Special Guest Blogger: Queen Elizabeth II

I guess someone has informed God not to bother saving me anymore because although i lived a long and healthy life (much to Prince Charles disappointment), i did finally die.
I know that not all my subjects can have a life which involved being handed millions for waving at the plebs lining the streets every now and then and remember to feed the corgi's while having your every whim seen to by an army of lackeys, but that's the life of a royal.
Probably the most famous British Royal before me was Henry VIII. When you consider that he was a bad tempered, ginger haired bloater with gout it is credit to him that he managed to get one wife, let alone six of them and when he wasn't attending the execution of a number of the aforementioned wives, he was picking a fight with the Pope but luckily, with the exception of my grandson Harry, the modern day Royals are less ginger haired and sweaty.
To be honest, despite the wealth, power and influence, being a Queen is surprisingly boring. I got to live in big houses and wear nice clothes and go to fancy events, but that's about it but because we didn't do anything to earn our money or position, we had to be seen to do things and the poor folk seemed to get a huge kick out of watching a rich old white woman ride down the street and wave at them from a golden carriage.
The only time i really managed to get my hands dirty was during the Second World War when i joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a mechanic although as well as learning how to change a spark plug, i really learnt how to swear, back at the Palace saying 'Hey Footman, where's my fecking cucumber sandwiches' was frowned upon but i could really let rip with the Anglo-Saxon in the garage.
I did see much in my 70 years ruling over a quarter of the Planet and probably had more ups and downs than Andrews backside at a Brian Epstein party including the troubles in Northern Ireland and Brexit but the lowest low was that photograph of Sarah Ferguson having her big toe sucked by a Texan, i said to Andrew for crying out loud she could have worn a pair of damn friggin socks for goodness sake.
Another low was meeting some awful world leaders, oafs like that Mr Trump, and I do use the term Mr. extremely loosely, after meeting him i mulled over the idea of offering to restore British rule over the United States of America but not with Parliament who cocked it all up last time, this would be an old-school monarchy. Just me, and then, assuming they’d rather not have Charles, we could go straight to William and those children of his.
I said to Philip about my plan but when i said i couldn't see how a hate-filled, bitter, conceited, arrogant, scum-sucking racist moron can have such control over a population, he pointed out we have Boris Johnson running things so i quietly dropped the plan.
I know many were sad because i died but let’s be realistic here, we were never going to hang out anyway so nothing will have changed however interestingly during my death and Charles taking over 10 days later, swans were temporarily not protected but that was kept quiet as we would have seen bands of hungry Brits bashing them with spades and barbecuing them in the street.
Like many of the Privileged, the Royal Family has its flaws. It's bloated, slow and largely clueless and that's just Prince Andrew but that's for Charles to sort out, i'm out of that game now.

Religion In Retreat

Britain has never been that religious a country with under 1% attending Church with any regularity so the latest results from the 2021 Census that the no religion box was ticked by 37.2% of the population, up from 28% a decade ago, is no surprise although the Churches answer of making Christ more widely known is because i am of the mind that the more you look into the writing of the Bible, the more you realise what a load of cobblers it is.
Most people come to religion through their parents who introduce it to their children from birth and have it reinforced through visits to Holy places, school and other grown ups although some, when they are old enough to think for themselves, question what they have been told and arrive at the conclusion that  it isn't what they were told.
I always think if you have looked at the 'evidence' and still believe, then you haven't looked hard enough because it all falls away once you have a serious look at it and the way that it came about and the damage that is does around the World.
With Christmas fast approaching, it is common knowledge that the Church shoehorned their guy into the Roman Saturnalia Winter Festival, the Church even fudged the date of birth of their man to cash in on an established festival which they also did with Easter which was another Spring Festival celebrating the Pagan Fertility Goddess Eostre.
Almost every tale in the Bible was plagarised from existing religions when the Christian Marcion of Sinope created the Bible by pulling together all the best stories from the other religions and erased the original names and inserted his own so Jesus's birth to a virgin was 'borrowed' from India's Buddha and Romes own Mithra, Garden Of Eden from Persia's Ormuzd, Noah's Ark swiped from Babylonian's Utnapishtim and Jonah and the Whale plagarised from the Hindu's Saktideva but it gradually evolved to the Book that gets thumped today.
Religion of all flavours has easily been the cause of most death and destruction on the Planet in some God or anothers name, watch any news station or read any newspaper to see how that is continuing today so i would love to know what the religious folk have seen, heard, read, watched or been told that makes them believe despite knowing that it is just the Johnny come lately on the religious scene with great PR despite being it blatantly being begged, borrowed and stolen from other religions.

Special Guest Blogger: Mikhail Gorbachev

I went from combine harvester driver to leader of the Soviet Union, the last leader as it turned out because after just 3 years of my leadership, the name USSR was being rubbed out of Atlas's all over the World as i was clearing out my desk that final day in 1991 and looked around and thinking: 'What the hell just happen?  
I withdrew troops from the Soviet–Afghan War and embarked on summits with United States president Ronald Reagan to limit nuclear weapons and end the Cold War between America and the USSR who were bitter enemies with only the threat of MAD, or mutual assured destruction, keeping each from destroying the other.
There was a brief period when Ronald Reagan came along and you thought that bloke could just be crazy enough but he turned out to be even crazier than we thought, making important decisions based upon advice from his astrologer so it was only by the grace of his 7th house not disappearing up Uranus that we all escaped unscathed.
Despite this, i had a good relationship with him, one time at a summit in Geneva we took a walk together and Reagan asked me if the USSR would help the US if aliens attacked and when i said we would, he said the US would do the same were the Soviets in the sights of an alien's Space lasers. An altogether different kind of MAD.
Seriously, if they didn’t have military hardware and a total disregard for human life, it would be impossible to take these guys seriously but that was before i had the plan to relax things in the Communist Soviet Union and move towards a more gentler social democracy but as you probably noticed, this plan had one fatal flaw, and that fatal flaw was the entire plan.
It was my predecessor Andropov who realised that the Soviet Defence budget was crippling us and he started the reformations which i continued although where i envisioned a gradual change over the course of a decade or two, within a few short years the Soviet Union had broken up and Communism was falling down all around Eastern Europe.
Domestically, my policy of Glasnost and Perestroika went down well but the situation that i began rolling kind of got away from me and before i realised what was happening, it had snowballed and i had done myself out of a job.
It may have earned me the Nobel Peace Prize but as the USSR crumbled, my 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.  
I spent my new found free-time winning a Nobel Peace Prize, starring in Pizza Hut advertisements and making an album of love songs while Yeltsin did what he did best, getting pissed and passing out before dropping dead and Putin took over and as i have been a critic of his, i added avoid not been quietly murdered by him to my hobbies.     
As for my legacy, well America may have won the Cold War but Russia paid off the last of our debt in 2017, the home of Capitalism is more than £23 trillion in debt so this is the world you created, try not to choke on it Comrades.

What Happened?

I'm not sure what happened while i was out of the country but not only do we have the same Prime Minister as the one who was there when i left four weeks ago but i have come back to see Matt Hancock has finished third in I'm A Celebrity. That would be the Matt Hancock who did such an awful job as Health Secretary during the Covid Pandemic and was forced to resign for breaking the rules he drilled into us daily we had to follow.  
I deliberately avoided the news courtesy of having a Virgin Mobile contract which means my phone has no service and is a useless slab of plastic in my pocket when not in the UK unless i'm on the Hotel's Wifi which i didn't bother with because i was either too full of Mulled Wine, picking through a plate full of vegetables which constitutes a vegetarian meal or building a snowman which is harder than it looks on TV. If any of the snowmen we built came to life during the night it would be a scary sight, not so much Frosty the Snowman and more Freddy the Snowman as in Kreuger.
As for Hancock, he was meant to turn up in the Jungle, be forced into endless consecutive Bushtucker Trials until his will was broken at which point the British public would gang up and send him packing at the first opportunity so how he went from villain to third place in a popularity contest i neither understand nor want to.
Maybe he came across as so utterly pathetic that a natural audience sympathy kicked in or he maybe made a heart-felt plea about seeking forgiveness for groping the woman he was having an affair with while telling us to avoid visiting our loved ones dying in hospital or how he was throwing a steel ring around care homes when he was actually sending Covid patients directly to them.
The World Cup started and were lucky enough to be in Munich to watch them lose 2-1 to Japan and discover what Wir Sind Scheiße means and as luck would have it was in Brussels on our way home when Belgium lost to Morocco and the Belgians decided the best way to commiserate was to have a riot although the water cannons and tear gas did look pretty in the evening light from our hotel window.
Now i'm back home and the memories of mountains, snow and wondering if i could still keep my job if i lose most of my fingers to frostbite are fading but my camera has 931 pictures on it and the revenge is going to be sweet to all those colleagues who insisted on showing me their summer holiday pictures in July and August.
You'd better grab yourself a coffee because this may take some time! 

