2023 Father Time & The Grim Reaper

For millennia, five minutes to midnight on December 31st is the only time of the year that Death and Father Time's path cross, a place where the past hands over the baton to the future, and they use that time to discuss the year which has just gone before going their separate ways for the next twelve months and this year the old man was already waiting and had his 2024 sash in his hand ready to replace the battered looking 2023 one currently across his chest.  
Holding up his timer to show Death just a few grains left to trickle through the top bulb he greeted him with 'You're cutting it fine'.
Death laid his scythe against the arm of the wooden bench and stretched before taking a seat next to his friend and giving him a friendly pat on the leg.
'Been busy?' asked Time and Death nodded his shrouded head and replied: 'They are humans, of course i've been busy, always am. Heaven knows what i would do if they ever actually stopped believing that inside every living person with a different view to them is a dead person with a different view waiting to get out'.
'I guess Ukraine and the Middle East has kept you busy' remarked Time who tried his best to keep up with the affairs of man as he made sure the calendar proceeded as it was meant to each day.
'Yep, went quiet for a while there and then whammo. Tell you what, say what you want about the Israeli's but they do tend to kill entire families in their house in one go which makes me job easier, much simpler to usher them all into the afterlife as a large group if they are all in one room'.
'I suppose it is, not much fun for the family though' said Time and Death shrugged and said that it wasn't his problem, 'I just show them the way to whichever afterlife they were expecting to be destined for'.
'Ah, the human life span is so short' uttered Time shaking his head. He had been doing the same job of chasing away the old year and making sure the new year began for eons, 'Yep' agreed Death, 'and some are shorter than others which reminds me, i got that bloke from that show you liked this year, Chandler was it?
'Matthew Perry' said Time, 'Did he not like that' smiled Time whose impression was lost on Death who just said 'doubt it, they never do much although that Pee Wee Herman chap was bouncing around like a lunatic asking if there was a cinema where he was going. Don't know what that was about'.
Time looked at his timer and saw it was a minute to midnight and stood up, removed his 2023 sash and pulled the 2024 one over his head and flattened it against his chest.
'Does 2024 look any better than 2023 for them down there' asked Time watching Death flip the page of his notebook to a new page.
'Hmmm...not for him' said Death, '...or her, or any of them them' he said holding up his book.
'If he knew he was going to die so soon, he would probably have led a better life' said Time pointing to a name written in bold type under June 24.
'If he knew how he was going to die he probably wouldn't have lived at all' said Death adding 'i fully expect his last words to be Arrgghhh....'
Time laughed and stood up saying 'Oh well, it's almost midnight so same time next year old friend' and waved farewell as he stepped through the archway and officially launched what the humans called 2024 but to him was the year 4.543 billion.  
Death stood alone for a few minutes, it was sometimes good to give the humans a few minutes to whirl through their tiny crowded lives, filling their days with the sheer effort of living and proving that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do, luckily for him.
Picking up his scythe, he checked his notes and set off for his first appointment whistling 'Only The Good Die Young'.

Today Is...New Years Eve

I have often wondered where in the World you could stand on December 31st, do the Auld Lang Syne bit and then step across a border and do it all again an hour later so you can celebrate New Years twice.
If you have a spare £7,380 the company PrivateFly will fly you from Sydney after the bells chime to land in Los Angeles 11 hours later to do it all over again.
There is an even easier way though and you get the chance to sleep off most of the alcohol in your body before pounding your liver again 25 hours later.
Due to the International Dateline passing between the Somoan Islands in the Pacific Ocean, the Eastern Island is the first place on Earth to leave 2023 and the Western Island the last to arrive in 2024 25 hours later.
As Somoa is 14 hours infront of Britain, it will be 10am New Years Eve when the East Somoans are clasping hands and singing about Auld acquaintance that may be forgot and our thoughts will be on elevenses when the New Zealanders step outside of 2023. 
Lunch will have been finished at 1pm when Australians get even more drunk than usual and stare bleary eyed at a clock striking midnight.
Then it's Japan at 3pm followed by China at 4pm and then India who are awkward and have lost half hour at some point and celebrate the arrival of New Years Day at 6.30pm British time.
The Bacardi Breezers will be flowing freely by 8.30 pm at New Years Eve parties here while they will already be dancing in the streets of Tehran as Iranian clocks chime midnight followed half an hour later by brave Moscovites filling Red Square at 9pm.
The Greeks will be smashing plates at 10pm British Time and then the Parisians will be eyeing the fireworks spinning out of the Eiffel Tower an hour later at 11pm which is just about the time when you are wondering where the police cone came from that you have been wearing for the past 20 minutes.
Then it is our turn and after a brisk Hokey Cokey and a search for your other shoe, it's onto Greenland who will join us in 2024. 
When Brazilians dance around on Copacabana Beach, it will be 2am on New Years Day and at 4am we will all be snoring loudly and exhaling alcohol fumes when the Canadians do whatever they do at midnight.
At 5am the United States will be shooting guns into the air like drunken Yosemite Sam in a Bugs Bunny Cartoon before the Western part of Somoa is the last to exit 2023 just in time for the Brits to wake up and break the vast majority of our New Years Resolutions within the first hour.

Easter Already?

People are always moaning about Christmas starting too early and i generally reply by calling them a grumpy old bugger and tell the to shove a mince pie in their gob but i was in my local supermarket today and where a few days ago was the Christmas display with selection boxes and wrapping paper, now stands a display of Easter Eggs.
Easter is not until 31st March this year which is still 92 days away, we have Valentines Day before then so it would make sense to shove Cupids and heart shaped things at us before we get to the chocolate eggs but the Supermarkets have decided that flogging us Easter in December is more of a money spinner for them.
With Christmas you get so much more with cards, wrapping paper, presents and clothes but with Easter it is Chocolate eggs although i have seen the cards shops try to introduce Easter cards but they never seem to have caught on, or at least i have never received one.
As my birthday is the day after Easter this year i am sure that in my Birthday Present pile i will find a few Easter Eggs (no Crunchie please, it is the worst of all sweets) which i won't complain about but that's not the point.
I am therefore taking the opportunity to say Easter starts way too early!!

Is Israel Committing Genocide?

Before 1948, there was no name available for what the Nazi's did to the Jewish people so the United Nations gathered together the top Jewish lawyers from the newly created Israel and arrived at what they called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2.

The Covention officially defined genocide as any of five acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group and these five acts were: 'killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly'.

As the Covention was written by Jews and as a way of describing what the Nazi's had tragically done to them, it is incredible, given its history, that it is the same people who stand today accussed of Genocide themselves but after rising Global voices about the widespread death and destruction of Palestine by the Israeli military, South Africa has launched a case against Israel at the UN’s international court of justice accusing the state of committing genocide in Gaza.  

Israel responded to the allegations 'with disgust' but of the five acts, it is hard for anyone to defend Israel's actions which seem to tick many of the five boxes.

Killing members of the group. The death toll today stands at 21,000 thousand Palestinian civilians, over half women and children but the death toll is expected to be much higher due to many bodies buried beneath the rubble of their homes and other buildings. Undoubtedly this ticks the box for the first of the acts.

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. This definition relates to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment and  Amnesty International have reported that since hostilities began in October, 2,200 Palestinian men, women and children have been held in administrative detention, without charge or trial. They have shown videos of prisoners being severely beaten and humiliating Palestinians while detaining them blind-folded, stripped, with their hands tied. Hard to state this is anything other than bodily and mental harm being imposed.

