Most Scandalous Government Ever?

As a Labour supporter it could be expected that i would say that this has been the Worst Government in history but as bad as things were under David Cameron and Theresa May, they have gone up a whole level since 2019 under the short lived tenure of Liz Truss and then Boris Johnson and now Rishi Sunak. 
Since Boris Johnson won the election that cold December morning in 2019, he has been found guilty of committing a criminal offence while at Number 10 catapulted out of the Commons after being found guilty of serially lying to parliament Deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, was removed for bullying, Party chair  Nadhim Zahawi sacked for tax evasion, Home Secretary Suella Braverman forced to quit because she committed a security breach and Gavin Williamson ejected from the cabinet the first time for leaking National Security Council meetings, then sacked again for being woefully inadequate as Education Secretary and then forced to quit a third time for bullying and then Health Secretary Matt Hancock resigned from government after breaking his own Coronavirus rules in an affair with an aide.
Junior ministers and backbenchers who have resigned their seats in disgrace include Owen Paterson for a lobbying scandal, Neil Parish who quit as an MP after watching porn in the Commons and Imran Ahmad Khan resigned from parliament after he was sentenced to 18 months in jail for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy.
Julian Knight had the Conservative whip withdrawn after an allegation of sexual assault, Rob Roberts is under investigation for sending lewd texts to a 21-year-old intern, David Warburton had the whip withdrawn following allegations of harassing three women and snorting cocaine and Chris Pincher resigned after groping two men at a club.
One unnamed Conservative MP was arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual assault has been told to stay away from parliament amid an ongoing investigation but there have always been scandals with sexual predators, liars, crooks and bullies  in previous eras but not this many so there is something rotten in our Government or the election process which the Conservatives use to send these dreadful people to Parliament.

Today Is...World Ranger Day

When i saw it was Rangers day i immediately thought either the Scottish football team or even Queen Park Rangers but it turns out it isn't all about fans of not very good Football teams at all but actual Park Rangers.
Then i thought maybe its the grumpy older ones who lock up the City park's at night and harass you to pay for the tennis courts but it isn't even them but the Wardens who look out for us in places like the New Forest and Exmoor and the only time i have met one of them was when one told me i couldn't start a camp-fire where i intended to because it was too close to some especially combustible trees so apart from him the only other Ranger i can mention is the one in the Yogi Bear cartoon, Ranger Smith of Jellystone Park and all i can remember about him was him trying to stop Yogi and Boo-boo from stealing peoples pic-a-nic baskets.
Of course, Yogi always manages to outsmart him in the end but American Park Rangers do have a lot more to contend with than their British version, while over here the worst thing you are going to come across is a grumpy badger, in the States their parks have bears, snakes and wolves and put out regular updates on what to do if you are making your way through a National Park and come face to face with something which could make you really wish you had gone with the brown trousers that day.
For Bears you should avoid any sudden movements, refraining from making loud noises and if a bear clacks its teeth, sticks out its lips, huffs, woofs, or slaps the ground with its paws, it is warning you that you are too close and are making it nervous so back away slowly. Yep, YOU are making the bear’s nervous!
If it's a Wolf standing in your way you should avoid eye contact as eye contact is a sign of aggression and walk away slowly while yelling and shouting and slumping your lower body and head in a submissive gesture.
As for Snakes, you should back away while watching the snake for signs of coiling as it is a prelude to a strike. Fend off the snake with a stick if it continues to moves towards you.
No mention of what to do if a badger attacks but the National Federation of Badger Groups said it only has one record of wild badgers biting someone and they were shooting at it so serves them right, hope it hurt.

Hmmm...

 
On the face of it,  when a former intelligence officer, a retired navy pilot and a former navy commander speak you tend to think they are not the usual tin foil hat wearing types so when all three say the US Government is keeping back evidence of UFO's then you would ted to believe them.
David Grusch, who led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAP) within a US Department of Defense agency until 2023, claimed that non-human biologics had been recovered by the government based on extensive interviews with high-level intelligence officials and had knowledge of 'people who have been harmed or injured in the course of government efforts to conceal UFO information'.
Next up at the hearing was David Fravor, a former navy commander who recalled seeing a strange object in the sky while on a training mission and retired navy pilot Ryan Graves, who claimed that he saw UAP's off the Atlantic coast every day for at least a couple years.
The Pentagon has denied the claims of a cover-up and issued a statement which said investigators have not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.
All very exciting and obviously if they did have alien ships and alien bodies in storage somewhere the US Government wouldn't admit to it but it all falls down when none of them could offer any evidence to back up their extraordinary claims which relegates them back into the pack marked don't call us, we'll call you.

NOVID's Theory About To Be Tested

 They call them NOVID's, or people who have so far managed to avoid the Covid infection which wreaked so much havoc since 2020 and i am one despite being a key worker and out and mingling all the way through lock-down but as to why i have not gone down with the disease, well that will be more luck than anything else but science thinks its down to genetics.
Almost two thirds of the UK Population have tested positive for COVID at least once and one theory why some people have avoided infection is that despite actually being exposed to it, they lack the receptors needed for the virus to gain access to cells and are therefore unable to replicate to any great degree in the first place.
All this could be tested as COVID data indicates a massive surge in cases with a million new cases this month, mostly in the South West and Wales, and Boots the Chemist are reporting sales of tests have jumped by more than a third this month and hospitals are reporting a small uptick of people admitted to hospital with COVID.
The UK Health Protection Agency has announced that they are keeping an eye on the situation and blame waning immunity but we were warned that we would have to live with it which is exactly what we are now doing so it may be time to dig out those masks and sanitizing hand gel again.

Today Is...Saint Olaf's Day

There is no denying that Olaf was a Viking and their culture was based on seafaring warfare, piracy and sporting natty horned helmets as they pillaged, raped and burned down monastery's and the odd whole village or two so there are not many other Saints whose average day was all about getting as drunk as possible, sailing into a foreign land and then setting fire to it's buildings and as the King of Norway he had to set an example so got drunker than most.  
He was nicknamed Olaf the Thick, not because he lacked the brain-cells although the Mead surely destroyed quite a lot of them, but because he apparently had arms and legs like tree trunks, and a belly like one too and when he wasn't pillaging or toasting his hands on a burning Monastery, he was dispensing Christian values.
It was on the way back from ransacking London that he stopped off at Normandy and met Duke Richard II who told him all about Christianity and how it would help to unite Norway and he would love to have Norway on the side of God so he was baptized then and there and set about spreading the word of the Christian God by following the Golden Rule of 'Love Thy Neighbour' although the Viking version meant something a bit different to what it does today and he loved them to death by annihilating the other kings of Norway, raiding Denmark, Iceland and Sweden and burning down any other temple to the ground and building a Christian Church in its place.
He was the ultimate badass, a God-fearing Viking King until a bigger and badasser God fearing King called Cnut the Great promptly handed him his own arse at the Battle of the Helgea but he wasn't completely beaten and came back two years later with an army to show Cnut and his gang exactly who the real King was.
Turned out it wasn't Olaf and he killed him with an enormous axe.
Numerous churches in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland are dedicated to Olaf and the Church had no qualms with him bringing Christianity to Scandinavia by violent and murderous brute force because they made him a Saint for it and in his coat of arms he is shown to be holding a Cross in one hand and a Battleaxe in the other showing the oh so Viking way converting people to Christianity...or else.