Special Guest Blogger: Olivia Newton-John

In the musical Grease, i went from a nerdy cardigan wearer to a leather-clad seductress and in many ways that is the same journey i made in my life going from a British Country singer with an Australian twang to a raunchy Lycra clad pop-star singing about getting physical.
When the British first discovered and colonized Australia, naturally they spent most of their time trying not to be murdered by it but in the 1950's it was a relatively nice place so my family left the UK and moved to Australia when i was five years old and by the age of 14 i had made a few singing appearances and entered a music contest which i won and the prize was a trip back to the UK to record a single which was never released but it got my name out there and i spent the next 5 years touring nightclubs in Europe as a Country and Western singer and i released a few singles and even got to represent the UK at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest but as i got more successful the American country singers didn't like the idea of a Brit, or an Australian, singing country tunes as they thought country music should only be sung by hot American women, those they could watch and indulge in activity likely to cause chafing.
Turned out that the general listening public didn’t care about what the country audience thought or that i didn't sing in their backwater, stump jumpin, redneck jibber speak and the Yanks really got the hump when i beat the big Country names to the Grammy for my country hit 'Let Me Be There'.
It was during a party at Helen Reddy's place that everything went up a notch and i met producer Allan Carr, who was looking for an actress for his film version of a Broadway play and despite being 28 and being asked to play someone 18, he offered me the role of Sandy in Grease.
In the original version of Grease, the Sandy character was actually Sandy Dumbrowski and not from Australia, but from the good ole US of A and although i tried, i couldn't shake my Australian accent so the character changed from the sweet and innocent American Sandy Dumbrowski to Sandy Ollson from down under and on release i was a full-blown movie star but not everybody was happy about my success.
I was up to my elbows in Grease but my record company still demanded 2 albums a year from me so i ditched the Country and Western and went pop and despite Grease making me famous enough to allow me to consider retiring without ever having to set foot on a movie set ever again, nobody said this was a career path that i probably should have been followed as i signed on to appear in the roller skating disco musical extravaganza Xanadu, just as the craze for Disco and roller skating faded and it bombed, winning the Golden Raspberries for the worst film of the year and i admit it was rubbish so if you unfortunately have a copy in your DVD rack, pick it up, take it outside and dropkick it over your neighbour’s fence.
Although my movie career was as shaky as the guy who played Kenickie's acting, my singing career was still going well and then i released the song physical and with lyrics such as only talk when were horizontal and let me hear your body talk it was pretty obvious what i was singing about but it was banned from being played on some American radio stations so i said no, you got it all wrong, don’t wet your big boy pants as it's about aerobics and shot a video of me and some men doing exercises and they went, oh okay then.
In the mid 80s i was being squeezed out by younger up-and-comers so planned to embark on a Greatest Hits tour but in one week i received the news that my father died and i had breast cancer.
I did have it treated and continued to perform but it came back in 2013 and again had it successfully treated but when it said you're the one that i want for a third time it was untreatable and i sadly died, not as sad as Grease 2 but close.

Special Guest Blogger: Manfred von Richthofen

I was the first world war's ace of aces, and if you only know one thing about World War I (that's the non-Hitler one), it's probably something to do with Germany's most notorious fighter pilot, with 80 confirmed kills to his name and that name is the Red Baron.
We usually think of fighter pilots as kick ass gladiators of the sky, but in WW1 airplanes themselves were new and experimental and we sat in rickety frames of plywood wrapped in flammable fabric, next to large tanks of highly combustible fuel. Then we took to the skies and tried to kill each other.
I may have been an actual Baron of a prominent Prussian aristocratic family but i started out like a lot of Luftstreitkräfte pilots, young, brave and parachute-less which could be a problem when you're flying a machine held together by string and best wishes but i quickly became Germany's leading ace and was awarded command of my own elite squadron with the best of the best pilots, Jagdgeschwader 1, which eventually became known as the Flying Circus because of the wild colors we painted our Fokker machines and in the camouflaged world of WW1 grey, my decision to paint my plane entirely red (and earn the nickname the Red Baron), was a bold declaration of confidence.
One of my favorite method of attack was to play air chicken with my opponent. Air chicken is just like regular chicken, the difference being that instead of two people driving at each other in cars, it was two planes heading toward each other at a combined speed of nearly 300 mph while pouring machine gun fire into each other's aircraft. The loser generally died in a cascading hellish fireball.
I became such a pain in the ass for the British that they hatched a cunning plan to dispose of me, coordinating a massive aerial raid on my home and it shows much of a badass you have to be when the Brits consider you scary but as usual they missed the target but i wasn't the only von Richthofen shooting down British planes, my younger brother was probably better than me but he tended to crash land quite a bit so due to spending much time in hospital, he only racked up 40 confirmed kills.
They did get me later though, i sustained a serious head wound during combat over Belgium and suffered temporary partial blindness which never improved after several operations and after convalescence i returned to active service months later, refusing to accept a ground job and despite my continuing sight problems, off i went that day looking for a few quick kills and back sucking sausages in Berlin by teatime.
I would like to say my end came after in a meeting with a gentleman fliers, two men of honour jousting together in the cloud-strewn glory of the skies, but it came after i misjudged the height above the banks of the Somme and a Canadian bullet fired up from the ground hit me in the chest and if that hadn't killed me then the mess i made of the landing would have done and by mess, i mean plowing into the ground at 125 mph. Yep that certainly would have done it.

Special Guest Blogger: Francois Villon

I was a firm believer that Gentlemen of literature should write about the things they have experienced and i had many experiences which ended with me looking at the inside of a prison cell but i was that good that i still managed to make them all flowery and rhyming.
I was born into poverty and raised by a foster father who taught me Latin grammar and syntax and became a student in arts and after receiving my Masters and Bachelor's degrees from the University of Paris i could have had a promising career in law or the church but instead i said right, let's see what this world has to offer for a virile, young poet and found out that mostly it was girls, alcohol and brawling.
The second and third combined immediately when i got into an argument with a priest in a bar, a scuffle broke out and daggers were drawn and he attacked me but i retaliated and not only jabbed him between the ribs but smashed him over the head with a rock for good measure.
Obviously with that much blood leaking from his head he wasn't going to live much longer so i ran away thinking what a great poem this would make only i wouldn't be able to write it in Paris as the authorities banned me from the city but they relented and exonerated me of all charges when the Priest publicly forgave me before he died.
My poetry was going great and i had more experiences when i joined up with a gang of thieves and we were caught stealing 500 Gold Crowns from a Chapel and i was banished from Paris again so i spent the next 4 years as a wanderer, mostly wandering through the windows of places and exiting again with their valuables.
I was caught again and spent time counting the bricks in an Orléans cell while writing my most famous works, Le Grand Testament, until i was released as part of a general jail-delivery at the accession of King Louis XI and became a free man again and returned to Paris or rather the Grand Châtelet fortress in Paris after i got arrested for theft and bailed.
I considered taking this time to reflect on my life, taking the opportunity to take a step back and evaluate my goals and objectives and to take the necessary action to in the aspects of my life that i might want to improve, instead what i did was get into a fight in a tavern and taken back to the fortress where i was condemned to be hanged.
While i was sitting on death row i wrote 'Ballad of Hanged Men' and 'I Am Francois, They Have Caught Me' but before i swung by my neck a last minute appeal saved my life and reduced my sentence to 10 years banishment from Paris.
Coming that close to death caused me to evaluate a few things so i changed my ways and went to live in a small town and there my story ends in a beautiful mystery and the speculation that i may lived a happy life, died on a mat of straw in some cheap tavern, or in a cold, dank cell, or in a fight in some dark street or even on a gallows in a little town in France and yep, it was definitely one of those.

