What's My Age Again?

Since i turned 50 i have been heard to utter such words of wisdom as age is just a number and you are only as old as the person you are feeling but there is no way to turn back time or drop a few years from your age unfortunately unless of course you are South Korean whose Government have given the population the  gift of youth, making them all a year or two younger overnight.
The South Korean method of working out how many candles go on your Birthday Cake was to count the age at birth as one and then a year was added every 1 January meaning if you were born on New Year’s Eve you would be two before the end of the next day.
The President, Yoon Suk Yeol, decided that it was far too confusing so has switched to the method the rest of us use which is to age one year every year and then when you hit 49 tell everyone you are 45 and start going from there.
If only we could all just understand that age is just a number and no reflection on us but i will admit that understanding it is simpler if we are given a couple of years extra to take a run at it like in the old Korean system.

Privatisation Will Always Put Profits Over Service

 

It is blatantly obvious even to the most ardent of Capitalists that privatisation doesn't work, it increase costs and lowers the quality of services because it is impossible for the private sector to deliver the same service for less than the Government and make a profit and making a profit is the only reason they are there in the first place while the customers get a worse and more expensive and lower quality service.
It has been one of the greatest pups sold to the public because to be frank, it blatantly just doesn't work and to driving home the point nicely is the ongoing debacle over Water.
It was Margaret Thatcher in a zeal of reckless privatisation who sold all the Water utilities in 1989, writing off their existing debts and three decades later the privately owned companies shareholders are doing very well but all are all tens of billions in debt and the Government are considering taking them back into public ownership.
The Government, keen to defend the Thatcher legacy point to the £36 billion which has been spent by the companies on infrastructure but are less keen to announce that it is half of the £72 billion which has been paid to the companies shareholders in that same time.
No new water reservoirs have been built in England since 1989 and some of the land held by the companies has instead been used for house building and the regulator Ofwat reported that amidst urgent calls for hosepipe bans and saving water, more than three billion litres, a fifth of the volume used, were lost to leakage every day and they have said they will spend billions to improve the infrastructure but the small print was that water and sewage bills would need to go up by as much as 40% to pay for it.
Thatcher’s crusade to privatise public services has proven itself ineffective, inefficient and a hugely expensive in many areas, a look at your gas and electric bills prove that but as water is essential to life, it is too precious to be trusted to companies who see it only as a way to satisfy their lust for larger profits and should be run not for profit but for the necessity that it is. 

Today Is..International Asteroid Day

In memory of the largest Asteroid to break through the Earth's atmosphere in modern times over Tunguska in Russia in 1908, today is National Asteroid Day and the United Nations celebrated it by naming four Asteroids careening towards Earth because nothing allays fears of the human race being extinguished like giving us the dates when it might happen.
First up is 1979 XB, almost five times larger than the 190 meter wide Tunguska Asteroid, currently hurtling through the solar system at nearly 70,000kph and current projections have it approaching close to Earth in 2024.
If 1979 XB misses us we only have to wait another five years for the next apocalypse because the 370 meter Apophis is blazing past our planet in 2029 less than a tenth of the distance to the Moon.
The 50 meter 2000 SG344 is predicted to turn up in our skies between 2039 and 2049 and next up is 2010 RF12 which is top of the ESA danger list travelling at a speed of 117,935kph but luckily is only 7 meters across and although it will have devastating consequences if it hits a major city when it comes in 2090, it is expected to be crushed by the Earth's atmosphere before it reaches the ground, they hope anyway.
Of course any change in the trajectory of any of the Asteroids will send them pinging off away from us still, the United Nations and people in white with telescopes are on it so nothing to worry about and they are actually planning to redirect an Asteroid into orbit around the moon.
Over the past nine years NASA have whittled down the list to just a potential four and are currently looking at which of these have the best velocity, orbit, size and spin to safely deflect our way because if you are going to fling a massive space boulder our way you need to be sure it doesn't go wrong and you find yourself apologising in to the massive crater where Norway used to be. 
With the date for the flinging pencilled in for 2025, NASA have already done a small scale practise by deflecting an Asteroid out of it's orbit which has the double mission of being handy for redirecting the path of an Asteroid or Comet which is dangerously heading our way. 
Called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the target was the 170 metre Dimorphos Asteroid about 7 million miles away which found a spacecraft ramming into it at 15,000 mph to change its orbit and provide vital information on how to best to apply it to future planetary defense scenarios which is crucial because an Asteroid over 140 meters landing on Earth would be catastrophic for life on Earth and each year a dozen or so over that size cause some sweating at NASA headquarters.
So yes, while preventing human's being wiped out is very important, it is a large step towards us having an freaking pet Asteroid circling the Moon in one of the coolest astronomical ideas ever.

Today Is..The First Tour De France

The Tour de France was started by the immensely wealthy car company owner Jules Albert de Dion as a massive up yours to a newspaper, Le Velo, who called him all sorts of unsavoury names after he was arrested for attacking the President of France with his cane at a local racetrack and leading to a melee which saw him imprisoned for 15 days.
What prison does is give you plenty of time to consider your revenge so on his release de Dion withdrew all his advertising from Le Velo and then founded his own competing paper and to add an even bigger middle finger to the up yours basket, as Le Velo was sponsoring bicycle races, he created an even bigger and better bike race with a huge cash prize for the winner and called it the Tour de France.
The massive prize attracted a huge field of contestants determine to win the cash and in the first race the favorite had to drop out midway through after drinking a poisoned bottle of lemonade and fights regularly broke out with the eventual winner, Maurice Garin, pushing his biggest rival, Hippolyte Aucouturier, to the ground, stomping his bike to pieces and then serenely cycling across the line, insane but the public loved it so they did it again the following year.
The bike stomping winner from the first race took his place at the line alongside the previous years losing stompee but Hippolyte came prepared this time with a pocket full of nails and a lead pipe up his sleeve. The cheating was imaginative, there was itching powder and ground-up stones in jockstraps, slashed tires and riders pushing each other off their bikes and some simply had themselves towed behind a car for large chunks of the route while some even more simply jumped on trains and raced ahead.
At some point the spectators felt that the point of attending a sporting event was to attack as many contestants as possible and ambushed riders on multiple occasions, sometimes ramming them with cars to run the riders off the road.
Maurice Garin was again crowned the winner, only to be disqualified for cheating as was the second, third, fourth, fifth...actually the majority of the cyclists but all the drama made the Tour a huge news event, sold loads of papers and made de Dion a tonne of money, so we went ahead and held it for another century anyway so famous cheat Lance Armstrong with his fridge full of performance-enhancing drugs was just sticking to the original sporting ethos of the Tour de France of it you can't win, cheat, which is an ethos many riders have endorsed with suspicious blood tests and dodgy urine samples ever since.

Today Is..Take Your Dog To Work Day

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

Today Is..National Bingo Day

Bingo is a game that only old people play once their hips are too fragile to do anything more energetic then dabbing a pen on a number card but wow those oldies can get feisty if they think someone is cheating at the game.
One Bingo caller said that fights are pretty common, especially if someone calls 'Bingo' as the caller was giving out a new set of numbers which apparently in the Bingo World is a massive no-no.
The other cardinal rule which must not be broken unless you want to see an 80 year old going the full John Rambo with her handbag include shouting 'Bingo' when you haven't completed the card which could cause some other players to rip up their cards.
Some of the national Bingo games can win thousands of pounds which attracts hard core cheaters such as  one mother and son team who won tens of thousands by printing off square stickers with the correct coloring and numbers and were only caught when one of them got careless and stuck down a sticker at an angle.
Probably the most famous part of Bingo is the caller jargon and there is an official list of 'Bingo Lingo' provided by the The Bingo Association on how to announce particular numbers if they are drawn which gives us the famous 2 One little duck, Legs eleven, 13 Unlucky for some, 22 Two little ducks, 44 Droopy drawers, 57 Heinz varieties, 88 Two fat ladies and 90 Top of the shop.
There is a push to modernise the lingo to attract a younger audience so we now have Gareth Gates Number 8, Chicken Vindaloo 52, Jimmy Choo 32, J-Lo's bum 71, Camomile Tea 73 and On The Skive 75.
Overall Bingo should be fun and not taken too seriously because at the end of the day, it’s just a load of balls.

