Special Guest Blogger: The Grim Reaper

I do love this Day as Halloween is the only night of the year when I can go out for a drink although Halloween has become so commercialised now. You lot seem to have forgotten the true meaning of the undead walking the Earth but you meat-bags do tend to complicate things which are really not that complicated, such as dying.
You are born, you live for a while and then you die but you invented all these things to explain what happens and where you go, if i had a penny for everytime one of you mention how surprised you are by how uneventful your last moments were so let me tell you now there are no tunnels of light, nothing flashes before your eyes, your just dead. Inside every living person is a dead person waiting to get out and that's where i come in.
Using my scythe, i sever the last ties to your life, i'm basically just admin so i don't understand why everyone makes me out to be the bad guy. It's not like i killed you, i'm just the one giving your soul safe passage to the afterlife. Imagine if you had to go alone, it's actually quite nice of me to take you and i don't care if you been good or bad, that's for other people to judge. I will mock you though if you die in a particularly stupid way.
Dying, and therefore me, have been around since the Universe was created, born in the furnace of a long dead sun and then the first living thing dragged itself into life which is longer ago than i care to consider.
I do remember the dinosaurs, i think an asteroid killed them all and then humanity arrived, loved, created brilliant things, fought with each other and died and will until one day the Sun will expand beyond the realms of the inner planets and consumes it all which is a shame because when the last living thing dies, my job will be finished and i will be at a bit of a loose end.
I did ponder the reason for it all with Einstein when he died, nice guy, strange hair but he explained his theory but i'm just the ferryman between this world and whatever comes next, his 'Time is relative' bit went right over my head but apparently we exist simultaneously at all points in time. Or something. I wasn't really paying attention. His hair really was that distracting.
I have been there for all the big events, you people do keep me busy. The hippy guy on the cross, all your Kings and Queens but i did enjoy the French Revolution. Whatever you think about the French, they gave violent insurrection a certain touch of class although i didn't like that Austrian guy too
much, he pushed so much work my way but he was SO shouty but one of the worst moments was while stood at the dock when the Titanic set sail from Southampton.
Nobody that day could imagine the horror that awaited 100 years later when Celine Dion would sing 'My Heart Will Go On'. Awful tune.
The British do deal with death in a way i always found slightly cold and odd. While other cultures wailed and gnashed their teeth in sorrow or celebrated the life now gone, the British always just give a collective shrug and go back to talking about the weather.
Truth be told, after all this time and meeting so many of you i do have a soft spot for humans but you've really got to stop being wankers to each other. When will you learn?
Whatever your gender, race, religion or sexual orientation, you're all as insignificant as each other. Lots of you are going to be very embarrassed when you find out there's no supreme being and you wasted all those Sunday mornings when you could have been doing something more fulfilling, like ... well... practically anything so live your best lives and treat everyday like it's your last because one day it will be and we will meet in person which will be nice, not for you obviously but i like the company, being the Grim Reaper can get a bit lonely sometimes.

What Your Halloween Costume Reveals About You

It might just be a bit of fun but what exactly does your Halloween costume reveals about your Personality? More than you want people to know according to Psychologists who call it 'enclothed cognition' which finds that our choice of clothing can reflect our psychological state.
The golden rule is if you are at a Halloween party and see someone wearing a mask then don't go there girlfriend because they are trying to hide their true self behind it so what about a Superhero costume? What type of person turns up dressed as a Superhero?
The type of person who has a childlike fantasy of saving the world and fighting evil and wants to be liked and admired but beware because they like to take risks, and can also be aggressive, bold and controlling, that's who.
So you move away from Superman/Wonderwoman and notice the hostess is dressed like a Disney Princess but don't get drawn into a conversation with her as she is pining for a return to a simpler more innocent life, when things were uncomplicated so unless you want to spend the next hour hearing her go on and on and on about how the person they married turned out to be a complete duffer, then move away swiftly before she comes over and hey, there is somebody dressed in sexy French Maid outfit, i bet she is fun but hang about.
Psychologists say they are after attention and want people looking at them so probably extrovert, probably a show off and definitely someone who if you spoke to them for five minutes that would be 4 minutes and 50 seconds too long.
You notice that most people come as vampires, zombies or witches, or those that hide a more darker side to their personality according to psychology so what about the two people dressed as a animals, well the tiger (or any wild animal) likes to see themselves as untameable so they would be unreliable and you should trust them as far as you could throw them while the other one dressed as Scooby Doo (or any other pet animal) is desperate to be loved and needs constant hugs and reassurance.
Giving up you get your coat and it is handed to you by someone dressed as a dead once famous celebrity and psychologists say this are the ones who have low self esteem and don't like to rock the boat so as you make your excuses and are about to leave you notice an overweight person who has painted their rather large stomach orange and drawn a pumpkin face on it.
The psychologists agree that the only thing you should say to them is that they should immediately go home and put on a tee-shirt.

Relax, Leaky Sue Is On The Case

Turns out that the Russian's had been listening into Liz Truss phone calls after hacking her phone although i always assumed they were anyway and not just the Russian's, but most nations because isn't everyone in power trying to listen to everyone else?
The chair of the Defence Select Committee has said the government is taking "stringent measures" to make sure they are still not at it although considering the the crazy things she did in her 44 days power, i expect the Ruskies probably thought she knew she was being listened to was just saying mad things to mess with them. Nope, she meant every mad thing she said.
It is normally China who get accused of eavesdropping on World Leaders but it was the US and Israel that the UN labelled the world's number one eavesdropping powers, even handed over information on Britons gathered under the PRISM programme to the British Government and received a rebuke after listening in to Angela Merkel's calls by saying 'The German government must protect the privacy of Germans from the USA too'.
To make matters worse the person in charge of these things is Suella Braverman who is currently being investigated and may well be forced to quite for a second time for security lapses so the Labour call for the Government to 'provide reassurance that the government has a grip' is probably wasted breath as she isn't nicknamed Leaky Sue for nothing.
Russia and the rest may as well save the time spent on setting up eavesdropping, she will probably 'accidentally' email the information to them at some point anyway.

Special Guest Blogger: Sylvia Plath

I was famous for what become known as confessional poetry, writing about events from my own life and as i was married to that two bit loser Ted Hughes, i have a lot of poetry to confess into although i did spend most of my life trying to end it.
I wrote poetry from a young age and had some published in newspapers and had a go a writing novels but they were rejected as juvenile which never helped my depression much and that was my first suicide attempt, trying to cut the artery in my leg but obviously i survived it and it did prove to be an experience i would write about in The Bell Jar or that may have been my second attempt a few months later with a bottle of sleeping pills in the cellar.
Between treatment of several bouts of electro shock therapy, i carried on writing poetry about what i had experienced and after graduation, i accepted a teaching job at the college, but it left little time to write my poetry so quit and took a summer job on a farm which gave me such inspiration for my poems that they were printed in major publications.
It was at that time that i met British poet Ted Hughes at a party, we ended up in a room alone together where he kissed my neck and i bit him hard on the cheek hard enough that he had blood running down his face but we married four months later although i was still being treated for depression.
We moved to England and i was gaining quite a name for myself as a poet but the depression raged on and after i tried to drive a car through a wall, i spent time in hospital and my husband spent time inside advertising executive Assia Wevill.
I wrote a poem about it called 'The Lady of Lazarus' which contained the passage 'Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well' and i finally did do it well, sealing myself in the kitchen and sticking my head in the oven, dying by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Dislike Sunak For Being Tory, Not Because He Isn't White

 
Not sure where comedian Trevor Noah gets his information from that there has been a racist backlash in the UK following Rishi Sunak's appointment as PM because i have heard criticism of all sorts but none that the problem with him is that he is not a white Englishman.
UK politicians, including Sunak himself, have come out to say Noah is just plain wrong and even Piers Morgan has joined in to say there had not been any backlash against Sunak being of Indian descent and then went on to call Noah a 'race-baiting twerp' so i find myself uncomfortably on the same side of an argument as Piers Morgan for the second time (the first time was when he ranted against American batshit crazy gun laws).
I imagine there will be some people who immediately dislike Sunak for not being white enough for them but they will be on his own ideological side of the fence, a favourite saying of mine is that not all right wingers are racist but all the racists are on the right wing so any racist fire will come from his own side,
not those of us on the left because we don't care a jot what colour or what his heritage is, we immediately disliked him for just being a Tory. 