Merry Christmas Movie Viewing

I have seen many Christmas movies and enjoyed most of them, some more than others, but you can generally tell in the first five minutes who is going to end up kissing who in the snow 90 minutes later and i am fine with that, it's a happy ending and that is how feel-good Christmas movies should be but i have noticed a few things which happen in every film.
Christmas time is basically a race to see how much food and drink you can cram into your face during December and almost every Christmas film has an appearance from a Christmas Cookie somewhere and Eggnog. I have never tasted Eggnog and have no idea what's in it, i assume egg and whatever nog is. As for the cookies, if they are not home baked then the shops seem to just give them away, nobody ever seems to pay for them, what sort of business model is that?  
As well as cookies, there is always a scene where someone buys someone coffee or hot chocolate but the cup always seems to be empty as you can tell by the actor or actress tipping the cup up to their lips as if it is only half full or the empty sound when they put it down on the table. Now i am to acting what Donald Trump is to weightwatchers but even i could act like i have a full cup of hot liquid and sip it and not risk tipping hot liquid down the front of my blouse.
Most movies take place in a small American town, normally the place where the female star grew up and returned from some high powered career for the Christmas period or to resurrect a failing family business and is destined not to return to their job for that imminent partnership or promotion because she has fallen for an old flame or the local hunk who sold her a Christmas Tree. It appears that it always snows in these small towns but obligingly it only snow at the edges of the roads and pavements but it will always snow, sometimes so heavily that it means the person is stranded in the town and unable to leave and everyone runs around willy nilly in the snow and never complains about how bloody cold it is or slip and falls on ice or if they do, it's in an adorable way.
We put up our fake Christmas Tree at the end of November and then take it down early January but in the movies they usually not only go out and buy a new Christmas Tree from a Christmas Tree Farm (owned by a handsome tree salesman with no regard for the environment), but they leave the purchase until a few days before Christmas.
What's the point of that? It would only be up for a few days and that means you have dragged a tree in to your front room and will be finding pine needles everywhere until Easter for just those few days.   
If someone is in a relationship at the start of the movies then a break up is inevitable, it has to be so they are single and can fall for the super nice, hunky guy or cute girl at the end but there has been a twist on this in recent years by making sure the character is single by giving them a dead spouse.
Nothing says Christmas cheer like a dead wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend leaving you free to shack up with the girl who has the high powered job that has turned up or the good looking guy who does all the odd-jobs around town.
Many of the perfectly decorated small towns will feature a competition, either a talent show at a child's school, float decorating in a parade, or something related to baking and a tree lighting ceremony in the town centre where the characters decide they really are in love and she will give up her career and live in the small town with the hunky new boyfriend. It's almost always the girl giving up her job in the City for someone she met a few days ago or hasn't seen since she left town 15 years ago and at no point asks herself hmm, he's in his late 20s or early 30s and single, what's up with him? I guess high-powered executive men don’t need to go anywhere, they fall in love with the Christmas-obsessed women that cross their path in the office.
The overriding message is that there is more to the season than presents and the real meaning of Christmas is love and family and not the presents or materialism and they will drum this message home between commercials trying to sell you stuff that you didn't know you wanted or needed.
It seems that every street in these American small towns have a Santa standing around ringing a bell which seems to make people automatically put money in the their bucket. That would never work here, they would have to at least sing or do something to get a few pound, the ability to say Ho Ho Ho and ring a bell doesn't qualify but they do sometimes turn out to be the real, actual Santa.  
As heart-warmingly familiar as the plots are the actors who show up and get us saying 'wasn't he in' or 'Isn't that the woman who was in' and any actor with a white beard is going to be the real Father Christmas (possibly ringing a bell on a street) and will impart some wise words of wisdom at some point to bring the two together which is unlike the usual older people who say inappropriate things, call you by the wrong name or button up cardigan wrong. Old people are not always a reliable source of information pertaining to your love life.
If the actor has an English accent there is a very good chance he will turn out to be a Prince of somewhere in Europe nobody has ever heard of and he is destined to take over as King soon which is fine if you didn't know that the only place in Europe which speaks with such a pronounced clipped English accent is England and the heir to the throne is married and the only single Prince's within touching distance of the throne are both under 10 years old.
The most annoying thing which happens in Christmas films which really crumbles my cookies is the way that the characters, at the end of a phone call, never say goodbye to the person they are talking to.
No 'Bye, speak later' or 'See you at 8' or even as much as a mumbled 'Love You', they just hang up which is not only rude but makes me wonder why they gave that person they hardly know their telephone number in the first place, they have only known them for a few days and they are handing out their personal number to them?
That's a lax attitude to your own personal security right there because he may seem nice, love Christmas and have a chiselled jawline but if you get woken up by a series of texts of photo's sent you of him wearing your knickers over his head, then then you may regret being quite so casual with your phone number.

Special Guest Blogger: Fritz Haber

It is said that the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry was probably the most important Nobel Prize ever awarded, directly responsible for solving one of the biggest problems humanity has ever faced and saving the lives of 4 billion people although at the time many of my peers refused to attend the ceremony and two other Nobel Prize winners rejected their awards in protest at me.
My story begins with bird islands off the coast of Peru where millions of sea birds gather to mate and poop. A lot.
Bird poop was big business because it contains lots of Nitrogen and it's essential for all life on Earth as we get our nitrogen by literally getting people to eat plants covered in shit and plants get their nitrogen from the soil.
The problem is if you farm the same soil year after year you harvest the nitrogen out of it, and eventually there isn't enough of it for healthy plants to grow so farmers need it to add nitrogen back into the soil, which is where bird poop comes in.
South America's rich deposits of bird poop did not go unnoticed by the rest of the world, there was wars over it but the bird poo was running out and Peru banned it's exports so the world needed another  way to get its nitrogen fix.
Here's the thing, nitrogen isn't rare, 78% of the air is nitrogen, but it's in a form that plants and animals can't use and many scientists were trying to solve the problem of making it usable and failing miserably then i came along and said how about we use Osmium, the stuff used in lightbulb filaments, to make ammonia nitrate which is even better than nitrogen and i built the equipment, placed a sheet of Osmium in the pressure chamber and created ammonia nitrate which Germany's biggest chemical company, BASF, commercialised and were producing five tons of ammonia per day.
With the fertilizer from my process, farmers were able to grow four times as much food, and as a result the population of the Earth quadrupled and made me a very wealthy man so why was i shunned by colleagues when i won the Nobel Prize including my closest friend Albert Einstein?
Well, it all comes down to what happened in World War I.
When the war broke out, i volunteered for military duty and only a few months into the war, the German army was already running out of explosives and Ammonium Nitrate, besides being an excellent fertilizer, is also an explosive and i converted the factories using my process to make ammonia for fertilizer to create nitrate for explosives instead.
The French were using tear gas as a chemical weapon but i went one better and tried to create a better chemical weapon than the Brits and French were already using and came up with chlorine gas which the first time it was used killed over 1,000 Allied soldiers.
The Brits soon began using my own invention against the German trenches and the Americans used mustard gas and my wife was horrified that her husband was the instigator of such a terrible weapon and shot herself which inspired me to spend the rest of the war researching even more deadly chemical weapons such as Zyklon B.
When Germany surrendered, i lost all the money i made to hyperinflation and died of heart failure the following year but my legacy continued into the next war as my Zyklon B was used against the Jews to perpetrate the Holocaust.
It would be easy to paint me as a hero for inventing the process used to feed billions or a villain as my invention enabled the death of millions but other nations scientists were also developing chemical weapons, i was just better than them at it and the much admired pacifist Albert Einstein began the ball rolling on Nuclear weapons which the Americans used to kill 200,000 in the blink of an eye so think again Albert on exactly who is the bad guy here?

