Sorry Kenya

Before his visit to Kenya, King Charles was asked for an 'unequivocal public apology' from those whose relatives suffered abuse, particularly during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.
'The wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret' he began before continuing that there were: 'abhorrent and unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans as they waged a painful struggle for independence and sovereignty' and ended by adding that there can be: 'no excuse and in coming back to Kenya, it matters greatly to me that I should deepen my own understanding of these wrongs, and that I meet some of those whose lives and communities were so grievously affected'.
There will be some who say the King shouldn't be apologising for the evils done by previous generations but in apologising we are recognising that what we did was wrong and are accepting it so hopefully it may start a trend because my own country has a lot of people to say sorry to.

Storm Ciaran Is Coming Thursday

Hang on tight to your hats because Storm Ciaran is heading our way Wednesday night into Thursday and it is going to be a whopper.
Meteorologists are predicting that the massive storm barrelling towards the UK will have the lowest air pressure on record of 948.4mb and the lower the air pressure the stronger the winds, with the highest speeds expected on the south coast.
The extreme of temperatures over North America has sped up the Jet Stream which is carrying Ciaran across the Atlantic and it is due to spit it out over the UK and the Met Office has issued an amber rain and wind weather warning from Cornwall right across the south coast to Kent between 6am and 8pm Thursday.
To rub salt in the wounds, due to the curl of the jet stream, the storm will grind almost to a halt over the UK, dumping up to 60mm of rain on an already soggy Britain causing widespread flooding but there is a chance that Ciaran may yet only clip the British Isles rather than slam into us.
'A slight shift of the storm could significantly increase or decrease the impact to the UK' said a Met Spokesman before mumbling that another storm is following Ciaran and should turn up just in time for the weekend.
I think this could be a good weekend to stay in watch Christmas Films on Great TV this weekend, if i can get home Thursday that is.

Today Is...Halloween

Back in 1984, Ray Parker Jnr posed the question that 'If there's somethin' strange in your neighbourhood, Who ya gonna call?
As we are now at the one day of the year when the veil that separates the living and the dead is at its thinnest, Ray's question is even more relevant but as the emergency services are bound to be busy dealing with the multitude of calls that 'there's somethin'  weird an' it don't look good', we should be prepared to deal with the visit from one of the living dead ourselves. Luckily, we have decades of horror films and Buffy The Vampire Slayer to fall back on so here's a handy guide on the best way to stay safe this Halloween night.

Witches
By far the most popular Halloween character you may encounter is a Witch. Although they may possess the power to turn you into a toad, witches were killed by the thousand back in medieval times and are basically just warty women with pointy hats and a broom so if a woman with a big nose and dressed all in black climbs through your window on Halloween, a blunt object to the head should cool her heels permanently.

Vampires
Vampires are the living dead, forced to feed on the livings blood. They fear sunlight, the cross, fire and a stake through their hearts. Their weakness is they always only go for the neck jugular so either sleep with a crucifix and a stake within handy grasp or wear a neck brace.

Skeletons
A skeleton reanimated by the dark arts offers the challenge of how to stop something with no brain or organs. Throwing anything at it is pointless as it will sail through between the rib-cage but the skeleton major weakness is that it is basically made of dog treats so entice the family pooch to sleep on your bed and within seconds of putting in an appearance, vital parts of it will be buried in the garden by an excited Rover.

Werewolves
Come the full moon anyone can change into a ferocious werewolf which can only be killed by a silver bullet. Unless there is a full moon this Halloween evening you are safe from having your intestines being used to decorate your bedroom walls. If it is a full moon then a silver bullet is your only salvation so you better start melting down that cheap jewellery.

Demons
Demons come in many shapes and forms but they all have something in common, they can be killed in many ways from fire to decapitation. They may come from hell and be super strong but they tend to be easily distracted. The old "Look out, behind you" ploy will give you more than enough time to grab a handily concealed battle axe and remove it's ugly head.