American Political Violence

I have heard several mentions of a coming Civil War in America and i just put it down to over excitable American's and then i saw a TV programme about how some Americans are stockpiling weapons and ammo and assumed it was just American gun nuts being typical American gun nuts, one guy showed us the inside of his garage which he said was going to be his bunker and it had two large piles, one of tinned food and another of ammunition and weapons and the one you couldn't eat was the larger of the two.
Now with the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband and the US Capitol Police reported 9,625 threats and concerning actions against members of Congress in 2021 compared to 3,939 instances in 2017 the trajectory seems to be slanting towards a powder-keg and maybe the guy with the garage was onto something.
Given his injuries, Paul Pelosi, is lucky to be alive and lucky for her Nancy Pelosi wasn't home and it was her that he and his hammer came looking for but America has been deeply and dangerously divided for a while and the situation has been exacerbated by Donald Trump's wild rhetoric and his mindless insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, a claim which sparked the violence at the Capitol Building in January which resulted in five deaths.
Government and police agencies across the nation have sent out a warning of 'a heightened threat of domestic violent extremism against candidates and election workers driven by individuals with ideological grievances' and although the Trump supporters and right wing in general in America are seen as ignorant, backward oafs, threats against politicians on both sides have increased and in a land where you can buy guns with your groceries, that's a spine-chilling mix of idiots with killing machines in their hands.
The media has a roile to play in not amplifying the mad rantings of all the more excitable politicians as words have consequences and even more if they come from a Politician who has supporters who have regularly attacked their opponents.
We had a taste of that during the ill-tempered Brexit campaign when Jo Cox was stabbed to death outside her office by a man with disagreed with her political view and the media has a role to play in not amplifying the mad rantings of all the more excitable politicians as words have consequences and even more if they come from a Politician who has supporters who have regularly attacked their opponents.
Joe Biden said that there is too much political violence and Trump, the main instigator of it, has not yet joined his other Republicans in condemning the attack although he did manage to post on his social media account the same day about his upcoming rallies, Brazil’s elections and the death of singer Jerry Lee Lewis.
With a population's eyes on social media and irresponsible news outlets that have regularly reinforced their existing political beliefs and fears, extremism and violence in America seems to be result.

Special Guest Blogger: Edward Ned Lowe

I had a good education for my later career, my whole family were notorious thieves in London and i became an accomplished pickpocket and burglar and much better than my brother who got caught and hanged and i took that as a sign to find somewhere where lawness was more appreciated and went to the American Colonies.
I did try to settle down, i got a job as a rigger and met and married Eliza Marble and we had a son, who died when he was an infant, and then my wife died in Labour during the birth of our daughter and that sort of tipped me over the edge, that and a bell end of a captain who refused to feed us whilst on a trip to Honduras.
I grabbed his gun and shot at him and that was the start of my life of piracy right there, me and 12 others took over a small sloop and made a black Flag, and declared War against all the World.
Piracy was a good career move in the early 18th Century and we joined up with some established pirates and i learnt my trade under them including some brilliant torture techniques and came up with a few of my own such as tying a victim's hands with rope between their fingers and setting it alight, burning their flesh down to the bones. Ouchies indeed.
Ready to strike out on my own, i was given my own ship and me and 44 of my hearty fellows set off to write our name into Pirate history, i even came up with my own flag, a red skeleton figure on a black background.
The seas off the coast of the American colonies was chock-a-block with pirates so i had to find a way to stand out so i tried to develop the notoriety of being the most ruthless pirate on the high seas, when one ship's Captain threw a bag of gold over the side rather than hand it over to me i cut off his lips, got the cook to fry them and made the captain eat them.
I then mutilated, disemboweled, decapitated and generally slaughtered the rest of the crew and took their ship but it was another ship, the Merry Christmas, which was where my story ends as after murdering a sleeping shipmate following an argument, my crew said i was too deranged even for them and set me adrift where i was picked up by a French ship who handed me over to the authorities and was hanged.
My pirate career only lasted three short years but at my trial i was called 'one of the most vicious pirates of the age with a reputation for violence, a savage and desperate man of amazing and grotesque brutality whose methods would have done credit to the ingenuity of the Spanish Inquisition' and what more sweet words could a pirate want to hear?

Special Guest Blogger: Jerry Lee Lewis

Arrogant. Brash. Loud. I was all three and goodness gracious i was one of the wildest rock stars to ever take the stage.
My parents recognised my talent at a young age and were willing to bet the farm on me, actually mortgaging their farm so that they could get me my own piano although they didn't expect it to get me banned from the local Christian school after i did a boogie woogie version of 'My God is Real'.
Knowing that their farm now depended on me making it, my parents drove me to Memphis, Tennessee to meet Sun Records producers and they signed me up but despite the first song tanking, 'Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On' got me known. I had to use my middle name, Lee, because there was another entertainer who became a star at the same time.
Sun records at that time was a haven of young talent and i was asked to play piano on a Carl Perkins song and met Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich, Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley who became my friend although he later had me arrested.
My love life was a little more complicated, i first got married at 16 at stayed married for just over a year and a half and even got remarried 20 days before my divorce was finalised although that one lasted 4 years which was an accomplishment because she was a lunatic, one time she tried to mow him down with her car, pushed me down a flight of stairs and threw a hammer at me. If i hadn't moved quite so quick when she came at me with a box of matches and some paraffin then the song Great Balls of Fire would have been a true story.
It was my third wife which caused a bit of a problem, her only being 13 and my cousin although being in a relationship with a relative wasn't such a problem especially in the southern states of America, hell, in Texas it's considered weird if you are not in a boinking someone you can go halfsie with on your Grandma's Christmas present.  
It was different in the UK and my managers warned me to leave my teen-cousin bride at home and when my tour there was cancelled before it even began and radio stations stopped playing my songs, i probably should have listened. Turns out, marrying your 13-year-old cousin isn’t exactly the best career move and my career went into a tailspin and i was reduced to playing shows in dingy bars and clubs for $250/night.
I was out of the loop for over a decade and it wasn't until the late 60s that i started making a comeback as a country and western singer and i had a shiny new wife to go with my new career but divorce number 4 loomed 4 years later or would have done if she hadn't been found dead in a friend’s swimming pool.
I turned to booze and drugs and decided it would be a good idea to see how long i could go without sleep. The answer was 12 days and 12 nights and my 41st birthday party came to a loud and bloody end when playing with a loaded .357 Magnum in my bedroom, i aimed at a Coke bottle and the bullet ricocheted and hit bassist Butch Owens in the chest.
I drank enough to float a mid-sized battleship although i spent much if 1981 in hospital with a ruptured stomach but that didn't stop the IRS coming after me for an overdue tax bill of and seized my motorcycles, jewelry and cars.
I was lucky enough to meet some great stars and unlucky enough to meet some not so great ones, i had an actual physical fist-fight with Janis Joplin and almost got to meet Elvis once he was really famous but i got drunk and drove my car into a ditch and i was arrested for driving while intoxicated, driving
without a license, and reckless driving and on my release i celebrated by drinking heavilly and drove into Graceland’s front gates and Elvis called the cops and i was back in the cells to sober up.
A minor stroke shake my nerves and rattled my brain which slowed me down but now i'm slowed down permanently but goodness gracious it was fun while it lasted.