Special Guest Blogger: St Hildegard von Bingen

Lock up your Communal Wine and wave those rosary beads in the air like you just don't care because St Hildeberg is coming to town for a night of Praise and Worship hymns that’ll have you shoving your fist in the air because i was the 12th Century's music maestro but when i wasn't rocking the aisles, i was writing down prophesies given to me directly from God and some bits of medical information.
The youngest of ten children, when i was 8 my parents placed me in the care of a Benedictine nun and not long after i began to experience visions and wrote them down and the nuns were so impressed that they made me the Superior but our little church got so popular, especially as i was very handy with the herbs and medicinal arts that we had to move to a new, bigger convent.
The Abbot assigned a monk to document everything i saw and the Pope himself got wind of it and my fame began to spread all throughout Europe and people traveled near and far to hear of my visions and seek help, especially men who seemed particularity afflicted with phlegm and we all know why, a certain man in a certain garden eating a certain forbidden fruit. Just saying if man had remained in paradise, he would not have had the flegmata within his body which introduces infirmities to the human body.
12th Century Medicine was particularly advanced, i knew all about the stones found in the gizzards of swallows hung around the patients neck cured epileptics, insanity and lunatic patients and mandrake root left in a spring for a day and then prayed over cured depression and for men experiencing problems with their testicles, they should burn a swallow’s egg in its shell, grind it to a powder, add some chicken fat, and mix until a paste and rub into their testicles.
It was about this time that i began composing my songs, you may have heard of 'Ordo virtutum' which was the very first Opera and a popular little ditty i knocked out and Pope Benedict XVI gave me the name Doctor of the Church which is pretty cool name although the rock n roll lifetyle caught up with me during
a four date hymn and anthem tour of Europe and i was found dead in my bed aged 81.

Special Guest Blogger: Lili’uokalani

I was born in a grass hut and in the Hawaiian tradition, children’s names must have a link to an event that happened around the time of birth. Unfortunately for me the only event at this time was a Princess who caught an eye infection. Because of this tradition, my full name of Lydia Lili'uokalaniu Loloku Walania Kamaka'eha means smarting, tearful, burning, sore eyes. Try singing that in my birthday song.
Another unusual Hawaiian tradition is to adopt children out, so at birth my parents gave me to another family who raised me along with their own children and sent me away to a boarding school run by American missionaries whose idea of medical intervention was praying so when an epidemic of measles struck, it went as well as you expected and half the class died.
Those of us still alive would go on school excursions which required an escort to get us safely home afterwards. My guy was an American missionary and he immediately fell off his horse and broke his leg in the process but he continued his escort me home which i thought was impressive so i agreed to marry him but on the day of the wedding the Crown Prince of Hawaii became ill and died and my brother became King and made me the heir apparent and he sent me on Royal duties including a visit to Washington where i met Grover Cleveland and London for Queen Victoria's Royal Jubilee.
Back home the anti-monarchists, spurred on by the missionaries, were after change because of sugar because the exporters had to pay the tariffs on sugar sales to the lucrative US market and wanted Hawaii to be part of America, so the tariffs would be eliminated.
My brother didn’t get removed from power, but he did have a stroke and die which made me Queen, the first in Hawaiian history and as it turned out the last as the Bible thumpers and sugar-heads wanted me out of power so they could annex Hawaii to the USA.
I thought my husband, being an American missionary himself, would have some sway but he went and died so when the USS Boston full of Marines and two companies of sailors arrived in Honolulu to begin a coup i said there was no need for war, let's negotiate which they did, agreeing to ignore me and set up a government and make themselves leader ready for the annexation.
Hawaii became the Republic of Hawaii but there was one last attempt to win it back so i declared myself Queen again but the anti-monarchists just locked me up in an upstairs bedroom of the palace and on my release from my luxury prison i headed to Washington to beg the president to stop the annexation but William McKinley was now in power and he wasn’t at all sympathetic but he did offer me a pension of $1,250 a month for the rest of my life.
I was therefore forcibly replaced by a bunch of Jesus-loving sugar warriors. I hope the bastards all got diabetes.

Special Guest Blogger: Ilse Koch

My school reports notes that i was a polite and happy child so you may be wondering how i ended up being known as The Bitch of Buchenwald and prosecuted for war crimes, well are you sitting comfortably? Then i shall begin.
My childhood was completely unremarkable and i began working as a bookkeeping clerk at a time when Germany’s economy was struggling to rebuild itself after World War I, and i and many of my friends joined the Nazi Party as Hitler’s ideology sounded attractive to Germans as the country faced hardship after losing the Great War and it felt like the Nazi Party would restore and perhaps even bolster the fraught economy.
As well as owning a snazzy swastika armband, i met and married Karl Otto Koch who was the Commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany.
Being a dutiful wife i jumped at the opportunity to become involved in my husband’s work, and over the next few years gained a reputation for being one of the most feared Nazis at Buchenwald.
One of my first orders of business was to use money donated (some may say stolen) from prisoners to construct an indoor sports arena where i could ride my horses.
I even often rode outside the arena and into the camp itself so the prisoners could see what their money had bought although some seemed less than enthused which upset me but whipping them to within an inch of their life soon cheered me up again.
At Buchenwald the Prisoners sweated and toiled until breaking point, hell, at the end of most days we worked them so hard they wished they were dead but as a woman i was tasked with cajoling the children into the gas chamber but i was able to select which adults i wanted gassed and i chose the ones with the nicest tattoo's but they didn't die for nothing. I skinned them to retrieve the tattooed parts of their bodies before being incinerated, and made pretty lampshades from them.
Such was our success at Buchewald the Nazi's wanted our help elsewhere because killing people is way harder than it looks. Most of them completely refuse to stand still and let you gas them into oblivion which is totally unreasonable so my husband was transferred to Lublin to establish the Majdanek concentration camp but i remained at Buchenwald until we were both arrested by the SS for skimming profits from the camp that should have gone to the SS.
My husband was sentenced to death and shot by firing squad but i was acquitted for lack of evidence but i was then arrested by the Americans at the end of the War and charged with participating in a criminal plan for aiding, abetting and participating in the murders at Buchenwald.
I was released after 4 years and then rearrested by the German authorities and charged with incitement to murder, incitement of attempted murder and committing grievous bodily harm and again sentenced to life imprisonment.
As for what i did next, not many people are able to make the transition from the famously difficult war criminal circuit all the way to national treasure so i hanged herself with my bed-sheets.

World Cup 2022

 

Today is the first day of the World Cup in Qatar, a country with no footballing heritage but it does have an awful Human Rights record and has laws criminalizing same-sex relationships which in a Footballing world run on morals would have excluded it but the Footballing World is run by FIFA and morals are not high on their agenda so it's football in the desert this November.
Despite FIFA writing to all national teams asking them not to make political statements, some teams captains have committed to  wearing heart-shaped armbands to support an outlawed homosexual movements and Denmark’s squad is taking a black protest team kit with the national team badge, Hummel logo and decorative white chevrons faded into the same single colour as the shirt as a sign of 'mourning' for those migrant workers who died building the stadiums in Qatar.    
The Netherlands national team wore t-shirts emblazoned with the words 'Football supports change', Norway players wore shirts stating 'HUMAN RIGHTS' and the German team lined up in black shirts, each with one white letter to spell out 'HUMAN RIGHTS' and did discuss boycotting the World Cup.
Fifa have come out and said that they respect all opinions and beliefs without handing out moral lessons to the rest of the world, a version of  sport and politics should be kept separate to not piss off the nation hosting it.  
The repeated promises made by Qatar, including by its Emir at the United Nations, that all visitors to Qatar will be welcome 'regardless of origin, background, religion, gender, sexual orientation or nationality' is true, of course they are welcome but only if they are prepared to forego their human rights while there.
Many players and managers have voiced their concern including England’s Beth Mead who said that were she to travel to Qatar with her partner, team-mate Vivianne Miedema, they would be risking flogging, incarceration or execution with any public show of affection.
Broadcasters have been banned from interviewing people not directly involved in the football matches themselves and risk having their permits to film removed by the Qatari Government if deemed 'inappropriate or offensive to the Qatari culture, Islamic principles' which makes it impossible to investigate issues such as the way in which migrant workers have been treated and LGBTQ+ rights.
It shouldn't be played there and FIFA and Qatar will be hoping that once the football starts fans will forget about the backwards country hosting the Championship so we can hope that more teams make gestures to remind the viewers a home.

