 more nurses and only 738 GP's.
Maybe the Hospital building is taking a back seat while the 300,000 new homes a year are being built but as 242,000 in 2019-20 was the closest it got to that figure, it probably isn't the reason.
One of the main pledges was to 'Get Brexit Done' and on the one hand he has taken us out of the EU but 3 trade deals to replace the 40 we lost and talking about breaking International Law over Northern Ireland, reversal of the foreign workers exit and supply line crisis and the economy taking a 4% hit to GDP makes it sound as though something got done but it certainly wasn't Brexit.
Towards the end of the manifesto was a pledge of no rise in rates of income tax, National Insurance or VAT but we know that wasn't kept as national Insurance went up buy 1.25p for everyone and the promise to keep spending 0.7% of GDP on international aid was quickly dropped as the Government cut it to 0.5% almost before the ink was dry.
As well as pledges, Boris Johnson has made claims about his government's record during the pandemic such as the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe and very true, we were one of the very first but it was due to the NHS independent of Government who handed over responsibility to them for the roll out so bit of a cheek for Boris to claim he was responsible for it.
All in all, not great and that is without factoring in the law breaking, corruption, the scandals, police fines, the lock down parties, the loss of safe Tory seats, wallpaper-gate, the lies and the lie cover-ups and the plummeting poll ratings so if Boris is hoping all that will be forgotten by 2024, he is even more deluded than that time he asked us to trust him that all the rules had been followed in Downing Street during lock-down.

Mikhail Gorbachev

I always had a bit of a soft spot for Mikhail Gorbachev because it always seemed to me that the whole Soviet Union break up thing was a situation that he began rolling which kind of got away from him and before he realised what was happening, it had snowballed and he had done himself out of a job.
As a Cold War kind in the 80's, i remember the quick turnaround of Soviet Leaders from Brezhnev to Andropov and Chernenko who all seemed scary men in a nation armed to the teeth with nuclear missiles and then along come Gorbachev in 1986 with his Perestroika and Glasnost and meeting with the Western leaders to reduce the Nuclear Arsenals and finally it seemed that the insanity which was Mutually Assured Destruction was a reducing threat.
It was Andropov who realised that the Soviet Defence budget was crippling them and he started the reformations which Gorbachev continued although during later interviews, he admitted that he envisioned a gradual change to a form of Socialism over the course of a decade or two but within a few short years the Soviet Union had broken up and Communism was falling all around Eastern Europe.
It may have earned him the Nobel Peace Prize but as the USSR crumbled, his powers were transferred to Russian President Boris Yeltsin who's political endeavours are best summed up by the story that he once was so drunk while flying to a meeting in Scotland that he couldn't get off the plane.  
Gorbachev never made any secret that events just overtook him and my memory of him will always be in my minds eye, as he cleared his desk that final day in 1991, he looked around him and thought 'How the hell did this happen?'

Green Day - Warning:

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 1 we have Warning: by Green Day

I know what you are thinking, how the Freaking Hell did a Green Day album which wasn't even that big a hit for them beat some of those other classic albums and i'm as shocked as anyone but of the 12 songs on the album, i only skip the one, Jackass, so using that criteria it sits proudly at the top with 91.67% of the album listened to. Hey, blame Math's not me.
What is obvious on this album is that the band stepped back from the angry Punk sound of their earlier offerings and aimed for a more folk-punk sound, citing Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Petula Clark, The Mama's and Papa's and The Kinks as inspirations and those guys are as folky as it gets and that
is most evident on the title song Warning song which is almost directly lifted from the Kinks Picture Book. How Ray Davis failed to sue and buy himself a new yacht to replace the one the taxman took i will never know.
The album includes probably my favourite Green Day Song which is the very un-Green Day like Misery which paints a picture of Virginia, Mr. Whirly, Vinnie and Gina who all come to a grisly end to a happy sounding Mariachi style tune.  
The other acoustic songs are Macy Day's Parade and Hold On but to dispel any sense that they were moving from the punk stage into Corduroy and plaid shirt territory, the album also has the more hard edged usual Green Day sound songs Minority, Deadbeat Holiday, Blood Sex and Booze, Church on Sunday and Castaway.
Guitarist Jason White was bought in to add some more fiddly bits to the music and stayed around ever since and he had certainly bought a new dimension to the band, American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown were classic Green Day but after a brief flirtation with mega-stardom, they seemed to have peaked and after shedding all those extra new fans, have happily shifted into the background again, helped by the next three albums, Uno, Deux, Trois albums being more like their earlier, less commercially accepted, body of work.

There they are then, my top 15 Albums and i agree there are not many modern ones and if you are not a fan of the angry, guitar driven stuff then you probably think they all suck and that's fine, each to their own and all that, but i guess one day i will grow up and embrace safe, radio friendly middle of the road sounds or alternatively, and more likely, i could just say f*** that and carry on until i'm in my old peoples home and having the residents banging on the wall at 2am telling me to TURN THAT BLOODY RACKET DOWN which would complete the circle because that's exactly what my parents shouted at me when i was a kid.

Defying Gravity

Gravity, it is said, is pretty weak. Pick something up off the floor, there you go, you have defied a whole planets worth of gravity but what Gravity has got is that it is constant so put down whatever it was you picked up and jump. You coming back down and failing to hit the ceiling is you NOT defying the Planets worth of Gravity.
With the Artemis rocket due to launch tomorrow morning (8.30am BST), to escape the pull of the Earth if it will burn through six tonnes of fuel per second provided by the two solid rocket booster rockets and then two million litres of liquid hydrogen and 740,000 litres of liquid oxygen before the upper stage rockets fire the Orion capsule into orbit and then the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage Rocket kicks in which will propel it around the Earth and then hopefully onto the Moon.
Many people say 'escape the earth's Gravity' but that isn't actually true, the Earths Gravity extends far out into Space, the International Space Station is is in Low Earth Orbit 248 miles above the Earth but even at that height it is still subjected to 88% of the Gravity down here on the surface, what it is actually doing is falling around the Earth but travelling at such a speed (17,500 mph) that it matches the Earth curving
away from it.
Imagine shooting a cannon ball which will fly along until friction slows it down enough and gravity pulls it towards the Earth and it drops down and hits the ground.
Imagine now using more gunpowder and shooting the ball even faster so it travels further until friction and gravity drag it down to the ground.
So the faster you shoot the cannon ball, the further it goes so now imagine if you could shoot a cannon ball out of the cannon at such a speed that as the ball fell to Earth, the earth curved away so the ball would be falling but the Earth would be curving away at the same rate that the ball was dropping.
With no friction to slow it down in space, the ball would continually be falling and the Earth curving away so the ball would never actually be able to fall to the ground and so it said to be in orbit around the Earth.
So, when you are in orbit, you are in free fall but going so fast that you won't actually fall to the ground which is continually moving away from you at the same speed that you are falling and even more amazing than the science and maths behind our knowledge of all this is who we have to thank for it so Danke Adolf Hitler, without your rocket development program and V2 rocket, at 8.30 tomorrow morning i would be watching Good Morning Britain and not the next step towards the latest Moon Landings.

What Items Use The Most Electricity?

With the news that our electric bills are going to skyrocket, the Government have decided rather than actually do something about the billions being raked in by the utility companies, they will instead offer advice and that advice is for the public to use less electric so thanks guys, reassuring to know you have our backs when the nations huddles around a candle this winter.
Obviously some appliances cost more to run than others and most people will throw on a jumper rather than the heating but i sense many arguments in households over running electricity-burning items but when asked, nobody knows exactly what the most electrical intensive appliances are and say that if they did then they would be more conscious about using them.
Luckily, i happen to have those details from Utilita so here's a guide to how much it costs me in a normal day.