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction. This is to create circumstances that do not support prolonged life, identified in the Convention as 'subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement. As Israel did not allow aid into Gaza and have attacked aide convoys when they did arrive, have bombed every Gaza hospital so there is no Health Service in the strip and people are dying from starvation and disease as the utilities have been bomb damaged and Gazan's have been ordered to leave their homes en-mass and cross the country, the third box of the Convention is proven.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group has not been identified so we are unable to accuse Israel of this one.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Although Israel has been forcing the movement of the citizens of Gaza around the 21 mile strip and have then bombed the area they have deemed as safe so as whole families have been forced out of their homes and forcibly transferring them to other parts of Israel, there is no evidence that they have been transferring Gaza children especially so this one is not completely provable.

The first three key definitions of Genocide are completely viable so as only one of the five key attributes need to be proven to allow an accusation of Genocide, with three of the definitions being wholly provable, what Israel is perpetrating against the Gazan's is Genocide and it was correct that the South Africans have launched this case against the Israeli Government.

FOAB Top 10 2023

It's almost at the end of the year so time to look back at which of my posts landed and which whithered and died although the vast majority of this year is down to my writing partner, the Right Honorable Reverend, who has been stitching together previous posts for the Today Is...series which followed a conversation about how i must have written about every subject possible, and then seeing if i actually had.

So in the most Top of The Pops countdown way possible, at 10 was probably the most fun to write which was Learning Unit Correspondence Program (LUCP) which was an April Fools attempt to make it look as if i was a Chatbot and was copied almost entirely from the Google website with some small changes to make it appear as if it was the Google researchers coming clean.

At 9 is Learning Life Skills At School which concerns the things we learn at school which we never actually use once we leave it and at 8 is Not A Good V Evil Thing in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre and the Israeli response, sadly a topic which would dominate the last third of the year.

Another topic i return to frequently is at number 7 Earth Failed It's Health Check with scientists checking the Earth for nine measurements of its health and finding it failed six of them and it is back to the 18th Century for number 6 and Today Is...Marie Antoinette's Death.

Into the top 5 and at number 5 is Today Is...International Day for Eradication of Poverty and a fact that always saddens me that the 100 richest people earn enough money to end world poverty four times over while at number 4 and the top post from that particular series of posts is Today Is...Captain Cook Claims Australia For Britain.

The top 3 all come from very early in 2023 with number 3 being Idea's From The Keyboard Of Lucy: The Earth Coming Together As One Nation which was an expansion on the post at number 2 Idea's From The Keyboard Of Lucy: Europe Coming Together while at number 1 is a topic which seemed to resonate throughout the year, A Human Wrote This Post which is around Ai and its current limitations but its onward march to whatever it has planned for us.

As always, a huge thank you to anyone who has stumbled across my small bit of the Web this year and read the lefty, tree hugging hippy stuff that i put on it.

Today Is...Rasputin Is Murdered

Any fans of 70's DISCO will know that Rasputin was the lover of the Russian Queen and his story begins with him passing himself off as a mystic and faith healer and the Russian Queen heard about his magical touch and hired him to heal her son who was ill.
Suddenly he was the best thing since potatoes (well it was Russia) and the Queen was so grateful that she allowed him to not only lay hands on her son, but lay them all over her as well, which he did, several times a week.
The Tsar found out but couldn't stop him from ploughing his wife because if he was taken out his son would die but he got so angry after hearing him being called Russia's greatest love machine once to many times through the bedroom wall, so he ordered Rasputin be killed.
The first attempt was a woman stabbed him in the stomach several times while he was preparing to give her a Russian Queen special but he managed to escape and then in an eventful evening a few nights later, while recuperating, he was invited to a friends house who poisoned his meal but he actually felt okay afterwards.
Taking the hint that he might not be as welcome as he first thought, he tried to make his excuses and leave but someone pulled out a gun and shot him.
As he stood there with a bandaged stomach, poison flowing through his body and now several gun shot wounds, he thought, actually, i don't feel too bad but he was determined to leave so he jumped out of the second story window.
As he lay on the ground winded and with several broken bones he thought, blimey, i feel okay but as he was getting up the 'friend' arrived and shot him again and after he started to think, holy crap, maybe i'm invincible after all, he hit him repeatedly over the head with his shoe until he unconscious, rolled him up in a carpet and lobbed him off a bridge and setting in motion the career of Boney M.

Today Is...UK Pays Off It's American Loan

By the end of World War II Britain had amassed a debt of £21 billion and was looking around for a loan and went to America and said we saved the World from Hitler so how about you throw us a few bob.
John Maynard Keynes was sent to the United States and Canada to obtain funds with the expectation that in view of the United Kingdom's contribution to the war effort, especially for the lives lost before the United States entered the fight in 1941, America would offer favorable terms and America went okay, heres £3.75 billion business loan (worth £61 billion in today's money) and you can pay it back in 50 annual payments at 2% interest starting in 1950.
Some officials in the British Government opposed it as it came with conditions which required radical changes to UK commercial arrangements but Britain was in no position to refuse so reluctantly agreed to it.
The last payment was made today in 2006 for the sum of £45.5m and was actually six years late and the the total amount repaid, including interest, was £3.8bn.

Today Is...Dennis Wilson Drowns

Probably the most Summery of bands was the Beach Boys, just the opening bars of 'All Summer Long' or 'Do It Again' sends my mind racing back to those hot summer nights and as they are so closely associated with being a Summertime group that's probably why the bands drummer, Dennis Wilson, was Christmasing in Marina Bay in California, the same place where only three years earlier he had thrown his wifes belongings into the sea.     
For a band who made a career out of singing about how rad and cool Surfing was, out of the five of them he was the only one who knew the correct end of a surfboard and could actually surf and it was his idea that surfing should be the band he created with his brother's and cousin's thing and call it surfin' to be a bit more cool.
Through out the 60's they ruled the surfing, cars, romance and the Californian beach lifestyle and narrowly avoiding all being horribly murdered by Charles Mason and his band of loonies so by the 80s they were safely entrenched in music history and with the the surf and car music dipped into the sunset, they were kicking back and relaxing which is how Wilson found himself at the same Bay where his ex-wife's things were now a fishes playthings.
Feeling remorseful when he found himself sat looking out at the bay today in 1983 and after an afternoon of knocking back tequila, he decided to hire a boat and to see if i could dive in and salvage them.
Turns out drinking lots of alcohol and swimming goes together about as well as drinking lots of alcohol and swimming and he drowned.

Only This Government Until Spring Hopefully

Although they won't admit it, the Conservative Government know that their time is up, every poll shows Labour with a substantial lead which even the most optimistic supporter didn't see even in their wildest dreams, an 80 seat majority should take two or even three election cycles to erode but that shows just how awful the Conservatives have been since Boris Johnson's landslide win in 2019.
Since they replaced Labour in 2010, we have had David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak and all have followed an increasingly right wing agenda, that Nigel Farage once of UKIP who Cameron dismissed as fruitcakes, nutters is being discussed as a potential Conservative Party leader it shows just how disastrously to the right the Conservatives have gone.
So with the blue side of the house about to be replaced by the red side as son as May, what can we expect from Keir Starmer led Labour Party?
Quite cleverly the Labour Leader hasn't given away too many details, the Napoleon quote of never interrupting your enemy when they are making mistakes has been a wise move as the Conservatives rip themselves apart but as the election cycle gears up, he will have to start putting out exactly what we can expect when he gets the keys to Number 10.
Starmer has announced five missions which will form the backbone of Labour’s election manifesto - Get Britain Building Again, Switch on Great British Energy, Get The NHS Back on It's Feet, Take Back Our Streets and Break Down the Barriers to Opportunity which are admirable but they come with no or very little details of how these things will be achieved or how they will be afforded.
We are where we are after 14 years of Conservative austerity, Brexit, lock-down and PPE scandals, a ruined economy and right wing immigration and economic polices so we have to hope that Labour are better than the people they replace because if they turn out to be just as appalling then our slide down the greasy pole will turn into a freefall and the only Great thing about Britain will be the exodus to other, better run nations. 