Today Is..First Harry Potter Book Published

With the exception of JK Rowling's bank balance, the series of Harry Potter books were great for British actors because anyone who was anyone in the British Actors' Equity Association turned up in the films which followed including the British acting Royalty big hitters such as Richard Harris,   Michael Gambon, Robbie Coltrane, Maggie Smith, John Hurt, Ralph Fiennes, Julie Walters, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall, Emma Thompson David Tennant, Jim Broadbent as well as the brilliant Alan Rickman and Johnny Rotten's short lived replacement in the Sex Pistols, Edward Tudor-Pole.
The series of seven novels sold more than 600 million copies worldwide, making them the best-selling book series in history, and have been available in 85 languages. The last four books consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history, with the final installment selling roughly 2.7 million copies in the United Kingdom and 8.3 million copies in the United States within twenty-four hours of it's release.
As usual, the nutty Religious folk found they had a problem with it, claiming the books promoted witchcraft and Wicca and are therefore unsuitable for children as it was anti-family, discussed magic and witchcraft, contained actual spells and curses and referenced the occult/Satanism. Maybe Rowling should have Harry zap a few homosexuals, i'm sure they would have been fine with that.
J.K. Rowling gave her dad a Harry Potter first edition from the initial first printing of 50,000 copies, and he promptly sold it which was highly irresponsible of him, both from both a parental angle and a financial one, as her books rose in value a lot in the years that followed, prices for first edition first printings go up to around £6,500.
Each Harry Potter book broke sales records set by the previous book with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, book 7 in the series, had an initial print run of 12 million copies and sold 8.3 million copies in the first 24 hours.
Between 1998 and when the series finished in 2007 one favourite pastime of Potterheads was to work out which House they would be in with the options being Gryffindor (values courage, bravery, nerve and chivalry) Hufflepuff (values hard work, patience, justice and loyalty), Ravenclaw (values intelligence, learning, wisdom and wit) or Slytherin (values ambition, cunning, leadership and resourcefulness).
I have not read any of the books and only saw most of the first film (i did duck out for a smoke part way through) have always advocated that anything that gets children into reading is a good thing but doctors coined the term 'Hogwarts headache' which is a tension headache accompanied by neck or wrist pains caused by unhealthily long reading sessions of Harry Potter but researchers at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford found that the admission rate of children with traumatic injuries plummeted on the publication weekends of the Harry Potter books so a bit of a headache compared to surgery to reset your broken leg is a small price to pay i'd say.

Who's Paying These Flops?

David Cameron walked out after losing his Brexit gamble, Theresa May was removed by her own party as was Liz Truss but not before she tanked the British economy with her economic debacle and then Boris Johnson was removed by his own Party and finally forced to quit for lying to Parliament so all in all, not a good run for the four Conservative Leaders who have taken turns in the big seat since 2010 but by all accounts all four are minting it in giving speeches.
Since 2015 when he was last seen walking away from the Downing Street podium for the last time, Cameron has made over £5m from speeches, charging £120,000 a time while Theresa May charges £109,000 a speech and the disastrous Liz Truss is asking £16,500 per speech and remember she was outlasted by a lettuce but the top earner is Boris Johnson who demands £250,000 per speech and you have to ask who the hell is paying them?
One walked away because he couldn't see how he could clean up the mess he mad, two of them were removed by their own side for incompetence and one was so distrusted by his own colleagues that they refused to work with him and then forced him out of Politics for having a less than honest relationship with telling the truth so none of them are being hired to speak on what a bang up job when they held the levers of power.
Maybe that is what they are talking about, how they managed to piss it all away but that is unlikely, Liz Truss has already been on TV bleating about how her economic miracle was not allowed to work by an 'anti-growth coalition' which turned out to include everyone on Earth apart from her and Kwasi Kwarteng.
David Cameron told a House Committee just last week that his severe austerity program had no detrimental effect on the UK and Boris Johnson is still banging on to anyone who will listen that his removal was wrong and in his resignation speech managed to blame everyone else, what he labelled the blob, for what he did but that must be a very powerful blob that made him attend all those lock-down parties and then lie about not being there until the photo's arrived, and then still deny it.
To my mind if you are paying a small fortune to hear words of wisdom from people that flopped so badly, then good luck with that, you work for a company with much more money than sense.

Wagner Leader Not Finished Yet

The Wagner business in Russia is a bit of a strange one but then i guess if you are using mercenaries to fight your war then you have to expect it to not go smoothly, after all the very definition of a mercenary is someone who only joins a military conflict for personal profit and what they can get out of it.
The details are sketchy but what we do know is that Yevgeny Prigozhin an his 50,000 Wagner troops have played a crucial role in the Ukraine war, capturing cities but Prigozhin has been criticising the Russian military top brass for a while over incompetence and lack of ammunition they are receiving and this
weekend overrun the Russian city's of Rostov and Voronezh and threatened to march into Moscow.
Russian troops attacked the Wagner group until an agreement was mediated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko between Moscow and Prigozhin that Prigozhin is stripped of control of the Wagner Group with some absorbed into the Russian military, and exiled to Belarus in return for mutiny charges being dropped but then it gets a bit hazy because despite exposed cracks in the Russian war as the attackers turn on each other, British top brass are warning that it has made the Ukraine war even more concerning.
Some are seeing this as a bit of theatre as Putin is unlikely to forgive treason quite so easily and Prigozhin is not the type to just disappear quietly into the night and nobody is saying how many loyal fighters are willing to follow Prigozhin to Belarus but it is noted that Belarus is the closest point to attack the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
I'm not sure this business has ended just yet.

Today Is..LEON Day

Today is exactly 182 days since Christmas Day in 2022 and tomorrow it will be exactly 182 until Christmas Day 2023 which i think deserves some sort of celebration and as i found out last year there is, and it's called LEON Day which is very cleverly, NOEL backwards.
I found out about it accidentally a few years ago and ever since we have kept a Christmas Film on the TIVO Box to watch on June 25th and i have done my best to spread the word hoping that it will catch the imagination and grow into a thing, not the full blown second Christmas, but a more simpler, cut back affair.
As we all know, the Christmas Story is actually just a cheap rip off of Saturnalia with Jesus copied and pasted in to replace the Roman's Gods and i assume if it does grow into something, then the Churchy types will be busy finding someone to fill his boots in June and they already have a Saint who's feast day is today, William of Montevergine.
Looking at his Wikipedia page, his story includes a donkey and Kings and he also performed miracles, ordering the wolf that killed his donkey which did all the towing and other tasks and demanding the Wolf to literally do the donkey's work instead.  
He also turned down a prostitute who wanted to test his faith which may not be quite so easy to spin into a jaunty LEON's Day Carol that the kid's can sing but we can let future generations worry about that as well as what bird will replace the Robin on LEON Day Cards and who will be the Santa replacement because we can't expect him to do the rounds twice in one year and the kids have to have someone to write to.
Ugly T-Shirts to replace Ugly jumpers, Strawberry Milkshake instead of Eggnog, pot plant palm tree instead of Poinsettias, the possibilities are endless so June 25th needs to be observed as it marks the point when this year’s Christmas starts coming closer than last year’s Christmas and that has to be worth celebrating.