BBC Weather Dept Explains To The Hard Of Thinking

Unbelievably there are still some people unconvinced that Climate Change is happening and the numpties are out in force as records tumble across the globe, mostly on Social Media accusing the BBC Weather Department of misreporting and driving fear with 'supposed' terrifying temperatures during the  heatwave sweeping through parts of Europe, North America and Africa.
Luckily the BBC Weather Department is full of numpties and have been answering the strangely disturbed people each time they rear their funny little heads so first up the claim was that 40C plus figures are the ground temperature to which the BBC replied by posting pictures of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Stevenson Screens used Worldwide sitting 1.25 meters above ground to prevent the reading being effected by direct heat from the ground and other hard surfaces.
The peculiar non-believers then went onto claiming there was no evidence that the high temperatures reported by the BBC were not backed by evidence for which the BBC replied by publishing the data from the published by the countries own Meteorological Services confirms the high temperatures reported, confirmed by the WMO.
They then claimed that the BBC Weather App for some cities was lower than the temperature they later reported to which the BBC politely explained that while forecasting includes many complex models and they aim to get as close as possible to the actual expected temperatures, it is only a forecast and they are updated once the confirmed maximum temperatures have been reached.
Finally they say the BBC is scaremongering by using a new dark red on the weather maps and they said yep, red is used when it is hot weather and blue is used when it is cold weather which are the standard colours to represent hot and cold on weather maps and the red is a deeper red simply because it needs to be darker than the red used for other high temperatures for temperatures we've never experienced before.
I would suggest to the hard of thinking to dip their feet in the kids paddling pool, pop another few ice cubes in their glass and stop embarrassing themselves by ignoring what is staring them in their red, flushed, sweaty face.

Fall To Your Knee's America

I didn't catch his name but there was a leader from an American Christian fundamentalist Group on TV today who proudly said that Christian Nationalism was on the increase in America and the time was ripe to push to make America a country that literally lives exactly as the Bible states.
A recent Gallup survey put the amount of Americans who interpret the Bible literally as the actual word of God at just over a third which in a nation of 350 million is a lot of people taking the what the Bible says as literal including i assume the bits about talking snakes, dragons (some with the head of a rooster), unicorns and multi-headed, fire breathing sea serpents.
So if the Christian Fundamentalists do have their way then there will be some big changes coming to America such as the diet because Leviticus 11-13 is very clear on what you can, and can't eat and especially animals which chew cud.
If your diet currently includes camel, rabbit, pork, eagle, vulture, kite (red or black), raven, owl, gull, hawk, osprey, stork, heron or bat, weasel, rat, lizard, gecko, snake, crab, oysters, whelks, octopus, squid or mussels then you had better buy another cook book.
You can eat ox, sheep, goat, deer, gazelle, roebuck, wild goat, ibex, antelope and mountain sheep as well as anything from the sea that has fins and scales and locust, katydid, cricket and grasshoppers.
After your dinner you can then set about feeding the women who have been isolated as unclean because they are having their period (7 days isolation), have given birth to a boy (40 days) or a girl (73 days) and once the isolation has ended, you can always sell them as per Leviticus 27:2-5 which sets out the scales as a woman aged 20 to 60 is worth 30 shekels and 10 shekels for a female aged 5 to 20.
Obviously one of the big Commandments is number 6, Thou shall not kill but the Bible does make some exceptions so God gives his blessing to kill gays (Leviticus 20:13), People Who Don't Listen to Priests' (Deuteronomy 17:12), Witches (Exodus 22:17), Fortunetellers (Leviticus 20:27), anyone who hits their parents (Exodus 21:15), anyone who curses their parents (Leviticus 20:9), adulterers (Leviticus 20:10), anyone who follows another religion (Exodus 22:19), non-believers (2 Chronicles 15:12-13), Women Who Are Not Virgins On Their Wedding Night (Deuteronomy 22:20-21),  Blasphemers (Leviticus 24:10-16), and Sunday workers (Exodus 31:12-15).
So you have eaten your Grasshopper stew, sold your wife and machine gunned down the sinners at the local gay nightclub but the Bible isn't finished yet because sins come in many forms including wearing gold jewellery having braids in your hair (1 Timothy 2:9) ripped jeans (Leviticus 10:6) and having a tattoo (Leviticus 19:28)
So by now you have thrown out your ripped jeans and sent all your jewellery to Cash 4 Gold and the only thing left in your wardrobe is a selection of polyester blend skirts. Oh dear, two kinds of material mixed together is a no-no (Leviticus 19:19) and that short back and sides haircut, hell awaits (Leviticus 19:27) as it also does of you own an American football, a pig skin American Football (Leviticus 11:7-8).
Obviously, to live your life according to the literal Bible doesn't sound much fun so it must come as a relief when you sit down and actually give the whole idea of religion some proper thought and realise, hang on, it's all a load of nonsense and live your life properly knowing there is not a loving and caring invisible man in the clouds wanting you to kill that guy who served you in Walmart last Sunday or banishing you to burn in hell for eating a Whelk or wearing those earrings you got for Christmas. Lucky eh?

Today Is...NASA's Birthday

In a relatively short space of time, humans have gone from tentatively sending the first artificial satellite around the Earth in 1960 to landing exploration probes on other planets and today is the 65th Birthday of NASA and the progress we have made is astounding.
Driven by the Cold war, the Soviet Union and the USA competed to go bigger and better and although the USSR achieved many firsts, it was NASA who landed a human on the Moon to take the ultimate space race prize.
The Apollo 11 Mission will forever stay the highpoint for NASA, or at least until a successful manned Mars mission, and the Earthrise photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders is amazing but there is a more poignant, thought provoking and beautiful photograph snapped in 1990 by Voyager 1 as it made it's way out of the Solar System.
At a distance of 40 Astronomical units or 3,757,059,000 miles, the space probe turned its camera back towards Earth and took a picture which became known as the Pale Blue Dot.
Astronomer Carl Sagan made one of the greatest speeches ever which puts it into perspective brilliantly:

'That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on
scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.'

Elegant and powerful words but yet we still we go on vandalising the only place that we have to live on.
What the image and Sagan's bewitching words drive home as we look at that tiny pinprick of light in the vast blackness of space is how our place, for all our arrogance, is just a tiny, infinitesimal part of a colossal universe.

Today Is...Parents' Day

I have always hoped that one day we would get a Pope who went by the name Sicle but it's highly unlikely because the present Pope has got his funny hat in a twist over parents choosing fashionable names over good old fashioned biblical ones.
The Pope whinged: 'Parents should stick with Christian names for their babies, rejecting the trend of distinctive or colorful names'.
I'm not sure what Moon Unit Zappa or his sister Diva Thin Muffin Zappa would say about it but i quite like the colourful and distinctive names some parents stick there kids with. It shows that they gave the matter a bit of thought and then gave no regard whatsoever to their off springs lifetime of hearing snickering whenever they are introduced.
Besides, we already have far too many people named Mary, John, Paul, Elizabeth, Matthew, Joseph and James clogging up the place so what else has the Bible got to offer the confused Catholic parent to saddle their small child with?
For the girls there is Zippo (Exodus 2:21), Gomer (Hosea 1:3), Hagar (Genesis 16:21) and my personal favourite Dorcas (Acts 9:36).
Names to consider for boys are Ham (Genesis 9:20), Mash (Genesis 10:23), Uzzi (Chronicles 6:5), Festus (Acts 25:1) and what parent would not be proud to call their son Nimrod (Genesis 10:8).
The Pope was right, there is a rich vein of biblical names for the discerning rosary carrying parent to choose from and i look forward to a future where i can hear the phrase 'Nimrod, Dorcas, your tea is ready' echoing around the parks up and down the land.