So i get up and the usual routine is take a shower for about 4 mins at 3p a minute and switch on the kettle for that first thing in the morning cuppa (2p for a 3 min boil) or the coffee machine (0.5p for 2 mins gurgling) and then dry my hair (0.1p for 5 mins) straighten my hair (0.25p for 5 minutes) before making some toast (0.003 for 1 minute) and watching a bit of TV for 15 minutes at 1p a minute.
After work it's home to cook tea and put on the oven to cook it (46p an hour) and then spend 15 mins running around with the vacuum cleaner (3p for 15 mins) and maybe tumble drying some clothes (9p for 15 mins) followed by 15 mins of ironing them (5p for 15 mins).
With tea almost done it's pop some beans into the Microwave for 3 mins (0.2p) and then sit down to our evening meal.
After tea the kids go and turn on the X-Box or Playstation for an hour (2p an hour) while the dishwasher gets loaded for its 15 minute job (at 9p for 15 mins).
As the evenings are getting chiller we put on the heating for a while (£1.84 for 2 hours) and while it is quiet i usually grab a drink from the fridge (cost 96p a day) and spend an hour on the computer at 4p an hour answering emails and writing a witty blog post about whatever has been rattling around in my brain that day.
Then it's about 90 minutes of TV watching (90p worth) and then around midnight plugging in my mobile phone to charge for 6 hours (0.6p) before i get up and do it all over again.

Using my basic grasp of maths and a calculator i work out that in a normal day i use approximately £4.86 of electricity or £34 a week or £1769 a year which is quite sobering so to claw some of that back, this post took about 15m so that's 1p of electric used to advise you on how much electric we use so if you found this post useful then cheques to be made out for 1p to Cash. Thank you.

You Don't Say

As President Donald Trump entered the final year of his term in January 2020, the U.S. recorded its first confirmed case of COVID-19 and on his last day America stood not so proudly at the top of the Covid Death League table with 400,000 deaths.
You would assume that as the death toll began to climb one of his aides or close personal friends would have taken him to one side and whispered into his ear: 'You know what Don, i think you should leave this to your Medical Professionals as your skillset lies elsewhere' but instead he suggested ingesting bleach and tried to blame China for his awful and lacklustre response to his own people dying.
He called it the 'China-Virus', witheld funding to the World Health Organisation and began talking about it escaping from a laboratory in Wuhan and when he looked around the other nations for support, they all said 'You're on your own with that one Big Guy' and went with the scientific evidence that it was a disease which had crossed over into humans from Bats.  
The Orange faced loon kept it up until a proper grown up took over and in some parts of America, the sort of people who are unlikely to ever trouble any Brains Trust meetings agreed that it was a Chinese ploy while the actual people who DO trouble the Brans Trusts Meetings conducted tests and analysis and have announced that after exhaustive research, the Covid-19 Virus started life at the Wuhan seafood wholesale market.
The lead Scientist, Angela Rasmussen, said that all their detective work for the origins led to back to the live food food market everytime meaning: 'Putting all this evidence together, there’s really no explanation other than that the virus started spreading in the human population at that market'.
As for the Lab theory, she poo-pooed that as well saying if the virus had escaped from a lab, somebody would have had to get infected in the lab, go to the market and infect people there without having infected anyone along the way which was not possible, as the first cases were in the market.
There you go then, one of the biggest questions in recent times now has an answer which is the answer the experts said all along, who'd have thought them and not the man who believed that global warming was created by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusions 1

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 2 we have Use Your Illusions 1 by Gun's N Roses.

On arriving back home in September 1991 with my copy of Nirvana's Nevermind i thought it would be a long time until anything better would come along to top it but as it turned out, i had to wait a week because Use your Illusions 1 & 2 was released at midnight the following weekend.
I always knew it was going to be good because back then HMV only did the Midnight opening for a few of the very biggest and best and there i was stood outside the record shop on a chilly September night wearing a pair of jeans with rips in the knees and a green flight jacket along with 20 other rather more grubbier looking GnR fans.
To be honest, i assumed that this would easily be my top album but of the 16 songs on it i skip over two and a half, Live and Let Die and The Garden as well as the first 3 minutes or so of November Rain until Slash plugs in his Les Gibson and for me Gun N Roses were all about Slash, the coolest man ever to pluck a guitar string and knock out a guitar riff so sharp it threatens eyeballs whenever it comes on the radio.
It would be easy for me to just bang on about Slash now but the sum of Gun N Roses parts made the complete package of the kind of wild Rock Stars we would all like to think we would be soaking their cornflakes in Jack Daniels, knocking seven bells out of each other while smoking 120 Benson & Hedges and still manage to put on a show before collapsing off stage into their own sick.
What Use Your Illusions 1 had was some very up tempo songs such as Right Next Door To Hell, Double Talkin' Jive and the frantic Garden of Eden but also some rock ballads which still have Slash wailing away which proved that soppy ballad's can still include a kick arse guitar solo like in November Rain and i can always appreciate a hunky man in tight leather trousers taking off his shirt and climbing onto a piano to give us a solo.
Use Your Illusions 2 had some amazing songs (Civil war, You Could Be Mine, Knockin' on Heavens Door) but never landed quite as well as UYI 1 and the double album was the last proper Guns N Roses offering with the original line up although they put out the Spaghetti Incident full of 70s punk songs and named after an infamous Mötley Crüe groupie encounter...ask your parents.
They did implode in acrimony not long after and although Axel Rose continued to plow his own furrow, without Slash it was never going to be the same and anyone who has heard Chinese Democracy will agree but between 1987 and their split in 1995, Guns N Roses were always drunk, mostly high, generally unkempt and smelling strongly of alcohol and their own vomit which is just how rock stars should be.

That's A Big Mass Ejection

A Coronal Mass Ejections sounds like something you would see on a film of the Adult variety but it is a thing and one has been been spent spinning our way courtesy of our Star.
The Sun has been getting a bit frisky this week and has been sending Moderate-Class solar flares our way which resulted in an impressive aurora display and blacked out radio waves in parts of Europe and Africa but Sunspot AR3089 isn't finished with us just yet and has ejected more charged particles our way which are expected to strike our planet on Monday.
The solar flares range from A-class which are the weakest, then B-, C-, and M-class with X-class the strongest and it was an X3 Class which is threatening a direct hit and knocking out power lines, satellites and radio signals.
The Sun began its current cycle of solar activity in 2019, and is expected to reach the peak around 2025 but it is yet to top the biggest flare ever observed which was an X28 in 2003 which dealt the Earth a glancing blow but still had satellite engineers scurrying to redirect their satellites and airliners rerouted and polar routes restricted.
Although annoying to radio station owners, the solar flares are not dangerous in themselves due to our thick atmosphere stopping all of the harmful radiation before it reaches us on the ground but if one did get through and killed us all with radiation, at least we will go out with a beautiful solar light show.

Orwell, Khan, Me and Now Biden

Joe Biden has accused Republicans who aligned with Donald Trump of veering into semi-fascism but Sadiq Khan and i got there years before him because back in 2019 i put Trump and his supporters up against the George Orwell tick list of Fascism and lo and behold, they fitted that glove perfectly although they didn't particularly take it well but my response was 'Hey, it's not our fault if all the racist, xenophobic homophobes are on your side, try not being racist, xenophobic homophobes and you won't get called it'.
The most famous Fascists have to be Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini but it is undeniable that while he was in the White House, Trump scapegoated and demonised groups (Mexicans, the media, Muslims) refered to a glorious past and wished to return to it (Make America Great Again), never allowed any dissent or challenge (62 members of his staff sacked or resigned under pressure), tried to rid his Government of the decisions of previous leaders to create his own (Pretty much everything from Obama) and threatened to used the military on weaker and smaller nations (threatened to destroy North Korea, warned of the end of Iran, discussed sending the military to Venezuela, sent armed troops to the Mexico border).
Understandably, the Republicans, Trump supporters and the American right wing in general object to the word 'fascist' to describe them but it is not easy to find another word especially when’s some Trump supporters are decked out in 'Camp Auschwitz' T-shirts, waving Confederate flags and making 'Sieg Heil!' salutes.
The first time the Fascists came around in the 1930s they had the advantage of nobody knowing just what they were but nobody has that excuse today and you should question why, knowing what we know today, why anyone with at least one working brain-cell would want to be associated with them but obviously working brain-cells are in short supply so i would say Biden is spot-on and America had better hope the semi-fascists don't become fully fledged fascists.