Today Is...Nirvana Day

My daughter came back from the Boxing Day sales with a Nirvana t-shirt to which i exclaimed that i didn't know she was a fan of them. Thinking that she must have heard me playing Smells Like Teen Spirit or Come As You Are at some point and liked the sound, she said she didn't know who they were and just liked the design.
Disappointingly, she hadn't finally woken up to the genius of Kurt and the gang, she screwed up her nose when i played her 'Heart Shaped Box' but then there are many kids walking around in t-shirts from bands of my era but have never heard the bands music.
Nirvana's Nevermind album was majestic and the singles from it almost perfect but the follow up 'In Utero' was disappointing, the first album 'Bleach' re-released in the aftermath of Nirvana's success was weak and the MTV unplugged album a huge mistake.
It seems that Nirvana just had enough decent material to ride the wave of greatness for a short time and then just ran out of steam and never got close to those dizzy heights again.
Nevermind was a classic album and Cobain, Grohl and Novoselic all deserve praise for it but Nirvana were not trailblazers in the way of The Sex Pistols or The Beatles or were consistently churning out chart hits year after year like Queen or ABBA.
They created an album that should rightly be celebrated but for me Nirvana punched seriously above their weight for a brief, brilliant period of time but that was all we were ever going to get from them but that said, i am confused how today's kids fail to appreciate the genius behind lyrics such as: 'A mulatto, An albino, A mosquito, My libido, Yeah'. Classic stuff.

Today Is...Boxing Day

Who said we learn nothing from these late night phone-in shows. I recently learnt that only the Australians, Canadians and us who celebrate Boxing Day (or St Stephens Day for the pedantic among us) although i'm not really sure what it is or what we are supposed to do with it.
It is a much gratefully received Bank Holiday and in the morning most people make an effort to get some exercise to walk off all the previous days indulgences and shouting at the football on the TV for the men and and cleaning up the kitchen for the women but mainly we use it to return Christmas gifts to the shops and exchange them for the correct size, an alternative to the same value or make up stories about how it was broken when we got it and can we have the money back please.
Shamefully, another British tradition is for the red breasted and small brained among us gather their horses and hounds and chase foxes across the countryside until it is to exhausted to continue and is then ripped apart by a pack of frenzied dogs.
Unless you live in a cave and rub two sticks together to make fire, it is impossible to defend hunting of any nature and hunt saboteurs spend their day off work trying to ruin as many hunts as they can and we can only hope that none of the hunters fall off their horses who have been spooked by someone shouting BOO at them as they leap out from bush and have to spend Boxing Day evening having limbs set in plaster because that would just break my heart.
So the rest of the World isn't missing out on much, a national holiday to get over Christmas Day after all those mince pies and anyway you get days off for gaining independence and stuff.

Today Is...Christmas Day

We may be separated by an Ocean and the use of the letter 'u' (it's a vowel for crying out loud) but the UK and America are also different animals when it comes to Christmas Day because there are some Christmas things over here which are not a Christmas thing over there.
One tradition and choking hazard is us putting a silver coin in the Christmas Pudding and the person who finds it are either driven to the hospital to get it surgically removed before they choke to death or they can look forward to a years worth of good luck. 
Another is the Kings Speech on TV where His Majesty will discuss current issues as well as tidbits on what Christmas means to him but due to a bunch of drunken men dressing as Indians and watching tea chests bob around in Boston Harbour years ago, it is understandable and to be fair i have never actually watched one myself, by 3pm on Christmas Day i am usually laying on the sofa in a food induced coma.
You would assume that if there was one country that would introduce mild explosives to their Christmas dinner table it would be the Americans but Christmas Cracker's, cardboard tubes wrapped in colorful paper that are pulled apart by two people, make a loud cracking sound and hold a small toy, a joke, and a tissue-paper crown, never really took off over there and remain a very British thing but then when you see the bad jokes (Who hides in the bakery at Christmas? A mince spy!) i can understand that.
Egg nog but I'm not really sure what that is but i guess it has an egg mixed in with Nog somewhere.
Who holds the Christmas Day No. 1 single is a big deal, or rather it was until Simon Cowell ruined it by releasing his newest stars single a week before Christmas and guaranteeing it the number one spot but after a lot of kick back (and the campaigns to get another song there) he has seen the light and stopped doing it but the topping the British singles chart on Christmas Day is still a much sought position and the Beatles currently hold the title with four.
There is a big hint in the name 'Christmas' to show who the day is actually about but Jesus hardly gets a look in here, it's all Father Christmas and Snowmen and reindeer with nasal deformities so unless you go to a Church or watch Song's of Praise Xmas Special on BBC at some ungodly hour, you won't hear the Birthday Boy's name mentioned anywhere. I have seen enough Hallmark Christmas Films to know that you guys try to keep Jesus front and center as 'the reason for the season', but we zoned him out years ago and replaced him with light up Elf that dances and sings 'Merry Christmas Everyone' when you push his foot. Damned cute it is too.

Today Is...WW1 Christmas Truce

Walter Kirchhoff was a middling Opera Singer, you won't find his name amongst the greats but he instigated one of the most well known moments in the 20th Century.
He was accompanying the German Crown Prince Wilhelm on a Christmas Eve visit to the German Troops on the Western front in the time before Hitler realised that picking a fight with the entire world wasn't going to end well for him and as a morale boost for the men, he was asked to sing for them and began 'Silent Night' and his powerful voice carried over to the British, French and Belgian trenches less than 100 yards away and at the end of the song, they applauded so he sang it again, this time in English and from across the wasteland between them, the British began singing along, then a Scottish guy joined in with bagpipes.
The German troops had been sent thousands of 3-foot-tall Christmas trees, already decorated with candles and a couple of the guys lifted them up onto the top of the trenches and Kirchoff climbed out of the trench and held one aloft and sang O Come, All Ye Faithful.
The British crawled out to see this German Opera singer standing on a trench holding up a Christmas Tree and as he tentatively shuffled forward, so did they and then the German troops crawled out and both sides kept edging forward until they met in the middle, meaning they both gained more ground in one Christmas Eve piss up then they did in most of the war.
These men who had been seeking to kill each other for five bloody months began trading gifts, drinking together, singing and agreed a truce for the night to remove the dead and wounded from the no-mans land, they even had a game of football with tied-up bundles of cloth, Germany v England with the Germans winning on penalties probably.
Both the German and Allied commanders made sure it never happened again, the German troops that had met with their enemy counterparts were taken off the front lines and replaced with soldiers who hadn’t been involved. The British military authorities declared any further informal truces with the enemy would result in a Court Martial and ordered their guys to continue with their brilliant plan which involved them climbing out of their trenches and walking very slowly towards the German machine guns.