Remembering Sinead O'Connor

Apparently Sinead O'Connor released 10 albums but the song she is most known for is the brilliant 'Nothing Compares 2 U' and getting right up the nose of an impressive amount of people.
Ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on TV to protest the child sex abuse being quietly brushed under the carpet by the Catholic Church was her most infamous moment although knowing what we know now and John Paul II’s own involvement in concealing child molestation by priests under his authority,
she was way ahead of the curve on that one although plenty sided with the Church and publicly trashed her including Madonna and Joe Pesci who said if he had been there at the time he would have given her a slap.    
She also feuded with Frank Sinatra after she refused the playing of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at her shows and Miley Cyrus who Sinead considered: 'Behaved like a prostitute and called it feminism.'
Her most bizarre quarrel was with the man who wrote the song which made her famous, Prince.
In her memoirs she told how apparently the Purple One wasn't best pleased that her version knocked his own version into a cocked hat and that she wasn't appropriately fawning enough in her admiration of him so he called her to his home and gave her a furious dressing down, challenged her to a pillow fight, made her eat soup and when she tried to leave, Prince physically blocked her and dragged her toward his car, prompting her to flee on foot to a neighboring home.
At only 56 Sinead O’Connor has gone far too early but wherever she is, John Paul II had better keep out of her way.

Today Is...King Macbeth Killed

When most people think of Macbeth, they probably conjure up images of the play by William Shakespeare and don't realise that Macbeth was actually a real person, a King although it was only Scotland he ruled over and his real name was Mac Bethad mac Findlai´ch.
William Shakespeare did take some artistic licence with the life of Macbeth so him and his wife never killed his cousin Duncan I in his sleep, Macbeth sliced and diced him on the battlefield and after beating him, crowned himself King of Scotland in 1040.
King James I was patron of Shakespeare's acting company and as he was King of Scotland and England, Shakespeare wrote the play to please his patron by showing Macbeth punished for his treason of killing King Duncan by making him increasingly paranoid, haunted by the ghosts of those he’s wronged and ending up with his head in a basket but by all accounts Macbeth was apparently a decent king who united Scottish tribes against the invading Vikings but that never worked for Shakespeare’s sucking up to the King plan so did a bit of a hatchet job on him.
The theatrical appearance of Macbeth is supposedly a bad omen with any misfortune surrounding a production of it due to Shakespeare is said to have used the spells of real witches in his text, purportedly angering the witches and causing them to curse the play, hence the misfortune to anyone who utters the name.

Barbie's A Lefty?

I didn't know Barbie was a left wing icon but you got to hand it to those wacky American right wingers who can turn anything into an ideological battle so well done to all the religious gun nuts over there who are at the forefront of a backlash against a girls toy.
Rather than say: 'Jesus Christ you morons, get a life, it's a film about a doll', the Films Director has gone down the far more tactful route of ignoring the smell of burning Barbie dolls and saying the film is: 'an invitation for everybody to be part of the party'.
Apparently, what the right wing has got their knickers in a twist over is what one called: 'neglecting to address any notion of faith or family, and tries to normalise the idea that men and women can’t collaborate positively' so basically Barbe doesn't pray enough or play along with the family stereo-type that the Trump voting supporters think of as family which by the example set by their man would mean she would have sex with a porn star, pay him off and have affairs with, or at the very least sexually assault, plenty of other men who were not her husband. THOSE family values i guess.  
Up next, how the American Right wing want Bambi banned as it is an obvious Communist/Black Live Matter Plot to subvert American Youth and overthrow Capitalism and instill Marxist policies.

Those Lucky Original Australians

An Australian who, when Prime Minister, weakened and seized Aboriginal land, suspended the racial discrimination act and refused to apologise to the  tens of thousands of Aboriginal children who were forcibly taken from their families, that man's view on pretty much anything is unsurprisingly awful
so when he said that the Brits colonising Australia was the luckiest thing that happened to Australia, it's not that much of a surprise.
I guess if you ignore the 100,000 Indigenous Australians who died at the hands of the settler Brits and brush off the way Britain emptied it's Prisons of all its rapists, murders and other undesirables into the country and let's not mention the rounding up of the natives and relocating them into reserves and stealing their land.  
Put all that to one side and yep, those original Australians who were there already must have been thanking their lucky stars when our ships turned up otherwise it's just the rantings of an idiot racist who should keep his big fat prejudiced and bigoted mouth shut.

Today Is...King Richard III Crowned

I imagine King Richard would be quite shocked to see that the History Books have him down as a crippled bad guy with a hump and a withered arm who killed his nephews after keeping them in the Tower of London but not as shocked as discovering that his name has become synonymous with Cockney rhyming slang for a natural bodily function along with Brad Pitt and Douglas Hurd.
Him becoming a Game of Thrones style villain was all down to Tudor propaganda from William Shakespeare and Thomas Moore who twisted his becoming King when his brother Edward died and his kids were too young to rule so he sat in their place.
During his time he introduced the bail system although to be honest that was mostly to give himself a get out of jail free card as things were getting out of hand with Henry Tudor, the most boring Henry who even Shakespeare couldn't find anything noteworthy to write about.
The war of the roses between the Tudors (White Rose) and the Plantagenet's (Red Rose) ended at Bosworth Field, Leicestershire, with Richard charging at Henry Tudor which didn't end well as his horse got stuck in the mud and historians recorded he was killed by a blow so violent that his helmet was driven
into his skull but just to make sure they stabbed him a further nine times to the head and had the rear of his skull sliced off.
His skeleton was found 528 years later under a Leicester Pub Car Park although many said that the reconstruction they made of his face didn't look anything like him but then he won't be the last bloke to have his face reconstructed after leaving a pub car park in Leicester.

Today Is...Saint Christopher's Day

Glory hunting come in many guises, to some it's a matter of changing your allegiance to a football team when they are not winning anymore but for Saint Christopher it was all about the most powerful icon and he started out working for the local King but one day he crossed himself at the mention of Satan and Chris thought hang on, this Satan guy scares the King so he must be more powerful so he left him and went looking for this Satan dude.  
Turns out he was easy to find as he was hanging out with a gang of marauders and he seemed a decent enough guy and they hung out for a while but one day he went out of his way to avoid going near a cross by the side of the road and again Chris thought hang on, this Jesus guy scares the Devil so he left him and inquired from people where to find this Jesus Christ dude.
Turns out he is not quite so easy to find but he met a hermit who told him all about the Christian faith so Chris asked him how he could serve Christ but none of that fasting and non stop praying nonsense, so the hermit suggested that because he was 7ft tall and built like a brick outhouse, he could make Christ very happy by assisting people to cross a dangerous river, where people were perishing in the attempt.
Figuring that this was probably the best move in the long run because the King and the Devil turned out to be such pussies, he chose to join the forces of good and would sit by the river and wait until someone dawdled along looking in dire need of a bridge and offered to hoist them onto his shoulders and wade across to the other side.
Luckily pastries and pies hadn't been invented yet so there weren't so many chubby people but then along comes this one kid who asked him to take him over and he don't know what he had been eating but he weighed a tonne and it was a real struggle to get over with the lardy kid on his shoulders but they made it and he put him down and said something like 'Wow kid, it felt like i had the World on my shoulders then' and the kid replied, 'not the world, just the person who made it'.
Turned out the kid was Jesus and he ran to the local town and started blabbing about how he had carried Christ himself which didn't go down too well with the local Christian hating King who told him to shut my yap about Christian things and trying to convert people or he would shut it for him which he did quite well actually by chopping off his head.
Due to him carrying people over the river thing, he got made the Patron Saint of travelers, mariners, ferrymen, boatmen, floods, sailors and surfers which all makes sense but why he is also the patron saint of toothache i'm not really sure but if you got an abscess or a filling falls out give him a shout and if nothing else he will make sure you get to the dentist safely.