Enough is Enough

It is hard to believe that we may be the sixth-richest country in the world but face a winter humanitarian crisis which the NHS are predicting will result in many deaths and hospitalisations.  
Due to the astronomical 80% rise in utility bills announced today, as well as the human cost countless shops and businesses will close thanks to a quadrupling of their energy bills which will curtail spending with economists stating that it will prove more devastating than the 2008 crash.
Today’s announcement of the new price cap set for household energy bills from October 1st is almost triple that of last winter and for many it is simply unaffordable for 25% of Brits who just dont have the income to pay the bill according to the Citizens Advice Bureau.
There is no point looking towards the Government as there is no Government to speak of, Boris Johnson spent his summer at parties and on holiday and failed to put up a single Minister to answer questions today following this mornings sobering announcement.
Of the two individuals who will become the next Prime Minister in two weeks, neither hold out any hope of rescue from the looming economic disaster
and Liz Truss, who is hotly expected to take the crown, has offered only tax cuts which benefit only those who pay the higher rate of tax, those who most need the help are the low earners who either pay no tax or pay very little so will not benefit from her delusional plan.
The UK is failing, we have an energy market that is unable to deliver an essential commodity at a price that people can afford while they rake in billions in profit while the water companies restrict access to water while leaking as much of a quarter of it through lack of investment and repairs and the finger of blame can be squarely pointed at the Conservative Parties years of Privitisation.  
The Government looked to make loans available to the public to pay the Utility Companies (which they later made into grants as anger over the cost of living crisis grew) yet they seem clueless on how to deal with the crisis but the public have an idea and are calling for the energy, water, rail and the postal services taken back into the public sector.
The Enough is Enough campaign to hold the Government responsible and take group action against the profiteers launched two weeks ago and had an initial goal of signing up 50,000 people but today it has 450,000 on board.
One of the most shameful things about living in England since 2010 has been the horrendous gap between the rich and the poor and under the successive Conservative Prime Ministers from David Cameron, Theresa May and now Boris Johnson it’s become yet larger and Truss’s awful tax plans are destined to make it even worse.
Without doubt we have had the most useless and incompetent Government in living memory at the worst possible times of a global pandemic and now the cost of living crisis so we can only hope that that this finally represents the rock bottom that will convince the country to do something about who we vote into power and what they do in our name.

One Februray Morning In Downing Street

 Downing Street February 2022

The Prime Minister is sitting looking at the Newspaper headlines as the Cabinet file in for their daily meeting.

'They're all going to blame me' says Boris shaking his head and holding up that morning's Daily Telegraph to show the headline 'Brit's Head For Cost Of Living Crisis'

'It cost me almost £100 to fill up my car this morning' moaned Dominic Raab as he took his seat.

'Don't forget that Ofgem have also announced they expect the April energy price cap to increase by 54%' said Nadhim Zahawi, 'what we doing about that Rishi? Your the money guy'

'Hmm...' mused Rishi scratching his head, 'we could tax the oil companies' which bought an audible gasp from around the table.

'Steady on' said Boris, 'they donate millions to us so we don't do that. What else you got?'

'How about we loan the public a couple of hundred quid to pay the oil companies, that way their profits are not affected?

'Go with that' nodded Boris, 'Ok, what about this rise in National Insurance?'

'Bit harsh putting up tax when people are already struggling' observed Grant Shapps 'So how about we say its for the NHS. The plebs won't kick off if they think its for Nurses and sick people?'

'Sneaky. I like it' said Boris 'but we still have the problem of inflation reaching the highest i's been for 40 years, massive hikes in petrol costs and the rise in the cost of living. Any one got any ideas of how we can blame someone else for it?

'Apologise for getting Brexit done?' said Kwasi Kwarteng to laughter all around the room

'As if we are going to admit to that one' smiled Boris 'come on lads, there must be someone we can blame, the economy is top of the voters list and i'm buggered if im going to take the blame for this as well, everyone already hates me for all those Downing Street piss-ups while they were locked down'.

'Well...there is the chance that Russia could invade Ukraine' suggested Jacob Rees-Mogg

'Go on' Said Boris leaning forward in his chair.

'Well if Russia does invade Ukraine' Jacob continued, 'We could blame Putin's war for all the price rises that are going to happen anyway'.

'I don't know' said Priti Patel slowly. 'The public are not as stupid as we think they are. Will they buy it?'

'Why not?' asked Boris standing up 'They swallowed the whole it wasn't Brexit it was Covid-19 bullshit so let's pray Russia invades Ukraine'

August 2022

Boris is standing in a Press Conference when he is asked by a reporter about the rising cost of energy bills and seizing the moment replies: 'Vladimir Putin is to blame for British people being hit by high energy bills, we are paying in our energy bills for the evils of Vladimir Putin'

As he leaves the stage James Cleverly whispers to him 'Think you got away with that?'

Boris shrugged and replied 'I don't care, im off in 2 weeks so it's Liz's problem. Have you seen Rishi? He still owes me a tenner'.

Green Day - American Idiot

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 3 we have American Idiot by Green Day (2004)

The story behind this album was that Green Day were recording an album but someone stole the Master tapes so rather than re-record the same songs again they wrote a bunch more 'spikier' tunes which reflected their disillusionment with was was going on in America at the time and as this was the America  of George W Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney with their Afghan and Iraq Wars, there was no shortage of American Idiots to be disillusioned with.
Turns out having their original songs swiped was a great move because this 'punk rock opera' turned them from a decent pop-punk band into Global superstars and deservedly so although it meant us small band of Green Day fans who had followed them since 1039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hours now had to share them with everyone else.  
Whereas the previous Green Day albums came with the standard punk driven 3 minute songs about non-important things, American Idiot was a less than subtle slap around the face with socially critical and politically charged lyrics while keeping that basic Green Day sound and to be honest kicking back against authority was what punk was originally all about although whereas the Clash and Sex Pistols did it in 3 minutes, Green Day went with 9 mins of Jesus of Suburbia and another 9 mins of Homecoming amongst the softer ballads of Wake Me Up When September Ends which i assumed regarded the 9/11 attacks but was about the death of the singers father and Boulevard of Broken Dreams which is a real builder and is joined onto the previous song Holiday which runs into Boulevard to emphasise that Holiday is the 'fire and rage' and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams is the resulting painful and lonely hangover. Gotta admit that's very astute and poetic of them boys.
Kerrang magazine put it in 13th place in the Greatest Albums of all time but i've gone higher and pegged it at number 3 which means the top 2 have to be amazing and number 2 is although i thought it would be a shoo-in for top spot and the Album which is number 1 with the least amount of skipped songs surprised even me and i'm the one writing this. Go figure! 

Nirvana - Nevermind

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 4 we have Nevermind by Nirvana (1991)

The year 1991 is probably best remembered for the Gulf War, the collapse of the USSR, Mike Tyson's rape arrest and my brief and unsuccessful experimentation with black hair dye but it was also the greatest year for music and that comes down to a week in September when Nirvana's Nevermind was released on the 17th and the following weekend the album which sits at number 2 on my list came out, two of the best albums ever to be shoplifted from HMV.   
Nirvana were effortlessly cool and that was down to the front-man Kurt Cobain who didn't have the best voice or the skills of a guitar maestro but was the epitome of cool with the long blonde hair, the piercing blue eyes, the languid 'don't care' approach and the downplaying of his and his bands own place in music history, he really looked the part and had the songs to back up him up as the voice of a generation, whatever that means.  
Back then MTV still played music videos and Smells like Teen Spirit was played on a continuous loop and that fast and slow tempo, loud chorus and quiet verse of Teen Spirit really hit a nerve as did Lithium and the slower paced Come As You Are with it's line 'i don't have a gun' which he obviously did as we found out four years later.
The lyrics were not earth-shattering, it takes a certain genius to appreciate the mind behind: 'A mulatto, An albino, A mosquito, My libido, Yeah' but it was always about the music and the whole Grunge Scene although i am not sure what they were aiming at with their follow up Albums, especially the Unplugged Album, but whatever it was they missed.
It's testament to this album that they are remembered 30 years later although i imagine if we asked today's kids who their version of Nirvana is they would say someone like The Script or McFly, so let's not ask them. They're obviously idiots.