Today Is..The Battle of Bannockburn

When Hollywood decided to make a film of the Scottish War of Independence they went with William Wallace as the main focus and he was a real pain in England's side, the killer of forty thousand English at Stirling, he was a proud Scotsman whose head could be held up high, and it didn't get much higher than where it ended up, on top of a spike at the Tower of London so Robert the Bruce would have been a better choice because he really did put the English across his knee and give them a jolly good spanking.   
England and Scotland had never had a steady relationship, if one wasn't actively invading the other than they were preparing to invade each other and it was pretty much going England's way until King Edward II decided he would keep with tradition and smack around our Northern neighbours a bit but as a King he was no great shakes and as a warrior he was even worse and when he turned up at Bannockburn with 20,000 men ready to hack and stab at the 6,000 Scots army, he ended up being  held captive and murdered by having a red-hot poker thrust up somewhere no red hot poker should ever be thrusted.
As we know Scotland's independence didn't last very long and it became part of Great Britain and then the United Kingdom but there has been a resurgence of wanting to go it alone again recently and i have always been of the view that if Scotland wanted it's independence then we should let it go. Not out of some romantic view of a country trying to free itself from under the shadow of a stronger, more powerful neighbour, but because Scotland doesn't actually bring anything much to the United Kingdom table but then i heard someone say something that stopped me in my tracks and got me rethinking the whole idea.  
The First Minister said that if Scotland was to ever gain it's independence, we couldn't keep our nuclear weapons there anymore.
Being the kind and caring people that we are, England keeps all its most dangerous weapons in another country, that country being Scotland and if Scotland goes it's own way, England will have to keep all our weapons of mass destruction in our own country.
Hmmm. Was a tough choice between keeping Scotland and having somewhere to store all our dangerous weapons or let them go and have to find somewhere here to stash them and then i realised that we still have Northern Ireland and Wales just sitting there. Problem sorted.

Rishi's Five Pledges Not Going Well

In January Rishi Sunak made 5 pledges to the British Public and asked us to judge him on how many of them he hits at the end of the year so as we are halfway through the year we can check in to see which he is on target to hit.
First up was halving inflation which sat at 11.1% in January and today is at 8.7% but as the Government does not control inflation as this one is in the hands of the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) predict that the UK economy would fall to 2.9% by the end of the year organically so bit of a sleight of hand for this one as he wants to take the credit for something which would happen anyway .
The second pledge was to grow the economy but rising inflation has led real-terms pay for the average UK worker which has led to strikes across the country as workers and the OBR says that Britain's economy has stagnated, and it has done so more than other economies elsewhere so again, not really going to plan so far.
Bring down the UK Debt was number three but as today it was announced that the debt is at a record high of 100% of GDP then he won't want to dwell on this one too long.
Decrease the NHS waiting lists was pledge four and according to the latest figures, over 7.2 million people are waiting for treatment and in January it stood at 7.2 million people waiting for treatment so no change there then.
The final pledge was to stop small boats crossing the channel with illegal immigrants which was 28,526 in 2021 and 45,755 in 2022 and so far this year there has already been 10,913 and we are just entering peak channel crossing period and the Channel Crossing Tracker predicts at the current rate will see 85,000 in 2023.

All in all not great Rishi.

Today Is...National Writing Day

There is a saying in Iceland 'Everyone has a book in their stomach' and as every tenth Icelander is a published author, it is probably true for them but almost everybody i know has at some time considered, or have started, a novel.
I have a folder on my desktop titled 'story ideas' and inside it is a notepad file that contains paragraphs of story ideas that i plan to get around to writing one day but find the idea of actually writing them too daunting to begin.I had a go once but my novel quickly became a novella and then a short story and then a forgotten couple of Word documents on a floppy disk which has long been recycled into milk cartons by now.
What i need is to hand the ideas to someone and they do the 12 months of writing and editing and proof reading but i still get the royalty cheques and get to turn up at the Man Booker award ceremony to thank my agent and give no thanks whatsoever to God who wouldn't have helped me in any way.  
What would be nice is for some software genius to write a program where you fill in a few prompts and it that writes the story for you but as yet that hasn't hit the shelves of PC World but science has found the secrets of how to write a best selling novel.
Scientists have developed an algorithm called statistical stylometry which can analyse a book and predict with 84% accuracy whether or not it will be a success.
A group of computer scientists from Stony Brook University in New York said that a range of factors determine whether or not a book will enjoy success, including interestingness, novelty, style of writing, and how engaging the storyline is.  
They analysed over 800 classic books and found that several trends were often found in the most successful books, including heavy use of conjunctions such as 'and' and 'but' and a large numbers of nouns and adjectives.
Less successful work tended to include more verbs and adverbs and made heavy use of words such as 'wanted', 'took' and 'promised'.
Sounds easy but if you have a potential novel with a storyline concerning a person who wants to take peoples promise's you may want to rethink it but if  you did clear the decks to have a shot at writing a novel, whats the best genre to write?
The Harris Interactive report shows that out of every 10 books sold, 8 are fiction and of these 48% were Mystery, Thriller and Crime novels with the next popular genres being Science Fiction (28%) and Romance (21%).   
So there you are sat with a blank Word document and the cursor blinking at you and have a great idea to hit all the bases for what people like to read with a Romantic Crime Thriller set on the International Space Station but how long should it be?
Some of the greatest books ever written were not long books by any stretch. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is only 30,000 words, A Christmas Carol is under 29,000, The Great Gatsby 47,094, Of Mice and Men has 29,160 words, William Golding considered Lord of the Flies complete after 59,900 words and The War of the Worlds by HG Wells is only around 61,500 words long.
Please note that if you have the idea for a romantic crime novel based on the International Space Station, it's already gone.

Think I'll Take Mine Without Thanks

Louis Pasteur must be wondering why he bothered because apparently drinking raw milk is a thing amongst the trendy set now who i hope have their jabs up to date unless the goal is to die from diseases like as listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria or brucellosis.
The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says improperly handled raw milk is responsible for nearly three times more hospitalizations than any other food-borne disease source, making it one of the world's most dangerous food products. Between 1998 and 2011, 79% of dairy-related disease outbreaks in the
United States were due to raw milk or cheese products.
Raw Milk was wreaking havoc with human bodies before Louis put down his baguette to solve it by heat treating the milk to remove all the harmful bacteria such as Salmonella, Listeria, Yersinia, Campylobacter, Staphylococcus aureus, and Escherichia coli and countries adopted milk pasteurization to prevent  
disease and loss of life but now raw milk is growing in popularity.
Because blasting hot liquid jest from both ends at once is not desirable, raw milk is banned in Scotland and it's been illegal to sell unpasteurised milk in supermarkets or high street shops since 1985 so it's semi skimmed in your tea or take it black or hunt down a farmer with afew cows and take it with e-coli, listeria and salmonella.

I Can't Think Of Everything!