Killer Dolls
Sometimes the best things don't come in small packages such as dolls possessed by the spirit of a dead serial killer. As cute as they are scary, the achilles heels for any type of doll intent on driving your mums best carving knife repeatedly into you is that no matter how evil it is, its still doll sized and can be launched across the room with a swift kick. As it is only held together with a few stitches, it will only take a few of these until its limbs fall off, it's stuffing comes out and all that remains is a pile of material and dead serial killer wishing he had possessed something a bit more substantial.  

Ghosts
Ghosts are just rubbish. They can’t hurt you and the only thing they can do is make scary noises. This can ruin a good night’s sleep, but it can’t hurt you.

Killer Clowns
A relative newcomer to the hall of horrors but though they may look funny with their squirty flowers and big red noses make no mistake, while some will do no more than honk their horn at you, others will rip off your head and spin it on a wobbly pole for the rest of eternity. Luckily, clowns have a liking for
oversized shoes which can be easily nailed to the ground and a good shove will render them useless although beware cream-pies, over-sized hammers or buckets of confetti in their hands as you make your escape.

Monster Created From Parts Of Corpses
Not as popular as they previously once were but we shouldn't neglect mad scientists stitching together body parts from dead people and hooking them up to a bolt of lightning. The first problem is that it is hard to get the body parts from many different sources to fit correctly, one leg may be longer than the other, the head may be too big for the body so they have problems with co-ordination but their main weakness are their own insecurities, Frankenstein just wanted to be loved. A few put downs and ridiculing their appearance should send them running blubbing out of the room.  

Zombies
Zombies are the walking dead but their biggest drawback is they are as dumb as a post and unless you are wearing boots, trousers and a coat made from lead, you could easily outpace the slowcoaches before they get the chance to eat your brain. Fire or a bullet in the brain will stop them in their tracks.

Mummies
Mummies are just zombies wrapped up in bandages, which makes it slower and more flammable than a regular zombie. Hopeless.

Robots
Probably the least welcome thing you could find looming over you in the dead of night is a robot. Whether they are cyborgs from the future, aliens or escapees from a local tourist attraction out to kill all of mankind, robots are notoriously hard to kill.
Not only are they metallic, but they are always immensely strong and impervious to fire, bullets, hitting with blunt objects or swords and have clear, logical thought which anticipates your every move.
You cannot outrun it so the only chance you have is to confuse it's circuits with some bizarre and confusing logic that will fry it's computerised brain trying to figure out. Reading out the lyrics to any REM song will work fine.

If the abomination that has made the journey into our world is anything else, then i suggest taking up Ray Jnr's advice of picking up the phone and calling Ghostbusters although to be honest, you will probably be in 27 bits spread around the living room before the first ring.

Finally Some Answers To The Covid Debacle

The long awaited COVID inquiry is finally getting into gear and we are finding out some very uncomfortable things for the previous and current members of the Government.
Despite being advised by Health Officials, Boris Johnson was sceptical that long COVID was an actual thing and the then Chancellor, Rishi Sunak's 'Eat Out to Help Out Scheme' was described by the Chief Medical Officer as more of a eat out to help out the virus scheme' and the Government's top scientific advisers brandished Mr Sunak 'Dr Death'.
The Government were advised on 9 March 2020 that a lock-down was necessary as the pandemic would far outstrip what the NHS was capable of dealing with and the current measures being considered would not suitably manage the coming pandemic and Boris Johnson asked why the economy should be risked with lock-down for people who will die soon anyway and challenged the need for a lock-down at all.
Health Officials repeated the message on the 13th March and the 14 March however a lock-down was not announced until 23rd March, two weeks later.
With heavy hitters such as Dominic Cummings penciled in to appear this week, and that man knows where all the bodies are buried and kept meticulous notes, by the end of the week we should have a better picture of just how inept our leaders were to allow the nation to end up near the top of the COVID death
league table.