Not A fan Of Oversharing

I was sat on my usual train on the way home on Friday when a lady of around about my age sat opposite me, i smiled at her, moved my bags to give her a bit more leg room and returned to gazing out of the window as the British countryside flashed past.   
Her mentioning how busy the train was resulted in a very one sided conversation and 20 minutes later when she got off, i knew her name, where she had been, who she had been with, why she had gone there and where she was going now as well as details of her divorce, some of her medical history, where she worked and the names of her two children.
All i offered up as way of personal information was that i avoided the Latte at the Station as it never quite tasted the same but oversharing  does seem to be a new, and very unwelcome, recent development.
I agree that being 'buttoned up and reserved' and not talking about our achievements, thoughts and feelings is a very British trait and i whole-heartedly buy into it and i thought most Brits did but more and more i am noticing a characteristic sneaking into the British psyche where we are open and willing to talk about our achievements which are bordering on boastful.
Where once if you asked a Brit a question about their job or education, you would get a jokey, self deprecating answer but now you are just as likely to get the full CV, salary and pension details and a list of qualifications or even worse get it without asking, just sort of dropped into a conversation.
Another thing i have noticed is the question being asked to you just so you ask them in return, and then they can unleash the full might of their achievements, so i deliberately don't ask and change the subject so they can't drop it in.
'So where do you work Lucy?'
'My colleagues would probably say what i do couldn't be called work but to be fair i did nick off a lot to go watch the Commonwealth Games, did you see them? That mechanical Bull was amazing and Birmingham looked great...' and so on.
Maybe it's me, i do reach for the 'pfft...listen to this Billy Big Bollocks' and tune out when someone starts to tell me something which is in danger of wandering into boastful territory and the irony is that my job involves asking questions and taking notes of what is said and then filtering out the bits i find superfluous which all means that i would be my own worst nightmare to interview because i would finish with only the words 'She doesn't like Train Station Coffee' written down on my pad.

Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill

 Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 5 we have Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morisette (1995)

Alanis came into existence as an angry, feisty young lady who had been spurned in love and was going to make 13 angry song to make sure everyone knew about it and this is the result but then she must have got a boyfriend or something because after this brilliant album, she went all sappy and i stuck with her for a few more albums just in case he dumped her and she got all pissed off again but he must have been a keeper because she never which is some ways is good for her, in other ways such as for her career, it sucked.
You Ought To Know is her at her ticked off best and serves as a reminder that if you ever find yourself sat behind her and her boyfriend at a theater, then you might want to change seats.
The song Ironic led to many discussions about whether rain on your wedding day, a free ride when you've already paid or good advice that you just didn't take is actually ironic at all but whether she was being ironic by singing a song called Ironic which wasn't ironic at all it obviously didn't bother people that much because the album spent 222 weeks in the UK Charts and sold enough copies to allow her to consider
retiring without ever having to set foot in a recording studio again which on hearing her follow up albums was a career path she probably should have been followed.
The cassette tape of Jagged Little Pill got dragged into my cars cassette player not that long after i bought it so i borrowed a colleagues CD and burnt my own to prevent paying for the same songs twice, reasoning that i had already paid for them once so i wasn't depriving Alanis of her 75p or whatever percentage she gets from it and i haven't yet been chased down the street by an angry Alanis Morissette demanding her 75p so i guess she's cool with it but if she isn't, then Ironic means using language that normally signifies the opposite and for that piece of advice i will charge you 75p so so we are now all square. Ironic ain't it. 

Brits Working Out That Privatisation Doesn't Work

Privatisation is grounded in the belief that market competition in the private sector is a more efficient way to provide services provided by the Government and allows for a better deal for us has been one of the great pups sold to the public because to be frank, it blatantly just doesn't work as we are finding out now.
In practice it increase costs, lowers the quality of services and leads to rising unemployment because simple logic tells us it's impossible for the private sector to deliver the same service for less and make a profit and making a profit for their investors is the only reason they are there and they only way to increase profit is to reduce the money they pay out (wages) or increase the money they bring in
(prices), both of which comes at a huge cost, financial and personal, to the public.
Between 1979 and 1997, Margaret Thatcher John Major sold over 50 publicly owned utilities and nobody can argue that the rail, utility, mail or water industries have been more efficient, lowered costs or saved jobs as what actually happened was large scale redundancies, prices sky-rocketed and the companies are now largely in the hands of international investors who pay themselves billions in dividends.
As many face utility bills topping £5000, water shortages and affordable rail travel, opinion polls are showing that we have woken up to Privatisation and want to return major utilities to the public sector with 69% wanting water back in public ownership, 67% for rail, 66% for energy companies and 55% for Royal Mail and bus companies.
The reports of as much as 20% of our water leaking from the Water Company pipes has been in the headlines as has the massive salaries and profits these companies are making while doing very little to improve infrastructure, since becoming private the Water companies have spent £123bn on maintenance and while taking out £57bn in dividends.
The Capitalists who now run the UK's public utilities do not seem to be serving the public very well, taking the customers left, right and centre, as the water, gas and electric suppliers know that whatever they put their prices to, we HAVE to have them.
They have us over a barrel and we know that and a few old people dying due to the choices between heating or eating isn't going to stop them putting profits first.
Something has to change because the right wing dream of Privatisation has failed us badly and nationalisation is now, quite rightly, striking a chord with the country.

Enjoying The Leadership Campaign Yet?

Have you been enjoying the Conservative Leadership campaign? Great isn't it, i particularly like the bit where the two candidates complain about the state of Britain and say they are the people to put things right. As the BBC's Nick Robinson said, they will be furious when they realise that they have been running the country for the past twelve years.
It's a refreshingly brave campaign slogan which says that Britain deserves better than them and they can be trusted to fix the problems they’ve caused, it's like your plumber saying i know when i came that first time to fix your leaky tap that i flooded your house then the second time i left the gas on and blew up your kitchen and the third time i sat on your cat and killed it but stick with me because if you choose a different
firm you might get someone who really spoils things.
We can only be grateful that the country voted for them in recent years, remember how Cameron told us in 2015 the alternative was 'chaos under Labour' then Theresa May in 2017 promised she’d make us 'strong and stable' and in 2019 Boris promised us the 'Sunny Uplands' post Brexit and now the same Party is promising a leader who we can trust when at each of the last three elections they’ve said the same, then got rid of the leader themselves.
So it still a few weeks until Liz Truss (or Rishi Sunak but probably not) is thrust into the top job in the country promising to fund the things they’ve been de-funding for the past twelve years and if that doesn't go right, then they always have plenty of other idiots within their ranks to take over.

We Missed The End Of The World

Despite the World being predicted to end so many times that i have lost count, the Planet and the creatures on it annoyingly refuse to go away but there is a great new conspiracy theory that says don't bother waiting around for the end of the world because it's already happened, we all just missed it.  
Now you are probably thinking that you would have noticed something like that happening, possibly picking up a few clues along the way but everything went Pop in 2012 just as the Mayan's predicted and it was all down to CERN who may have found the Higgs Boson that year, but destroyed the Universe in doing so.
If you are one of those disbelieving people who demand proof then what more could you want than the belief that 'nothing has felt right since 2012' as after CERN carlessly blew up the Planet, 'our collective consciousness was moved into a parallel universe and we are now living in a series of simulations with remnants of memories from our old life on the real Earth'.
When they put it like that it's obvious really, everything that has happened since 2012 is just in our collective imaginations which according to another Conspiracy theory, is exactly where you will find Australia because just like our Planet, that doesn't exist either.  
That may come as a surprise to the 19 million people who live in the land Down Under but not as much as a surprise when they realise that where they actually live is on an island off the coast of South America.
It's all down to those dastardly British who murdered all the prisoners it supposedly sent to the non-existent island around the other side of the World that it made up as a desperate cover up.
Frankly, if they didn’t have all that proof to back them up then it would be impossible to take these guys seriously.