That Didn't Take Long

That line about Rishi Sunak bringing honesty and integrity aged very quickly, it was barely minutes after he said it that it was discovered that not only did Home Secretary Suella Braverman, lie about owning up to an accidental 'security breach' or rather only owned up to it once she had been confronted with the evidence but her nickname in Government is is Leaky Sue and she has been responsible for multiple breaches.
Rishi Sunak bought her back into Government six days after she resigned and is now facing some very awkward questions about if he knew she had a reputation for being as leaky as a colander with a hole in it before he re-handed her back her old job which includes dealing with highly confidential information.
As Braverman is on the unhinged right wing of the Conservative Party (dreams of sending immigrants to Rwanda and all that) and he needed those MP's to get him across the winning line in the leadership battle against Penny Mourdant, rumours of what Keir Starmer has called 'a grubby deal' are circulating.
MI5 have come out and said they had to remind her what stands as a security breach, you think maybe her skill-set resides elsewhere and she is not expected to last very long, some are saying we could have another Home Secretary in place by Monday morning.
Meanwhile, ex-Prime Minister Liz Truss is said to be 'enjoying spending time with her family' after her awful 44 day stint as Prime Minister, great for us because it means she isn't wrecking the economy with her right wing ideological nonsense but it's not so great for her family who are probably already asking her when she is going back to work.

Special Guest Blogger: Robert Knox

Anatomy was one of the most prestigious pursuits for scientists of the 19th century and in this sphere i was a bit of a legend, a true pioneer of comparative anatomy but the study of anatomy requires one major component, recently deceased bodies, and they were not easy to come across as we only had access to those who died in prison, suicide victims and the bodies of foundlings and orphans.
Luckily i had two new suppliers, Mr Burke and Mr Hare, and the bodies were fresh so i took a strictly ask no questions policy, they said they were friends, acquaintances and relatives and they both looked like proper, respectable gentlemen so i was ready to take them at their word.
These bodies taught me much about the human body worked which i passed on during lectures to my students and as time went on these kind men brought me several males and female bodies, at one point over the ten months that they supplied me, my lab was chock-a-block with all their freshly passed-on pals for which i paid them them the overly generous sum of £7 10s each.
It was going well until one day a Policeman came and asked if i had seen a certain gentleman, he had been a lodger at Mr Hare's house who had gone missing, i was being honest when i said that i hadn't or least not until the next day when Burke and Hare dragged his dead body in and lay him on my slab.
Being an upright citizen i contacted the police who arrested the two gentleman and charged them with the murder of at least 16 people, all of which were in bits and pieces held in jars on my lab shelves.
Hare was set free after an offer was put to him granting immunity from prosecution if he turned king's evidence and he provided the details of their murderous past-time and Burke was hanged and in a magnificent twist of irony, his body was handed to me to dissect and his skeleton displayed at the Anatomical Museum of Edinburgh Medical School.
There were persistent rumours that i must have known what was going on so to avoid all the awkward questions i packed my bags and went to work in a Cancer Hospital in London but all i did i did to advance medical knowledge so my path was paved entirely with good intentions, and human organs.

Special Guest Blogger: Franz Mesmer

As the human body is approximately 65% water, it seems to make sense that as the Moon and Planets have an effect on our oceans tides, it can also mess with us in some way and that was my theory in my dissertation 'On the Influence of the Planets on the Human Body' which built on Issac Newton's theory of tides so in order to prove it i produced an artificial tide in a patient by having her swallow a preparation containing iron and then attaching magnets to various parts of her body and it was a success, she said she felt better almost immediately.
I stated that by using the magnets to maneuver the iron around her body, it cured her of whatever ailed her and i called it animal magnetism, a life force that every animal has but if these internal fluids are somehow unbalanced, then the patient would get sick but with the correct placement of my metal rods which were a conductor of animal magnetism, the fluids could be realigned.
I was invited to the Munich Academy of Sciences to look at the exorcisms carried out by Priest Johann Joseph Gassner and concluded that it was nothing religious or Holy, he just possessed a high degree of animal magnetism and Gassner's exorcism career stuttered to an end.
I moved to Paris and established a medical practice and soon attracted such luminaries as Mozart and announced that life flowed through thousands of channels in our bodies and blockages of the free flow caused illness and to restore health the flow had to be restored and i was the owner of just such metal rods to do it.
My reputation grew and soon i had more patients than i could treat individually and i established a collective treatment where metal rods were placed in a vessel in the middle of a room at different heights and upon touching them, the animal magnetism flowed out to cure them.
King Louis XVI was interested in my medical discovery and hired five scientists to test it out and they concluded that the cure only seemed to work when the subject was aware of it, they called it 'imagination' or as it would become known, the placebo effect.
That killed my career in France, nobody wanted to pay for a cure which consisted of me holding a metal rod over a patient's body to realign their juju before declaring them well and getting handsomely paid but they did in Switzerland so i moved there and continued to practise my animal magnetism cure until i died.

Special Guest Blogger: Nell Gwyn

I was  an X-Rated Cinderella. Born in abject poverty, i became a professional actress and deciding not to mess around with the lower income bracket, sleeping with a number of famous men including King Charles II.
I started out life in a filthy back alley, my father died in a debtor’s jail and it wasn’t easy for women to get respectable employment back in the 1600s so my mother turned to the oldest profession in the book and i worked a lot of odd jobs from hawking fruits on the streets to serving booze at my mother’s brothel where i learnt a thing or two which i put to good use to catch Charles number 1, the head actor at a theatre and he got me work as an actress.
In the good old days, Kings conducted themselves with formality and decorum, and were probably never naked. As it turns out, there has always been ridiculous moments from every Royal, it just gets forgotten and the recently restored King Charles was no exception but before him was another Charles, Charles Sackville who gave me an allowance of £100 so she could leave acting which i did and then he dumped me but then came the third Charles, Charles II of England.  
Ah, the nobility, our betters. We've seen how they roll all genteel, with their cucumber sandwiches and pantaloons and the King took a shine to my fellow actress Moll Davis but i slipped some laxatives into her drink just before she was scheduled to 'attend' to King Charles and after that stinky mess was cleared up, he came to me and asked what it would take for me to be his mistress. I cheekily said £500 a year, he agreed and he took me out to dinner.
We got on very well and i was always the life of the party and one time, on the way back from a meal an anti-Catholic mob surrounded our carriage and began shouting that i was a Catholic whore, so i popped my head out of the carriage window and assured the mob, 'Good people, you are mistaken. I am the Protestant whore!' The crowd cheered and allowed us to carry on our way.
Another time my servant was having a heated argument with another man and when i asked what all the fuss was about he replied that had dared to me a whore. I replied: 'I am so find something else to fight about' and it was that kind of quick wit which made me a national treasure and why when i became pregnant, Charles upped my allowance to £9000 a year because unless you pay top money you'll never get top people in the top job flat on their backs with their legs in the air, you'll just get mediocre.
After years of being Charles II’s favorite, a new, raven haired mistress, Louise de Kérouaille, came on the scene and we hated each other, i called her 'Squintabella' because of her piggy eyes, she called me 'an orange selling wench' but we did team up one time against another mistress, Hortense Mancini, squintabella bashed Hortense’s head on a bed post until she had a black eye and i let it drop that she was having an affair with the Prince of Monaco and was also sleeping with Anne Lennard, one of Charles II’s daughters.
Bonking both the father and the daughter, and then another royal on the side meant she was soon told to get the heck out of his palace and i was back as the number 1 mistress until one day the King got out of bed and suffered a terrible seizure and withing days he had died.
The Royal court gave me a pension of £1,500 per year and i went back to my theatrical rooots until i suffered a stroke which left me completely bedridden and finally killed me, apparently caused by late-stage syphilis, a last gift from my Royal lover.