Today Is...Apollo 11 Returns To Earth

We're all familiar with the Apollo 11 Moon landing because we have Neil Armstrong's unforgettable line and the live space footage and the American flags stabbed into the Moon to remember it by but what we're not quite as familiar with is the trip there and back with three men crammed inside the space equivalent of an Ice Cream van.
It may have been the single greatest human achievement in the history of the entire planet but it didn't stop NASA accidentally erasing the original tapes from the first Moon landing because despite a budget of millions, nobody went and got some extra blank video tapes and to cut costs, NASA had resorted to reusing tapes on later missions and at some point, a NASA employee had taped over it.
For conspiracy theorists, it's further proof that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had travelled only as far as a Stanley Kubrik studio where the Government mocked up the whole thing to stick a finger up to the Soviets while the Cold War was in full swing.
The conspiracy theorists spout how the American flag is flapping as if in a breeze, no stars are visible in the pictures taken from the surface of the Moon and the exposure to radiation from the Van Allen Belt would have killed the three of them instantly but that is to overlook the 382kg of moon rock and the tracks made by the astronauts in the moon dust but with the Internet at their fingertips, the early 21st century in is a very good time to be a douche-bag so what do they think happened?
The story goes that in the midst of the Space Race, someone in the American government saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and asked Stanley Kubrick to help them fake the Apollo 11 moon landings in order to gazump the Soviet Union who were ahead of America in the Space Race at the time.
Kubrik agreed but afterwards he realised just what a big deal it was and become worried that he might be silenced by the Government so to protect himself, he filled his film, The Shining, with clues about the conspiracy.
Danny wears an Apollo 11 jumper, Room 237 is a reference to the 237,000 miles distance between Earth and the Moon, when Jack types 'All work and no play…', the first word looks like “A11” or Apollo 11. The twins represent NASA’s Gemini space program and the guy in a bear suit represents the Soviet Bear.
If that isn't enough to convince you then how about the final piece of the jigsaw, Jack agreed to look after the Overlook Hotel during the winter just like Kubrick agreed to help America during the Cold War.
I don't know how much more proof anyone would need but it would explain why Kubrik made such a pigs ear of filming the King novel, because he was too busy stuffing it full of fake moon mission hints that he completely forgot how the book finished and just made up his own ending.

New Wheeze For Rip Off Football Kits

Arsenals new neon yellow and black away Kit isn't great, actually its bloody awful, but Football kits are big business and last season Arsenal sold 835,000 kits at £70 a time so it's no surprise that almost every club in the Premier League release multiple new strips annually.  
This season, some clubs and manufacturers have come up with the Pro-Kit concept which is an exact match to the kits the players wear rather than the polyester replica kit with the only difference being the Pro-Kit is more comfortable and made from better materials.   
Obviously for a better quality Kit you would expect to pay more and for £110 it can be adorning your torso rather than the inferior £80 one which is a massive mark up for someone because both kits cost £8 to make.
Without doubt football shirts are an utter rip-off, upwards of £80 for a cheap polyester t-shirt is absolute robbery but the cheapest Premier League 'normal' shirt is Burnley at £55 and the most expensive belongs to Arsenal, Fulham, Manchester United and Tottenham at £80 but if you want to push the boat out for your Team and buy the Pro-Kit then there are many reasons for Spurs fans to be sad, but now they can add the most expensive kit to it at £125.
Aston Villa's Pro Kit is £115.00, as is Wolve's Chelsea's and Liverpool's and Manchester United and Manchester City's are pegged at the same as Arsenal's at £110 but the City website does state it comes in a box which probably doesn't come with a card saying the club apologises for ripping off their fans but a box is still a nice thought.
I have a 1970's replica kit, cost £20 a few years back with the old Arsenal Canon badge and is made from warm, thick cotton and apart from the white sleeves being less white than they used to be and a few suspicious stains on the front, i plan to wear it until it is no longer wearable and deny Adidas and Arsenal my £80/£110 and keep it for something else that isn't cheap that sold to fans as a must have thank you very much.

Barbie V Oppenheimer

I admit i don't fancy either of these films but as one is a garishly pink fantasy movie based on a toy doll while the other is a very real story about the man who made the world’s first atomic bomb so i know which one i would go out of my way to avoid, and it isn't the fantasy one.
Released on the same day, they are polar opposites of what could be called entertainment as entertaining as a film which covers the birth of a weapon so powerful and destructive that it could literally end life on Earth could be anyway.
The Barbie film, i guess from the adverts, is a light-hearted romp where everything is all shiny and pink and wrapped in shiny paper while Oppenheimer, again from adverts, is a cold, hard look at what happened in New Mexico and the grim future of humanity and the destructive power of nuclear weapons as witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with it's abhorrent death toll.
Maybe the whole point of the Oppenheimer film is less of his 'Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds' quote and more on his horrific reaction to the 250,000 innocent Japanese deaths his invention caused and led him to campaigned against his own weapon but either way, i have no interest in finding out
but if i was forced into a cinema, a lustrous fantasy romp through a glossy pretend world would be my choice every time.

Not The Planet We Need To Save

 In 2015, World leaders signed an agreement to try to limit global heating to 1.5C by the end of the century, the current projection we are on will see the Planet heated by 2.7C so the case for cutting carbon emissions has never been more blindingly obvious as freak heatwaves around the globe shows.
In the US, hospitals are treating patients suffering severe burns from contact with pavements while forest fires ravage Greece and Antarctic sea ice levels have fallen to record lows for July so we are inching towards a tipping point which climate scientists and environmentalists have long warned about and the frustration is that we know full well what the consequences will be and what we can do about it, just that the people who can do things about seem to carry on with business as usual.
I read an excellent piece in one of the newspaper by a Climate Scientist who had the great line that we don't need to save the Planet, the Planet will be fine if it's a burning ball of methane or a frozen ball of ice, it's the people on the Earth who are in danger.
Research puts the death toll from heat in Europe last summer at 61,672 people, mostly from heatstroke and record-breaking temperatures in the day grab the headlines but it is the hot nights when much of the death occurs as the body can’t cool down, causing organs spend under stress for longer periods and ultimately death.
In the 1980s, when the planet was 0.5C hotter than before the Industrial Revolution, Europe experienced five to seven days of heatwaves each year. This number has already now reached 30 days and that's at 1.5C, as we go on towards the 2.7 figure than things will become fatally uncomfortable for us humans  on this massive ball of rock which doesn't care if we are riding on it or not.

Farage's Bank

The Nigel Farage has his bank account shut down thing continues to rumble on and i am split between thinking a Bank shouldn't be able to close down an account just because someone holds abhorrent views and thinking: 'It's Nigel Farage, who cares?
Coutts Bank is part of Natwest and is where the very rich and famous bank, you need to have a minimum of £3 million in your account to even have an account and after the red faced gammon Farage came out bleating that Coutts had said his account was being sut down due to his extreme right wing views, Coutts
explained that actually he wasnt sufficiently wealthy to hold one and offered him an account with Natwest instead.
Man of the people Farage didn't like that one bit, a bank account the same as the other commoners indeed and he continued to bleat that he had documents from the Bank which showed senior staff had taken into account his: 'xenophobic, chauvinistic and racist views' alongside his not meeting the wealth criteria when deciding to close his accounts.   
At the moment the 'Who Cares, Farage is a complete knob' is winning out but a (very) small part of me does wonder who defines what is a political view that is deemed sufficiently wrong enough to be refused service by a business and although it may be extreme right wing views which are at the moment being
deemed sufficient enough, one day someone may say to me 'Sorry Mrs Lucy but due to your left wing views you are no longer able to use our service' but i take the Groucho Marx view that i wouldn't want to belong to any business that wouldn't accept me as one of it's members anyway.