Today Is...Radio Play Of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds

As a literary masterpiece, The War of the Worlds takes readers on an exhilarating journey as Earth is invaded by Martians who have travelling billions of miles from their home planet armed with giant death machines but are foiled by our pesky bacteria.
The War of the Worlds radio broadcast was produced by Orson Welles, and to make it more interesting he based the style on a earlier BBC 2 play where it was presented as a series of news bulletins and interrupted regular programming to create an illusion of reality.
But what makes this broadcast even more fascinating is how people reacted to it. The broadcast caused widespread panic, as many listeners believed that the news bulletins were real and that aliens were actually invading the Earth. People ran to the streets in terror, and emergency services were flooded with calls.
The first few bulletins interrupted a program of live music and are relatively calm reports of unusual explosions on Mars followed by a seemingly unrelated report of an unknown object falling on a farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey.
The crisis escalates dramatically when a 'correspondent' reporting live describes creatures emerging from an alien spacecraft and incinerating local officials with a heat ray and then updates detailing the beginning of a devastating alien invasion and the military's futile efforts to stop it.
What convinced people mostly was the lack of advertisements which only happens during very rare significant events and such was the ensuing panic that a disclaimer was hastily added to the end of the programme to assure listeners that Martians hadn't actually invaded.
The BBC did try something similar many years later with a Haunted House Halloween Special but all it did was generate thousands of complaints to the BBC so not quite so exciting.

Today Is...Internet's Precursor Invented

In today's digital age, it's difficult to imagine life without the internet. From shopping online to connecting on social media, the internet has transformed our lives in many ways and it all began with a research project by the U.S. Department of Defense known as ARPANET and an Austrian actress married to a Nazi arms dealer.
The Department of Defense realised the need for a communication system that could function even if some parts of the network were damaged or destroyed so computers in different locations could contnue to communicate which led to the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).
The first message sent was 'LOGIN'and other research institutions and government agencies created their own networks and connected to the network, communicating through electronic mail and remote login, using the newly-developed system.
The protocols developed for ARPANET formed the basis for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) using the idea dreamt up by actress Hedy Lemarr's who came up with the invention of a frequency hopping spread spectrum which she developed during WW2 and tried to hand it to the NAZI's who's tornadoes kept getting jammed by radio-waves but they smiled politely and told her not to worry her pretty little head over such things.
Rebuffed, instead she went to the U.S. Navy with her technology but they also just smiled politely and suggested instead her services would be better used just looking pretty as a pin-up girl to support the troops overseas.
While there were many important people and developments that paved the way for the modern internet, Hedy Lemarr and ARPANET was instrumental in the very early stages and allow men to look at porn sites on Public Transport today.

Today Is...Christopher Columbus Lands In Cuba

Some people are born lucky and some are so incompetent its amazing that they can find their own front door but still land on their feet anyway which is exactly what happened to Christopher Columbus who found Cuba while looking for India and thought it was Japan.
To avoid confusion he called them Indians anyway but he is considered to have discovered America and the New World which must have come as a surprise to the people already lived there who had a legitimate call that they discovered it a long time before he bumbled by on the Santa Maria that day.
He came by it by sailing the wrong way to start with, heading West instead of East in search of new lands and riches and the first natives he encountered actually greeted him and he wrote in his diary that he found them to be peaceful, kind, hospitable and loving but most importantly what he did notice was that they were unarmed so with lucking into such a fertile island with abundant resources he promptly took a large group of them prisoner and interrogated them as to where they hid all their gold.
It wasn't all take though because something the European's did give to them was our diseases so measles and smallpox ravaged the native populations but the lack of resistance to native diseases went the other way also, some of the native inhabitants suffered from a new sexually transmitted disease called Syphilis that was then transmitted throughout Europe by Columbus's randy crew but months at sea will do that to a man.
Although he never reached his original destination of the East Indies, Columbus's discovery paved the way for the colonization of the Americas and the European conquest of new lands and said that it proved that he was fine sailor and navigator and if he goes looking for India, India is what he finds, even if it isn't.