Meet Rishi, The Latest Prime Minister

I'm guessing nobody was taken in by Boris Johnson words that he was withdrawing from the leadership race out of some remarkable gesture of magnanimity, that's him withdrawing for the good of the party and the nation because we all know thats bull because he didn't have the 100 MP's backing him and would have made himself look a right pillock.
He wouldn't have cut short a Caribbean holiday and rushed back to the UK to only then decide against running and Rishi Sunak and Penny Mourdant have come out and said that Boris tried to offer them a deal to withdraw and leave him a free run at a second tilt at the job he got kicked out of seven weeks ago but while celebrating that Boris won't be stinking up the nation once again, we do still have the man who was his Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who this afternoon was handed the keys to Number 10 and the warning of his MPs to not be as awful as Liz Truss.
It's a bit like being the Doctor who got to replace Harold Shipman on his rounds in Yorkshire although as a man of colour and a Hindu, how well that will go down with the very old and very white Conservative Membership is not hard to guess, like a brick in a swimming pool is the answer.
So we now have the third Prime Minister in 4 months and another gift to the opposition as Rishi was the man who holds an American green card, is a multi millionaire married to another multi millionaire who paid £30,000 to avoid paying her tax in the UK until she was caught and is the second Prime Minister in office to have a police fine against his name for breaking his own governments lock-down laws.  
The much repeated line when he ran before was if he couldn't get his own wife to pay her share of Tax how can he get the rest of us but as his first speech was to announce 'tough economic decisions', it sounds like he will give it a good try although he failed to mention that the tough economic decisions are due to the economic mismanagement of his two Conservative predecessors, one of which he was an integral part of the decision making team but i guess he hopes we forget that.

Special Guest Blogger: Jose Delgado

Many scientists have pondered on how to control peoples brains and to be fair, some peoples brains do need someone to take over and stop them doing weird shit but i did more than ponder on it, i actually went and did it.
I was initially an eye specialist but changed his focus to the brain and the electrical impulses which drive a human to do things and experimented with the effects of electricity stimulating regions of the brain.
I successfully developed technologies that manipulated the mind electrically using a brain chip which stimulated the neural tissues and allowed me to control them with a remote control and i started out small on mice, cats and then monkeys and went on to use it on a bull before experimenting on humans.
Stood in a bullring with only a small metal box to protect me, i taunted the bull who had one of my chips implanted into it's brain and it charged at me and when it was half the distance i pressed a button on the box which sent an electric impulse to the bulls brain which inhibited its aggression and the bull halted it's charge mid-stride and turned away.
Another experiment was with a chimpanzee called Paddy who was very disruptive by after fitting it with a receiver linked to a computer that detected the brain signals, it not only made it quieter and calmer but proved my invention could stop panic attacks, seizures, and other disorders controlled by certain signals within the brain.
I discovered that i could invoke rage, anxiety, pleasure, drowsiness and involuntary movements in the animal and human subjects which some critics complained was paving the way for mind control so when i wrote up my experiments in a book i called 'Happiness' which showed how we could manage our inner being and make us less cruel and more benevolent, happier, better people, it was trashed by critics.
I advocated for the implantation of electrodes in people to control their behaviour and even worked with some mental patients to cure their depression and subdue their schizophrenia and epilepsy but that caused even more protests and the newspaper began running articles about the creation of a Manchurian candidate who could potentially, under the control of another, assassinate whoever they chose. 
My idea was taken on to produce the cardiac pacemaker but rather than being used to control the heart, it could have been so much more and looking around at some of the people making Global decisions today, well they said tinkering with peoples brains is unethical but then just allowing some seriously mentally sick people run nations isn’t a recognised treatment either.

Musical Memories

Greatest Hits Radio has a 10 at 10 slot which is a guess the year and my husband and i spent many evenings in the Summer on the balcony listening and if i had a penny for every time he said 'Wow, i haven't heard this one for years' i could have bought myself some headphones to block him out and listen to the Thompson Twins and Culture Club in peace and while we generally rocked the 80s and 90's, anything from the 70s we generally sucked at.
It is always amazing how the first few bars of a particular half forgotten song triggers a memory which sends the years spinning back and you are transported back to your younger self doing whatever your goofier, stupider younger self got up to with equally goofy and stupid friends.
I could easily make up a musical timeline through all my life's important moments although Billy Joel would feature very heavilly because from a young age he has been a constant thanks to parents who had all his Albums and played them on a loop and through sheer weight of Mr Joel in my ears, he has followed me into adulthood like a Piano-Man comfy blanket.  
If the 70s were a bit of a blur then the 80's was the time of all lifes first so there are many songs which spend me spinning back in time like an older and more female version of Marty McFly, some brilliant, some sad, some i'd rather forget and some which probably made sense at the time but all are memories lurking in my brain just waiting for a 80s singer to drag them into the light.
There is one song which i forced into a situation, a song which i knew i would be hearing, hopefully alongside the man who would share my Radio on the balcony decades later although it's a bit of a strange one, the German National Anthem.
Turns out that the tune to Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken is also the same tune as Das Deutschlandlied, the German National Anthem so when we had to choose a hymn for the Wedding Service, i chose that one as i knew we would be hearing it at every World Cup, European Football match and generally where-ever Germans  gather to sing about Germany, Germany above everything in the world.
Obviously it could all have gone very wrong and my husband could have turned to out be a complete git and a bitter divorce and i would be throwing Schnitzengruber at the TV screen every World Cup and European Championship but we are about to embark on a much delayed 25th Wedding Anniversary European Tour for most of November then it turned out okay and if i can just find somewhere in Munich to hear their National Anthem on the 25th November, then it would complete a very
romantic circle.

Blackout Advice - Just In Case

While Britain has a considerable gas supply in the North Sea, we lack space to store it as companies made the decision to close their storage facilities as it was cheaper to just import the extra gas during periods of demand than to pay to upkeep storage facilities which has backfired now that the cost of gas has increased and led to the National Grid warning that three-hour planned blackouts may have to be implemented this winter.
The Grid's Electricity Systems Operator (ESO) is hoping to avoid imposing blackouts but have worryingly released a statement of how they will work with the supply being cut for 3 hours either in the morning or between 4pm and 9pm on a rotation so not all areas of the country have their power cut at the same time and people will be warned the day before.
Charities have been offering advice of how to survive and the first piece advice is to not burn your house down by using candles and go for torches instead and recommend keeping battery-powered torches in an easy-to-find place.
Keep your phone charged because although WiFi will be cut off, you will still be able to access the internet, send messages and make calls using 4G and no electric means no TV or Radio but with a battery operated radio you can still listen to the local stations telling you how your electric has been cut off.
As the electric is to be switched off in 3 hour blocks, the English nightmare is 3 hours without a cup of tea but you can keep boiled water in flasks and drinking hot tea or coffee is a good way to keep warm as your heating will be off also.
Keep the freezer door shut as frozen food should easily last for the 3 hours with the doors kept closed, which means you shouldn't have to either throw away or cook a freezerful of meat once the lights come back on.
Fill up hot water bottles but if it gets too cold with no heating indoors, go sit in your car as it is a smaller space and will warm up quicker and if you leave a light switched on during the blackout, you will know when power is restored but make sure you turn off appliances like irons and electric fires.
Importantly, if you are vulnerable, of state pension age, disabled, are pregnant or have a child aged under five or have a medical condition which means your life literally depends on a machine being plugged in you can register with the Priority Services Register who will arrange for your service to continue with a backup energy supply so you are not put at risk.
The ESO have said that it is only a last resort but as they have gone from for information only and so negligible that it's not really worth mentioning to announcing how it will work if they have to do it to actually giving out the times it may happen then it might be prudent to stock up on hot water bottles and flasks, you know, just in case.