Special Guest Blogger: Terry Pratchett

I was called Britain's most shoplifted author which means one of two things, either my books were really expensive or the book shops always paraded them to close to the exit. I sold over 80 million books so a few walking out down the back of people's trousers never really affected me much.
I did start out with the idea of being an astronomer but i was no good at mathematics so decided instead to be a journalist where the only math's you need are to count if that's your 10th or 11th cup of coffee that day and got work at a local newspaper and one job was to interview a local publisher who i just happened to mentioned to that i was actually writing a book myself called The Carpet People, a novel about the trials and tribulations of different tribes and people living in a carpet and he asked to have a look. He did and was so impressed that he then passed it to his co-director.
They actually published it and i began writing the first Discworld novel and as the series became more and more successful, i gave up my job making up writing about other people to become a full-time writer of the Discworld novels.
All the Discworld novels take place on a flat, circular world which sits on the back of four elephants, which stand on the back of a giant star turtle and despite how that sounds they were wildly successful, i was even knighted for services to literature and decided that if i was to be a knight, i needed a proper sword so i gathered deposits of iron i found in a field near my home in Wiltshire and smelted it myself.
Over 55 million sales Worldwide and 39 books into the series later i was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s but i wasn't going to let a small thing like Alzheimer stop me although part of my condition was my eyesight failing so i used computer dictation software for Discworld 40 and 41 and a few other books and there was a rumour going around after i had what i described as a strange experience that i had found God.
I said it may be possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and human traits there may be an ordered structure to things but as for finding God, it's unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my own keys.
I wasn't afraid of dying, i even created a Death personification in Discworld who loves cats, curries, rides a horse named Binky and only talks in CAPS but it wasn't him who came for me that March morning when i died peacefully at home with my family around me and my pet cat asleep on my bed, as i took my final breath the cat raised it's head and looked at me as if to say so who's going to sort out my tea now then.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Achilles

When you are the son of a king and a sea goddess, unkillable and prophesied to be stronger than either Zeus or Poseidon, it would be expected to be a bit up yourself but it wasn't that i was arrogant, i was just better at everything than everyone else.
Greece was a time of Gods and demi gods taking each other out and the Fates had prophesied that i would be killed at Troy so my mother trained me to be a fearless warrior and sent me to the Chiron School For Heroes and in order to make me immortal, she dipped me in the waters of the River Styx, thereby making my whole body invulnerable, except for the heel by which she had held me which would become a pretty important mistake later.
With a sword and shield made by the blacksmith to the gods himself, Hephaestus, i poo-pooed the Fates and led an army into battle against Troy and was cutting a swathe through the Roman army, arrows zinging off my unpenetrable skin but when i heard that Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae whose side i was fighting on gave away my wife as part of a peace deal, i laid down my sword and refused to fight anymore, deciding to see out the rest of the war sulking in a tent.
There was then a scuffle and my good friend Patroclus was killed by Hector, the eldest son of the Trojan king, so i picked up my sword and Hector soon found it being forcibly shoved through his throat and his body dragged behind my chariot around the tomb of Patroclus and then thrown onto a rubbish heap.
Back to the mowing down of Trojans by the wheel-barrowful, i helped the army raide some towns on the outskirts of Troy and took a young girl called Chryseis prisoner who just happened to be the daughter of a priest of Apollo who warned that as such, Apollo was on his side and would strike down the Greek forces with disease if we didn't release her.
Obviously we never and although Apollo had 'God of Plagues’ on his CV and disease and pestilence did strike the Greek forces, i was busy being challenged by Hector's little brother Paris who was ticked that his brother ended up with a sword shaped hole in his neck and his dead body dumped on a rubbish tip.
Now as an almost unkillable demi-God armed with a weapon made by the gods, i quite fancied my chances against a mere mortal armed with a puny bow and arrow even if he did have Apollo in his corner but it is said that pride comes before a fall but the before in my case was the twang of a bow string followed by a sharp pain in my heel, the heel my mother forgot to make invulnerable.
I should have been a legend but as it turned out, what let me down was a leg end.

Special Guest Blogger: Edward Gein

Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs may not appear to have much in common with each other beyond making you pee your pants but they were all inspired by the same guy, a Wisconsin handyman with a penchant for DIY interior design, aka lil ol' me.
I lived for most of my life in an isolated farmhouse in Wisconsin, with an alcoholic father and fanatically religious mother who shielded my brother and i from the outside world which not strangely, backfired somehow.
After our father died my brother and i had no choice but to seek more work outside the home, my brother started dating a divorced woman and turned away from our beloved mother until he strangely died during a brush fire on our property, officially an accident.
I got my mother all to myself for about a year before she died too and some may say i went a little insane although boarding up her bedroom and concentrating on building up my porn collection is not that insane.
Making expeditions to local graveyards after dark in search of recently buried women who looked like my mother could be deemed a little weird to some folk but unlike the depictions in those films, i was no serial killer and was only officially linked to two murders, the owner of a tavern i shot and dragged back home on a sled and a hardware store clerk who refused me a date.
I killed her and carried her body back home but unfortunately for me, her son was the deputy sheriff, and he was pretty interested in finding out what happened to his mum so he sent the police out to my farmhouse and was pretty ticked to discover her in one of my barns, her decapitated body hung from a rafter by her ankles.
They also found some of her organs in the refrigerator, her heart on the stove but she was all still there, just in different rooms.
As for my home decor DIY skills, my soup bowls were made out of skulls and masks and a bin made from human skin but what pushed them over the edge was the nipple belt, a curtain drawstring made of lips, and a face lampshade.
The authorities held me for 10 years without trial, having been declared too insane to try, until i was found not guilty of the store clerks murder by reason of insanity which was bitter sweet as it meant they could now lock me up in a mental asylum indefinitely.
Lazy Horror movie writers who heard about me wasted no time capitalising on my crimes and although i never received a cent on royalties before i died of cancer, i did watch Psycho and have to admit that that Hitchcock guy crushed it.