Blimey, my idea of plastering the Moon with Solar Panels and firing the electricity generated back to Earth got complicated quickly because it turns out that the optimum heat for a solar panel is between 15°C (59°F) and 35°C (95°F) with the equator of the moon ranging from a sweaty 120°C (248°F) during the day to a chilly -130°C (-208°F) at night which leaves very little time for the slim range for the optimum heat.
Obviously the Space boffins will have special Solar Panels and not the bog standard ones we have on our roofs but i wasn't aware that there was an optimum range and outside of that the panels themselves grow less efficient.                                                             Solar Energy UK say that performance falls by 0.34 percentage points for every degree that the temperature rises above 25C although they also say that during Summer this is mitigated by the longer days so it's still in the positive column.                                             Solar power contributes 9.2% to the UK's electricity output and the electricity is stored in giant batteries or capacitors where the electricity is converted into another form and turned it back into electricity when you need it.                                                            Battery storage and Capacitors are the go to options but i'd be buggered if i understood any of it so Solar Panels on the Moon are still a thing and anyway, i'm the ideas person, actually making it work is for the big brains in the white lab coats to work out. 

Today Is...World Rainforest Day

We all remember from school how trees take in Carbon Dioxide and release Oxygen and we breathe in the Oxygen and release Carbon Dioxide and it's a life saving circle that we rely on for survival.
With forests playing such an important part of keeping all living things and our planet healthy, then it would need to be a monumentally stupid creature which cut down swathes of them so step forward the monumentally stupid humans who cut down ten million hectares of forest every year, an area the size of Portugal.
Once covering 14% of land on Earth, Rainforest's now make up only 6% and the 3 million square miles left contains over 30 million species of plants and animals. That's half of the Earth's wildlife and at least two-thirds of its plant species.
As well as providing us with oxygen, Rainforest's store over half of the Earth's rainwater, on an average day 20 billion metric tons of water evaporates from trees in the Amazon releasing it back in to the atmosphere in the form of mists and clouds and continually recycling huge quantities of water, feeding the rivers, lakes and irrigation systems so the less forest the more likely droughts leading to widespread famine and disease.
So as well as depriving ourselves of air and water, over 25% of our modern medicines originate from tropical forest plants and if the current rate of deforestation continues, the world's rain forests will vanish within 100 years although many World Governments have a tree planting scheme but according to the United Nations Environmental Program, approximately 2 billion trees are planted each year which is far less than the 15 billion which are felled annually.
The UN issued a joint statement saying that: 'Forests are a major, requisite front of action in the global fight against catastrophic climate change thanks to their unparalleled capacity to absorb and store carbon. Forests capture carbon dioxide at a rate equivalent to about one-third the amount released annually by burning fossil fuels. Stopping deforestation and restoring damaged forests, therefore, could provide up to 30 percent of the climate solution'.
Since we’re making more and more CO2 every day, and simultaneously removing the planet’s method to deal with it…three guesses where this is heading.

This Isn't A Post About Penis Size

Sometimes size does matter for example if you are jumping out of an airplane then you want the the biggest parachute available or if you buy a slice of cake then you want the biggest bit but when it absolutely doesn't matter whatsoever is penis size. Yep, size doesn't matter when it comes to your man's trouser snake so you guys may as well stop reading here because i am going to segue into a post about girly things such as make up, skirts and boys.

Have they gone? Good because bless there little fragile male ego's, as we women know size really does matter, we just say it doesn't to men with small willies and a British study published in the BJU International journal of urology has had a look at 15,000 International penises from Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America and have made a handy chart of where the big boys and where the dinky ones are.
Of the 88 nations, the top three biggest members belong to men from Ecuador, Cameroon and Bolivia while the less well endowed hail from Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines.
In the USA, the only big guns are on the shop shelves because they come in 60th so it isn't just the Orange buffoon who has the small hands but British men can't gloat because they are 68th and i have already heard the excuse that it's those damn immigrants.
Yep, rather than hold up their teeny tiny hands and admit it's time to invest in smaller tape measures, they blame the immigrants coming over here with their tiny penis's and getting measured by scientists and its dragging down their stats which is as laughable as...well..you know...   
I say never fear men, next time you are asked how big you are give the answers in centimeters, it will make you feel so much larger.

Today Is...The Summer Solstice

If you are reading this in the Northern Hemisphere then Happy Summer Solstice day but if you are in the Hemisphere which has bent sticks that come back to you and animals with pouches then Happy Winter Solstice cobber.
The UK will enjoy 16 hours and 38 minutes of daylight today as it is officially mid-summer but to some it is the start of summer and the Sun has obliged today by being particularly shiny but today won't be the hottest day for us Northern Hemispherers where the sweltering weather is still to come.
I'm not a big fan of summer anyway, in the mind of poets and romantics, Summer is all about those balmy nights and long lazy days where the warmth of the Sun gently caresses your skin and the sound of children's laughter fills the air.
In reality, a British Summer is usually more raincoats and wellies than bikini's and flip flops or sitting on the grass and slapping ants off your legs before running away from a large buzzing thing or the pain of sunburn and the sound of people wincing every time they move before a week of flaky skin to reveal their original pale skin colour.
There there are the nights when it is just too hot to sleep and after an hour of turning your pillow trying to find a cold spot you give up and resign yourself to spending the next day being cranky. Open a window and you have personally invited every midge, mosquito and moth into your home. Manage to fall asleep and you will wake up with your hair plastered to your face with sweat and having to peel off your nightwear that seems to have become part of your skin.
Third degree burns off the seats of your car, smoke from barbecues making your eyes water, other peoples body odour, sweating if you do anything more energetic than turn your head, men in budgie smugglers, women in bikinis 2 sizes too small and people sitting out in their gardens drinking cheap beer and thinking that we all want to hear their CD collection until 3am.
Luckily our Summer is not that long in the UK, a couple of weeks of stunningly hot temperatures and then it is all over. Then we all start moaning about how rubbish our summer was.

Today Is...The Launch Of First Man Made Object Into Space

America and the Soviet Union fought it out to become the Space Race winners and both nations can count many firsts to argue their point to who actually won but the first nation to actually launch a rocket into Space in 1944 was Nazi Germany so every cosmonaut and astronaut that followed can say thanks to Hitler. Danke Adolf.
The MW 18014 V-2 rocket reached an altitude of 118 miles (176 km) before it plummeted back to Earth on top of some terrified bystanders, becoming the first man-made object to reach outer space and the brains behind it was Wernher von Braun and all he wanted to do was develop the means send man to the moon which is what he explained to the Nazi's when they came knocking and they said Jah, but as you are aiming rockets at the stars, could you maybe also aim a few towards London and as the Nazi's were not renown for taking no for an answer, he ended up working as the Technical Director in Germany's rocket development program and developing the V2 rocket.
Luckily for Germany's enemies, the rockets were unreliable and not the war-winning innovation they hoped it would be and by the time they got their head around them not blowing up on the launch platform the war was almost over and during the aftermath of World War II, the American government gained access to the V-2’s technical designs and the scientists responsible for creating the rockets.
The Americans recruited all 1,600 of the NAZI rocket scientists under a program called Operation Paperclip and von Braun explained that all he wanted to do was develop the means send man to the moon and they said Yes, but as you are aiming rockets at the stars, could you also maybe aim a few towards Pyongyang and he was put to work on their intermediate-range ballistic missile program just as the Korean War was starting up.
In the late 1950's von Braun's team was assimilated into Americas brand spanking new space program and worked as the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon and one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.