Lettuce 1 Truss 0

It's hard to imagine an incompetent brain surgeon or astronaut, you would hope the awful ones would be weeded out long before they made it to the operating table or launchpad so in those important professions you are safe to assume that only the cream would rise to the top but it seems that in politics having a negligible moral code and almost mesmeric stupidity is no hindrance to reaching the top seat.
The Liz Truss Prime Ministerial ship may have gone down on the iceberg of incompetence, an incompetence so colossal that it's a wonder she ever made it out her own front door in the morning, but she will now have a single line in the British History Books as the 56th British Prime Minster between Boris Johnson and whoever gets foisted upon us next and it may say *Resigned next to it but in her short tenure she accomplished a lot.
Of her 44 days in power, 10 days were lost due to the period of mourning after the Queen died and then there was 4 days of Party Conference so in effect she was in charge for only 30 days which makes it even more impressive that her ideologically driven ideas on economics which led to the pound falling to it's lowest-ever level against the dollar, the gilt market collapsing, the Bank of England forced to intervene and buy up £65bn of government bonds to save pension funds and global markets went all WT Actual F and even the IMF issued a diplomatic 'you moron' rebuke.
If we put to one side her role in the estimated 5 million families facing an average rise in annual mortgage payments of £5,100 and the £90 billion black hole she left in the Government budget which seems almost inevitable that a return to severe austerity is needed to plug, with all that parked elsewhere we can concentrate on those things that, despite everything else, she got right.
Firstly she made lettuce popular again when the Daily Star put a live stream of a lettuce against a picture of her at number 10 and asked which would last longer (Spoiler Alert: the lettuce won) and the Conservative Party are so far behind in the polls that Keir Starmer would have to be photographed punching a midwife in the face with a kitten to fail to win the next election so making the nasty party unelectable is a pleasant side effect of her bungling.
Right Wing ideology has never been great, think Hitler and his Concentration Camps, George W Bush invading Iraq and Donald Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord but staying inside Stormy Daniels and it was obvious where a zealously right wing economy would lead to and it has, i just hope all the weeping of the newly homeless families in doorways don't disturb your sleep too much.
So bye then Liz, it was thankfully short and not particularly sweet and it's onwards and downwards in the search for the third Prime Minister in four months and judging by the recent reverse evolution track record of the next Conservative leader being worse then the one who preceded them, Cameron to May to Johnson to Truss to the Daily Star limp Lettuce seems the natural choice.

No To Boris Mk2

Obviously we should be penciling in the date of the General Election by now but whoever steps up to replace Liz Truss who's tenure as prime minister was shorter than the leadership contest that put her there, is under no obligation to call one.                                   
As the Conservative Party are on average 30 points behind Labour, even they have too much sense to call one they know they will be heavilly beaten at so on we plod in this Democracy with the second Conservative Prime Minister the public never voted for and with Rishi Sunak and Penny Mourdant hoping for a better result this time around as they are one of three expected to put their names forward with the third being the answer to the question: Who would think a lying, narcissist was the answer to this crisis? Boris Johnson does apparently.                                                         
The man ousted as UK prime minister by his own government just three months ago, is said to be 'taking soundings' to see if he has enough support to throw his beer stained hat in the ring although being under investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Committee for lying to the House of Commons doesn’t  seem to bother the few MP's who are as excited as a monkey with the keys to the gates of a banana plantation at the prospect.                                          
The idea that the answer to their crisis is a lying, corrupt, amoral, entitled, self-absorbed, cunning, treacherous man who broke his own laws is something that tells you everything about the Conservatives who are thinking of it so this might be a good time to remind them what a shitshow unfolded under Boris the first time. In alphabetical order: 

Arcurigate where he denied having an affair with Jennifer Arcuri despite her saying they had been involved for four years.
Brexitgate where the trade deal he negotiated cost the UK £100bn a year in lost economic output and signed up to arrangements on Northern Ireland that the Government has desperately been trying to get out of ever since.
Covidgate where Johnson’s initial response to the spread of the coronavirus was to miss the first five Cobra meetings and embraced an early strategy to aim for herd immunity saying 'he would prefer the let the bodies pile high then have another lock-down. Scientists put his delays at costing 30,000 extra deaths.
Cummingsgate where he backed his adviser, Dominic Cummings, who drove with his family to Durham while ill with Covid
Kabulgate where he left thousands of people desperate to flee on the tarmac as he prioritised the evacuation of staff and pets of an animal welfare charity
Partygate where he said 'all the rules were followed' during the Covid lock-down although the investigations discovered leaving dos, birthday gatherings, a Christmas quiz, an ABBA party and became the first Prime Minister to be criminally sanctioned in office.
Patersongate where rather than suspend his friend Owen Paterson when he was found by the parliamentary commissioner to have committed a breach of lobbying rules, attempted to have the rules rewritten to get him off.
Pinchergate where he denied sexually assault allegations against Chris Pincher after he groped two men and then admitted actually, he knew all about them.
PPEgate where the Johnson government established a 'VIP lane' for much needed equipment by which friends and associates of senior Tories received preferential consideration in the supplying of contracts which the high court has since ruled was illegal.
Queengate where he lied to the Queen over proroguing parliament that the supreme court later ruled unlawful.
Track and Tracegate where he introduced a system that cost the equivalent of a fifth of the entire NHS England budget, yet MPs found 'made no measurable difference to the impact of the pandemic'.
Wallpapergate where he told his standards adviser that he didn’t know who paid for the Downing Street renovation until it emerged he had sent Whatapp messages to the donor Lord Brownlow, asking for more money.

As anyone who had considered getting back with an ex has probably heard, the golden rule is if they weren’t good enough for you then, what has substantially changed to make them good enough for you now and the answer is nothing, he will still be lying, immoral, egotistical, cheating, murderous, narcissistic, treacherous lech he always was, which actually makes him the ideal Tory leader.

Special Guest Blogger: Giovanni Aldini

As far as celebrity scientists go, i was a rockstar with global fame who traveled across Europe with my electricity experiments on dead animals which all begins at the gallows of Newgate in London and the dead body of the recently hanged criminal George Forster.
I was the professor of experimental physics at University of Bologna and my scientific work was chiefly concerned with galvanism which is the generation of electric current by chemicals.
My Uncle Giovanni would perform experiments on dead frogs, stimulating their legs with electricity and watching them twitch and i followed in his footsteps and began experimenting with reanimating dead frogs but moved on to something more exciting.
I began performing the same experiments on larger animals and crowds would gather a my lab to watch me reanimate sheep, pigs, cows, and oxen and gasp at the corpses heads shaking, their eyeballs rolling and their tongues rolling out of their mouths.
Such was my fame that i took it on tour but i always thought that if i could do it with dead animals, the natural progression was to move on to humans and maybe, bring them back to life.
Luckily for me the early 1800's was a good time for procuring recently dead bodies and i just waited at the door of the local executioner in Milan but beheading tended to drain the head of blood so i went to England where they hung rather than decapitated their bad guys and ordered myself one freshly hanged criminal.
A still warm deceased body was too much of an opportunity to miss so before a large audience, i prepared to return the corpse to life by taking a pair of conducting rods linked to a powerful battery and touched the rods to various parts of the body.
When the rods were applied to Forster’s face his jaw began to quiver and his left eye actually opened and when one rod was moved to touch the rectum, the whole body convulsed, giving the impression that the body was reanimating, in fact some of the spectators genuinely believed that the dead body
was about to come back to life.
Eventually, my battery died along with it Foster, this time for good but as much fun as it was, it did have a serious side as it was used to treat mentally ill patients with shocks to the brain and reported complete rehabilitation following transcranial administration of electric current.
There was a 5 year old girl who was obviously taking notice of my experiments because she mentions in the introduction to her book, Frankenstein, galvanism and used my experiments to draw inspiration when she sat down to write her book which would make me the inspiration for the mad scientist Dr Frankenstein.