Today Is...The Most Dangerous Moment In Human History

The Cuban Missile Crisis is said to be the nearest we have ever come to a Nuclear War but events today in 1962 showed just how close we really did come and how we have one Soviet Chief of Staff to thank that we never.
As the Cuban Missile Crisis was coming to a head, a group of United States Navy Destroyers noticed a nuclear armed Soviet submarine off the coast of Cuba and tried to force it to the surface by dropping depth charges.
The Submarine had been too far down to receive radio signals from Moscow and with depth charges going off around them, the captain of the submarine decided that a war must have already started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.
As it took the three top officers on the Submarine to agree to launch an attack, the three men got together and two said to launch but one, Vasily Arkhipov, was against the idea and wanted to surface first and find out from Moscow if they were actually at war.
As the majority was not reached, the submarine surfaced where it was met by the American ships and fighter jets and after a discussion around whether they were actually at war yet and on hearing they weren't, they set a course back to the Soviet Union.
Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, stated that: 'We came very, very close to nuclear war, closer than we knew at the time' and an advisor to the John F. Kennedy administration called it : 'The most dangerous moment in human history'.

Thoughts And Prayers?

When i turned on the TV this morning the first thing i heard was 'There has been a mass shooting...' and i just knew that the next words would be '...in America' and i was right because the American population has been decreased by 22 by some nut running amok with a military grade weapon.
It is fair to say that US gun laws are pretty relaxed, some would say batshit crazy but lets go with relaxed but for a nation which is perfectly fine with it's citizens shooting large holes in each other, they don't seem quite so relaxed with other things which are on the banned list.
In Georgia anyone over 21 can own a gun but you could find yourself in trouble if you have a sex toy beside the high powered rifle as it is illegal to own: 'any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs'.
In Kansas, children are not allowed to buy toy guns but as long as you are over 18 you can buy a real one
while in parts of California, peoples safety is a priority as you need a permit to walk through the streets in heels over two inches high so 18 year olds have to wear flats on their way to the gun shop.
Caviar is banned in the entire USA as are Kinder Eggs and it is illegal to label vegetarian burgers ‘burgers’ or ‘sausages’ and our own chef Nigella Lawson was banned at one point as she confessed to taking drugs, maybe they were concerned she might corrupt the American youth with her chocolate soufflé recipes.
I am sure that rather than do something about it we will shortly hear how the thoughts and prayers are being offered because that has always worked our so well.

António Guterres Was Right

António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, commented that the attacks against Israel 'did not happen in a vacuum' and Israel responded as it always does when someone dares to criticise them by saying the UN is bias and have an anti-Israel agenda and is calling for Guterres to be removed from his post but he was completely right, the current situation did not start on October 7th as many would have us believe, it has been ongoing for 75 years of death and
displacement of the Palestinian people by Israel as it militarily and brutally occupied it's neighbour.
That sentiment was shared by Jordan’s Queen Rania who gave a very eloquent speech on how western leaders were guilty of 'a glaring double standard for not condemning Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in its bombardment of Gaza' with the latest grim figures showing 7,028 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October and among the dead were 2,913 children.
Rania said: 'The people all around the Middle East, including in Jordan, we are just shocked and disappointed by the world’s reaction to this catastrophe that is unfolding. When October 7 happened, the world immediately and unequivocally stood by Israel and condemned the attack but what we’re seeing in the last couple of weeks, we’re seeing silence in the world' and ended with a withering: 'Are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family, at gunpoint, but it’s OK to shell them to death?'
Guterres also spoke of the 'epic suffering' in Gaza and said there had been 'clear violations of international law' which prohibits 'collective punishment under all circumstances. When a nation carries out collective punishment during an armed conflict, it is committing a war crime.'
Human Rights Watch have identified Israel’s use of airbursting white phosphorus in Gaza and Amnesty International asserted that Israel: 'Have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure.'
A joint statement signed by the foreign ministers of nine Arab countries, UAE, Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt and Morocco has condemned what it described as the targeting of civilians and until the Americans, Brits and other nations begin to condemn Israel for their actions as they
did Hamas, they are complicit in the Israeli war crimes murdering Palestinian civilians.