Today Is...The First Council of Nicaea

The Christian message is quite straight forward really, it all came about when a man in the clouds made the first couple who went on to annoy him by being enticed into eating an apple by a talking snake and if you are good then you go to the good place to listen to harps and if you are bad then you go to the bad place and listen to things like Hawaiian guitars and Banjo's.
Back in the early days that wasn't such an easy sell and due to one guy called Arius suggesting that there might have been a time when Christ hadn't existed, like, say, before he was born, the big bananas called a meeting to set some ground rules for this new religion.
Arius said that if Jesus was the son of God, there must have been a time before God Begat him when it was just God all on his lonesome so that must mean that Jesus was not infinite and eternal, only God is, but the Church told him to shut his big fat yap and actually, FYI, the Holy Trinity of God, Jesus and the Holy Sprit were the same thing but the Roman Emperor Constantine got involved and ordered a meeting of all the top Churchy types to end the Christological dispute and set some rules.
Two months and a few thrown slaps and punches later (they was actually a few hooks and right crosses thrown), the Church decided that God's son wasn't actually the son of God at all but God himself and anyone who says different is a heretic and will burn in the fires of hell.
They also decided when Jesus's birthday was and said that's when Easter should be and tided up and established what Christians believed such as what will happen on Judgement Day and when the congregation should fall to their knees in Church. 
As for Arius he was exiled but was then invited back into the Church a year later but on the way there suddenly felt faint and to put it politely, there was a violent relaxation of his bowels, or to put it less delicately, he shat myself, violently. So violently in fact that amongst the red and brown stuff on the floor behind him was his small intestines, spleen and liver.
Some said it was God making a statement about him being bought back into the fold but it was probably down to the copious amounts of poison on his food rather than a Holy assassination by bowel evacuation.

Alien's Are Such Bad Parkers

Such is the downgrade of American Intelligence Officers after the Iraq debacle that if one told me it was raining i would stick my hand out the window to check for myself so when an ex-US intelligence Agency Officer supposedly blows the whistle on alien spacecraft landings i am hoping this is one who wasn't dropped on his head as child but meet his claims with a massive dose of skepticism.
David Grusch, 14 years in the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office and sat on the US Department of Defense’s unidentified aerial phenomena taskforce has said that the US government are hiding the fact that it has been retrieving alien spacecraft and retrieved craft of non-human origin for decades.
Sounds great until you note that the evidence he put forward to bolster his case amounts to him saying it which as evidence goes, is on the flimsy side.
Michael Garrett, Radio Astronomer at the UK's leading University for all things Space, was not that impressed, explaining that: 'If there were all these alien spacecraft crashing on Earth you’d think that if they could travel between the stars, they could get the last 0.0001% of the journey right too' and he has a point until you realise that due to the difference in Gravity and Atmospheric pressure we struggle to land on Mars properly after traveling 140 million miles to get there so we mess up the final 0.0001% ourselves.
I believe there are life forms elsewhere in the galaxy and some could well have advanced space flight capabilities but why they would want to come here and watch us is another question along with why are most sightings and crash landings in Hicksville, USA and not in Brighton Town Centre or onto the roof of a Tesco Express in Cardiff St Davids Shopping Centre?
We get our answer to that after learning that Grush is looking to expand his sky watching adventure in the sentence 'after donation's to build five more observatories to extend the search to other parts of the US. Oh there is that.
Anyway, if they landed here Suella Braverman would send to them on the next plane to Rwanda.

Missing Your Children's Jabs Is Another Level Of Awful Parenting

The World Health Organisation states that the eradication of infectious diseases is the reduction of an infectious disease's prevalence in the global host population to zero but in human history we have only managed to eradicate one, smallpox, but there seems to be a resurgence of diseases which seem to come from the pages of a history book.
The WHO figures show in 2022 globally there was 10.6 m cases of Tuberculosis, 208,000 of Leprosy, 54,00 Scarlet Fever, 461 of Bubonic Plague, 391 of Diphtheria and 30 of Polio and most of these are not in third World nations, but in first World countries where the vaccine is available.
As we found out during the Coronovirus outbreak, there are some amazingly dim people who refuse the life-saving vaccines and my own doctor showed me one shocking reply she got to a Covid reminder which told her to 'Go f**k yourself with your poisonous cocktail which is killing people' and being too dense to get yourself protected is one thing but putting your own child at danger from killer diseases is another level of awful parenting.
So concerned by the drop off are the NHS that they have has issued warnings about children risking serious health implications when parents miss the 6-in-1 jab for their children which defends them against against Diphtheria, Hepatitis B, Haemophilus Influenzae type b, Polio, Tetanus and Whooping Cough.
Amazingly some parents get their information from the Internet and not from their child's doctor who legally have to give you information on the risks of each vaccine so why they take advice on vaccines from some unknown uninformed source somewhere in the World when they have a highly trained professional at their elbow is bizarre but some do.
All vaccines are fully and rigorously tested before being approved for use and while there are some minor side effects from getting a vaccine such as a slight fever or swelling at the injection site, the risk for death or serious side effects is so small that it is negligible and claims that vaccines cause autism or other diseases have been carefully researched and disproved many times over by experts and the amount of children who have developed autism from the 6 in 1 jab is nil.
You may think you are being a good parent by not getting your child vaccinated but by exposing them to a painful death from a disease that they could be prevented from contracting in the first place is selfish, ignorant and anything but good parenting.

Today Is...International Sushi Day

I don’t like Sushi and i don’t pretend to like it and when i go to a Japanese restaurant with others, they all get Sushi and try to get me to at least try it but i look at the sticky rice and bits of seaweed and slimy, raw fish and politley explain i would rather have my fingers continually slammed in a car door than
let that go anywhere near my tastebuds and opt for something which has been cooked and won't lead to making a reappearance minutes later in the restaurant toilet.
To be fair to any Japanese readers, i am not a fan of seafood even when it has been cooked and smothered in batter so i am not down on your national dish, i just can't stomach fish at the best of times and ever since i saw the original South Korean OldBoy movie when the guy sits down and eats a live Octopus i can never look a sea creature in the face ever again. There was no CGI or special effects, he just chowed down on it and apparently he actually ate four live octopuses, because they did four takes.
A report showed that the white tuna at sushi restaurants is sometimes actually Escolar and if it is not prepared expertly, can lead to diarrhea and anal leakage and at that point i stopped reading but as its International Sushi Day, enjoy it if you indulge today but i will stick with my tofu and vegetables and keep the anal leakage to a minimum thank you very much.

Nothing Glorious About Summer Heat

England hit 29C during the week and it was hot, very very hot so it was no surprise when the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that the first 11 days of June was the World's hottest ever, breaching the crucial 1.5C temperature air temperature threshold which follows a May that was less than 0.1C cooler than the warmest ever May on record.
Already water companies are urging customers to start conserving water while Devon and Cornwall and parts of East Anglia are still in restrictions from last summer while 28% of mainland EU territory is in drought, particularity the western Mediterranean area and as we are only at the start of Summer, it doesn't bode well for where we will be at the end of it in three months time
From June to August 2022 there were over 20,000 heat-related deaths in the EU but still the weather people insist on describing all this Summer sunshine and dry conditions as 'glorious', 'beautiful' or 'wonderful' which isn't the words i would use, i would go with stifling, oppressive and too bloody hot, i seem to have found 23C my limit before i start moaning how i wish Summer would bugger off.
Thunderstorms is the only high spot of Summer and we are forecast to have some this weekend which were described by the BBC Weather person as a spoiler and putting a blot on our weekend but then the hot and sunny weather is set to continue afterwards but i fail to share a good old Summer downpour as a negative thing as there is nothing glorious or wonderful about grassland fires, dry riverbeds, water bans and thousands of people literally dying through the heat.  
During a time of devastating Global Warming, by framing warm, dry and sunny weather as positive it only plays into the hands of the numpties who say things like how can Summer-like weather all year round be a bad thing and anything that gives succor to people that stupid should be avoided at all costs.