Downing Street Podium Makes Another Appearance

Well it wasn't the best of starts and then it got worse in the middle and lets not even talk about the end but Liz Truss is out but she leaves Office a record breaker.
With 44 Days in Downing Street, of the 56 Prime Ministers she is the shortest serving, beating George Canning's 119 days in office although he arguably had a better excuse as he died of tuberculosis.
Straight faced some MP's are asking for Boris Johnson to come back, if Johnson is the answer, it's a very silly question as that's the same Boris they removed two months ago after his multiple lying and sleaze scandals and a contender for the worst PM in history until Truss came along but the favourite is Rishi Sunak although he was rejected by the Conservative Members in favour of Truss (not white enough for them) and Penny Mourdant who was rejected by her own MP's in the last coronation so neither are a good fit.
As the Government are facing being decimated in a General Election, letting us pick our own leader is highly unlikely, as one MP brilliantly put it, going to the  country wouldn't just be Turkeys voting for Christmas, it would be them also basting themselves and turning the oven on.
Unfortunately, after the 44 days she was in charge, she has left a legacy of everyone being poorer but at least the guy who gets to haul the podium out into Downign Street is being kept busy.

Special Guest Blogger: William Miller

It is said that after his last visit was cut short, Jesus will come back however the exact time of his comeback is unknown but after miraculously surviving the War of Independence i began studying the Bible with fresh eyes and became especially interested in Daniel 8:14: 'Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed' and i took that to mean that Earth was the sanctuary and Christ was returning to cleanse it, and i worked out that the 2300 days later meant that Big J would return between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844.
Now, i was aware that Christ’s return has been predicted many times before but i was so confident that i shared my prediction with the newspaper who dutifully began printing it because it was a quiet period of the 19th Century and the old timey newspapers were always short on material and America has never been short on people who are eager to see Christ's return.
I got inundated with questions and requests to travel and preach but America is a big place so i wrote a little book on my beliefs and sent a copy to anyone who got in touch including Joshua Vaughan Himes, a Preacher and newspaper publisher in Boston.
Himes was a full-fledged believer of my prediction and published them in his newspapers and arranged speaking tours and lectures to get the word out to as many people as possible that the son of God was due back circa Spring 1844.
Over a million Americans came to hear me speak and my theory was gaining traction and i even received letters from people in Europe who waited with baited breath as March 21 1843 came and went and when March 21 1844 also passed i pleased for patience and he will be here by April 18 1844, 100% absolutely guaranteed, no doubt, cross my heart and hope to die.
He never showed but happily i didn't die and instead slapped my head, said oh silly me i didn't count the leap years which makes it October 22 1844, sorry about that but and the big day came, believers gathered and waited, and waited, and waited, growing more and more anxious as darkness fell.
When day broke on October 23rd, they mumbled and went home or the ones who still had homes anyway because many of my believers had given away all their possessions because Jesus didn't care for such things and wanted to be spiritually prepared.  
I did try the line that Christ had returned but in spirit only and not in body but the newspapers were not buying it and labelled it the Great Disappointment and a year later, instead of him coming down to visit me a heart attack meant i went to see him in person and my first question was where was you then, you made me look a real divvy?
His answer was 'Last time i went there they crucified me, buggered if i'm going back down there again' which when you think about it, is perfectly fair.

Special Guest Blogger: Josef Mengele

Fancy Dress parties are popular and if you went to a second World War Party the majority of men would either be Hitlers, SS officers or run of the mill Nazis because on some sub-conscious level everyone is fascinated by the evil ones throughout history. In any history book Genghis Khan, the Vikings, Napoleon or Vlad the Impaler will be read before anyone turn to the pages of Gandhi, Mother Theresa or the Suffragettes because there is something deep down inside of us that draws us to the worst side and i would be one of the worst people of the 20th century, and I'm telling you, that is not an easy list to get onto.   
Before the war, i received doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and began a career as a researcher in a lab which was absorbed into the NAZI Sturmabteilung and was assigned as a battalion medical officer at the start of World War II, then transferred to the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz, where as the chief medical officer i saw the opportunity to conduct genetic research on human subjects.
My area of interest was research into twins and the trains arriving full of POW's gave me plenty of material to work with and so after the initial selection process which removed those deemed unfit for labor such as children, women with small children, pregnant women and the elderly sent on a one way trip to the shower blocks, the best that the rest could hope for was a merciful death but when those opportunities for a good death weren't available, some just had to make do.
I did do some proper doctoring work, i single-handedly stopped a typhus epidemic in one of the women's camps by sending them all to the gas chamber which stopped it in its tracks, i got awarded the War Merit Cross for that and a promotion to First Physician.
My twins experiments included weekly examinations, amputation of limbs, intentionally infecting one twin with a disease and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other. Obviously many of them died during the experiments, one evening i injected chloroform into the hearts of 14 pairs of twins to see what would happen.
Unsurprisingly what happened was they all died horribly but i had more success when i sewed two Romani twins together, back to back, in an attempt to create conjoined twins, the success was they managed to survive for a week.
All good things must come to an end and the war ended and i was spirited away to Argentina were i worked as a carpenter and a salesman between dodging Israeli agents trying to extradite me and put me on trial so i moved to Paraguay and suffered a stroke while swimming and drowned.
Everything i did, i did in the interest of advancing science and spent years doing the sort of experiments which would make a normal man's testicles crawl into his eye sockets, which funnily enough is one of the experiments we did for fun on those long, cold Winter nights.

Special Guest Blogger: Frances Farmer

Everyone thought i was destined to be the next big thing and i probably could have been if it wasn't for being incarcerated in a mental institution for five years but like all good stories, mine begins at the start and that is at the Theater where a talent agent steered me straight to Paramount Pictures where on my 22nd birthday, i signed a seven-year acting contract.
At that time young girls were puppets of the studio but i was far too rebellious for that and refused their demands that i change my name but nothing they could do about it because by then my name was out there and my first few films were massive and i met and married actor Leif Erickson.
I had a booming career, a handsome husband, and my whole life ahead of her. What could possibly go wrong?
The studio's wanted me to be a star off screen too and attend parties and high profile events and interact with the press but i refused and even disappeared for a while to star in Theater Shows but mostly i was drinking heavily.
When i turned down a role in Take a Letter, Darling, the studio suspended me but not only was my career veering into dangerous territory but so was my marriage.
and we divorced and then a series of events occurred which ended with me in a padded cell.
In a nutshell, i got pulled over for drink driving, abused a policeman and spent the night behind bars and a $500 fine which i never paid and got arrested again and then faced a charge of dislocating my hairdressers jaw before streaking naked down Sunset Boulevard and then lashing out at the officers who came to arrest me. Oh, and bouncing an inkwell off the judges head at the hearing for which i got 180 days in a psychiatric hospital.
Upon release, and with a certificate stamped with 'cured', i was released into my parents care but after i ran away they sent me back to the mental hospital where i remained for five years.
On release i got a job sorting laundry and landed a job as a bookkeeper and secretary but i was once famous and people recognised me and i got some small parts at theaters but five years of drugs, padded cells and jackets that do up behind your back has an effect and it's said that so few performers are able to make the transition from the famously difficult mental asylum circuit, all the way to headlining a major television show so i  spent the rest of my life staying out of the limelight until i died of throat cancer aged 56.