Today Is...First View Of Moon's Far Side

The idea that the Moon spins does seem a bit confusing, especially as we only ever see the one side but it is because it only shows us the one face that shows  that it is actually rotating. 
We don’t see the far side because the moon is tidally locked to the Earth so it rotates at the same speed that it rotates around the Earth, completing one full rotation on its axis in the time it takes to orbit the Earth so the same side is always turned toward us and it wasn't until 1959 and the Soviet Luna 3 that we first saw photographs what the far side looked like.
The grainy images showed that it was the complete opposite to the smooth near side and was rugged with a multitude of impact craters and few flat and dark 'seas' but rather than being dark as in receiving little sunlight, it was bathed in as much sunlight as the near side but the near side benefits from additional Earth-shine which is light reflected onto it from the Earth.
Until recently all crewed and uncrewed soft landings had taken place on the near side of the Moon until 3 January 2019 when the Chinese Chang'e 4 spacecraft made the first landing on the far side and deployed a Lunar Rover to scoot around the far side lunar surface.
It hasn't found anything of note yet, not even a NAZI Space Station which some people had said they had built over there, but mankind's adventures in Outer Space and our nearest neighbour continues.

Today Is...International Artist Day

I like to dabble with art and am capable of producing something which i look at and think, 'that went well' or equally something which looks as if a 4 year old had done in nursery which even the most loving parent would hesitate to put on the fridge so while i won't have anything selling for big bucks, they are more likely to go for a few pence to line the bottom of a budgie cage but there are some breathtaking pieces of art in existence.   
Whenever we are away we do like to wander around an art studio and i have been lucky enough to have seen many of the greats and also some which are considered great but have me wondering if there is another definition of great which i am unaware?
Anything by artists such as Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt you know what you will see is going to be a bit special, if the name is Van Gogh or Picasso not quite so much.
The impressionists i was never overly keen on but by definition they were not meant to be a direct painting of a scene, rather the way the artist saw it and quite what people like about Picasso i never understood, his efforts just looks very weird to me.
I do have a soft spot for the bright, vivid colours of Pop Art and regardless of how you feel about religion, you can't deny that it has given us some of the greatest art of all time and some of the religious paintings are breathtaking and are the reason why Angels are depicted as dressed in white and have wings because the artists gave them wings as a way to identify them from the regular people in the painting.
Another Biblical character is the Devil, him of the cloven-hoofed, pitchfork, red-skin, goatee and horns only that's how the artists painted him to make him visually striking by giving him all of the above and the image just stuck as did that of Hell with it's fire and brimstone with demons handing out punishments for eternity.
The art world does seem very male dominated for some reason, a survey of the National Gallery showed that out of the 2,300 works in it, only 11 were by women but of the paintings themselves, 85% of the nudes are female.

Today Is...United Nations Day

On the face of it the United Nations is a mighty Organisation whose purpose is to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, protect human rights, deliver humanitarian aid, achieve international cooperation and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations by upholding international law.
Starting with 51 Nations in 1945, it today has 193 which is almost all of the world's sovereign states but i can't decide if the United Nations is working or not, whether it needs to be scrapped and started again or left as it is.
We presently have five nations having a veto who can scrap anything the other 188 countries decide should happen and that is surely not very democratic, one country able to defy the will of all the others.
As with Russia who will defend its friends Syria, we have America who will hear no criticism of Israel and as we are seeing now and in the recent past with Iraq, if a country wants a war and the United Nations say no, they just ignore it anyway.
The last 78 years of United Nations existence has just been the big five, UK, USA, Russia, China and France, pursuing their own interests. The Russians have thrown down its veto 123 times, the US 83, UK 43, France 18 and the Chinese have wielded their veto 6 times.
With the exception of Israel, the United States and United Kingdom have probably been the greatest warmongers of the past 7 decades as well as the greatest arms exporters but somehow are they are most responsible for upholding global peace.
The West is always complaining about the veto powers of two permanent members (Russia and China) because it objects to the fact that it is working as it was planned to, with two nations able to pull the rug out from under their plans to do what they want.
That's where my confusion comes in, during the build up to Iraq, permanent member France whipped out the veto and stopped the US and UK the fig leaf of legitimacy and although they went ahead and invaded anyway, it did not have UN backing and was illegal therefore the UN did its job, stopping aggression and making any subsequent military action therefore illegal.
The problem seems to be that once the UN has been defied, there is no sanction against the countries attacking another one without the UN say-so so the problem isn't with the United Nations but the lack of punishment for defying it.