Meatloaf - Bat Out Of Hell

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 6 we have Bat Out Of Hell by Meatloaf (1977)

Bit of a cheat that Meatloaf finds himself in such a lofty position in my best Album chart because his Bat Out Of Hell Album only has 7 songs on it and although it may run for a tad over 46 minutes, the title song is close to 10 minutes long and the 3 songs i skip equals only 16 minutes of missed opera-esque warbling from the man who spent his last few months denying Covid-19 existed before dying from...guess what...Covid 19.
Despite his less than satisfactory medical expertise and blatant refusal to end a song at a decent run-time, i always quite liked Meatloaf who had a great rock voice and some amazing songs as well as seeming a very jovial, pleasant man who never took himself too seriously.
The stand out song for me on here is Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad, a lovely ballad which is the complete opposite to the Bat Out Of Hell song which is a tumbling and rollicking good song about a teenage boy ending up torn and twisted at the foot of a burning bike after seeing a sudden curve way too late
which sounds better without the explanation that the songs writer, Musical Steinman, who imagined Peter Pan singing it to Wendy so i guess Disney decided against that particular ending.   
You Took The Word's Right Out Of My Mouth starts with a dialogue about a girl offering her throat to the wolf to rip out and then goes into a song about a girl leaving a guy speechless after kissing him which if you read the previous sentence about Peter Pan seems par for the course.
The last song on the album is Paradise By The Dashboard Light and in my mind i see the record creators saying hey Meat, great songs so far but we have 10 minutes left at the end so have you got 2 or 3 more songs and Meatloaf going, nope but i do have 1 which is 4 songs stitched together which is why we have the brilliantly barmy boogie woogie type song which for 8 mins is about a boy getting his rocks off with a girl after swearing to stay with her forever and ending the song 9 minutes later praying for the end of time.    

Project Fear Becoming The Reality

As inflation rate reaches double digits in the UK, the question is why are we experiencing such a rise in the cost of living?
Of the G7 nations, the UK has the highest inflation rate of 10.1% compared to 8.5% in the US, 7.9% in Italy, 7.6% in Germany and Canada, 6.1 % in France and 2.3 % in Japan.
We regularly hear that the price rises are driven by soaring food and fuel prices due to the war in Ukraine and the effects of the Pandemic but those things are not limited to the UK and every nation is affected by these things so it doesn't explain why the UK is suffering it's highest inflation rate for 40 years.
The Bank of England expect inflation to reach even higher and peak at around 13% before falling in 2024 so what had the UK done, or not done, that makes it such an outlier from the other richest nations?
The Peterson Institute for International Economics point squarely at Brexit, attributing 80% of the difference between inflation in the UK and other countries to Britain’s departure from the EU which the Government Economic Service and the Centre for Economics and Business Research agree with, saying that Brexit’s impact on the UK’s prices is due to a very substantial drop in the value of the pound which discouraged companies from investing and a loss of workers and a fall in exports due to increased costs.
Gerard Lyons, previously the chief economic adviser to Boris Johnson as the mayor of London thinks that we are still feeling the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis which has meant that many firms put their investment plans on hold.
Forecasters agreed that the potential hit to GDP following Brexit would reduce the UK's economy by 4% and despite what Liz Truss is saying, the only new trade deal's we have made are with Australia, New Zealand and Singapore while the rest are just rolled over from our time in the EU so the Brexit gang who voted us out of the largest Single Market on the Planet may not like it, but a large part of this is the consequences of their woeful decision and they can't say nobody warned them because they dismissed it as Project Fear at the time but it's all coming true, and about to get worse.

Summer's Not Through Just Yet

The Beach Boys, through their song All Summer Long, gave us a tick list of things to do in the summer months and in the 'Yep' column is sitting in my car outside my house, spilling coke all over my blouse (it was Sprite but close enough), i wore T-Shirts, Cut Offs and a pair of thongs (the US version of flip-flops, a pair of UK thongs would be very uncomfortable)  and i did play miniature golf and rode a Honda although riding a horse did evade me but as the rain-clouds roll in, the much heard cry is that's the end of Summer
but whoa there fella, mid August to the end of the month is generally always stormy, it's called a weather singularity.
A singularity is a weather phenomenon likely to occur with reasonable regularity around an approximate calendar date and the occurrence of storms from August 16th until 30 August is 67% so if it wasn't stormy now then it would be more surprising.
The good news for those strange people who actually like a bit of Sun and heat is that although officially Summer ends August 31, the season isn't finished with us yet as between 1 September and 17 September, with 87% probability so pretty much nailed on, Mother Nature flings some high pressure across the UK bringing warm, fine days in what is sometimes incorrectly referred to as an Indian Summer but it isn't, they are the warm, fine days in October or November so you can give a Chinese Burn to anyone who uses that phrase inappropriately.
What that means is that it gives us one more chance to do the things we didn't do during proper Summer which for me means finding a horse to complete the Beach Boys checklist so i can officially say that i had fun all Summer Long.

Billy Joel - An Innocent Man

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musician's who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 7 we have An Innocent Man by Billy Joel (1983).

Considering that Billy Joel has banging out tunes over a 50 year career, he doesn't seem very appreciated in Britain where he has only had 5 top ten hits and 3 of them came in 1983 from this album so not a great return for him but two people who did appreciate him were my parents and it was an unusual day if we went without hearing a belt of Piano Man or My Life coming from the record player.
As i grew up i obviously took in my parents taste for the New Yorker subliminally as whenever i heard one of his songs in a Supermarkets, i always found myself singing along to his ditties as i price up the Cleaning fluids.
Before Uptown Girl reminded everyone that he was still around, his big song was Piano Man and it was only fairly recently i discovered it comes with a music video although it didn't help it much in the UK charts although it was probably the best number 136 we ever saw.
Probably my favourite Billy Joel songs is 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant', mainly because halfway through singing about Brenda and Eddie in the summer of '75, it changes to a completely different song and then ends up back where it started and the two in one songs always seem to appeal to me.
'This Night' is a real gem hidden away on the album and Beethoven is given a writing credit on the song as it is based on one of his compositions which means i can boast of knowing two Beethoven songs, this one and that one that starts Dom, Dom, Dom, Dom!!!.
So there we have it, i have a soft spot for Christie Brinkley's ex-hubby and i blame my parents although it could have been worse, they could have been Country and Western fans.

MET Office Weather Warning

People of Britain, do not be alarmed. That wet stuff falling from the sky is called Rain, details of exactly what it is can be provided by Grandparents or older relatives.
You may notice that during or after a period of 'rain', things will be wet and there may be small pools of water outside, these are called puddles which should not be stepped in unless you are wearing suitable footwear.
Unfortunately, 'rain' does come with the risk of frizzy hair if it gets wet, suede shoes being ruined, white t-shirts and blouses becoming transparent and having to run from one place of shelter to the next, if you have not run for a long time then you may find breathlessness follows as a result.    
Garden's and grass areas may become a vibrant green instead of the usual dull brown you are used to but this is only a temporary measure and will return back to brown once the 'rain' has ceased falling on them.
Finally, do not attempt to drink the rain-water as it will need to be cleaned by your Local Water Authority to make it safe to drink before they return some of it to your taps for consumption and allow the rest to seep out through old pipes.
Please keep up to date with weather warnings for your area through the MET website, social media and your local TV and Radio stations.

Sex Pistols - Never Mind The Bollocks

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 8 we have Never Mind The Bollocks by The Sex Pistols (1977).

I Know!! WTF...Sex Pistols at number 8? WTFFFF Lucy!!! I had to double check myself but true enough there are Sex Pistols songs on this album that i skip through to get to Bodies, God Save The Queen, Holiday In The Sun, Anarchy In The UK, No Feeling's and Pretty Vacant.
I was 8 years old when Johnny and his lot were in their pomp and safety pins, purple Mohican haircuts and flobbing at the teacher were frowned upon in Bramble Road First School so i had to wait until i was much older and all my friends were plastering posters of Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet on their bedroom walls before i came out of the record shop with the bright yellow Album Cover with a sticker saying 'Warning: This ALbum contains Explicit Lyrics' and thinking 'i f****ing hope so w....r'.
The songs were very much of their time and compared to some songs today, seem pretty mild except Bodies which apparently is based on a true story of what happened after a Sex Pistols gig one night when a female fan turned up with a present in a plastic bag for Johnny, the song makes it pretty clear exactly what she handed him.
Although they admit it now, Pretty Vacant never fooled me, the emphasis Johnny put on the second syllable of Va-CANT was obvious and although fans of the New York Dolls and The Damned like to argue that the Sex Pistols were not the first punk band actually, to me they were the grand-pappy of all the bands who's type of music that i like which followed, all kickstarted by this one album and the handful of singles from it so to quote Mr Rotten, 'Ah but now, And we don't care...va-CANT'.  