Special Guest Blogger: George Patton

I was born to be a military man as after getting kicked in head by a horse as a boy, i saw all my previous lives as a 14th-century French knight, a Viking raider, a Roman Legionnaire, an English soldier at Agincourt and a general under Napoleon so it was no surprise that i became a soldier in the US Army as i had war in my blood.
I started out in the Mexican War, moved onto World War 1, became an alcoholic and had an affair with my wife’s 19-year-old niece through the boredom of nobody shooting at me during the boring bit before World Wars where i played a crucial role in the victory of the Allies in the second one for which i am most remembered.
I entered the prestigious military academy West Point at 17 and was great at all the military stuff but sucked at the academic side, specifically mathematics, i had to repeat the first year because i failed maths so many times i could hardly count but it was a military academy, how would knowing Pi help when you are in the jungles of Mexico?
I developed a cool way of carrying my gun by stuffing it in my belt but one day my Colt .45 accidentally discharged so deciding i liked both my testicles where they were, i switched to a Colt Single Action Army revolver which wouldn't accidentally blow my nuts into the next country and personalised it with an ivory handle.
Luckily for me, WW1 broke out and i was taken on as part of the American Expeditionary Force where i was introduced to tanks and i was trained to drive them which came in very useful in 1932 when a massive protest by World War I veterans and their families took place in Washington DC. demanding
the compensation certificates they had been given in 1924 and not redeemable until 1945 be cashed in now as they needed to feed their families.
We answered it with infantry, cavalry, and driving tanks at the marchers with me commanding the tanks which didn't harm my reputation as being ruthless, during the Second World War i was nicknamed 'Old Blood and Guts' and that was exactly what it took to win the War, the soldiers blood and guts scattered
across the battlefield and it was during this period that i made one of my most regrettable actions.  
I held great respect for the men under my command wounded in battle, declaring them the real heroes which didn't go down well with those families whose relatives weren’t lucky enough to be wounded but killed instead and i was visiting an army hospital in Sicily when i came across two men suffering from battle fatigue which i always said was an invention of the Jews (in my keenness for a spot of war i did sometimes forget which war i was fighting) and i furiously screamed at the two men, called them cowards and slapped them both hard across the face which got me reported and after a public outcry, i got took out of front line action for a year. I learnt a valuable lesson that day, if you are going to slap two men very, very hard, wear a glove as my hand stung for the rest of the day afterwards.
All good things must come to an end and after the war i was made the military governor of the German region of Bavaria instead of getting transferred to the war going on in the Pacific which is what i wanted but it never lasted very long as i allowed former members of the Nazi Party to carry on working in Government and said that anyone working in Government would have to join the Nazi Party and President Eisenhower relieved me of my duties so i went on a driving tour of Europe.
That ended with my breaking my neck in a car accident and spent the last 12 days of my life paralysed from the neck down.
I said it was a hell of a way to die but it's better than the last few deaths such as that time with Alexander the Great when a wall fell on me or my life in the Roman Legion when i died from a hail of arrows in the neck.

Special Guest Blogger: Charles Ponzi

If you looked through some of the greatest cons in history, the name Ponzi stands out and became byword for financial impropriety although it all started out as perfectly legal and then kinda got tangled into a web of deceit and lies which made me very rich, and later, very, very poor.
I arrived in Boston from Italy with $2.50 to my name. i boarded the boat with $200 but lost $197.50 of it while gambling on the boat over.
I gained employment as a waiter in a restaurant although that never lasted very long as i was caught out shortchanging customers so moved to Canada and found work in a bank which again, was pretty short-lived as i was caught forging cheques and served three years in prison.
Unable to now work in Canada, on release i went back to the USA side of the border and got caught in an immigrant-smuggling scheme and ended up serving two years in another prison and so with two prison terms to my name, i tried to go into business for myself and wrote to some European friends with various ideas and when i got the replies, it set into motion the scheme i am known for.
The correspondents in Europe would send an IRC (International Reply Coupon) which was bought for the cost of postage in their country but was exchangeable for the cost of postage in America so with each IRC and the European currencies going down, i could make as much as a 400% profit on each one so i put the word around of this get rich quick scheme and 18 people invested $1,800 to buy the IRC's.
As i was working out how to exchange the IRCs for cash, word spread of this great financial opportunity, things escalated quickly and more investors handed over their money to me because as soon as people see someone else making money, that’s all the proof they need so a month later i paid back the original investors with money from the new investors which attracted even more investors and i was doubling peoples money and word spread and within 6 months i had $2.5 million, enough
to start up my own bank and nobody thought to ask: 'Hey, are you the same Charles Ponzi that spent jail time for forging cheques?, and was able to pay previous investors with the money coming in from new investors.
Since all the interest was paid out from the next wave of investors’ money, the scheme requires more and more investors as it goes on to stay solvent, and since at first glance, everyone’s making money, it was easy to find new investors until it wasn’t.
The Boston Post were suspicious that money was so easy to make so decided to investigate my scheme and the piece caused panic amongst investors and an angry mob descended on my home but i paid out $2 million to the crowds and the panic was over, and even attracted more investors but state examiners nosed around in my accounts and found i had borrowed $7 million from my bank and was charged with 86 counts of larceny.
Looking at a nine years jail sentence, i attempted to skip the country but was caught and imprisoned but on this release i made it back to Italy and then to Brazil where i died in poverty but my biggest crime wasn't ripping off people, it was me giving greed a bad name.

Special Guest Blogger: King Francis I

I was never supposed to see the throne of France, coming as i did from a minor branch of the Royal Family but after my father died when i was two, the people who decide these things traced their fingers down the line of succession, skipped straight over the many females in front of me because women could not take the throne, and there was me.
It became a game of can the current ruler, Louis XII of France, produce a male heir before he curled up his toes and my entire childhood was spent waiting for news of Louis either having a son which would relegate me or dying and making me King and just after my 11th Birthday i got my answer although the dying King made it a condition that to be King i had to marry his eldest daughter to keep his bloodline.
She was a okay-ish so i agreed but the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V wanted to marry her and that came back to bite me on the Royal derriere later.
As King i began grand building projects and began huge erections all over the nation, as a husband i also began huge erections all the country but not with my wife, i had a wandering eye and it wandered to her courtiers, friends and pretty much anyone with boobs but as i was wooing the ladies, Charles V was shaking his fist threateningly at me the whole time so i went to see the English King Henry VIII.
The big Galoot challenged to me to a wrestling match which i won which i assumed meant he would side with me against Charles but the double crosser signed an agreement aligning England with Spain in the event of a conflict with France.
Things then went bad as my wife died and i lost land to the invading Charles, then got worse when i got captured and delivered to Charles and then the less said about the deal to buy my freedom the better, i had to hand over my two sons and marry Charles sister, Eleanor of Austria.
I obviously agreed to it and then after the wedding run off back to France and negotiated for the retun of my sons and despite them being royally pissed with me for handing them over in the first place, everything was looking up until a game of tennis when my eldest son asked for a glass of water, collapsed and died, poisoned on behalf of Charles V of Spain.
I was so angry that i didn’t care who i teed off so broke all the rules by becoming the first ruler to make an alliance between a Christian and non-Christian empire by teaming up with the Ottoman Empire but before i could get proper revenge, i died so my annoyingly my lifelong enemy outlived me. I know the saying is that you can’t win 'em all but blimey, just one win would have been nice.

Special Guest Blogger: Timothy Leary

Richard Nixon called me the most dangerous man in America however i saw himself as an influential psychologist and visionary with nothing to declare except my genius, that and a whacking great bag of LSD.
I was chased out of West Point Academy for drinking and enrolled at the University of Alabama, where i developed my interest in psychology and girls, getting expelled for spending the night in the women’s dorms which would have been totally worth it if WW2 wasn't raging and i got drafted.
I was assigned to the psychology department of an army hospital in Pennsylvania and once everyone had stopped killing each other, i accepted a job at Harvard and settled down into a perfectly ordinary, middle-class life or i may have done if i hadn't been introduced to magic mushrooms which the Mexicans used in religious ceremonies.
I experimented with the psychedelic mushrooms and found they induced feelings of euphoria and profound religious experiences and i became an advocate for psychedelic drugs, founding an organization called the International Federation for Internal Freedom to raise awareness about the consciousness-expanding qualities of these substances.
I took some for my students and gave it to them on a field trip which got me fired from Harvard but i was determined to continue my research and attracted the attention of some wealthy supporters, most notably one of the heirs to one of the biggest family fortunes in America and they set me up in mansion in New York, where i spent the next four years writing, researching and making LSD which is genuinely impressive when you are completely stoned all the time.
I renamed my organisation the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD for short) and pitched it as a religious movement, saying that LSD offered a key to unlock the doors of religion and i had a calling from God to lead humanity into a new era by distributing my drugs as widely as possible.
I claimed that LSD could solve the world's problems and even cure homosexuality (it couldn't) and came up with the slogan turn on, tune in, drop out which especially the hippies took to heart.
Traveling back from a research trip in Mexico, US Customs officers found two marijuana joints in my car and i was apprehended and sentenced to 30 years in prison which was successfully appealed.
I did try to run for governor of California against Ronald Reagan (John Lennon wrote "Come Together" as a campaign song for me) and i told people to just be themselves although for some i met it was actually don't, you're a dick. Take my drugs and be someone cool and interesting but another drug bust and a 10 year sentence bought that to a swift end but my sentence came to an even swifter end as i was not content with my involuntary vacation, even with all expenses paid by The Man so after a few months i shimmied along a 100-foot telephone cable over the prison fence and escaped.
That was when Richard Nixon came up with the most dangerous man in America line and the Weather Underground group who were hoping for some reflected credibility with the hippies, smuggled me out of the USA and into Algeria, Switzerland and finally Afghanistan but the Afghans forced me onto a plane and returned me to my home country where i was immediately apprehended and another 5 years was tacked onto my sentence. Upon my release from prison i returned to my life as a psychedelic celebrity and in all i was arrested often enough to see the inside of 29 different prisons worldwide and created enough LSD to get every single American high twice over, which certainly sounds like a fun weekend.
After hanging out with all those Hollywood celebrities, and with the era of Hippy Love LSD over, i got a bit part in the sitcom Frasier but when doctors diagnosed me with terminal cancer i tried to get myself cryogenically frozen but it was too costly so instead i had my remains cremated and blasted into space.
All those drugs did shake loose a few brain cells admittedly but i did try to make the world a better place but the Governments are just too evil dude, take toothpaste, they use it to control us. Why do you think all the commercials tell you to brush twice a day? If you'd seen what I'd seen, and if you've heard what I've heard, you'd never brush your teeth again!