Today Is...The Statue of Liberty Arrives In New York Harbor

If you have ever been to New York you can't miss the 93m tall woman stood in the harbour which turned up today in 1885, a gift from the French to commemorate the alliance of the two nations against the British.
Being French they could have sent wine, onions or even a lifetime supply of baguettes but they decided to go with a 225 tonne statue of a French woman with a 35ft waist and a 4ft nose holding a torch enlightening the World and symbolizing freedom from slavery, oppression, and tyranny and a quick knock off of a couple of statues of the national symbol of France, a chick called Liberty, knocking out a much bigger version of a couple of statues they already had standing around in Paris anyway.
The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World to give her her full title was built by the same guy who put together the Eiffel Tower, Gustave Eiffel, but what they didn't provide was a pedestal for her to pose on so the present ended up costing America $100,000 so they could stand it in New York Harbour so the first thing arrivals to America see is the massive symbol of France.
A competition was held to find a suitable poem to attach to the base which was won by 'The New Colossus', penned by American poet Emma Lazarus which mentions the lines 'Give me your tired and your poor' and you will be both after paying $50 to climb to the top up the 354 steps because as well as not providing a pedestal, the French only put in a lift which goes to the first section.

Today Is...Father's Day

Today is the day when we spare a thought for dads as research shows we spend double on our Mum's as we do on the man of the family on Father’s Day. 
From breakfasts in beds, fresh flowers on display, beautiful handmade cards to jewellery, every year children around the world, pull out all the stops to celebrate Mother’s Day and a study found that we spend an average of £27.37 on Mother’s Day cards and gifts, such as flowers, chocolates and cosmetics but when it comes to forking out for Father’s Day it seems we are rather less generous with an average spend of just £14.45, almost half as much.
Marketers agree that Father’s Day is actually one of the smallest commercialised events, way behind Mother’s Day and a fifth saying they had forgotten to send their dad even so much as a card at least once, compared to just six per cent who admitted ever forgetting to send a Mother’s Day card.
It is not only the kids who wait for this day to honour their Mum's tireless efforts and shower them with love, but one can also see shopping malls, bakeries, florists and restaurants stocked up with gifts, coupons and schemes to make the most of this celebration of maternity but it is not so common to see kids gearing up to celebrate Father’s Day with equal zest and excitement.
One shop owner said that there’s just more stuff to buy for Mum but beyond a gadget, socks or chocolate, there’s little else for Dad's but regardless of the price tag, shouldn't we expect the holidays to punch at the same weight?
Parents are equal partners with their responsibilities cut out so generally it is the Mum through the formative years who spend so much time with their children so are in a better position to impact their children’s mindscape in the formative years while Dad steps up later in life although that does seem to be changing.
In today’s world, it is getting increasingly common for Fathers to balance work and fatherhood equally in a bid to spend more time with the children and even employers are taking note of the same with changes to paternity leave and work-life balance so be it a card, a bottle of whiskey or even just a hug, it's Dad's day and he should just get a little thank you for everything he does.

Solar Power From The Moon

Look up tonight and see the moon and consider why we are not doing anything with it. Sure it is hundreds of thousands of miles away and nobody could live there but it does seem that while we have an energy crisis here on Earth, there is a massive rock a third of the size of the Earth being bathed in sunlight and we have the technology to collect and turn that into electricity so why are we letting all that solar power go to waste?   
There has been tentative talks about building some sort of Dyson Sphere around our star to harvest its power but it is 92 million miles away compared to the Moons 250,000 miles and as yet we haven't got anything that wouldn't become a crisp whenever it got close so when the Government today announced
millions of pounds of investment to develop new technology that generates solar power from space i assumed he was nicking my idea for solar panels on the Moon which would be far more efficient on the moon than on Earth but what he actually meant was solar panels attached to satellites which then beam it back to Earth using wireless technology which could generate a quarter of the UK's power needs.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank are asking why the Government is looking at Space rather than spending the millions developing more wind, tidal and solar in the UK and only they know the answer to that but as usual while we are still thinking about it the Chinese have put it into
practise with the Luna Ring Project.  
They plan to launch small solar power stations into the stratosphere by 2025 as well as install a line of solar panels around the Moons equator which is then transmitted to earth using a microwave laser beam which is converted to electricity in the earth-based energy conversion base and distributed to the power grid.
I did suggest doing this on this blog in 2009 but it seems only the Chinese reads Falling On A Bruise so we missed out again, people should really listen to me!  

Today Is...The Signing Of The Magna Carta

Today marks the anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta by King John on 15 June 1215 at Runnymede on the banks of the Thames between Windsor and Staines.
There are only two original copies in existence, in Lincoln and Salisbury Cathedrals, although the British Library does have two copies and whilst most people can have a vague stab at what the Magna Carta is and who the King was who signed it, the relevance of it is very much overstated because for the vast majority of the country it wasn't much use at all.   
The story goes that King John of England was forced to sign The Magna Carta so he and whoever followed him onto the throne could no longer ride roughshod over their subjects but in reality, the Magna Carta provided plenty of personal rights and freedoms if you were wealthy because it was the landowners and Barons who wrote the document and forced the King to sign it because they were outraged that he kept putting up their tax and rents to pay for his wars against the French, and war isn't cheap.
Not so much motivated by a sense of great injustice at King John’s acts of cruelty and murder against his subjects then, more because he was trying to squeeze more money out of them.
King John may have signed it but he dissolved it almost as soon as he left Runnymede Forest that day and it wasn't even an original piece, it was a dusted off copy of the Charter of Liberties that Henry I signed in 1100 promising to respect certain rights of the Church and the Barons.
Far from being the basis of all English law, of the original 61 clauses, only 3 remain which are the freedom of the Church of England, the continued ancient liberties of the City of London and that no free man shall be denied Justice or Right.
There's nothing in the charter corresponding to the rights of the citizens and Oliver Cromwell dismissed it, noting that it merely: 'Tied one sort of people to be slaves to another; Clergy and Gentry have got their freedom, but the common people still are, and have been left servants to work for them.'
We hear it mentioned time after time that the signing of the Magna Carta was when the common man gained his rights but actually, the only beneficiaries of it were the richest people who were able to continue oppressing the common man while being freed of paying their share of taxes and from where i am sitting, 808 years on, that hasn't really changed.

Irony Detectors Everwhere Explode

Who doesn't love a bit of irony, i know i do, and even better when the irony recipient is a magnificent imbecile such as Boris Johnson who has spent the last week howling to anyone who will listen how Rishi Sunak promised him he would get his full quota of peers as per his list only for Rishi to then go, 'nah, don't think i'll bother' as soon as Johnson wobbled off to wherever he wobbles off to these days.
That the man who made a career out of lying and was forced out of politics for his whoppers is now endlessly bleating about someone supposedly lying to him  which would make even the most industrial stength irony meter explode but then Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was never going to go gently into the night although he may have to because his supporters are running away from him so quick that they would give Ussain Bolt a run for his money.    
There are still some deluded souls in the Conservative Party who believe that he was not only a Great Prime Minister but he has been treated shoddily and will one day make a triumphant return to lead the Blue side of the House but then these are the same people who thought Liz Truss was the best they had to offer and that went well.
Trying to persuade people that Boris was anything other than a lying opportunist who didn't only soil his own bed but all of ours is a hard sell especially as he is just about to be outed by the Parliamentary Committee for lying his arse off about all those lock-down parties he said he didn't know were going on despite being at most of them but then it seems everyone now knows what an absolute arse he really was, shame it took over 250,000 Covid deaths and a knackered economy for them to realise it.