Time Travel Whistleblower Tell's All

The first rule of the Spatio Temporis Correctores is that you don't talk about the Spatio Temporis Correctores which means this post is buggered straight away as could be the career of the whistleblower who initially sparked controversy in the scientific community by blowing the  lid on Time Travel.
'The assumption was even if we did talk about it, nobody would believe us anyway because our business is subtly correcting things in history so certain events happen in the future' she explained in our late night meeting at a motorway cafe.
She explained how the Spatio Temporis Correctores idea was devised by Aristotle who would philosophise on how historical events determine the future but it wasn't until a combination of Albert Einstein's maths and Nikola Tesla's work with intense magnetic field's that the actual mechanics of time travel to came to fruition.
I prompted her to explain how it worked and she pushed a well thumbed book towards me which contained pages and pages of complicated equations and told me that even she couldn't explain most of what was in there but back at the start they discovered that time itself would not allow direct interference in any events which will change future history but Tesla found a loophole that a single, seemingly inconsequential event would allow the bigger changes to happen if it goes through enough other events.
I asked for an example and she came up with how in 2036 a physician will invent an inoculation which is given to new born babies which prevents their body developing Cancer cells, therefore ending Cancer but we had to make sure the right couple gave birth to him at the right time and the only time they were ever together was one day when they both went to buy a microwave in an electrical shop in their lunch break at the same time, dating and then marrying and giving birth to the child.
For them to meet there must be a microwave which came about from the Cold War which in turn came about following WW2 which only happened due to WW1 which started after Gavril Princip assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand outside a cafe but he was only outside the cafe because the bomb he threw at the Archduke's car missed because he couldn't get a clear throw.  
In the original timeline, the Archduke was killed by the bomb and Princip was seized by the crowd and arrested and handed over to the Austrian's who executed him so never declared war on Serbia and WW1 didn't happen so no WW2 and therefore no events which led to the microwave being invented and the day when both spent their lunch break at their work and never met.
By making sure that he didn't get the clear throw, let's say a group of people deliberately stood in his way as the Archdukes car came into sight, the chain of events which resulted in a Microwave and therefore that fateful meeting happened and the cure for Cancer was not set back hundreds of years and consigning billions of people to an early death.  
I sypmathised that nobody will ever know it was thanks to you and she agreed that by going back in time and changing things, to everyone it is business as usual as they didn't know there was an alternative but she did say that such was the uproar over her whistle-blowing that she will have no choice but to go back and not spill the beans after-all and she will as soon as i publish this post on the internet as proof that it happened until the space time equals itself out and the post removes itself, just as she did with lot's of Journalists back in 2009 when we last spoke and she dropped some hints into a post she helped me write.
Invariably, writing that post or having that meeting i don't remember but i guess that's the whole point and shows that it works.

Hey Conspiracy Nuts, It's Not Just Summer

There are always people who for whatever reason refuse to accept what is in-front of them and social media seems to have amplified the 'they are hiding something' crowd, one is my neighbour who delight's in pointing out the trails behind some planes and is incredulous that i refuse to believe her that it is a Government plot to spray us all with some chemical for some unknown reason, preferring to point out that they are called Contrails which is short for Condensation Trails so there is a massive clue in the name of exactly what they are.
Her latest social media inspired rant is against the Government in cahoots with the MET Office and the Media to scare us all into something or other totally bonkers with the current heatwave.  
Her initial evidence was that: 'It was hotter in 1976' although the the peak temperature in 1976 was 35.9C and this year it peaked at 40.3C so it patently wasn't hotter in the summer of 46 years ago.
Second is the way the MET Office manipulates the temperature figures by collecting data from airports which they do, along with over 200 other locations and each weather station is standardised to remove external factors such as heat from runways by being in identical white boxes, all facing the same way at the same height and positioned on grass to minimise the influence of man-made surfaces.
The next proof that the MET and Media are scaremongering us all into something is the use of a new dark red on the weather maps and as we know red is the color which screams danger. True, red is used when it is hot weather and blue is used when it is cold weather and as we have had red hot taps and blue cold taps since indoor plumbing was introduced, those are the standard colours to represent hot and cold on weather maps and have been since colour TV became a thing, the red is a deeper red this summer simply because it needs to be darker than the red used for other high temperatures for temperatures we've never experienced before.
What about weather warnings? Those are new and scary which would be right if the MET Office hadn't been issuing them since the 80's for wind, snow, rain, thunderstorms and heat but as the summers have been getting hotter, hence more heat warnings.
Finally, the good old reliable 'It's just summer, its always like this every year' so first off congratulations for knowing your seasons and then think again that it is like this every year as the average UK Summer maximum temperature here in the UK is 23-24C and this year we hit 16C higher than that which broke the hottest day record so dip your feet in the kids paddling pool, pop another few ice cubes in your glass and stop embarrassing yourself by ignoring what is staring you in your red, flushed, sweaty face.

A Post On Asteroids, Banana Daiquiri's & David Boreanaz

Space is sexy, not in a David Boreanaz serving me Banana Daiquiri's on a desert island dressed in skimpy speedo's type way but in a looking on in amazement and awe type way, think Boris Johnson making cocoa in your kitchen wearing his Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas and you get the jist of where i am heading with this.
On the whole space exploration is lots of little very important, but very ho hum, missions like travelling a couple of million miles to have a look at a Planet's Atmosphere or collecting data on watercress being grown on the International Space Station but then the space boffins will do something spectacular and one which was announced in 2013 was to redirect an Asteroid into orbit around the moon.
Over the past nine years NASA have whittled down the list from 1,000 potential moon circling Asteroids to just four and are currently looking at which of these have the best velocity, orbit, size and spin to safely deflect our way because if you are going to fling a massive space boulder our way you need to be sure it doesn't go wrong and you find yourself apologising to the massive crater where Norway used to be.  
With the date for the pencilled in for 2025, NASA are doing a small scale practise by attempting to deflect an Asteroid out of it's orbit which has the double mission of being handy for redirecting the path of an Asteroid or Comet which is dangerously heading our way.  
Called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the target is the 170 metre Dimorphos Asteroid about 7 million miles away which will soon find a spacecraft ramming into it at 15,000 mph to try and change its orbit and provide vital information on how to best to apply it to future planetary defense scenarios which is crucial because an Asteroid over 140 meters landing on Earth would be catastrophic for life on Earth and each year a dozen or so over that size cause some sweating at NASA headquarters.
So yes, while preventing human's being wiped out is very important, it is a large step towards us having an freaking pet Asteroid circling the Moon and to return to my initial line, that's sexy in a David Boreanaz serving Banana Daiquiri's on a desert island while apologising that he had forgotten his speedo's and packed only a dozen bottle's of baby oil type way.

Sum 41 - All Killer No Filler

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 9 we have All Killer, No Filler by Sum 41 (2001).

As i skip half of the 13 tracks on this album that name is a bit misleading but the ones that i do play are certainly great, the sort of up-tempo guitar tunes that i would thrash out before i got all old and started wearing cardigans and sensible shoes.
I don't know if Pain For Pleasure is a mickey taking metal sounding song, it certainly looks like a send up in the video and they did evolve into a more metal sound rather than the pop-punk they began with, but that song is all about the grinding intro slowly growing louder and louder and if Sum 41 does have one thing in their locker, it is great intro's and the first 25 seconds of Motivation with the big, choppy chords and heavy drumming is just brilliant and to be fair the rest of the song isn't bad also.
Fat Lip, which is just about larking about as a teenager and getting punched in the mouth which looking at singer Deryck Whibley's face, must have happened quite a bit in his formative years, also has a good intro and that is the song which made their name, Wikipedia lists them as the 31st best selling Canadian Artists although that list probably makes more sense to Canadians, after the top 10 names i hardly knew any of them.
The lead singer dated Paris Hilton and married and divorced the 8th best selling Canadian artist, Avril Lavigne, and when you can call Avril Lavigne you ex-wife that is some impressive punching above your weight.  
There was a bit of a pop-punk explosion around the turn of the century with bands like Offspring and Blink 182 before Simon Cowell came along with his nonsense and put an end to it but we must be due another punk-pop renaissance soon...please.