What Your Music Collection Say's About You

I was emailed a Research Article regarding Musical Preferences which sounded interesting but as the very first paragraph included the formula S = (AQ-R-<AQ-R>)/150 & E = (EQ-<EQ>) /80, i decided to go straight to the Results section and it turns out that if we are one of those types of people who judge people by their musical tastes then well done because it turns we are right to as the kind of music we like is actually a pretty reliable reflection of us.
Whether it's assumptions about the intelligence of Country and Western fans or the working eardrums of Jazz fans, the research found that the likes of listeners to Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston or Celine Dion have an abundance of empathy while someone who prefers harder-edged, more rock orientated music is more of a logic-oriented person and open to try new experiences.
If you like Pop music and mostly listen to chart-topping pop songs then you are more likely to be extroverted, honest, hard-working and confident although less creative while Heavy Metal fans are actually a lot less aggressive than their T-Shirts would let on, they are gentle, intuitive, creative and introverted although they also tend to have lower self-esteem.
Hip-hop fans are outgoing, sociable confident, and show no higher propensity toward violence than anyone else while the much derided Country and Western fans are identified as hardworking, conventional, outgoing, right wing politically and emotionally stable although are less open to new experiences and a bit boring.
Fans of the indie genre registered as introverted, intellectual, and creative, but rather lazy and more anxious than fans of other styles but those who preferred dance music were typically outgoing, assertive, and open to experience but are not particularly gentle, thoughtful souls.
The genres which came out best were Classical, Jazz, Blues and Soul whose listeners are all introverted but at ease with themselves and the World while being very intelligent and creative whilst having a healthy amount of self-esteem.
Obviously this doesn't fit for every person, my old boss listened to nothing but Classical but you wouldn't trust her to sit the right way around on a toilet but if your record collection is full of Soul or Blues legends then you can consider yourself a decent, well rounded person but if you look and see an album by either Garth Brooks or Dolly Parton staring back at you, put it down to temporary insanity and slip them into a bin a safe distance from your home and let's never mention it again.

Special Guest Blogger: William of Ockham

Most people have heard of Occam's razor and explain it as 'The simplest answer's always right!' which ironically isn't right at all.
Firstly i was from Ockham in Guildford, Surry so where the Occam bit came from i have no idea and secondly the razor in question belonged to me and i was a Franciscan friar and a prominent philosopher and i would teach that as a rule of thumb, among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected as a starting point, or, and here is the razor bit, the extraneous information should be shaved away.
So let's say for example you notice that every time you put a bowl of nuts outside your door, it's gone an hour later. What accounts for this phenomenon? Well, maybe there's a hungry squirrel in your neighborhood. Or maybe your next door neighbor has a nut allergy and patrols his surrounding area to make sure nothing is left just hanging around which will kick off his allergies.
Obviously i would say, 'Y'know what, let's go with the Squirrel theory, because it has the fewest assumptions'. I'm not saying that the hungry Squirrel theory is right, it's just an obvious starting point where there is no evidence for one solution than another so it may turn out that your other neighbour really likes nuts and is nicking them to make a cake but the squirrel one is simpler and requires you to make the fewest assumptions about your neighbours.
Some of my other ideas included denying the right of the papacy to interfere with the affairs of states which brought me into conflict with the Church and saw me hauled before a Franciscan meeting in Avignon to defend my views which didn't go too well.
Somehow i ended up accusing the Pope of heresy and decided the best course of action was to flee Avignon and found refuge in the Holy Roman Emperor, who protected me whilst i was excommunicated but my theory did influence others.
St. Thomas Aquinas believed that Occam’s razor helped prove the existence of God. He suggested that the simplest theory about Earth’s creation was that God created it but Atheists now try to use my own theory to dismiss religion.
For them Ockham’s razor doesn’t cut it with God but in the debate of atheism against religion what's the simpler explanation, evolution over million of years or a man in the clouds creating the first couple who were enticed into eating an apple by a talking snake? Seriously, what's so hard to understand about that? Sheesh.

Special Guest Blogger: David Koresh

Every religious nutjob in the world with some out-there theory thinks he's the reincarnation of whatever flavor of messiah you prefer but virtually all of them are, in fact, simply insane but i was not only the proud owner of the full allocation of all my marbles, but i was version 2 of the biblical King David and i knew that from a young age.
I am probably most famous for my doings with the Branch Davidians but i never created them, they existed long before i came along to guide them and they were not even my first choice, i originally took my messiaship from screaming on a street corner to the local Christian Church.
One of the perks of being a reincarnated messiah is that God had already decided certain things belonged to me, such as females, which i explained to the Pastor when i told him that God had decreed that i have sex with his daughter which was received about as well as telling the pastor God said i had to have sex with his daughter and in the religious world which is much more tolerant of saying some truly insane shit, i was banned by the congregation.
A leader without a flock to lead, i turned to the WACO Branch Davidians, a sect that had an imminent messiah figure handily already baked into their beliefs and i got a job as a guitarist in their sermons and began to casually mention i was their messiah who had come back to lead them and took the leadership once the previous leader died.
It became clear to me that these people really digged me and they loved my prophecies, especially the ones about how it is written that the Government, in league with Satan of course, will attempt to destroy the sect and they all needed to start hoarding guns and ammunition for the coming war.
As for why the alarm bell didn’t tinkle at this point, one can only conclude they may have done if the Government hadn't been quite so disturbed that someone preaching holy war is building an arsenal in Texas and showed up with guns. The congregation believed it was as God predicted, via me, and the initial raid resulted in casualties on both sides so a standoff ensued.
Fifty one days later they tried again and at some point a fire began that consumed the compound, and with it, the lives of 76 members of my band of religious folk but i was not one of them, i was already dead having shot myself in the head at the start of the raid so now the exciting bit is which biblical character i will be reincarnated as next. I'm really keeping my fingers crossed it isn't one of the Jewish ones as i do like my bacon sandwiches.