Today Is...A Visit from St. Nicholas Published

Christmas was not miraculously handed down as a fully formed holiday, complete with wrapped gifts and blinking lights, rather it is a rich tapestry woven from countless sources, one of which is the Clement Clarke Moore poem 'A Visit from St. Nicholas' or 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' as it is more famously known.
It was printed anonymously today in 1823 in the New York Sentinel under the title 'Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas' and it was anonymous because the author was the son of the head of the Episcopal Diocese of New York and the churchy set were not keen on Christmas being anything other than about Jesus and Saint Nicholas so anything popularising the festive season which didn't include a baby in a manger or a Saint clambering up on roofs to throw money into prostitutes socks was frowned upon.
Clement Clark Moore wrote the poem to amuse his children and was never meant for publication but a friend submitted it to the newspaper and it was picked up by the Saint Nicholas Society who used it in their cause to to make Christmas, which was more of a feeding frenzy and drunken orgy, more child friendly and put together his eight reindeer with their Sinterklaas and a legend was born.
The idea of Santa's sleigh being pulled by a reindeer is based on another poem, 'Old Santeclaus with Much Delight' but he gave him eight and named them Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder and Blixem although over time the last two became Donner and Blitzen and then later another one called Rudolph was added to the gang.
He referred to Saint Nicholas all the way through, never Santa or Father Christmas, and even called him a jolly old elf at one point but as a professor of classics, up until that point his most notable work was a two-volume tome entitled 'A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language' and nobody remembers that but they remember the poem he dashed off in half hour in an effort to shut the kids up one night.

Today Is...First Electric Christmas Tree Lights

Putting lights on Christmas trees became popular in the 17th century and at that time, the lights placed on trees were small candles that were attached to branches using wax or pins.
Obviously naked flames and dry, wooden trees was not the best idea but in 1882 an associate of Thomas Edison, Edward Johnson, hand-wired 80 blue, white and red lights and wrapped them around an Evergreen tree and created the first electric Christmas tree lights.
The idea of replacing the Christmas tree’s traditional candles with electric lights didn’t catch on right away as there was still a general distrust of using electricity for indoor lighting and they were very expensive so it wasn't until the early 1900's that shops began selling them and using them in their own seasonal window displays.
While electric lights are massively safer than sticking a candle on the tree, the Fire Service say they are still called out to hundreds of fires in December due to families leaving their Christmas lights on continually and overloading the electric plug sockets and in a message which will really annoy traditionalists, they say that an artificial tree is safer than a real one if it does catch fire.
The Guinness World Record for the 'Most lights on a Christmas Tree' is 612,000 and is held by Universal Studios Japan, in Osaka which must have been be a nightmare to untangle.

2024 Year Of The Election

The American election is widely tipped t be between a Democrat who is clearly suffering from signs of age and often forgets where he is and what he is saying halfway through saying it and another who is obviously one of the most unfit people ever to be President and has been impeached twice and last time led an insurrection and lied to try and remain in office so not a good example of the best of America but it is going to be interesting, moreso if you are not an American having to be ruled over by either of them.    
The State of Colorado have been the first to come out and say the Orange Buffoon who did such an awful job last time is such a magnificent moron that he can't be on the Nomination Ballot this time and more are expected to join them in barring the name Trump from appearing on their ballot papers although some of his supporters are saying that not being able to vote for him this will actually help Trump who is currently preparing for four criminal trials, yep, that's the level of intelligence those Trump supporters are playing with but it isn't clear if Biden will be on the papers either as he faces impeachment himself.
The US House of Representatives has voted to formally open an impeachment inquiry, although no evidence has been produced of Biden and his family of personally profiting from his position while vice-president under Barack Obama.
US political history would suggest that things do not bode well for Biden as three of the four Presidents who have faced inquiry have ended up being impeached, the fourth, Richard Nixon, only got off with it because he resigned before the vote.
2024 not only see the American election but also the UK will go to the polls although i doubt it will be as exciting as the one on the other side of the Atlantic and as Labour is expected to wipe the floor with the Conservatives, we can expect the incoming Keir Starmer to not be quite so dictatorial or forgetful.

Dec 25th Just Another Day This Year

For the first time in around 20 years i am working on Christmas and Boxing Day this year so i hope nothing newsworthy happens as i want a peaceful few days and you would assume that December 25th is a relatively quiet news day and compared to the rest of the year it generally is but there have still been some important events which would have me scampering to cover if they happened in 2023.
In 800AD Charlemange was coronated which would warrant a mention and in 1000 the country of Hungary was established although 13 years later England got a new King in the shape of Danish Sweyn Forkbeard which would be pretty big news but December 25th is a good day to take control of England because in 1066 William the Conqueror did it also.
Things were quiet for a few centuries and then in 1989, the Romanian Revolution reached its conclusion with the President and despot Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, being stood against a wall and shot by firing squad for 'illegal gathering of wealth and genocide'
Mikhail Gorbachev went much more peacefully in 1991 when he resigned as President of the Soviet Union leading to its collapse the next day and then in 2021the James Webb Space Telescope, the replacement for the Hubble Telescope, was launched.
The Grim Reaper has no concept of Christmas or allowing me to put my feet up and eat mince pies so he swung his scythe in 1977 and took Charlie Chaplin, then came back in 1995 for Dean Martin, 2006  for James Brown, 2008 for Eartha Kitt and then took George Michael in 2016.
With a bit of luck anything big which is going to happen will on December 27th and i can say to my returning colleague something like, wow, we have been rushed off our feet while you were opening presents and scoffing your turkey while making sure there are no mince pie crumbs or empty bottles of Prosecco left hanging around.

Today Is...Winter Solstice

It's going to be a long night tonight, literally, as its the Winter Solstice and the shortest day and longest night of the year.
At 10.44pm GMT tonight, the Northern Hemisphere will be at its farthest tilt of 23.5 degrees away from the sun which also means that in the Southern hemisphere they will be the closest to the Sun for another 364 days so will have their longest day of the year.
The shortest day of the year lasts for 7 hours 49 minutes and 41 seconds in Britain but the day after the winter solstice marks the beginning of lengthening days, leading up to the summer solstice in June.
One of the places to be this evening is Stonehenge which is a prehistoric monument aligned on a sight-line that points to the winter solstice sunset.
Might be a bit chilly though and a Pagan white sheet and fancy pillow case on your head won't cut it so you may need a fire and by great coincidence according to Scandinavian legend, 21st December is the very day to burn the yule log and collect the ashes to place under your bed to stop it from getting hit by lightning.
You could also take along a snack and as luck would have it, according to Iranian myth, tonight is the very night to eat watermelon, carrots, pears, garlic, pomegranates and green olives to ensure your  health and well-being.
So grab you best bed sheet and a box of matches, take an axe to the City Center Christmas Tree and raid the vegetable tray in the fridge and you should not only stay in good health but you also won't be woken up by a billion volts of electricity going through your mattress.

Today Is...It's A Wonderful Life Premieres

A film about a man who tries to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into a river before being saved by an Angel who hasn't won his wings yet isn't the most festive sounding of movies but that is what 'It's A Wonderful Life' ended up as which is one of the Christmas staples on our televisions every year.
The movie is based on the short story 'The Greatest Gift' by Philip Van Doren Stern which is loosely based on A Christmas Carol and involves a man called George who is contemplating suicide and is approached by a stranger who tries to talk him down and when he says he wishes he had never been born, the stranger tells him that his wish has been granted and hands him a bag and tells him to pretend to be a door-to-door brush salesman.
George returns to his town, and discovers that no one knows him and discovers that his wife has married someone else and he offers her a complimentary upholstery brush and returns to the bridge to beg the stranger to return his life and George returns home and finds everything restored to normal.
The story was refused by publishers but was seen by Cary Grant's agent who thought it would be perfect for his client and handed it to RKO Pictures who in turn handed it to their script writers who rewrote most of it and added Clarence the Angel and made George a Banker before passing it on to the Director Frank Capra who rewrote it some more to make it more palatable for the cinema going audience although an argument over the ending meant that the scene with the bell tingling on the tree and Clarence getting his wings was a hurried last minute addition during filming.   
In the confrontation between Mr. Gower and young George, the actor playing the chemist was drunk at the time of the scene and slapped the young boy for real but it was kept in the film because no acting could beat the man actually whacking the child for real.
Henry Fonda was considered for the George Banks role but he had to pull out due to filming commitments elsewhere so James Stewart was bought in and apparently said: 'If you want to do a movie about me committing suicide, with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I'm your boy' and Olivia de Havilland and Ginger Rogers was offered the role of his wife but they turned it down as the role was too bland so Donna Reed was given the role.
The film was unsuccessful at the box office on it's release in 1946 although it did receive a special award from the Motion Picture Academy for creating a new artificial snow effect.