Today Is...World Blood Donor Day

If you suddenly need lots of a stranger's blood in your body and you are not a vampire then you are presumably not having a good day and the UK needs needs nearly 5,000 donations a day for patients which is why the NHS are constantly asking for it because the red stuff is always in short supply.
You can't donate blood if you have had cancer, a heart condition, HIV, hepatitis B or C or inject non-prescribed drugs but as six million biscuits are eaten after giving blood every year, it seems that there are either plenty of people willing to give blood or maybe they just really like biscuits.
Probably the most famous blood donators were the victims in Dracula but they didn't so much as donate as have it taken forcibly from them but Bram Stokers book would have been much shorter if someone had just given Dracula a Fruit Shortcake or a Hobnob in the first chapter.
We all know the standard A, B, O, AB blood types but there are over 30 blood groups and the first recorded successful blood transfusion occurred in England in 1665 when a surgeon transfused blood between dogs before progressing from sheep to humans and in 1818 between people.
Many people are afraid of needles and i completely get why they will steer clear of the blood vans which usually sit in the corner of car parks but if saving lives isn't enough to get enough people rolling up their sleeves, maybe they should push the angle of it being a great way to score free cups of tea and biscuits.

UK's 162 Year Old Abortion Laws

While i don't hold a view on abortions and consider it a private matter between the parents, i was shocked to hear that woman has been jailed for 28 months for ending her pregnancy using abortion pills after the 24 week deadline under a law from 1861.
The woman obtained the at-home pills during lock-down by saying she was under 10 weeks' pregnant when she was actually 28 weeks into her pregnancy and 32 weeks when she ended it and as the law allows abortions after 24 weeks only under very limited circumstances such if the mother's life is at risk
or the child would be born with a severe disability, neither of which appear to be the case here, then it is hard to justify her actions but if the law courts are using a 162 year old old, then the abortion law needs to be seriously looked at.   
The current abortion laws in the UK are they are legal only with an authorised hospital or licensed clinic and when two doctors agree it would be risky for the mental or physical health of the woman although when the COVID pandemic struck in 2020, at-home abortion pills were made available by post for people seeking an abortion in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, a measure which had now been made permanent.
The punishment for breaking the abortion law under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act carry a maximum life sentence and since 2012 there have been 67 cases of obtaining an illegal abortion in the UK.
'Cases like this, although tragic and fortunately very rare, do throw into stark relief that we are reliant on legislation that is very, very out of date' said MP Caroline Noakes and 66 organisations have written a letter to the director of public prosecutions urging them to end the prosecuting of women who end their own pregnancies although Downing Street has said there are no plans to change abortion laws or sentencing guidelines.

Today Is...Jagged Little Pill Released

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

Today Is...World Day Against Child Labour

In my local Tesco store, they sell jeans for £4. Not particularly nice jeans but they seem popular in these financially challenging times. I'm not privy to how much Tesco pay for these jeans or where they come from, but they obviously pay the distributor less than £4 per pair in order to make a profit, and the distributor pays the factory and the factory pays the jeans makers who by the time the money gets to them, and everyone else has taken a slice of the £4, must be paid a pittance to make the jeans in the first place.
As with clothes, we also enjoy food and without it we'd all die horribly but short of it growing in the ground, we don't worry too much about where it comes from or the farm working kids out in the fields, learning the virtues of menial labor instead of wasting their time playing with their friends or going to school and that's not in some third world country, in America farm workers can be under 12 and can legally be paid less than the minimum wage.
Happy with that iphone in your pocket? The Chinese mining company Huayou was reprimanded by The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) after it has discovered children as young as four mining for cobalt.
Cobalt is a vital component in the batteries for mobile phones and the main recipient is Apple who have now told Huayou to suspend all mining until they can be checked to be free of child labour.
Last summer Apple celebrated selling their 1 billionth iphone so there is a very good chance that as they have only just stopped using this supplier, the iphone currently sat on your table was a product of a small child being paid pennies to toil in a cobalt mine.
Worth thinking about next time you moan about your phone's short battery life.

Today Is...Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Duc's Suicide

It is said that a picture paints a thousand words but sometimes a photograph doesn't need any words at all and unfortunately there are many which are too gruesome or gory to make it onto the news but that doesn't mean that the ones deemed worthy are not heart-breakingly awful and hard to look at.
Sometimes you see things you wish you could unsee and the ones which stick with me are the young Palestinian boy and his father cowered behind a small metal barrel as Israeli bullets rained around them seconds before they are both shot and killed.
The Napalm burned girl running down the road, the starving, dying Child in Sudan being stalked by a vulture waiting for her to die, the hanging of the teenage Serbian girl Lepa Radic by the Nazi's and the body of the lifeless refugee infant washed up on the shores of Greece are all horribly burned into my brain along with the photo of a Monk Thich Quang Duc, who sat down on a cushion at a busy Vietnamese crossroads, poured a can of petrol over himself and said a prayer before striking a match and dropping it on himself.
It was due to the rising rivalry between the Catholics and the Buddhists and witnesses state that the Monk didn't even move and remained absolutely still even while burning.
US President, John F. Kennedy, said of of the photograph: 'No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world' and the photographer, Malcolm Browne, described the scene he captured as: 'Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh. As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.'
President Kennedy, whose government was the main sponsor of the ruling regime who were persecuting Buddhists, saw the photo and threatened to publicly announce that it would no longer associate itself with the regime unless they stopped attacking Buddhist, they never and a U.S. backed coup later toppled the Government.
Photographs such as this allows the public to see situations they would otherwise be blind to and can make us angry, guilty and ashamed of what inhumanity us human's are capable of but they are important to change our worldview and make us think about the issues that matter in life.

The Party's Over For Boris And Trump

As expected, both are too narcissistic to hold their hands up and take the blame for their sorry actions, far better for their fragile ego's that they blame everyone else and refuse to accept what they did was wrong and it was a brilliant bit of timing that the news that Trump faces 37 counts of mishandling official documents and Boris was stepping down from Politics came hours after each other.
For Boris, his years of lying finally came to a head with the Parliamentary Investigation into whether he lied to Parliament found that he was such a liar that even if he admitted to being a compulsive liar, nobody would believe him.
Rather than reflect on how he was forced out of the Premiership when 60 of his own Party refused to work with him, then being found guilty of lying to Parliament by a team which had a majority of Conservative members, the former Prime Minister has quit as an MP and has gone on a mad rant about being forced out by Labour's Harriet Harman, Brexit remainers and the Labour Party and not once mentioned how he said that he was unaware of any Parties at Downing Street during lock-down and then it turned out he was photographed being at most of them.
The brilliant Angela Raynor summed it all up in two words, 'Absolute Tosh' but while Boris is facing a future where his name will be proceeded by the words 'the lying Boris Johnson', Donald Trump is facing a much darker future sharing a cell with someone called Big Maureen because hot on the heels of being found to be a sex abuser, he is now due to face a court and a potential sentence of decades after being accussed of willful retention of national defence information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations.      
Despite audio evidence and photographs of piles of horded boxes at his Mar-a-Lago estate, being thicker than a submarine door, his response was to say that he was 'an innocent man' which is like the Klu Klux Klan saying they only put that large burning cross on that black mans front lawn to keep him warm.
His defenders, and there are unbelievably some who still want him to run their country, instead of holding their heads in their hands and gasping: 'Oh my God, maybe he made up that other stuff as well? Maybe he DID sexually assault that woman in the changing room. Oh no, you don’t think that line about the Election being stolen was false do you? My, i feel such a fool', they have come out to defend him and claim this business is about distracting from his bid to become President again and they have a point because it is distracting everyone from things he has done that so much worse, such as pulling out of the WHO during a pandemic, advising drinking bleach to treat Covid and taking the US National debt from $19.95 trillion when he landed his bloated carcass in office to $27.75 trillion when he left it.
Both men were disasters for their countries but where both hoped to be remembered as great political actors in the history books, they will both go down as the equivalent of the men who do the dance in the advert for webuyanycar.com and neither will be missed, especially Donald who will be hoping that he he will be missed if he ever drops the soap in front of Big Maureen in the prison showers.