Today Is...Amy Winehouse Dies

'Police were called to an address in Camden Square shortly before 16.05hrs. On arrival, officers found the body of a 27-year-old female who was pronounced dead at the scene...I can confirm that the deceased is Amy Winehouse.'
In the music industry, there's no such thing as a drug scandal because everyone expects musicians to be on drugs anyway and they would be a little disappointed if they found out they weren't, so no disappointment from Amy then because she was on drugs big time.
While it is always sad when a young person loses their life, it hardly came as a surprise to hear that Amy Winehouse had become the latest member of the Forever 27 club.
Considering her heavy drink and drug lifestyle, the surprise was that she made it to 27 at all to join Kurt Cobain, Brian Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison in that sad, exclusive club.
One common theme through all of the above mentioned musicians who burnt bright rather than fade away as Cobain put it, was the self destructive heavy use of drugs.
The stories of Amy Whinehouse's drug problems always eclipsed her music which had dried up as she battled her demons, unsuccessfully as it turned out.
The question is would Winehouse and the rest have been the musical forces that they were if they were not out of their heads on heroin for the majority of their careers? Would they even be remembered today if they had just faded away?
It seems the best way to be remembered is to die tragically young and leave a promise that much more was yet to come. Hendrix and Morrison definitely, Cobain possibly but for Johnson, Winehouse and Joplin it's doubtful.
While we all love our music stars to live up to the Rock n Roll image of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, it's exciting and what we think we would like to do if given the opportunity, it is always sad when it is taken to its extreme.
A whole industry sprang up around Winehouse, yet another fatally flawed talent who lived fast and died tragically young to stamp her place in musical history although it takes some cojones for an alcoholic junkie to write a hit song about refusing to go to rehab and when she died her blood alcohol level was five times the legal driving limit and so full of chemicals that the coroners needed a periodic table to perform the autopsy.
With hindsight, she probably really should have gone to rehab.

Today is...National Hammock Day

I have slept in a bunk bed, four-poster bed, air bed, sofa bed and even a waterbed but never have i even attempted to get into a hammock and when i look at the flimsy piece of fabric slung between two trees it's very unlikely that i ever will.
Firstly, they are just too darn hard to get into. You see all these pictures of people gracefully lounging in a hammock, but the reality is you have to awkwardly clamber into it often resulting in a spin and a painful looking face-plant on the ground. And don't even get me started on trying to get out of it with any grace.
Secondly, if you do manage to get into it, the slightest movement or gust of wind will have you flipped upside down and either suspended in mid-air like a massive fly caught in a spider's web or it's face meet ground, ground meet face again as the sound of the neighbours snickering floats your way.
Thirdly, as you are unable to move, you are there dangling in the open air like a juicy piece of fruit at an insect buffet.
If you want to waste your time trying to get into and out of one of one then go ahead but I'll stick to my good old-fashioned King Size double thank you very much.

Only A Daffodil Between Us

Nobody knows how the AI phenomenon will play out but it really does depend who you talk to because for every 'it will help us develop new drugs, diagnose illness quicker, fight climate change and eliminate poverty' there is another group calling for the brakes to slammed on.
I'm on the side of the worried researchers who are calling for an immediate pause in its development due to fears that the technology could pose risks to humanity and they offer up ways it could al go horribly wrong.
First up is the theory that if we become the less intelligent species, we could be wiped out and they offer up scores of times when a species has been wiped out by others that were smarter, us humans have already wiped out a significant amount of the 'not so smart' species on Earth.
Next up is the Minority Report scenario where powerful algorithmic technology is used and makes incredibly high-stakes mistakes falsely accusing people of crimes but as the AI is deemed infallible, it is accepted as correct.
Third is it would smart enough to want us dead as we cause the problems but be subtle enough to kill us 'by accident' for example by creating a new wonder drug given at birth which eliminates cancer but also unknowingly makes the user sterile hence ending the Human Race in one generation.
Fourth is a Terrorist Organisation gains control and is able to access weapons we really would wish they couldn't access and fifth  is where the AI develops its own goals and survival instinct and we are viewed merely as a collection of troublesome DNA which could be used elsewhere or taken out of the equation altogether.
Scientists are saying that the current AI has the brain power of a squirrel and squirrel to super human is a massive leap but as Humans share around 85% of our DNA with the nut burying mammal, we are less than a daffodil's DNA away from them.

Being Buttered Up For Alien News

 I don't know if any other Planets in the Universe have TV's or if they do they have shows which show them exploring strange new worlds to seek out new life-forms and new civilizations but many people seem to think they have done it for real and are already here and other the last few months there has been
what could be a softening up before the big reveal that not only have they travelled here but popped down and said howdy.
In 2021 the US Government released a report on 144 unidentified flying objects that officials said they couldn't definitively rule out as 'crafts piloted by foreign adversaries' and recently a former intelligence worker has came out publicly to claim (without any evidence whatsoever mind you) that the US
government has secretly recovered other-worldy spacecraft and even the bodies of dead aliens.
Now a US Senator has introduced legislation which requires any knowledge, technologies or non-human intelligence from 'Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)', formerly known as UFO's to be disclosed to the public.
Personally, i really hope the men and women from Mars, Venus, Alpha Centuri B or even Betelgeuse have put in an appearance but i find it doubtful as we know there is no life in our Solar System and the nearest one is over 4 light years, or 23.52 trillion miles, away which would mean they set off tens of thousands of years ago unless they have some technology which means they can travel the speed of light or own a hyper-sonic warp drive in which case they may have turned up here which would be very cool, but it's unlikely.

Today Is...National Ice Cream Day

There's nothing quite like a bowl of ice cream on a hot summer day to cool you down and satisfy your sweet tooth. This treat has been around for centuries and there are endless flavours to choose from when it comes to enjoying this frozen delight.
Ice cream always makes things a little bit better whether you like classic flavors like vanilla and chocolate and someone has even invented an ice cream that somehow, changes color the as you eat it so there is an ice cream out there for everyone but after reading this you may want to skip the Raspberry flavored one.
The use of the dead Cochineal beetle to colour our food red is well known and we accept that we may find the odd Cochineal leg or crushed shell on the red Smartie's but if you are eating anything flavoured raspberry you may want to stop reading now or at least stop eating it for a second.
Being the simple soul that i am, i always assumed that raspberry flavoured products were given their distinct flavour by people picking raspberries then handing them to other people who squeezed the raspberries who then gave it to yet more people who do the magic bit of making our ice cream and other treats raspberry flavoured.
Turns out that raspberries are not raspberry enough for our refined taste buds so they have to use something else that tastes more like raspberry than raspberries. That something is beaver, or more precisely, beaver’s anus.
Of course beaver arse flavoured ice-cream would not be flying off the shelves at Iceland or Sainsbury's so its official name is 'Castoreum' which comes under 'natural ingredients' on the label.
I'm not sure what the person who discovered this was thinking when they were coming up with ideas for new flavours. Apple? No. Lime? No? Beavers tush? Hmmm...
If you have a freezer with some raspberry flavoured ice cream in it, i wouldn't tell the kids just yet, just as you might not mention it just yet to that woman who drinks the stinky fruit flavoured tea at work, or at least wait until she has drank half of it anyway.
And to think not that long ago people were moaning that they were sneaking a bit of horse flesh into their burgers!

Today Is...International Chess Day

Chess. The ultimate meeting of minds where two of the very best strategists joust together, face to face across the 64 squares of the Chess Board, the panoply to encapsulate the unspoken nobility of competition in the time honoured tradition until the loser is vanquished and the victor tries not to squirm too excitedly in his seat due to the anal beads.
Yep, you read that right because the Chess World was recently in turmoil due to an allegation of cheating through the medium of signals conveyed to him via an anal sex toy.
The accused offered to play the rest of the games naked in order to show people he wasn’t cheating but nobody explained how signals could possibly be conveyed through anal beads but the commentators were very careful when they talked his favorite opening but there was none of that at my school where one afternoon a week we would pack away the school books and the whole class would be taught how to play chess.
After leaving middle school, the chess dropped by the wayside and occasionally i would find someone to play against and i even had an electronic chess set so i could play against the computer but the magnetic pieces quickly got lost and knights and bishops were replaced by boys, cigarettes and alcohol.
One time Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was a Chess player and it does seem that there is a long list of famous chess players with a less than savoury reputation such as Stalin, Menachem Begin, Napoleon, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Ivan the Terrible, Franco, Goebbels, Henry VIII, Rudolf Hess, Hitler, Ho Chi Minh, Machiavelli, Bin Laden, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald, Tito, Kaiser Wilhelm, William the Conqueror and Bono of U2.
My teacher told us that learning chess would serve us well in life because it would teach us to think ahead of the possible consequences of our actions but that is quite an impressive list of chess players who didn't take that message on board.
If only someone had hid the chess pieces from a young Adolf and Bono we could have avoided WW2 and the awful Zooropa album.
There does seem to be a casual link between knowing the rules of chess and rising up to become a Nazi, despot or over hyped singer so maybe we should be looking in chess clubs for the next big bad.