Today Is...Apple Releases The iPod

It wasn't that long ago that we listened to music on the go with a Walkman or portable CD player or if you were lucky an early version of an un-weidly MP3 player until Apple turned up with a small, sleek piece of work called the iPod.
The original, introduced today in 2001, was the first MP3 player to hold a mind-blowing 1,000 songs on a 5gb hard drive and had a 10-hour battery which they improved upon so when they put out the seventh and final generation in 2019, it held 14,000 songs on a 256gb hard drive and had a 40-hour battery life.
At £399 a pop, cheap was never Apple's thing, in much the same way that healthy has never really been Chips thing but that didn't stop people who love waiting in lines buying new, marginally improved products every single year if it had an 'i' in front of it.
I did have a secondhand ipod many generations behind with around 5,500 songs on it but while being able to take 5,500 songs around with you is nice, a backside related incident involving my husband, it was dumped sadly on the side crushed and with an arse shaped crack in it.
My first thought was to slap hubby with the bill for a replacement iPod but after the 10th 'sorry' cup of coffee, i began thinking do i really need 5,500 songs at my fingertips.
Truth is i spend just as much time track-skipping as i do listening to the songs and if i was able to still look at the play counter feature on the deceased player there would be  plenty of songs which would have a big fat zero next to them.
The problem is i like the idea of my whole record collection being at my disposal ready to plug into and choosing between a bit of 90's Grunge or 70's DISCO depending on my mood but it does seem to get to the wheat, i have a lot of chaff to skip through.
I estimate that of the 5,500 songs, approximately 5,000 very rarely make it into my ears apart from the first 2 seconds before it gets quickly shifted on. 
The solution then would be to just put the 500 most played songs on the MP3 player but i know that wouldn't happen, i would be tempted to put the whole lot on there again because you never know when you might need a bit of Electro Velvet singing their 2015 Eurovision Song on the way home from work.
I decided to point hubby and his debit card in the general direction of the shop to get a smaller and cheaper MP3 player with as many bells and whistle as possible, one that held just the 500 songs max, those that won't be skipped and risk me plowing into the back of a Tesco lorry as i try desperately to skip on from Adam and the Ants.
So men it really isn't true that size is important, or rather it is very important with penises but not with MP3 players.

Christmas In 64 Sleeps

Christmas is 64 Days away and once Halloween and Guy Fawkes Night is out the way, it is pedal down to Christmas and the inevitable arguments of when should the decorations go up.
If it was up to me i would never take them down but my husband is very much in the thought of putting them up mid December and then taking them down when the last of the turkey has been eaten so we normally compromise and go with untangling the fairy lights we carelessly just threw in the box when we took them down last year towards mid November.
Apparently there is a date for balancing on a chair to drape tinsel over everything while the cat climbs up the Christmas tree and it's the  the first day of Advent, which is the fourth Sunday before Christmas or the 3rd December this year.
Obviously i am keeping that particular detail quiet from hubby and will emphasise the report from Christmas Tree World who said that it is becoming more and more common for the decorations to go up earlier these days with some setting up their trees as soon as Halloween is over.  
My usual thing is to buy Mr Lucy an extravagant advent calendar and state that we HAVE to put up the decorations before December so he can be ready to open up the first door and that normally cools his heels about our door bell singing Jingle Bells or being unable to look out the living room window due to it being covered in snowflake stickers while the ashes from the bonfire's are still being cleared away. 