Today Is...Alcoholics Anonymous Is Founded

In general, an alcoholic is someone defined as someone who craves alcohol and for anyone with alcohol issues, Alcoholics Anonymous is the most well known source for battling against their demons but what i didn't know was that what the AA want you to do is swap that double whisky for a dose of double religion.
It all began with the Christian movement modeled after first-century Christianity by Robert Hughes today in 1935 who experienced a bright flash of light, which he felt to be God revealing himself and deduced 'to help others overcome a physical compulsion, coupled with a mental obsession to consume alcohol' but he struggled to find enough alcoholics willing to swap Gin for God so toned down the blatant religious parts, and sneaked them into his 12 steps instead.  
Step two of the program is to accept that only a Power greater than ourselves can restore our sanity and the third step is to turn our lives over to God.
The fifth step is to admit to God the nature of our wrongs which leads on to the sixth step which is to ask God to remove these defects of our character and the seventh to ask God to remove our shortcomings.
The eleventh is to improve our conscious contact with God by praying and the final twelfth step is to have a spiritual awakening and carry this message to other alcoholics. Apparently every meeting then end with a rousing rendition of the Lord's Prayer.
The NHS website has a link to the Alcoholics Anonymous website for people who think they may have a problem with alcohol but nowhere does it mention that it is a religious group which follows the line that 'You’re a sinner and your only chance of salvation is through our God' which you would have thought would be a major consideration if you are going to direct vulnerable people there.
Some people may have the view that if AA works and it stops people killing themselves with drink, then turning them onto religion is a fair trade off and i could accept that if AA advertised itself as a religious program but it doesn't and the UK website describes itself as spiritual, not religious but when seven of its twelve steps involve asking God to 'fix you', that screams of religion to me.
While they claim to only want to help people, it is clear that this help comes with strings attached, and these AA organisations are religious recruitment agencies aimed to sign up people at their lowest ebb and asking for help.
I also have a real problem with people who want you to believe that you need God to help you through your darkest times because if you do overcome addiction then YOU deserve all the credit because YOU did it, not some mythical man in the clouds who decided that he wanted to help you because you offered up a prayer to him because there are millions of people doing the same thing everyday in far worse situations who deserve to be helped who are ignored.

Today Is...Emperor Nero Dies

Reading history books you could be excused for thinking that Nero was arrogant and self-centred and there is much about killing his mother and executing his first wife and kicking his second wife to death.
When Nero ascended the throne and become the emperor, he thought his mother, Agrippina, held too much influence and was too popular so decided that she had to go but it needed to look like an accident so he rigged her bed so that when she lay down in it, her weight would activate a mechanism that would cause the ceiling to collapse on top of her but instead of her the ceiling collapsed on the slave she got to lay down and warm her bed.
Next he tried to drown her by capsizing a boat she was on but she managed to outwit him by swimming to shore so he went old school and hired three men to stab her to death in her sleep instead.
During the great fire of Rome, which may or may not have been started by him, he had called all the Senators to his place to allow them the pleasure of listening to him play the fiddle and although they protested that the city was going up in flames, being the consummate professional that he was, he insisted that the show must go on although its doubtful that the Senators were really paying attention what with the city burning down around them and all that.
The history books do make him sound awful, especially the using burning Christians covered in animal fat to light his garden at night but he tried Muslims and Jews and they just didn't burn so bright, lack of pork in their diet probably, and an Emperor shouldn't be expected to risk tripping in the garden and getting his toga muddy.
Something the ruler of the largest Empire shouldn't do is commit suicide in the wrong way which is why he asked several of his friends to try it first, which they did in different ways but after witnessing all that screaming and stabbing themselves and bleeding, he decided he probably won't do it after all and went back home. 
With all of Rome baying for his blood, he asked his secretary, Epaphroditos, to stab him when he wasn't expecting it and he did exactly that, walking straight to the kitchen and seconds later he was sprawled on the floor, dead with a knife in his back.

No US Trade Deal A Good Thing

Rishi Sunak has found a good way of getting out of being held to account on a Wednesday Afternoons at Prime Ministers questions, he nicks off out the country and this Wednesday he jetted to to America with the aim of sorting out some sort of trade deal but he has returned without it moving any further forward and he blamed the macroeconomic situation and the war in Ukraine but i don't care why he came back empty handed, i say bloody good because any trade deal with those guys would not be great for us as America has some very different standards when it comes to environmental and animal welfare.
Antibiotics in farm animals is five times higher in US farming and chicken is acid and chlorine washed at the end of the production chain and although steroid hormone drugs for use in beef production is banned in Europe due to it being possibly carcinogenic, in the USA hormone-treated beef is the norm and in the US, 88% of corn and 93% of soy are genetically modified and in Britain public concern remains firmly against it but don't expect to see it on the nutritional label, none of those either as they are considered 'a barrier' by the Americans.
American food standards mean that incidences of food poisoning in the US affect 14% of the population annually in the UK its 1% and as any UK-US deal is likely to include public services provisions including NHS services, education, transport and prison services opening them up to US firms and privatisation.
That we are even considering a trade deal which will see us chancing food poisoning and more of the privatisation which has proved so appalling for the British public while we have the largest single market is literally on our doorstep is madness, hopefully we will get a Government that agrees and reverses Brexit sooner rather than later.

Today Is...1984 Published

George Orwell got in early on hating the Soviet Union, he was hating on them back when they were ostensibly our allies and wrote 1984 especially to irk them and sales of the dystopian novel soared in America the last few years and it is a great book and i would urge everybody to read it and not only to see what the TV programmes Room 101 and Big Brother are all about and not just because it is a brilliant read but also because although it may seem absurd, some of the concepts in the book such as doublethink and thought police have been acted out in front of us.
The quotes from the Trump administration regarding 'Alternative facts' and 'Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening' are dangerously close to the line from the novel that read: 'The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears'.
The lies told over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made people far less willing to believe the media and plays into the often repeated line of 'fake news' to describe any coverage which is not favourable to politicians despite obvious evidence that they are lying, or as Orwell put it: 'political language designed to make lies sound truthful'.
The key message running through Nineteen Eighty-Four is that the purpose of propaganda is to narrow and limit the human range of thinking but where we differ from going full Orwell is that the novel's Big Brother tried to hide what it was doing whereas the likes of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump just lied and didn't bother to try and hide it.
The most damning and overarching line from Orwell is that 'Ignorance is Strength' and it is the ignorance of the politicians supporters, rejecting what they see with their own eyes and ears that allow them to carry on, and get away with, what they do.
It is no surprise that people are reaching for 1984 to gain some understanding of what they are really seeing and hearing.