Today Is...Tudor Warship Mary Rose Sinks

I wasn't around in 1545 when King Henry VIII's prized warship the Mary Rose sunk off the coast of Portsmouth with the loss of over 400 crew members but i was in 1982 when all Portsmouth school-children got given the day off school to stand on Southsea beach and watch them drag what was left of it out of the Solent.
The French liked to claim that they had sunk the Tudor flagship but the real reason it sank was that they loaded too many crew and cannons onto it so the ship sat too low in the water and then whilst turning the sea poured in through the gun ports.
The call went out to adjust the ballast on the starboard side as the sudden listing was thought to be due to uneven weight distribution and the Captain gave the order to start bailing out the water which obviously didn't work as it sunk to the seabed with most of the Solent Channel inside it.
The ship itself was made from 600 Oak trees taken from 40 acres of woodland in Southern England and named after either Henry VIII's sister, Mary Tudor, or The Virgin Mary but whichever Mary it was, there wasn't much rising, more Mary Sank than Mary Rose. 
Many suggestions for raising the ship were discarded, including constructing an enclosure around the ship and pumping all the water out and even filling the ship with ping-pong balls but they decided to go with a cradle and huge cranes instead and now it proudly stands in Portsmouth's Historic Dockyard where for £24.00 you can spend a few hours looking at some 500 year old planks of wood and think to yourself, they gave all those kids off school for this? They did, and it was double math's that day so well worth it.

Today Is...Saint Theodosia of Constantinople Day

Life, it is said, can turn on a sixpence and Saint Theodosia's certainly did one afternoon when Emperor Leo III sent a bunch of Byzantine soldiers to her Church to remove a huge icon that she had hung above the main gate her monastery.
She was born into a wealthy family and was orphaned young and was taken in by the local nunnery and on becoming a nun herself, she used some of her inheritance to commission many big, elaborate icons for the Church with the biggest and most elaborate being the one of Jesus that she proudly hung over the main gate of the monastery of St. Anastasia in Constantinople.
Not a fan of massive Jesus icons was Emperor Leo III who, when he became emperor, ordered that all religious images be destroyed because worshiping icons was wrong so he sent soldiers to remove it. Anyway, an imperial guardsman arrived with his ladder, and climbed up to take the icon down while Theodosia and a few of her nun chums stood close by.
While one was taking it down and balancing awkwardly on the top rung, she gave his ladder a good shake, the officer came crashing down to ground with a crunch of breaking bones and died from his injuries.
The guard's superior was nearby and came running over to arrest Theodosia who explained that she really didn't want them to remove her icon and just in case that didn't get the point across, the nuns picking up rocks and doing what any peace loving bunch of nuns would do and bashing his brains in definitely did.
The nuns were arrested and brought to the Emperor who ordered the others be beheaded but he saved a more bizarre and gruesome fate for Theodosia as the ringleader by giving her a hundred lashes each day for a week and then on the eighth day decided to hammer a ram's horn through her throat.
Her tomb is said to be the site of numerous healing's of the sick who turn up in their droves to be healed but unless you turn up with a goat horn jammed in your neck, she really isn't much help.

Today Is...World Emoji Day

I learnt something today, if you come across a smiley face that contains a character you can find on your computer keyboard, it's an emoticon. If it's a little cartoon figure it's an emoji.
Strangely i never got involved in the original emoticon thing ('o') but now that we have proper smileys instead on our text and email messages, i kind of miss them. :-(
I never appreciated just how clever making faces out of the punctuation keys on the keyboard was to show how cheerful :-) or sad :-( or surprised :-0 or angry >:( or confused :-/ or cheeky ;-) the sender was.
My phone automatically changes any emoticon to a proper smiley face when i try it now but that's our changing times and i could weep :'-( for kids that never knew what once passed for text based fun \o/. 
As the younger generation doesn't seem to know how to punctuate anything, they at least have something to do with all those redundant buttons on the keyboard so as the original text based emoticon is now dead (x_x), i'd better send some flowers, or  @-->-->- @-->-->-

Today Is...Artificial Intelligence Appreciation Day

Back in the 1980's, when the climate change campaigners were just starting to make an impact on our thinking, many people dismissed the warnings of rising sea levels and today are standing knee deep in their flooded living rooms and stupidly wondering why.
Another looming catastrophe that never seems to get a mention is humans crazily creating their own downfall by Artificial Intelligence which is rapidly gaining on us humans and will finally overtake us and the repercussions that particular scenario will unfold.
It is already happening, pale faced girlfriendless people are out there writing computer code that can park our cars and even drive them for us. It starts small, consider those adverts in the margins of our web pages, type into Google that you are looking for a tent and you are bombarded by adverts from every camp shop or go browsing for guns and receive adverts for penis enlargements.
In the driverless and car parking examples, we have AI that can do things better and safer than a human and within the next decade we will be happy to let them parallel park and safely transfer us from A to B which is a sure sign that humans haven't got long left as robots intellect bypasses our own, known as the 'the singularity' in AI circles which is the moment when humans cease to be the smartest things on the planet although i already know some humans who once they buy a pot plant, are not the smartest things in their own house anymore.
Computers already dominate modern life from directing traffic to controlling financial systems and security systems and satellite navigation GPS to most forms of modern day communications so imagine the chaos if they all suddenly just stopped.
My biggest concern, other than the Artificial intelligence taking over in Hal 9000 style, is that they will give robots human-like faces which is creepy. I wish they would introduce some code of practise where robots are supposed to look like robots with square heads and blinking red lights about their persons and not duplicate human features although there is another group of people who want them to look, and act, even more human-lilke so they can have sex with them.
In true techno-geek fashion, the pasty face brigade have given up trying to woo the female population with their knowledge of calculus and being able to recite the script from Star Wars and are preparing for ready-built girlfriend.
The idea of humans interacting with synthetic humans is an old idea but as technology continues relentlessly onwards and upwards, it will become more and more commonplace.
For some people - the lonely, the miserable, men who wear Hawaiian shirts, sexbots could be a great relief and release although there are fears that an entire class of humans may emerge who will not know how to interact with the opposite gender and may never have sex with other humans.
Very much like today's computer programmers come to think of it but i do wonder if the sex-bots will be self cleaning like a cooker or dish washer?
Might be best not to dwell on that thought too long.