Today Is...A Christmas Carol Published

The Internet Movie Database lists more than 100 versions of Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carol', including four operas and two ballets and is probably my favourite Christmas film, the 1951 version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge and a very young George Cole as the younger Scrooge is the definitive version in my opinion which isn't bad for a book which was dashed out in six weeks. 
Charles Dickens was suffering from financial problems and his publisher was threatening to reduce his royalties as sales of his books dropped so in October 1843 he sat down and tried to dip into the recent rebirth of Christmas under Queen Victoria and borrowing from his own short story about a man who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited by goblins who show him the past and future titled 'The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton', he reworked it into A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge was based on British MP John Elwes who was famous for his miserly behaviour while the name came from an inscription Dickens saw on a tombstone of Ebeneezer Scroggie while writing the story, Tiny Tim was based on his disabled nephew and a local cheesemonger called Marley provided the name for the first ghost of Scrooge's long dead business partner to visit.
The book was a roaring success but Dickens did not make much money from it mainly because he took legal action against his publisher for making illicit copies which he won but which bankrupt the publisher and further reduced Dickens's small profits from the publication.
One huge faux pas in the book is the confusion around Scrooges sister Fan because the book states that Scrooges mother died giving him life and his father blamed him and his sister died the same way and he blamed the nephew and as his father never allowed him to come home for Christmas holidays, he hated Christmas and thought it all 'humbug' but at the end of the film he comes to the realisation that he was blaming Fred for Fan’s death the same way Ebeneezer's father blamed him for his own mother’s death.
But...Fan was Scrooges younger sister, Dickens himself said when Fan came to collect him from the boarding school: 'a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her 'Dear, dear brother.'
Hmmm...mother died giving birth to older brother which is the background to everything that happens after but somehow manages to have another child and call her Fan.
Maybe we should put it down to Dickens being distracted by being called away to drag a child out the chimney or something midway through writing that scene and try to ignore it.

Today Is...Arabic Language Day

After a night on the ALCOHOL, with a mouth like the SAHARA, i dragged myself from the MATTRESS to the SOFA, stopping briefly to grab a very strong COFFEE with plenty of SUGAR and opened my phone to CHECK what national Day it was today.
I could see in my screens reflection that i had drank one to many SHERBETS last night as my MASCARA was still on which would mean my COTTON pillowcase would need to be changed but that is always a HAZARD of not removing your make up before going to bed and it you get it on your SILK sheets then nothing is shifting that mark.
My phone showed that today was Arabic Language Day and as my AVERAGE brain cell count was probably lower than that of our pet GERBIL at that point, i could TELL looking up Arabic words was going to be about as much fun as having a WISDOM TOOTH pulled unless i had something to eat first but all we had in our cupboard was a JAR of SYRUP and a limp SPINACH leaf while in the fruit bowl sat a funky looking ORANGE, a squashed LIME and a LEMON which had seen better days.
I knew that left to me the total word count for this day would be ZERO and i could wave SO-LONG to that bet about writing a post for every day of the year so that would be CHECKMATE unless i bought in some help so i called my Egyptian friend, JASMIN.
She said that she was away on SAFARI in her CARAVAN but would send me a link to a MAGAZINE article which has a list of Arabic words which are common in English when they next stop which gave me time to brush myself up so i felt less like a GHOUL and sip my SODA water while waiting for my phone to ting to tell me it had arrived.
Within 30 minutes i was looking at photos of her and her family stroking a GAZELLE and a GIRAFFE but most importantly the all important Arabic words but i only recognised a couple so today's post is about the time i played my GUITAR at the local ALGEBRA club which isn't a gripping tale but fulfills my
obligation and i'm back in the game for that that years worth of Beanies COFFEE bet.

Today Is...First Christmas Card Sent

Brits spend an average of £43 on Christmas cards and we have Henry Cole to blame for that additional expense as it was he who designed and sent the first card today in 1843.
The Festive greeting card sent today as part of the traditional celebration of Christmas in order to convey between people a range of sentiments related to Christmastide and the holiday season ranging from 'I wish you a very Merry Christmas' to 'I have no idea who you are nor care if you have a Merry Christmas orif your house burns down but you sent me a card last year so i am now sending you one this year' and usually depict wintry scenes and snowmen but the first cards were not quite so cheery, they had children riding giant bats, dead robins, and a bloody battle between sword-wielding insects.
Cole began the custom of sending Christmas cards when he just couldn't face writing out long letters which was the custom of the time so he asked a designer buddy to create something with 'To' at the top, a picture in the middle and 'From' at the bottom which he sent to his grandmother and aunt.
That Cole was in charge of the newly created 'Post Office' and was promoting the penny post service to get more people to use it had nothing to do with it, it was a an act of charity, for which he sold the cards at 1 shilling each.
The first cards were not allowed to feature anything religious but were just large enough to stick money in the envelope which was a great way to let someone know that due to your jam-packed social calendar and the festive binge-drinking, you couldn't be arsed to bother buying them a present and care about them as much as the sandwich you grabbed while waiting in line to pay for the card in the supermarket.
He can therefore lay claim to two Christmas firsts, the card so you don't have to write to people and the laziest, easiest, least personal gift you can give someone which is also the one they look forward to getting the most because that removes all doubt about whether or not they'll get the right thing, cash always fits nicely.

Today Is...Worst Day To Have A Birthday

I always thought that December 26th or January 1st are the worst possible days to have a Birthday on, just after everyone has just finished exchanging presents and eating and drinking themselves silly but apparently there is a worst day, December 16.
Being born nine days before Christmas you share a birthday with Jane Austen, Noël Coward, Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick, Quentin Blake and Christopher Biggins but a survey by Interflora say it is basically a write-off.
What makes it especially worse according to the flower delivery service is that the days are dark and cold but it is very close to Christmas, which means people are busy with pre-Christmas parties and you get combined presents usually wrapped in Christmas paper.
Although i agree that it’s bad to have a birthday that close to Christmas, they don't expand on why 16 December is worse than the 8 days this side of December 25th which are even closer i'm going to stick with my original dates as being worse and be thankful that my birthday usually coincides with Easter and i get double the amount of Chocolate Eggs in that period.
So if it is your birthday today then Happy birthday and if you are really, really careful, you can use the Christmas wrapping paper that your Birthday present came in to send back to the person who couldn't be arsed to find proper Birthday paper for you.