Dating Tips For Singles

 
As i have been married for more years than my husband cares to remember, i haven't been dating since Lou Diamond Phillips was still considered a decent actor but if i was single then my first date test would be do you have a collection of Star Wars figures or a model train set in the attic and if the answer is yes then if the toilet window wasn’t big enough for me to scramble out of then i would politely tell them a second date would not be necessary.
During a discussion with friends we came up with a list of things that means when it comes to giving them your mobile number you should 'accidentally' give the last two digits wrong because if you ever met them again you would be wondering what life decisions led you back to them.
Odd socks, unwashed hair, licking their fingers, arriving late, looking nothing like their profile photos or saying they are 6ft but obviously having to stand on a box to look in the mirror when they brush their hair or insisting on ordering food or drinks for you are signs that mean you should be eyeing the distance to a fire exit ready for when they nip to the bar.
If they say they are not like any of the other dates you may have been on then they obviously are because all the dates say this and if they turn whatever you say into a story about them or talk about their exe's or how much the earn then you should really think about taking this relationship to the previous level, like before you met them.
Using words like 'ping me an email', 'inbox me' or any mention of anything being 'outside the box' should be met with words like 'i'll be back in a tick' and any one who causally uses olde English like 'methinks', 'fair maiden', 'barkeep' or 'nay' should be told thou art a huge twat who has watched far too much Game of Thrones and left alone with their frothing pint of ale.
If they call you 'babe', 'sweetheart', 'darling', 'honey' or 'love' within the first five minutes of meeting them or correct your grammar or give you fitness tips to get in shape then it's either half a lager in their face or being the only person to hear your phone go with a text about a family emergency you must attend to immediately, either option will do.  
Finally, if they have a pet name for their car or a body part, photographs their food, calls their mum/friends while on the date, makes joking insults about you and call it 'banter' or repeating TV catchphrases it should have you looking out the window in the hope that a plane will fall on you but probably the best (or worst) sign that the person is not going to be your one and only is if they turn up with a printed out list of dating techniques from a blog then you should probably back away very slowly and do not make eye contact.

A Nip In The Air

As we head into the colder months this probably isn't the best time to be a nudist but there will certainly be a nip in the air somewhere because The British Naturism Organisation have announced an unprecedented rise in naturism with 14% of people now describing themselves as naturists or nudists, up from 2% in 2001.  
That comes out at an estimated 6.75 million Brits with a newfound enthusiasm for getting naked which is being put down to people discovering the benefits that nudity brings to mental, emotional and physical health which is all well and good but the last thing you want to see when you are perusing yoghurts in the chiller aisle of Tesco is some nudist bending over to pick up four pints of milk.
The trend for letting it all swing seems about to have developed during lock-down with Skinny-dipping particularly popular and discovering that it was so freeing and liberating.
The saving grace is that the steep rise is in the age range of 16 to 24 so now if they could just dissuade anyone with a BMI over 24 from going au naturel then it could be a trend i support although if you men do find yourself in the chilled aisle in Tesco, that 'It's Cold' excuse wore out long ago.
I guess it does means that we can actually see if it is a Mars Bar in their pocket or if they are just glad to see us though.

What Your Dog Says About You

 
Some people say that dog owners end up looking like their dogs which must be galling for pug owners because the pug is the of the Steve Buscemi of the Dog World but a new report from the Kennel Club say that people choose their dogs which are most like their personality.
Do you have a Whippet currently sat in the dog bed beside the radiator? That makes you someone who likes new experiences, has lots of hobbies and enjoy taking risks while Golden Retriever owners are positive and happy.
Schnauzers owners are organised and stick to the rules and if you throw a stick for a Pomeranian then you are agreeable and an extrovert while that Staffordshire Bull Terrier chewing your shoes are trustworthy and affectionate and Jack Russel owners are loyal and friendly, when they are not chasing it up the street as it goes after next doors cat it is anyway.
Springer Spaniel owners are traditional, reserved, and punctual and i have never known a Springer Spaniel be late, Border Terrier owners are charming, lively and exuberant and Cocker Spaniel owners are creative and family-orientated and inclined to roll in fox poo i assume.
It should be added to a dating app, what breed of dog do you have and also what colour because 10 minutes after siting with a dog owner you will be finding dog hair on your best dress and if he says he is a Border Terrier kind of a guy then make sure you have tissues in your bag because lively and exuberant is another way of saying they get overexcited when meeting new people and there WILL be a wet patch to mop up.

Bye Bye Kami-Kwazi

It's not easy to feel sorry for Kami-Kwazi Kwarteng so i won't even try because he had no sympathy for anyone else when he tanked the economy in an ideological zeal and forced up interest and made everyone so much more poorer, good riddance to the incompetent idiot but it still means that the other half of the comedy duo is still there.
The whispers in the Commons are that Truss days are numbered and she may as well start packing the thing away again, a month after unpacking them but short of a general election, there is nothing we can do to kick her sorry arse out the door, only thr Conservative MP's can do that so what planning?
She could read the room and just resign but she is too pig headed for that so it could be what did for Theresa May and Boris Johnson and the 52 letters declaring a lack of confidence in the Prime Minister but there is a year's grace before they can do that and its only been 5 weeks although apparently some
letters have gone in already.
The nuclear option is that the MP's just pick another MP and declare them the new leader but the Conservative Party rules are that the Members have to pick the leader so the only option they really have is for the Cabinet to resign en-mass, much the way it happened with Boris Johnson who had to be almost dragged out of Downing Street because everyone refused to join his cabinet.
Not sure how it is going to go, i assume she will try and brazen it out and has said she is 'absolutely determined' to stay on and has already appointed a new Chancellor to see through her many U-Turns but the concern is that from Cameron to May to Johnson to Truss, each time the leader has got worse and worse so the next one is probably going to be a tub of lard because after Johnson and Truss, it is difficult to see how they could get anyone to drag them even further down.

Special Guest Blogger: Gloria Swanson

I was the Queen of the Silent Movie Era but my life was full of more drama and tragedy than any of the films i starred in and no one was paid as much either but i didn’t save any for a rainy day, i spent almost all of the $8 million i earned.
It all started with a vist to a local film studio in Chicago when a talent scout spotted me and asked if I wanted to come back and work as an extra sometime and i got so much work that i dropped out of school and soon i got bigger roles, got married to husband number 1, then divorced husband number 1 and was signed to Paramount Pictures and began working (and an affair) with director Cecil B. DeMille and we made six films together and then went to work with Sam Wood and starred in 10 of his films, one with Rudolph Valentino who of course i had an affair with.
Husband number 2 came along, the President of a film company handily but that divorce wasn't quite so straight forward, he accused me of adultery with 13 different men (just the 13 he knew about) and as this was the time of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the film company made me sign a morality clause stating that i had to behave in a way that followed general moral standards, or else.
After the divorce, i threw myself into my work as it was probably the best way to keep out of trouble which worked for a while until filming Madame Sans-Gêne in France, and i hired a translator, a French nobleman called husband number 3.
I moved to United Artists studio and made the movie Sadie Thomas which saw me nominated for the very first Best Actress Oscar for the film but one of the critics was film maker Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future President John F. Kennedy but we still started an affair (obviously) and Kennedy even gave my husband a job at his film studio on one of the 3 films we made but then came the talkies and my star began to fade.
Divorce number 3 and my career may be fading but my love life never and husband number 4 was athlete Michael Farmer, the same guy as my divorce number 4 but i had already started an affair with British actor Herbert Marshall but Hollywood was moving on without me so i kept busy for the next few decades appearing in TV, theater and radio until Director Billy Wilder came knocking with a movie called Sunset Boulevard, all about a silent film star who faded into obscurity and became reclusive after the advent of sound pictures which is something i certainly knew much about.
Many of my friends from my heyday appeared as themselves in the film and it was such a hit that i decided to go out on a high and retired from films but not from marriage vows as husband number 5 came and went to be replaced by husband number 6.
All that wedding cake took its toll and i died just as i got back home from Portugal to celebrate my 84th birthday but i left two two stars on the Walk of Fame, countless awards and nominations, films selected for preservation on the merit of their cultural significance and some very rich wedding bridal gown shop owners.