Scratching That Itch

Edouard Manet and Al Capone definitely had it while Henry VIII and Vladimir Lenin were only considered to have it, Oscar Wilde was famous for having it while Abraham Lincoln not only had it but he gave it to his wife but then syphilis is the disease that keeps giving and once thought to be in decline, it is now rampant.  
One of the oldest known sexually transmitted diseases, genetic studies have traced it back to South America and Christopher Columbus's crew in the late 15th Century who became infected with the disease while in the New World where it was running rampant among natives and brought it back to Europe.
The disease was on the verge on being eliminated at the turn of the Century but since 2020 cases of syphilis have increased by 32% and the World Health Organisation puts the number of new cases at 7.1 million, the largest spike since the 1940s  
The infection itself is easily treated and widely available, a few doses of penicillin clears it up but left untreated it can lead to blindness, paralysis, long-term neurological, cardiovascular diseases and death and most concerning can be passed congenitally from mother-to-child leading to miscarriage, stillbirth, premature births, low birth weights and the death of a baby shortly after birth.
In the US, congenital syphilis rates are soaring and have increased by 900% over the past five years, mainly amongst black, Latino and Hispanic women which the public health community put down to the disruption of STD prevention and testing resources during the pandemic and in Australia are introducing a national test and treat response plan including a prenatal screening for expectant mothers after a 90% rise amongst the population.
The WHO think that in the 1980's and 90's, with HIV and AID's in the news, there was more widespread use of condoms but over time unprotected sex became the norm and hence the explosion of STD's although they are unable to offer an explanation of why syphilis is rising faster than the other
sexually transmitted Diseases but they suspect it is due to the disease becoming more virulent and resistant to antibiotics.
It is also complicated by the embarrassment of admitting you have a STD and the way Syphilis symptoms in the early stages, flu-like symptoms, high temperature, headache and aching muscles, can be mistaken for less serious disorders and easily dismissed until the more serious consequences present themselves.
If you are concerned, the NHS provide a free self-test kit which you can use at home send it to a lab to be tested.

Today Is...National Give Something Away Day

The Red Hot Chilli Peppers had a song called Give It Away although the lyrics seem blatant enough, 'What i got you got to get and put it in you' doesn't leave much room for manoeuvre although i have heard Anthony Keidas say it was about selflessness and altruistic behavior but then the video with the camera angles and close up's of groin areas doesn't scream altruism to me although a close up of Keidas's love plums is always welcome.
There were not so many close up's of low hanging klackers in Plato's day but in between deciding which sheet to wear for the day and philosophising about matters, he said that man either spread his wealth or become what he despised.
Karl Marx picked up the mantle, combed his impressive beard and wrote a whole book on the matter which has those of us who bothered to read the thing, pondering on the disproportionate distribution of wealth ever since.
There must have been a copy of the Communist Manifesto in Andrew Carnegie's local library because the industrialist's philosophy was: 'The man who dies rich dies disgraced' and after selling his steel company for $480 million in 1901, died 18 years later far from disgraced as he gave 90% of it away to worthy causes.
Scores of the world's wealthiest people have taken to his Marxist driven philosophy, donating their riches to causes with Britain's most philanthropic man being the Sport Division Sports Shop owner, Tom Hunter, who has given away £1bn to charity but's chickenfeed compared to the £5 billion donated by the founder of Intel Gordon Moore, who has given away over 77% of his £6.5 billion fortune and Warren Buffett who has donated £21.5 billion but the top philanthropist is the person you probably spent the 90's moaning about when his Operating System crashed yet again.
Microsoft's Bill Gates was once the worlds richest man until him and his wfe, Melinda, set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from which they have donated £27 billion to organisations that include the GAVI Alliance, the World Health Organization, The Rotary Foundation, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria and UNICEF.
It really does restore your faith in humans and German's with silly facial hair writing political books.

Today Is...Saint Camillus De Lellis Day

The Saint's didn't start out all that saintly. Born in 16th-century Naples and followed in his father's footsteps by going into soldiering and joined the Venetian army just as they began fighting against the Turks where in one battle, he got a nasty leg wound but after a few more scraps the regiment was disbanded and he traded in his sword for a horse and cart but his real love was gambling but as much as he loved it, it didn't love him back because he lost everything, including his horse, and was forced to work as a labourer at the local friary.
The guardian of the friary would often talk to him about God and things on his tea break and he offered him the chance to make it up to the big guy upstairs by doing his work down here.
He entered the Novitiate of the Capuchin Friars although his leg wound continued to bother him and refused to heal but he decided that he could help the soldiers wounded on the battlefield so created a group of health care workers who would assist soldiers during conflict and they carried a large red cross to show the soldiers not to get all stabby on them as they were there to help.
It obviously worked because the big Red Cross became a thing but the problem with spending time around the sick is that you get sick yourself and as well as that damned unhealing sore on his leg, he suffered a rupture, weeping sores on his body, violent colic and a loss of appetite which compared to the other things, not being very peckish could have been worse.
At the age of 65, after a long life of care-giving, conflict, and not feeling hungry, he went and died despite all the prayers because popping a leach in your trousers and praying is not as effective as proper medicine and he was laid to rest in peace or rather in peace until someone decided to rip his Christ-loving heart out of his dead chest to send it on a tour around the globe for religious folk to gawp at rather than letting his mortal remains just turn to dust in a tasteful grave somewhere which truth told, would probably be his first choice but the Catholic Church does like a Saintly body part to hoick about.

Stay There Cerberus

Cerberus is the three-headed dog who torments sinners in the third circle in Dante's Inferno and also the name given to the heatwave baking Europe at the moment where temperatures are 10C higher than the norm.
Sweltering under temperatures of 45C in Spain and with Health and essential travel only warnings published in Italy, France, Turkey and Greece, climate experts declared the World has just had its hottest week on record following the hottest ever June and the heatwave has the not so clammy hands of
climate change all over it.
A study revealed more than 61,000 people died in Europe last summer as a result of extreme heat and the MET Office has warned that in the UK we can expect more 'uncomfortably hot days' which is a very understated way of saying bloody hot and we can't even stay indoors to keep cool because British homes are designed to keep the heat in.  
The Government are looking at a program for new homes which will need to incorporate things like shutters on windows to block out the sun, better ventilation, ceiling fans and lighter coloured roofs.
It is with particular irony then that this Summer the UK finds itself on the Northern side of the Jet Stream which means the heat from Cerberus is kept on the Southern side of it so if it could just stay there until September it would be much appreciated.

The Inflation And Pay Rises Lie

To me inflation is what happens to balloons so outside of something filled with Helium and with Happy Birthday written on it i don't know much about it or what causes it but luckily i know a man who does and he is the perfect person to ask about the often repeated line from this Government that with inflation at 8.7%, they can't give decent pay rises to the public service as it will push up inflation.
Firstly, he explained that inflation is high due to supply chain disruption following the Covid lock-downs that created shortages, the war in Ukraine and Brexit which means what hasn't caused it is wage increases so the causes of inflation have nothing to do with pay.
'Hmmm...' i said, 'but could paying Nurses and Teachers more prolong the high inflation rates as the Chancellor keeps saying'?
With a swift shake of his head he said that as the NHS, teachers or many other public servants incur no charge for the services they supply, their pay increases cannot directly fuel inflation and would only fuel it indirectly if they got above average pay rises but as the public sector pay deals that have been agreed are lower than inflation, it is tosh to say they are going to impact inflation so not only can public sector pay not increase inflation, inflation will fall whatever happens to public sector pay'.
Ah, so the Government's claim that it cannot afford public sector pay rises because they are inflationary is in that case a lie? i asked .
'Indeed', he agreed, 'The question should be then why are the Government continuing to claim it when they must know it's not true?'
Giving it some careful consideration i suggested: 'Because they are a bunch of tossers?'
'Yep, complete and utter ones' he confirmed and asked me if i wanted a Digestive but as they were not the Chocolate ones i politely declined and walked away safe in the knowledge that any discussion which ends with the Government are a bunch of lying tossers is a good one.