Israeli Support Dwindling

A week after the Biden administration used an emergency authority to allow the sale of 14,000 tank shells to Israel, it is now warning them about their 'indiscriminate bombing of Gaza' using the same 14,000 shells they sold them because maybe Biden thought they wouldn't use them against the defenceless civilians they have been pulverizing and murdering for the past 60 years.
The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, today said the US would pressure Israel to hold 'extremist settlers accountable for violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank' and was joined by the UK, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the European Union who have signed a letter to the Israeli Government calling on them to take 'immediate steps' to tackle settler violence in West Bank which has seen more than 350 violent attacks, killing eight Palestinian civilians, injuring more than 83, and forcing 1,026 Palestinians from their homes.
The Settler violence has stepped up since the Hamas attacks in October but the settler violence has been going on for decades, usually with police and army cover who do nothing to stop the attacks and have been known to join in.
The long suspected plan has always been to force the Palestinians off their land and then move their own people into it in settlements, hence the suggestions that the Palestinians move into Egypt and surrounding nations and that has been laid bare this week when the two state solution was torpedoed by the Israeli Government who have said that there will be no Palestinian state and that Israel believes there is no prospect of a two-state solution.
The Western world continues to insist two states with Palestine and Israel side by side is the only answer but Israel seem to have decided that their is only enough room for one state, and that is Israel and they are razing the homes and infrastructure of the 2m people in Gaza and evicting the 3m people in the West Bank.
Biden has said that Israel is losing support in it's war with Hamas as the death toll nudges now 19,000 civilians with many more dead and buried under the rubble and it is although i am sure that this will be twisted into either supporting Hamas or antisemitism and that is untrue, it is more about not supporting the blatant and horrific bloody genocide of one nation by another that has been going on for far too many decades.    
The dwindling number of Israeli supporters point to Hamas wanting to wipe Israel off the map and that is true, but then Israel is escalate it's long term plan of wiping Palestine off the map whether by killing them or violently forcing them off their rightful land.

Today Is...The Second Amendment Established

James Madison was the shortest American President at only 5'4" so he had to compensate somehow so what he did was insert the second amendment into the Constitution although it is always the second part quoted by American gun nuts, the bit about 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' although the first part of that sentence is never heard, the part that states the right to bear arms belongs to 'a well regulated militia'.
From where i am sitting, admittedly safely thousands of miles away from the gun toting lunatics, the arms bearers are anything but well regulated because the vast majority of the mass killings that we see are perpetrated by guns that are legally owned and the militia as mentioned was at the time the US didn't have a standing army, which it does now therefore rendering the need for an irregular army composed of ordinary citizens obsolete.
Whenever the newsreader starts a story with 'There has been a mass shooting...' you just know the end of that sentence is going to be '...in America' because like Mom's Apple Pie, words without a U in them and pick up trucks, shooting kids while they attend school is a purely American thing as is doing absolutely nothing about it ever happening again because to some the right to own a gun is much more important that your kids surviving their education.
To be fair after each mass shooting they do do something, they offer thoughts and prayers but dinky little Madison wasn't thinking of military grade weapons being used to shoot up schoolchildren back in his day, he was always very suspicious of the British invading again so insisted on the clause but the problem was that the British never invaded again and Americans just ignored the well regulated bit and went on collecting bigger and more dangerous weapons and with a lack of British soldiers to aim at, they began blowing big holes in each other instead.
As the right to bear arms was introduced in case us British invaded again, i think the only solution is for the British Government to put out a press release stating that we have no intention to invade in the foreseeable future and those yankee's can therefore make another amendment to that previous bat-shit crazy amendment to say put the guns down, the Brits ain't coming.

Cheers

 COP 28 in Dubai  ended with what was described as an 'historic agreement' to transition away from fossil fuels.
With a devastating 1.5C being the long term temperature goal, and bear in mind that the 2022 heatwave led to 62,000 deaths in Europe in 2022 and we are still only building up to 1.5C, it would still be would catastrophic, the latest UN analysis has the world was on course for 2.8C of warming which will have
consequences which doesn't bear thinking about but we can't say we haven't been warned.
So in Dubai after agreeing to the historic agreement, the EU's commissioner for climate action said it is was 'a moment of true satisfaction' and the US climate envoy John Kerry was photographed hugging the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and i was sitting thinking, are we supposed to congratulate
them for agreeing not to literally set our planet on fire?
Are we meant to be celebrating that the heads of Government have got together and finally done something about a problem which has been talked about for a century and we waited until now to do something about it?
Yeah, thanks a lot.

Today Is...Last Moon Mission Returns

Today in 1972, the Apollo 17 mission plopped down into the Pacific Ocean and two of the astronauts aboard, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, became the last humans to leave their footprints on the Moon because we never bothered going back.
For three days they carried out experiments, collected 741 rock and soil samples and drove around in the lunar rover but they almost never made it at all as President Richard Nixon's was concerned that if the thing didn't make it then it would effect his re-election campaign so held back funding for Apollo 17 until a compromise was reached that it wouldn't take off until after the election.
NASA had hoped to continue with more Apollo missions and eventually establish a permanent moon base but public interest waned and funding for the space program was cut and with the Space Race win under their belt, the US government shifted its priorities towards other endeavors but in total twelve men walked on the moon over the course of six Apollo missions.
Of the 12 only 4 are still alive: Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11), David Scott (Apollo 15), Charles Duke (Apollo 16), and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and as the the youngest is 88 we could very soon have nobody alive who has walked on anything other than our own planet. 
NASA is now planning its return to the moon through the Artemis program and one of the first things they should do is haul down the flags which were planted in it's surface because at some point Aliens will pass by the moon on the way to Earth and there they will see the six former large stars and stripes not billowing in the lunar breeze and which are by now large white flags which will either reassure intergalactic travelers that us humans are a lovely bunch of pacifists but if they are coming armed with intergalactic lasers to take over our planet and enslave us all then it isn't really the signal we want to send out before they arrive.

Today Is...Francis Drake Sets Off On World Voyage

As the good Lord said 'Love thy neighbour as thyself, unless he's Spanish, in which case, kill the bastardo' and Drake killed plenty of them but his CV had plenty of other things on it, he was also a slave trader, pirate, politician and explorer.  
His career as a salty sea dog began when he was apprenticed to Sir John Hawkins, the first Englishman to become heavily involved in the slave trade and transporting them to Spanish plantations in the New World but he came into his own when he was given his own fleet and decided that slaves were not lucrative enough for him so began a career in piracy, even teaming up with the French pirates currently operating in the Spanish Main transporting gold back to Spain.
One time he robbed a Spanish mule train loaded with gold and silver and killed them all including the mules but then realised that it was too heavy to carry back to the ship in one trip and regretting killing all the mules, he buried the treasure and made a map marked with a big X which began that particular Pirate thing but by the time him and his men came back to retrieve it, the Spanish had found it and dug it up again.
A Pirate's life is so dark and shadowy and full of fear and trepidation but then so was going to the toilet on a Pirate ship in the middle of the night so he returned to England and was hailed a hero before turning his hand to Exploring.
Leaving Plymouth today in 1577, he sailed around the World in the Golden Hind, stopping off at a few places to teach johnny foreigner good wholesome British values like stealing other peoples land by force and wearing crotch hugging tight pants while you do it.
After his triumphant return to England, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I and made Vice Admiral of the Navy just as the Spanish were getting bolshy again.
He was famously playing bowls when they attacked England with their Armada so he finished the game and then set out to create what will become the year 6 syllabus centuries later.
He was buried at sea off the coast of Panama but nobody has been able to find his body, someone should have made a map and put a big X on it i guess.