Special Guest Blogger: George Reeves

If you were a kid in the 1950s and had a TV, you were probably obsessed with Superman who was faster than a speeding bullet but he may have been but i certainly wasn't as i later found out.
My life started out complicated, i grew up thinking i was Italian and that the man my mum was married to was my dad but turned out neither was true so that was pretty messed up but i made it through High School and enrolled in acting class where i met and wed Ellanora Needles.
I had a talent for remembering pages of lines and could shoot long scenes and that skill got me an appearance in the first scene of Gone With the Wind which got me signed on with Warner Brothers and signed on for five Hopalong Cassidy films.
I was officially on my way but acting wasn't particularly well paid and when i lost all our money on a bad investment, my wife left me but i was an actor and had my pick of women, unfortunately the woman i picked was Toni Lanier, an ex-showgirl, stunningly beauty and already married to MGM’s general manager Eddie Maddix.
Maddix didn't mind, he was having affairs all over so he was happy that his wife was otherwise occupied which was lucky for me because he was pals with some very unsavory characters in the mob.
Film roles started drying up and i was offered the role in a new film based on a comic book character, Superman, and i really didn't want to but had little choice so i took the role and it did make me a star but i wanted to be a proper big screen actor and here i was a 40 year old playing a guy in tights and a cape so i told the studio i was moving on to other things and told Toni the same thing which she took as well as any psychotic nutcase would.
I became engaged to American socialite Leonore Lemmon but long before Glenn Close boiled a pet rabbit to get back at her man jilting her, there was Toni Lanier.
First, there were the silent phone calls, then someone abducted my pet dog and then the brakes got cut on my car and it was obviously nutty Toni so days before my wedding i took out a restraining order against her but she didn't let a piece of paper stop her.
We had a bit of a pre-wedding party at my house and i went to bed early and came down a little later to see a few people i didn't know sat around so i went back to bed and you would need to read the police reports of what happened next but i ended up lying face up on the bed, naked and with a fatal gun-shot wound to my head.
I did hear that another Reeves took on my role in some Superman films, i hope he had better luck than i did.

Those Meddling Kids

 
Turns out that Velma from Scooby Doo is a lesbian which is not such a revelation as i always assumed she was anyway, something about the haircut i guess but some people (looking at you Bible thumper types) who are not happy that their enjoyment of a children's cartoon is being sullied by one of the Mystery Machine Gang members (aka those meddling kids) not conforming to what they deem as 'normal'.
I have seen enough Scooby Doo's in my life to see that Velma's sexual orientation is the least of their problems because as they are considering rational explanations for supernatural events, nobody queries the talking Great Dane they are having a conversation with. A Lesbian is not normal but a talking dog is fine?
Also, as i'm on a  roll, start with the janitor as it's always the bloody the janitor or if its a haunted theme park, it's the theme park owner pretending that the hotel/theme park is haunted to drive down its value so he could buy the place cheap but spent hundreds of thousands on holographic equipment to achieve it.
What sort of economic lesson is that teaching the kids?

Government Sucks So Thanks Ofgem

Strange that the Government have mentioned the possibility of three hour rolling blackouts to save energy in the winter but also said the likelihood of them happening is almost nil.
I say if the possibility is so negligible that it is hardly worth mentioning, then why mention it at all but the cynic in me chips in that it is either more likely than they are letting on the other-side of Winter they can claim the measures they took literally 'kept the lights on' and give themselves a slap on the back.
What they certainly are not doing is giving out advice on how to save electric because that would be 'nannying' and they like to treat us as big boys and girls who can work for ourselves but that hasn't stopped other nations giving out the advice and enforcing some changes.  
Italians have been told to turn their heating down by one degree, and off for an extra hour a day and the French Government have said that homes and offices will be heated to a maximum of 19C, there will be no hot water in public buildings, and the temperature in swimming pools and gyms will also be reduced.
A ban on doors being left open in heated or air-conditioned shops has also been introduced while the Spanish Government have enforced the 19C rule and said that all lights in shop windows must be turned off after 22:00 and Germany has stopped lighting up public monuments and buildings and turned off the heating in the entrances, corridors and foyers of public buildings.

The Government may be next to useless but at least the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets, (Ofgem) have been quick to give out some energy saving tips inlcuding:

Set the heating and hot water to come on only when required.
Set the Hot wayer cylinder thermostat to 60oC (140oF).
Close your curtains at dusk to stop heat from escaping through the windows.
Check for draughts too.
Always turn off the light when you leave a room.
Use energy-saving light bulbs.
Don’t leave appliances on standby
Only charge laptops and mobile phones when necessary.
When using the washing machine, fully load the appliance.
Try to only boil the water you need.
Dry your clothes outside during nice weather

Reputation Saved Yet Rebekah?

I'm guessing Rebekah Vardy didn't have any friends close enough to say to her you know what Rebekah, this libel case may not be such a good idea which is why she know has to pay millions of pounds to the woman she sued for libel.
A quick recap is required at this point so Coleen Rooney accused Vardy of leaking private information she obtained on Instagram to the Sun which Vardy denied and took Roony to court for damaging her reputation.
Her agent unfortunately dropped her phone containing potentially incriminating Whatapp messages over the side of a boat days after being ordered to hand it over for a forensic examination by Mrs Rooney's legal team and had 'forgotten' the password to a potentially incriminating lap top while admitting to selling stories to the Sun about other footballers.
Now we are at the end game and the final decision from the judge is that: 'It is likely that Ms Vardy deliberately deleted her WhatsApp chat with Ms Watt, and that Ms Watt deliberately dropped her phone in the sea' while Vardy: 'knew of, condoned and was actively engaged in the process of leaking stories about Rooney to the Sun' and ordered her to pay Coleen Rooney court costs of £1.5 million.
Ironically, it was the loss of the potentially vital evidence that had driven up the final bill as Coleen’s pursuit of that evidence increased her costs substantially Vardy has made a start on earning the money to pay Coleen, being paid for an exclusive interview with TalkTV, the television channel owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK which also owns The Sun Newspaper so paid by the Sun owners and not for the first time obviously.

We Certainly Live In Interesting Times

 There is a saying that goes 'Ladies and Gentlemen, we live in interesting times' and since 2016 it has certainly been that because it is hard to remember a time since i entered journalism in 1987 that such a succession of 'interesting things' have happened in such short space of time.
Brexit, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, a global pandemic and Britain getting a new King have all happened in the last 6 years which will all give historians plenty of material to focus on in the future although they probably won't be calling it a golden age, more of a shitty brown one but nobody can say it hasn't been interesting, window shakingly awful certainly, but not boring and it doesn't seem to be finished just yet.  
Brexit is probably going to lead to the break up of the UK, Scotland will eventually get their second referendum and this time, according to the polls, they probably will pick up their bagpipes and go home and Northern Ireland is being politically pushed further and further away from the rest of the UK that it seems inevitable that it will decide that teaming up with the Republic is the easiest option and then it will just be us English and the Welsh and even they are making noises about going their own way so the words Great Britain and United Kingdom will be consigned to the shelf to gather dust alongside the names USSR and Yugoslavia.
Donald Trump is threatening to make another run at the American Presidency and despite what a laughably atrocious job he made of it last time, it seems there are enough American's who look at his record and think: 'Actually, i think despite everything, i'd give him another go' and will vote for him, apparently he is the favourite to become the Republican Candidate which is a burning indictment of the American legal system that he isn't sitting in a cell with all expenses paid by The Man.
The Conservative Party have been playing Musical Chairs with their leaders which is how we got Boris Johnson who bought his own brand of leadership to the job along with bottles of Heineken, Coors and everything else in the Off-License although nobody was surprised when the man who had been twice previously sacked for lying, lied his way out of the door only to somehow already be the bookies favourite to succeed new prime minister Liz Truss who promised to hit the ground running and did exactly that before immediately tripping over her own laces and face-planted the floor. It takes a special kind of awful for your own side to be plotting to remove you before you have been in the job a fortnight.
The Government decided to play a game of it nobody mentions the pandemic then it doesn't exist anymore and the backside on the British throne now belong to King Charles III, the previous backside now laid in a crypt in Windsor Castle so all in all it has been interesting times and maybe in our dotage, we can look back and have a slightly demented laugh about the years 2016 to 2026, the WTF just happened years.