Taking The Piss By Drinking Your Own Urine

I live actually overlooking the beach, i look out of my window and see a huge and expansive body of Water stretching out in-front and to either side of me as far as i can see which is a reminder that Great Britain is an island and just like that famous line, ‘Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink’, water is literally all around us but is often not safe enough to consume.
Sea water can be made drinkable by a process of desalination which removes the minerals from it but it is a very expensive and time consuming measure so nobody really bothers with it but as the UK's heatwave continues and water companies introduce drought measures, it may be that we are forced into doing things we wouldn't dream of as the reservoirs run dry.
There is one method which could potentially quench your thirst which is practised by Astronauts and some athletes although i think i'm not sure just how thirsty you would need to be before you even contemplated drinking your own urine.
As usual when anything urine related is up for discussion, i turned to the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Unit in Cambridge and asked them if drinking a cup of Pee was a healthy alternative to tap water and hastily added that i was asking for a friend.  
'If 'your friend' doesn't have any urinary infections' the lady said, 'then urine is generally free of harmful bacteria and is actually a very good sterliser for a wound but as for drinking it...hmmm'.
She explained that urine is what the body has expelled and is 95% water and 5% excess minerals such as sodium, potassium and chloride so the first time you put it back in your body it may be worthwhile but the next time the urine is more concentrated and it would take more water to get rid of the minerals than you have water in the urine, dehydrating you further.
'So once is fine but more than that is a no-no then?' i ventured to which she tentativly agreed saying only if you absolutely had no choice and nothing else except your own wee to drink, then the first and last parts of the stream are where the most impurities are so introduce your container midstream and a tip is to hold your nose as you drink it because it will still taste and smell like urine.
All very useful information which may become more relevant the longer the drought continues but remember the experts say only drink it as a very last resort and if you have nothing else to drink, or you are a regular drinker of Aussie lager because you will be used to drinking stuff that tastes like piss anyway.

Madness - One Step Beyond

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 10 we have One Step Beyond by Madness  (1979).

There were a few Ska bands around in the late 70s and early 80s, bands like The Specials, Bad Manners and The Beat and while i was drawing Siouxsie Sioux make up on my Cindy Dolls and falling into the Punk movement, my brother would be in his bedroom playing Madness singles and despite my constant advice that him and his speeded up reggae music was lame, i did like them but i wasn't ever going to admit it to him.
A DJ friend always said that whenever a disco was dying on its arse, he would whack on One Step Beyond as it was a sure way to get people up and dancing and i can't hear that song now without seeing groups of lads going from standing around trying to look cool to doing that jerky arm waving dance only Sugg's seemed to be able to do properly.
As this was the debut album it has all their best songs because Madness started off brilliant but as they got more famous, their songs became more 'grown-up' and they rapidly went downhill over the next few albums and they finally broke up after no longer bothering the top 20 of the charts.
Over the years Sugg's has become something of a National Treasure and the group played on the roof of Buckingham Palace at the Queen's Golden Jubilee and they are back touring again and i went along with my brother to see them in concert a few years ago but it was the early hits that they played and which got the best reception which proves that although some bands mature and change style successfully, it never worked for them and the style change did them no favour's whatsoever.

Liz Truss's Election Suicide Note

With Boris Johnson refusing to do anything to help ease the Cost of Living Crisis and saying it is for the incoming Prime Minister to sort it out, eyes turn to what exactly the two potential leaders are offering when they pick up the reins in 5 weeks time.
We can politely glide over Rishi Sunak's pans, his rival Liz Truss is so far ahead in the polls that even someone as dimwitted as her shouldn't be able to mess it up, and she has said that she will not be giving handouts to people but instead will cut income tax to help the poorest in society.   
Now i'm no Tax Expert but the poorest in society are by definition, the ones with the least amount of money so if you are on benefits, a state pension or earn below £12,570, then you don't pay tax anyway so cutting the rate of tax will add precisely zilch to your income.
If you are an average earner of £25,971 and currently pay 20% tax and under Truss will pay 19% tax, your tax bill will reduce by £131 a year or an extra tenner and some small change in your monthly pay packet.
Anyone earning over £50,000 currently pays tax at 40% and over £100,000 at 45% so they are the ones who will benefit most from any tax cuts and are by no possible definition the poorest in society, if anyone can weather a cost of living crisis and could forgo a bit more back in tax, it's these people.
For some people on a low wage an extra £10 a month will be very gratefully received but you have to remember that a change in tax affects all earners across the board so while you get the extra £10 to pay your gas bill, a higher earner will be receiving much, much more, enough to pay their gas bill easily and have extra to spend on luxuries.
A former Cabinet Minister called Liz Truss's economics plans 'an Election suicide note' and we can only hope so because after 12 years of Right wing policies, sleaze, corruption and lies which has led to a broken UK, the Conservative Party should never be allowed near an elected office ever again.

Have You Seen Those Boxes I Left Here Melania?

Funnily enough it was only the other day that we mentioned that America's third fattest and first small handed President has been quiet recently and we found out why today, he has been going through the 15 boxes of documents he skipped out of the White House with in his teeny weeny, dinky little fingers.
No news yet of exactly what the FBI were looking for when they raided his Mar-a-Lago home but it is assumed it is linked to one of the many investigations he faces for election interference, financial crimes, the storming of Congress and various lawsuits by police officers injured in the Congress attack,fraud, sexual assault charges, cheating his own family out of inheritance and his own personal lawyer who is suing him.
Trump once said that he loves the poorly educated and the barely educated have been out in force as expected to defend the man who once suggested ingesting Bleach as a cure for COVID-19, and they have gone with the usual of when an opportunity for a good explanation isn't available, just make do by pointing out that if this can happen to the former president, then the ordinary people are next so all you ordinary people with over a dozen boxes of stolen classified presidential records should sleep with one eye open.
One former Republican Congressman said recently that there is only one way his party can move on from Donald Trump, and that is waiting for him to die and at 76, a liking for fast food while morbidly obese and with high cholesterol, he may be only one KFC Bargain Bucket away from their wait being over so the courts had better get their act together quickly.

Green Day - Insomniac

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 11 we have Insomniac by Green Day  (1995).

Unsurprisingly, Green Day feature heavily in my top Albums because i have been a fan of Billy Joe and the gang since that first 39/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours album in 1990, becoming part of the noise which spat forth from my car casette player back then along with the likes of Gun N Roses and the emerging grunge bands.
Green Day hit upon a sound early on and pretty much stuck with it which is fine if that sound is a good one, which there's is, but it didn't work out quite so well for Rick Astley who spent 1987 at the top and 1988 known as that whats-his-name bloke who had those few songs that sounded the same.
Insomniac harks back to their three minute pop-punk style before they got all political and back when only a handful of us knew who they were and before the likes of Blink 182 and Sum 41 become the face of Pop-Punk and Green Day went on a hiatus every couple of years citing exhaustion (from abuse of alcohol and prescription pills) between albums which popped out every 3 or 4 years.
There has always been a question asked around if they're 'punk' and to me they fit comfortably into that genre and Insomniac is the 1995 version of it and anyway in true punk style, i don't care, i like them.

Nirvana - In Utero

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musician's who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 12 we have In Utero by Nirvana  (1993).

Always amazes me the amount of teenagers walking around wearing Nirvana T-Shirts because if they had been born in 1993 they would have been doing stinky things in their nappies rather than singing along to the line 'I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black' in Heart Shaped Box which i guess passed for a romantic line in the strange drug fueled World of Kurt Cobain.
Almost certainly the Nirvana the kids today think of is the cool one behind the brilliant hits of the Nevermind Album because it certainly wasn't this second effort which reeks of the Record Company allowing their new stars to do what they wanted for half of it as long as they got a say in the other half.
That they sank even further afterwards with their insipid Unplugged Album probably shows that they peaked straight away but they did leave behind a few great songs from this album, even managing to make a very decent song out of an anti-rape message.
As Kurt later found it easier to put a gun to his head than stay amongst the living, we won't ever know if the trajectory of Nirvana was going to tick back up again or continue it's decline but a note to today's teenagers with the Nirvana logo on their chests, if you do happen across the Unplugged Album, it also contains Dumb, Pennyroyal Tea and All Apologies but do yourself a favour and avoid it, it's the musical equivalent of finding an original first edition of To Kill A Mockingbird and shoving it under the leg of a table to keep it steady.