Today Is...The Live Aid Benefit Concert

What began as a BBC documentary about the catastrophic drought and famine in Ethiopia, led to the historic Worldwide concert, Live Aid, which brought together the biggest musicians and performers of the era and became one of the most significant global fundraising events in history.
The 1985 event was organized by Sir Bob Geldof of The Boomtown rats and Midge Ure of Ultravox who were so moved by the documentary that they got the cream of British pop to make the Band Aid record, 'Do They Know It's Christmas' and then kicked it up a notch by gathering the biggest names in the Global music industry at the time to perform concerts simultaneously in London's Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia's JFK Stadium and watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people across 150 countries with some of the most memorable performances including Queen, Madonna, David Bowie, Elton John and Paul McCartney.
Phil Collins was there also and performed in London and then flew in Noel Edmond's helicopter to Philadelphia to perform the same day.    
According to the Live Aid organisers, the concert raised over £130 million in total for which was used to provide food, water, and medical aid to those in need and it is estimated that Live Aid saved around 1.5 million lives and brought the world's attention to the plight of those suffering in Africa, and it
showed that people from all over the globe were willing to help.
Live Aid was an exceptional moment in history and not just for so many massive artists putting aside their even more massive egos to share a stage for a good cause, but it united the world in a global effort to fight against poverty and hunger and remains an important reminder that when people come together, great things can be achieved, and lives can be saved.

Today Is...Malala Day

Today holds special significance for Malala Yousafzai. It’s not only her birthday, but it’s also this date in 2013 that she spoke at the UN to call for worldwide access to education for all saying: 'Malala Day is not my day. Today is the day of every woman, every boy, and every girl who have raised their voice for their rights'.
At just age 17, she was the youngest recipient ever of the Nobel Peace Prize and came to our attention in the most horrific of circumstances, shot in the head aged only 15 while on a bus home after taking an exam by the religious zealots of the Pakistani Taliban who had banned girls from attending school, her crime blogging that she wanted to go to school to educate herself.  
After four days in a military hospital, doctors transferred her to an Intensive Care Unit in Birmingham, England after the chief spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban called her a symbol of the infidels and an obscenity and added that if she survived, the group would target her again and after multiple skull construction surgeries and weeks of rehabilitative therapy later, Malala began attending school in Birmingham.
On her 16th birthday, she traveled to New York and spoke at the United Nations and received the United Nations Human Rights Prize and The Liberty Medal and in 2013, TIME Magazine declared Malala one of the world’s most influential people and a year later, was handed the Nobel Peace Prize where she made an inspiring speech where she said that she was not against anyone and was not after personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group, she just wanted to speak up for the right of education for every child, including the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all terrorists and extremists.

Today Is...World Population Day

The cost of food have risen astronomically over the past year, energy prices have shot up and the old guy who changes the numbers at the petrol station is in danger of a heart attack. The atmosphere is dirtier than the latest Jenna Jameson DVD and we are going through the worlds resources quicker than we can replace them.
The great and the good continue to scratch their heads and wonder what can we do about it but the answer is obvious but very uncomfortable. There are just too many of us. Now this is where it gets uncomfortable because just what exactly can we do about it?
We can't order people to stop reproducing and who exactly should not be creating offspring? People who wear Hawaiian shirts i hear you say but that is a given.
The present world's population is around the 8 billion mark and on its current trajectory, is expected to reach 9 billion by the year 2050. According to the CIA's World Factbook, the world human population is increasing by 211,090 every day but how many more of us can our planet sustain?
Based on calculations of the Earth's available resources, the magic figure is 10 billion according to the United Nations Population Division, but that comes with the proviso that our planet can handle 10 billion vegetarians, not that many meat eaters.
The Earth currently has 3.5 billion acres of arable land available which produces approximately 2 billion tons of grains annually and if all that grain was dedicated to feeding humans and none to feed livestock, then 10 billion of us can happily live side by side.  
As it is extremely unlikely that everyone will agree to stop eating meat, the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth based on food resources will fall significantly short of 10 billion, somewhere around the 7 billion figure which is past where we find ourselves now and that is without the complication of arable land becoming infertile due to the consequences of climate change and ensuing desertification and water shortages.
Throw in the issue that an increased population means greater production of the gases that cause global warming and global warming will mean less arable land, then the 10 billion figure is beyond reachable as less and less arable land leads to the current 2 billion tons of grain being reduced and therefore less of us fed.
Our present problems are the symptom but the cause is far too uncomfortable to debate but needs to be addressed somehow. No idea how though without causing outrage somewhere.

Today Is...Nikola Tesla Day

Nikola Tesla really was one of the guys that history should be kinder to, but unfortunately he is the genius that got stomped on by bigger guys and squeezed out of history until recently.
He came to America from Serbia with four pennies, a few poems and a blueprint for a flying machine in his pocket but went on to invent the electrical generator, FM radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights and the coil which is used in TV and radio transmissions.
He did show a strong commitment to the whole 'mad scientist' thing, he was celibate, afraid of round things and hated human hair, jewellery and anything that wasn't divisible by three. If they isn't nutty enough for you he also built a death ray, a portable earthquake generator and constructed a bath designed to cleanse the human body of germs using nothing but electricity, oh and tower which generated a 130-foot long bolt of lightning which remains the world record for man-made lightning.
As well as dodging hairy humans and cylindrical things, he would only stay in hotel rooms with number you could divide by three and once paid for a stay with the gift of his death ray which the owners eagerly accepted although years after his death they opened it to find a bunch of wires but that's one those the hidden benefits of being a crazy genius, say you've created a death ray and people tend to believe you.
His rival was Thomas Edison who he worked for but after he refused to give him a bonus he was due, he told him to go do one and went off on his own and while Edison was inventing boring stuff like light bulbs, Tesla invented all the cool stuff which the FBI confiscated when he died for fear of someone else building the machines and actually using them to split the world in half, the spoilsports.

US Decisions Means Killing Will Continue After War Ends

The current game plan for the Ukraine War is for the West to keep escalating it in the hope that Russia backs down by keep shoveling more powerful weapons towards Ukraine which as i have said many times, seems like throwing fuel onto a fire, or in this case weapons, and will only result in a greater death toll on both sides.
So with no World leaders clambering for peace talks, more War is the foreseeable future but there seems to be a crack in the relationship between America and the UK, EU and the other 123 nations who have signed the pact to not use the banned cluster bombs which America are shipping to Kiev.  
The British Prime Minister and the US President are due to hold a meeting in Windsor castle to discuss, amongst other things, the Cluster Bomb plans, a plan which Rishi Sunak has publicly refusing to back, citing that the UK is a signatory to a convention which prohibits the production or use of cluster munitions
and discourages their use and urged the the US to reconsider their offer.
One Conservative MP tweeted that: 'This is the wrong call and will alienate international good will. Their use leaves deadly unexploded ordnance over the battlefield, killing & injuring civilians' and there is plenty of evidence that a good portion of the bombs fail to detonate on impact and can lay undiscovered until unsuspecting civilians are blown up when they accidentally set them off.
Russia, Ukraine and the US are not signatories to the international agreement banning their use which complicates matters but as Ukraine has promised the weapons will not be used in civilian areas and not used in Russia, they will only be used in Ukrainian cities therefore condemning their own side to
further deaths from their own weapons even long after the tragic war ends.

The Truly Nasty Party

If you ever wondered why the Conservatives are called the Nasty Party, and you need yet another example of just how awful they are, then i give you the Immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, noticing some pictures of Disney characters on the walls of a centre for unaccompanied child asylum seekers
and ordering them painted over as they gave the impression the UK was welcoming to asylum seekers.
That is unaccompanied child asylum seekers being held in child detention centres being made to not feel welcome in the UK and the immigration Minister being most affronted by pictures of Mickey Mouse on the centres wall.
You have to wonder the mentality of a person like Jenrick and his equally dreadful colleague Suella Bravermann who said her dream was to fly immigrants to Rwanda but in truth the whole country has been sliding into decline since Tony Blair led us to war in Iraq which saw the Labour Party removed by voters
and usher in the Conservatives and their vile, right wing ideology.   
Painting over a picture of Mickey Mouse so not to appear welcoming to scared, frightened children is not a small thing, it defines this Government and what it represents which is everything awful and pandering to their equally abhorrent side of the political fence.