Special Guest Blogger: Leopold III of Belgium

The secret to most things is timing, and mine was lousy as i was born into a horrifying time in Europe and became King just as a certain single testicled Austrian was blitzkrieging his way across Europe.
Being a Royal you would assume it would be a modern-day fairy tale and indeed it was, Grimm, however it was going well up until i was 13 when the German's invaded Belgium and my Father toyed with the idea of protecting me by sending me safely abroad but instead thought it would be character building to let me play soldier and join the Belgian army until Belgium was crawling with Germans and then he wisely pulled me out and placed me in Eton College in England until the German's were defeated and Belgium became less sausage sucking.
Now back in Belgium my first problem was finding a wife and producing some heirs and i did both with Princess Astrid of Sweden and just in time because 11 months later my father perished when he literally fell down a mountain which meant i was now King of Belgium.
Two years and two children later we decided we wouldn't have any more children due to my driving skills, or rather the lack of them because on a drive through the countryside in Switzerland i didn’t quite manage to make a curve but did manage to find Lake Lucerne and poor Astrid died.
I mourned my beautiful wife right up until Germany reared it's pointy head again in 1939 but while some other European countries formed the Allies, i decided that if the German's tried to take a shortcut through Belgium again we would open a can of Flemish tinged whup ass on them.
Does it feel to you like this is going to have a happy ending? In short no as they did invade and we never opened anything so i surrendered to the Germans which didn't go down well with the Belgian's so i said rather than flee to safety, i would stay and endure whatever the Belgian public endured, well those under house arrest in a Palace anyway.
The Belgium Government fled to France from where they bravely accused me of being a traitor and joining the Germans although a year later when France was under the Nazi jackboot, they asked if they could come back and i gave them a two word answer, the second word being 'Off'.   
During all this i had met and secretly married a family friend called Lilian Baels and it had to be secret because having a lavish wedding during the time of hardship wouldn't have gone down well with the public and also my new wife wasn't a royal either.
As expected, the fan went in overdrive with the brown stuff when it was revealed especially as the public already blamed me for the nation being full of armed German's so it was actually a blessing when the Allies began to threaten the Axis in Belgium and they kidnapped me and moved me to Germany and then Austria until the War ended.
Rather than live a quiet life of chopping wood and gazing solemnly at sunrises i made plans to come back to Belgium but the Government so said i wasn't welcome back so instead we went to Switzerland and i spent the rest of my life travelling the world collecting insect specimens until my heart
gave out.

Special Guest Blogger: Hippocrates

Considered one of the most outstanding figures in history, while it is said that all famous people stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, it is a very much another part of the body that i am known for standing on as i explain in my book, 'On Hemorrhoids' which was a revelation in the treatment of arse maladies.
Let me tell you if you want to feel wind rushing through your hair, spend a day dousing the backside of someones who diet is mostly vegetables with boiling water and urine and then inserting a red hot metal pole into the anus to separate the hemorrhoids. How nobody ever thought of it before me i won't ever know but in my time medicine was making incredible advances in the field of shrugging as a patient died horribly. 
Illness and disease were considered to be bestowed upon the owner by the Gods and i was the first to say hang about, Zeus isn't sitting on Olympus paying enough attention to us to send down the punishment of odd discharges and a strange burning sensation if we steal an apple, rather it's a result of environmental factors, diet and living habits.   
I found that in a point in the progression of disease the patient's body would either begin to heal itself and would either get better or they would die and i called this the crisis point and my role was to find a way to make the former more likely.
I also invented the first lie detector by noticing that measuring a patient's pulse while asking them questions resulted in an increased rate if they were lying although most of my patients were men.
It was a time when even leading medical people like me were wary of involving themselves in the complexities of the female body with it's inverted penis (or vagina) and wombs slithering around their bodies and damaging their heart, lungs, kidney and spleen making them sick, that was too much even for me to unravel.
My hippocratic oath was that a doctor must 'either help or do not harm the patient' and i am sure that techniques and practises have since expanded and improved my methods, and improved upon the medical jam jar lid i had already loosened although i would be interested to know how sticking a hot pole up someones backside could be improved upon.

Special Guest Blogger: Marcel Petiot

If you went to a painter you would be happy to know that he had spent his lifetime painting and if you went to an accountant you would prefer one who has spent his life working in Accountancy so after a life of suffering from mental illness the job i was best suited to was working as a doctor in a mental hospital.
I got diagnosed as being mentally ill following a psychiatric evaluation at the age of 11 after being expelled for shooting my fathers gun at school but too mental for school didn't mean i wasn't too mental for the French army and i signed up at the start of World War I but not long afterwards was wounded and sent to various rest homes, where i was promptly arrested for stealing off the staff and then someone remembered i was mentally ill so sent me to a psychiatric hospital where they all agreed i was not mental enough to not be sent back to the front where i then tried to blow off my own foot with a grenade so they discharged me with a disability pension.  
At a loose end i took an accelerated medical degree and found work at the Évreux mental hospital and found a nice sideline in selling addictive narcotics to patients and as a respected member of the community, i went on to be the mayor of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne and embezzled funds until i got
caught and forced to resign but i then got elected as a councilor of Yonne Département and got caught stealing electricity from the village so obviously i resigned again and moved to Paris and opened a medical practise just as the NAZI's rolled into town.
I then invented my most lucrative activity yet, pretending to send Jews to Argentina and safety for only 25,000 Francs and i threw in the inoculations that i told them the Argentine officials required them to have.
As soon as they paid it was sleeve up followed by a syringe full of cyanide and a trip to the bottom of the Seine or thrown into a pit in my garden.
It was all going so well, their friends and families thought they were safe in South America and not getting nibbled at by the fish at the bottom of a river but i found myself out of luck when the Nazis got their arses spanked by the Allies and France began forming a new government and one of it's first tasks was rooting out collaborators and traitors.
As i was both i skipped out, grew a beard and changed my name and was set to travel to Indochina but even cultivating a real honker of a face-bush didn't fool them and they arrested me, put me on trial where i pleaded innocence as the people i killed were all Nazi Collaborators so i was one of the good guys and remember, i'm mentally ill and for a moment i thought i was going to get away with it but my head nestling in a basket under a guillotine a few days later was proof i never.

Special Guest Blogger: Howard Carter

Obviously i am most famous for discovering the tomb of King Tutankhamun and unleashing a curse and resulting in, well, not much really because the curse was nonsense.
My journey which ended up with me dragging out the mummified corpse of an Egyptian King which had been snoozing in a sarcophagus of solid gold for over 3,000 years begins in a mansion in Norfolk where i trained as an artist and got hired by the local rich family to draw their collection of  Egyptian antiques which impressed them so much to suggested me to their friend who was excavating a tomb in Egypt.
I turned up, copied the tomb decorations and went to several other excavations before being appointed Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt in the Egyptian Antiquities Service (EAS) based at Luxor and given funding to head my own excavation projects.
I teamed up with Lord Carnarvon to excavate the Valley of Kings but we were not getting anywhere until a water boy stumbled on a stone that turned out to be the top of a flight of steps cut into the bedrock.
We dug it out until the top of a doorway was found, a door with Tutankhamun's insignia stamped on it along with some hieroglyphic nonsense on it but once we cracked it open...kerching!
Now that hieroglyphic nonsense we ignored translated as: 'Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence' and in the tomb itself was a statue of Anubis, the guardian of the dead, but come on, a curse is about as real as leprechauns and to show how much we disregarded it, when my anthropologist pal Sir Bruce Ingram visited, i presented him with a paperweight with a mummified hand inside it.
True, soon after receiving the gift, Ingram's house burned down, followed by a flood when it was rebuilt but King Tut had nothing to do with it.
Nor Lord Carnovan's demise when he died of an infected mosquito bite and another expeditions financier's suicide was probably due to something else while George Jay Gould, dying of a fever shortly afterwards and my secretary dying was both purely a result of 1920's medicine.
The death of my pal Aaron Ember and his family all dying in a house fire was pure coincidence and Lord Carnarvon's half-brother, Aubrey Herbert, going blind and dying from Sepsis was poor timing as was the death of the guy three days after X-raying Tut.  
Admittedly, if you believe in these things then all those unfortunate events from fire and pestilence within 12 months of dragging the corpse out of a door which warned of deaths from fire and pestilence doesn't look good but i could only be considered jinxed if my curse as the guy who found him was to live out my life in luxury and die in my comfortable bed 20 years later.