Today Is...Saint Asterius of Amasea Feast Day

At this time of year you will likely hear many stories about how the Atheist's are trying to ban Christmas but Saint Asterius of Amasea was way ahead of them and tried to get the whole thing cancelled over 1600 years ago.
That might be surprising to hear, considering he was a Saint and a Bishop but hang on to your rosary beads, because thing are about to get religious.
Asterius was aware that Christmas was not a Christian thing, it was a Pagan Roman thing despite what people will try and tell you, and as such, he said Christians should have nothing to do with a certain December day chosen to remix their boy Jesus with the birthday of the Roman's guy Mithras.
When he become the Bishop of Amasea, Christianity had almost overtaken the Roman pagan religions but it was still blurred with the Roman holidays of Saturnalia and Kalends and these Roman practices were still being celebrated, especially the gift-giving.
He explained that gift giving was foolish and harmful which taught children to be greedy and the gifts made their minds sordid by capitalism which was an entrance to sin and the birth of Christ should be about being led into a life of light and uprightness.
The pagan custom of leaving food out for the gods in midwinter was co-opted as a Christian act, as was decorating the house with greenery but the pagan practice of giving gifts was spun by the Church as emphasizing donations to the poor and celebrating the human nature of Jesus but because nobody was willing to give up their pagan celebrations and the idea of getting drunk for three days straight was too strong, his whinging completely tanked and went nowhere.
His attempt to draw minds that they were just glorifying Paganism and their gods devastated the most deeply religious folk who displayed said devastation in their own unique way, by roundly ignoring him and going right back to drinking and eating to excess and so the church accepted and accommodated it as part of their celebrations.

Today Is...Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Introduced

Christmas is the biggest shopping holiday of the year so it's no surprise that companies spend every December bombarding us with ads full of cheerful, wholesome, uplifting messages to capitalize on all that goodwill and turn it into money but not everything in the Western World is based on some crass marketing campaign.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, however, was and that's how the story of a nasally deformed outcast reindeer came about.
Robert L May's employer, department store chain Montgomery, would give away free colouring books to children around Christmas but they decided it would be cheaper to make their own book instead of buying them from publishers so despite being Jewish and not celebrating Christmas, May was asked to write a cheery Christmas promotion story to be handed out, the only condition was that it had to be an animal story.
Based loosely on the Ugly Duckling story, he came up with how a foggy Christmas Eve threatened to disrupt the Jolly Fat Mans sleigh trip but he used Rudolph's glowing, shiny red nose as a makeshift lamp to guide his sleigh therefore saving Christmas and becoming a hero.
It was today in 1939 that Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer was introduced to the public as Montgomery's began handed out the colouring book to customers for which May was paid a nice round sum of zero dollars but he was given the rights to Rudolph a few years later as payment once the store had handed out 6 million copies of the book and thought they had exhausted all the reindeer stuff unaware that a Rudolph song, movie and a mountain of merchandise would soon be hovering into view as his little reindeer became a permanent addition to the Santa legend.
May's brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, was a Christmas song specialist and wrote songs that you've no doubt heard every Christmas since you were born such as Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree and A Holly Jolly Christmas and he adapted the story to music and had it recorded by Gene Autry and as the song says, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, he went down in history.

Not A Palestinian Flag

During the Pro-Palestinian demonstrations recently, pictures of watermelons have been seen and have been causing confusion as to what exactly the fruit has to do with the Palestine struggle but it isn't a new thing, it goes back to Israels military occupation of Palestine after the 1967 war.
Following the take over, the Israeli's didn't want it to be seen that they had taken over another nation so they banned the flying of the Palestinian flag so the Palestinians instead flew flags of Watermelons which just happened to be the same colours of their flag, red, white, green and black and became a substitute for the Palestinian movement.
Although laws restricting the flag no longer exist, the symbol has continued to be used and is usually accompanied with a message that says: 'This is not a Palestinian flag', although it is a representation of it
Following the latest Israel murder spree, the then British Home Secretary tried to ban the Palestinian Flag stating that it showed support for Hamas until someone with more brain cells pointed out that it was the Palestinian Flag and not the Hamas Flag which people were showing so she backed down and said that
Palestinian Flags should not be used if they are done to show support for Hamas but by then the use of Watermelons had taken off.

Today Is...Same-Sex Marriage Legalised In UK

Love and marriage goes together like a horse and carriage according to the old song which is fine until it is between two people of the same sex but if it isn't an XX and XY Chromosomes receiving the blessing then the religious folk start angrily shaking their rosary beads and stutter that 'MARRIAGE IS A 3,000 YEAR OLD SOCIAL CONSTRUCT BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE OF OPPOSITE BIOLOGICAL SEX'.
I have never got Religion or the religious at the best of times, to me if you believe in a God then you obviously haven't given it enough thought, but more than anything i don't get the refusal to accept same sex marriage.  
As long as two people love each other, why should it matter if they are of the same sex and if your only objection is the question of sex between same sex couples, then why is what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom any concern of yours? If you were so obsessed about sex between a man and a woman then there is a name for that, you would be a Pervert.
Homosexual weddings were commonplace in Rome between the first and third Centuries regardless of whether the bride and groom had the same sex organs, even the Roman Emperor Nero married men in wedding ceremonies but it wasn't until the eighth Century that the Church realised they could drag God into the union and the Catholic Church made it so that for a marriage to be 'legal', it had to be conducted by a priest.
The early Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches even had special documents for homosexual wedding ceremonies, the “Order for Solemnisation of Same Sex Union and the Uniting Two Men documents where the priest would grant the participants 'grace to love one another with the help of the Holy Mother of God and all thy saints.'
The actual wedding sacraments were not written into canon law until the Council of Trent in 1563 although the church still held that men were the head of families, with their wives deferring to their wishes and the bride’s identity was absorbed into the grooms, so the bride would give up her surname as a symbol of surrendering of her identity and the husband would become the representative of both people.
It wasn't until women won the right to vote and became a full citizen that that the institution of marriage underwent a dramatic transformation to resemble what we know today which is the union of two people so far from protecting a 3,000 year old construct of men and women, the Bible carrying crowd are actually protecting a 1,300 year old social construct when it became officially the religious union of two people regardless of whether they were the same sex.

Today Is...First Traffic Lights Installed

When someone stuck up some red and green lamps today outside the Palace of Westminster in 1868, they invented the very first traffic lights and the red/amber/green are used almost everywhere around the world thanks to the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals Chapter III which set the rules for stopping traffic at junctions and giving men (it's always men) time to sit and pick their nose.
What nobody told me about traffic lights was how they actually worked, i just assumed they spent the same amount of time on each colour until one day, after sitting at a red light for an eternity, someone knocked on my window and asked me politely to move forward onto the detector to trigger the light.
It was only when i told other people and they said yep, that's how they work i thought why did nobody tell me, i'm been sitting at red lights for years like some sort of moron thinking the traffic controllers had a grudge against me.
Turns out the thing is called an inductive loop detector and they are rectangles of wires just before the stop line and when your car stops on them, it breaks the circuit and the lights know that a car is waiting to be shown green.
Obviously if you don't position the car in the right place the light thinks nobody is there and keeps it on red longer which makes sense because no point in stopping one lot of traffic is there is nobody waiting to go the other way but bicycles and motorbikes being smaller and less heavy, sometimes have problems triggering the detector but they are advised to  position both bike wheels directly over either the right or left side of the loop.
Makes sense once somebody bothers to tell you.

Today Is...Pretend To Be A Time Traveller Day

Up until now my greatest achievement with my time machine was going to the Patent Office in Bern in 1904 and handing the lowly Patent Clerk with the bad hair an explanation of the Special Theory Of Relativity although i had to go back a further time to tell him it's E=mc2 and not E=mcmc, dummkopf.
Anyway, that turned out okay in the end but as another Pretend to be a time traveller days rolls around, an elite group of pals and i plan to spend today putting right things that once went wrong as i explained next week. 
The biggest problem with time travel is that things can go horribly wrong when we travel backwards, forwards, or sideways in time so as HG Wells is the most notable authority on Time Travel i could think of, i invited him to come up with the Laws of Time Travel to provide a helpful guide for anyone who finds themselves travelling in time today.