Hey Ho, Let's Go Premier League

 Ah, it's the dawn of the new Football Season which brings with it a sense of optimism, hope and expectation unless you are a fan of one of the teams who will face months of being mocked when they go into work on a Monday morning because they have suffered yet another humiliating defeat.
The Premier League title is only destined for Manchester City, Liverpool or Chelsea and Arsenal, Tottenham and Man Ure will be fighting it out for that fourth place and the final berth in the lucrative Champions League so the top of the table won't be that vastly different to last seasons so the real battle will be at the bottom where it is perm 3 from about 8 who could fall out of the Premier League.
I am expecting to see the new boys Fulham and Bournemouth swapping places not so proudly in the bottom three all season and joined by Brentford when the gong sounds in May but you can't discount Brighton, Leeds or Aston Villa who have managed to escape relegation recently but look a bit below standard.
Southampton will flirt with the drop and then pull it out the bag with 5 games to go as they always do and as much as i would like to see the back of Everton, they will do enough to avoid it as i suspect Nottingham Forest will although that will be by the skin of their teeth.
So it's full steam ahead to November when the League pauses for the World Cup in the desert and then back again for the Boxing Day fixtures and the first stop is tonight at Selhurst Park where my team Arsenal, with a striker called Jesus and a continental midfielder called Vieira who will take on Crystal Palace managed by our previous continental midfielder called Vieira.

Joan Jett - Glorious Results Of A Misspent Youth

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 13 we have Glorious Results Of A Misspent Youth by Joan Jett  (1984).

As a young girl learning guitar there were not many female rockers to emulate in the early 80s but my teacher was a proper music nerd and would teach me the chords and then punk or metal riffs which used the three or four chords i knew and through him i found out there were two rock goddesses, Joan Jett and Lita Ford, and both were in the band The Runaway's and when i heard that the remnants of the Sex Pistols were working with Jett and Black Sabbath and Motley Crue with Ford, it was Jett i kept my ear out for because a punk band was always going to knock musical spots off a metal band.
Joan Jett really hit it big in the UK with I Love Rock n Roll in 1982 dressed in leathers and full of attitude and looking like someone i had for me in my minds eye as well as adding another dirty great riff to my repertoire.
The brilliant angry sounding Cherry Bomb was the Runaway's debut song but Jett seemed to take the thought that she wrote it so she can have it on any damn album she wanted and put it on this one along with her version of I Need Someone and somehow fused the original doo wop and her guitar sound and did the same with another 60s hit New Orleans so her misspent youth was sitting in her bedroom playing 60s songs and working out how to turn them into brilliant 80's rock anthems which was more productive than my misspent youth which involved cigarettes and nicking bottles of Babycham from my parents drinks cabinet.

So Begin The Water Bans In UK

Following the driest July since records began in 1935, a hosepipe and sprinkler ban is being imposed on a million people in Kent and Sussex with the firm saying it 'had no choice' although the kickback has started as South East Water loses about a sixth of all the water it supplies through leakage and its customer face a £1000 fine if they use are seen using a hosepipe, sprinklers, irrigation systems or pressure washers.
Last week Southern Water announced a partial hosepipe ban in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight which comes into effect from Friday and other water companies are looking closely at imposing bans although with over three billion litres of water leaking from water companies pipes every day, it isn't going to go down well with their paying customers.
Thames Water (leakage 673m litres per day) said they may to introduce water saving restrictions soon as did South West Water (leakage 84m litres per day) who announced formal restrictions over the coming weeks and Sutton & East Surrey Water (leakage 25m litres per day) are keeping restrictions under review.
Anglian Water (leakage 211m litres per day) said they continued to monitor water levels as are Severn Trent Water (leakage 453m litres per day) while Wessex Water (leakage 71m litres per day) and Portsmouth Water (leakage 30m litres per day) are asking customers to use water responsibly.
Bristol Water, (leakage 49m litres per day) Northumbrian Water (leakage 66m litres per day), and South Staffordshire Water (leakage 74m litres per day) have said they have no plans to impose a water ban.
An Environment Agency spokesperson said that they are 'working with water companies to protect water resources and ensure they take precautionary action so the needs of water users and the environment are met but everyone can play their part to use water wisely' which i assume means not allowing three billion litres of water be lost through leaking pipes although it is far easier and cheaper for the water companies to not fix them and tell us not to waste the water we do get obviously. Got to protect those profits after-all.

That Truss Lady Is For Turning

Whisper it quietly but Labour supporters are telling me that they are concerned that despite them being 11 points ahead in the polls against the Conservatives, any new Leader for the Tories will gain a new leader 'bounce' and they may call a snap election to cash in on the rise in support and deny Labour the majority to rule.
There will be a bounce, there always is, but how big it will be in the world outside of the Conservative Party members is up for debate as both Rishi Sunak as Chancellor and Liz Truss as Foreign Secretary are widely seen as irretrievably linked to Boris Johnson who's star dropped so far that he skipped going to the Women's European Cup Final for fear that he would be deafened by the crescendo of boo's aimed his way.
With every poll heavilly suggesting that it is going to be Prime Minister Truss in September, yesterday we had a taste of why the Tories voting in Truss as the third British female Prime Minister should be welcomed by Labour supporters because she may not want to be known as the continuity candidate but she has continued the policy of making major announcements only to U-Turn on them once it is pointed out that the policy is painfully flawed.
Monday evening she announced that one of the first things she would do once elected is pay government employees less in parts of the country where the cost of living is cheaper and save the Government £8.8bn.  
Obviously she went to bed that night feeling very chipper with herself but by breakfast, less than 12 hours later and after someone had obviously whispered into her ear that her policy would mean cutting the wages of Teachers, Nurses and Police and the public wouldn't accept that, she was on TV announcing that: 'Our hard-working front-line staff are the bedrock of society and there will be no proposal taken forward on regional pay boards for civil servants or public sector workers' and blamed journalists for 'wilful misrepresentation' of the policy, aka as reporting on the details in her own press release.
You know what fellow Labour supporters, i think with Liz Truss running the show and making policy, i think we will be alright and by alright i mean Keir Starmer should not stop looking at the carpet samples and wallpaper catalogues for number 10 because the only bounce she is likely to see is her suitcase going into the back of a taxi leaving Downing Street in a few short months.

REM - Automatic For The People

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musician's who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians and at number 14 we have Automatic For The People by REM  (1992).

REM had six other albums released before they hit their stride with Out of Time and then the even better Automatic For The People and then as soon as they hit it, they missed it again with the next seven but they were part of the early 90's along with many other great bands like Nirvana and Guns N Roses although they couldn't be further away from the guitar sound, their greatest hit, Losing my Religion, featured a mandolin but they were on MTV at the time between the louder, more shouty bands so are inexplicably linked with them in my mind.
Like most REM songs, the lyrics to their songs can be a bit weird, i would sing along and think that can't be right and look up the lyrics and discover actually, he really did say that but then Michael Stipe is wonderfully eccentric so it makes sense.
The song Everybody Hurts is one of the most downbeat songs i have ever heard but the video did give a friend and i the game of looking at people in stationary traffic and guessing what they are thinking so it would be she's thinking 'i wish i had turned on the light when i put my make up on this morning' or the old guy is thinking 'I wonder where the tree is that is growing the wood for my coffin?
Those two albums did bestow upon them the label of One of The Biggest Bands Around and made them household names but i can't help thinking that it they hadn't had that burst of inspiration over those 20 odd songs in the very early 90s they would be the band version of Tom Petty who everyone heard of but when he died, the conversation with most people went i know the name but buggered if i can name any of his songs.