Law 1) Don't Kill Anyone
Since half the humans who have ever lived are alive today, most of the people in the past are related to people in the present in some way and you will have no way of knowing who is a descendant of yours so you could find yourself either blinking out of existence or even worse stuck in a paradox loop if the person you killed turns out to be an ancestor of someone who helped invent your time machine so to stay safe, don't kill anyone.

Law 2) Don't Change The Long-Ago
Changing the past too far back in the past is generally held to not be a good idea as you don't know what the repercussions could be. What if you go back to Prehistoric times and somehow prevented the first fish that crawled onto the land or turn up at the Great Fire of London and helped put out the fire before it burned down all the buildings which stopped the Black Death which rather then ending there would in turn flourish and kill more people, one of which could be a descendant of yours or someone who helped invent your time machine and Law 1 is back in the game.

Law 3) Avoid Meeting Yourself
Go back 25 years and as far as the younger you is concerned, they are meeting your older self for the first time and hearing what will happen in the next 25 years. The danger is the younger you will assume that their future is predetermined and may not do the future things that bought you to the situation where you could go back 25 years to tell them in which case the meeting wouldn't happen and your past would change and you wouldn't have a time machine and you are once again stuck in the Law 1 paradox loop and even worse, stuck 25 years in the past with your younger, whinier self.

Law 4) Don't Say Anything
Since every action has an equal and unintended reaction, it is best not to say anything when you're in the past or the future.
If you let slip something that changes the course of future events then the consequences could be terrible. Imagine letting slip the words 'World War 2' just after World War 1 had ended or discussed 'Climate Change' before the inventions that the Industrial Revolution gave us such as the internal combustion engine or the components for your time machine and yep, hello Law 1 and that damned paradox loop again.

Law 5) Travel Forward Rather Than Backwards
As doing anything in the past may very well have unintended consequences on the present and that frustrating Law 1, you can mess about with the future as much as you like as it hasn't happened yet and if you mess up, you can just come back to the present and not do the thing that messed up the future.

I don't know if Mr Wells had any more time travel laws but it was at this point that i congratulated him on the Invisible Man book and asked him where he got such a brilliant idea of a scientist who invents a way to change the way the body reflects light so that he becomes invisible and after successfully carrying out this procedure on himself, fails in his attempt to reverse it.
It was when he grabbed his notepad and said: 'That would make a brilliant novel' that i realised i has said too much and made my excuses and left.
Oops, at least there was no paradox loop implications even if i must apologise to Bram Stoker who was meant to write that book, sorry.

The Cosmic Calendar

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan is responsible for one of the most moving, evocative speeches i have ever heard. His 'Pale Blue Dot' oration about how our Earth has hosted everyone you love, know, ever heard of, who ever was and how our Planet is the only home we have ever known and we have nowhere else to go so we should preserve and cherish the pale blue dot is brilliant.
As well as one of the greatest ever expressions, he also gave us the 'The Cosmic Calendar' where he took all of history and compressed it into a single year.
He placed the 15 billion-year history of the universe in context placing the origin of the universe on January 1, the formation of Earth on September 14, the origin of microbes on October 9, the appearance of dinosaurs on December 24, and the appearance of humans at 10:30 p.m. on December 31.

January 1    Big Bang
May 1        Origin of the Milky Way Galaxy
September 9    Origin of the Solar System
September 14    Formation of the Earth
September 25    Origin of life on Earth
October 2    Formation of the oldest rocks on Earth
November 1    Invention of sex (by microorganisms)
November 12    Oldest fossil photosynthetic plants
November 15    Eucaryptes (first cells with nuclei flourish)
December 1    Oxygen forms on Earth
December 24    First dinosaurs
December 31, 10:30 p.m.    First humans
11:59:20 p.m.    Invention of agriculture
11:59:59 p.m.    Renaissance in Europe
January 1 (Second year) 12:00 a.m.    Widespread development of science, medicine, and technology

America Wising Up To The Israeli Slaughter Of Innocents

Israel has been occupying and annexing Palestinians land since 1967 and since then have racked up an amazing number of UN resolutions against it, 45 in total by United Nations Human Rights Council, almost more resolutions condemning it than on the rest of the world combined and many of the Resolutions are for Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.
During that time America, while Israel has been scuppering peace talks, building illegal settlements on occupied land, killing innocent Palestinians, holding over 10,000 Palestinians in its prisons including children, destroying farms, bulldozing homes and businesses, using Palestinian children as human shields and building a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the international court of justice and turned Gaza into an outdoor prison, America has bankrolled Israel in its military occupation.
This has encouraging it to pursue aggressive, genocidal and expansionist policies and practices and after the abhorrent attacks by Hamas, gave Israel the red light to do whatever it liked in Gaza but a soaring civilian death toll (17,177 the latest grim total, two-thirds women and children) and a deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza has jolted the Biden administration into a change of rhetoric towards the actions of the Israeli government.
In recent weeks, with Global criticism growing, the White House have continually reminded Israel of International law and cautioned the need to limit civilian fatalities but with Benjamin Netanyahu and his Government showing no signs of easing off, there is the the worrying prospect of many more Palestinian deaths to come as Israel embarks on fresh military action in an area of southern Gaza where up to 2 million displaced people have gathered on orders of Israel.
The US Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, warned that Israel risk a strategic defeat by failing to protect civilians and Vice-President Kamala Harris, said bluntly that: 'Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed and International humanitarian law must be respected' while condemning the forced relocation of Palestinians.
As well as supplying the military hardware they are using to commit mass slaughter of civilians, America hand tens of billions in aid to Israel, a nation with the fourth most powerful military after Russia, the US, and China and that is expensive to maintain so America could end it now if they wanted by   denying them the weapons, Bernie Sanders said: 'What the Netanyahu government is doing is immoral, it is in violation of international law, and the United States should not be complicit in those actions'.
A survey this week from Gallup showed 63% of Democrats opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza, with the figures climbing to 67% for adults under the age of 35 and Biden faces an election soon so he is losing the support of his own party which should focus his mind with the spectre of Donald Trump looming over him.
Israel will continue to treat Palestinians with impunity until America and others stop funding its military and have to pay its own way which will force it to the negotiating table as it is seems that finally it is dawning on Americans that Israel is using their tax money to kill thousands of civilians, steal land, destabilise the Middle East and run an apartheid system worthy of South Africa.

Today Is...Candle Day

To me a candle is a lump of wax with a bit of string through it which you use when the lights go out but to some people they have greater significance especially which colour candle you stick a match to and the aroma which wafts out from them.
Pink candles put you in a romantic frame of mind but you might want to keep some red candles on standby for later because red candles are associated with things like lust, passion, and energy while an Orange candle should be used when you are looking for a creative boost or want to release pent up frustrations while if you are finding it hard to keep your focus or want to calm your mind, light up a yellow candle.
A light blue candle will help you to rationalise a situation but if you are wanting to see things a bit more clearly, reach for the indigo or dark blue one while if you look to escape the real world, a purple one is the candle of choice.
Black candles may be associated more with Halloween or calling up evil spirits at midnight but they are also great for destroying negative thoughts and then you can light up a White candle which promotes cleanliness.
Scented, or aromatherapy candles, are also a thing and woody smelling candles are used to de-stress, the fruity ones for relaxing and help fight insomnia while citrus ones lift your mood.
All this time i thought i had been buying candles depending on which colours went with the soft furnishings or it was our weekly Ouija board night but maybe i will put a bit more thought into it next time, or consider the colour of the cushions, either is good.