Not Much Protecting Of Lives I Can See

Another day of Israeli airstrikes and every spokesman that Israel wheel out to try and defend their bombing of Gaza explain that they are doing everything they possibly can to limit Palestinian to protect the Palestinian population but as as the death toll reaches an abhorrent 4,600 dead in 16 days they are obviously not doing very much.  
Compare that to the 9,614 Ukrainian civilians killed by the Russians who are another nation with little regard to who is under the bombs they drop over the past 18 months then it is an appalling number.
During conflicts all sides lie, it wasn't that long ago that Tony Blair went along with GW Bush to blatantly lied to start wars in Afghanistan and Iraq so maybe that's why the British public are not as quick to accept the Israeli propaganda about being concerned for innocent Palestinians especially when we see the shattered streets in Gaza lined with the rubble of bombed out buildings and lifeless bodies being dragged out of them.
With hospitals being hit along with schools, amenities and 5,000 Palestinian homes, how can anyone believe that Israel is targeting Hamas members only so when despite the staggering death toll, the American President and UK Prime Minister give the green light for the continuing indiscriminate bombing of an entrapped population with nowhere to go (the US vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that called for a pause in the fighting to allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza, the UK abstained) then they do so with no regard for the civilians beneath the Israeli weapons dropped from high in collective punishment.
The West's leaders quite rightly condemned Hamas for their crimes against humanity but don't seem quite so ready to condemn Israel's which is why demonstrations broke out around the World yesterday, 100,000 marching for a ceasefire yesterday in London and that number was when the police stopped counting, but with troops massing on the Gaza border waiting for the nod to invade and send the death toll skyrocketing, but then Israel has had decades to talk peace with its neighbours but only took the opportunity to subjugate and steal their land.
The danger always has been that some of those on the receiving end of 65 years of one of the greatest atrocities since the 2nd World War would retaliate with some spectacular act of cruelty which happened on 7 October.
Hopefully the silver lining, once the dead have been buried and the Palestinians and Israeli's rebuild their broken lives, is that talks regarding a two state solution will be top of the agenda because what we have had for the past 6 decades hasn't worked and as it is America that bankroll Israel to continue the horrific status quo, Biden or whoever follows has to grasp the moment, condemn Israel's indiscriminate killing of civilians as much as they condemn Hamas's and end a very long running wrong.

Today Is...The Bible's Proposed Creation Date

The Bible says that the 'Keys to Heaven Also Open the Gates of Hell' which is an awful security system but then the big guy didn't do a bang up job on the rest of things either when he created the Earth today at 6pm-ish.
That date was worked out by Irish Archbishop James Ussher using information gleaned from the Bible and announced that: 'The time and date of the creation was the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October... the year before Christ 4004" or in other words around 6pm on 22 October 4004 BC.
That would make today the Earth's 6027th Birthday if we ignore all the scientific evidence and go with the whole Universe wasn't created by the Big Bang and all the creatures, including us, evolved from single cell organisms and instead the Earth and everything on it was made by God in six days because he put his feet up on Day 7 which as it turns out, was a bit of a mistake. 
Instead of resting he could have made sure that the top layer had set properly and wouldn't crack and not fit together and slide around causing massive quakes or decided that things with big claws, poisonous fangs or sharp pointy teeth and stingers were not the best idea and after all his hard work making the Universe and blowing up some human shaped dirt pile to create man, why then build an apple tree with apples that will show mankind the difference between Good and Evil and get them kicked out of Paradise and why call it the Tree of Knowledge, why not the Tree of Stupidity or the Tree of Curses?
Obviously, as with all things Christian, the story was pilfered almost entirely from elsewhere, the Persians Avesta in this case, but that doesn't seem to put many Christian's off and they will absolutely 100% guarantee that God made the Earth and God is love and not in any way responsible for the suffering in the world.
If they focus on that then they are not thinking too hard about the icky business of the many, many generations of incest that followed those first 2 humans.

Today Is...Back to the Future Day

October 21 2015 is significant for anyone who enjoys the Back to the Future Films because in Back To The Future 2, Marty McFly is sent 30 years into the future from 1985 and arrived in a time when where there were hover boards zipping around, everyone wore self-lacing shoes and flying cars were the norm.
October 21 has been celebrated ever since but 8 years after he and the DeLorean turned up, we know that flying cars and hover boards were obviously wrong as was self lacing shoes and clothes that blow dry themselves when they get wet. We never quite made it to Jaws 19 either and Queen Diana wasn't going to be visiting Washington DC in 2015.
What they got right was video glasses which is suspiciously similar to Google Glass, voice controlled TVs with multiple screens, video games where you don't need to use your hands, video phone calls, biometric security, clothes that play sounds and scenery TV channels.  
Of course as the Doc explains the year 2015 in our reality isn't the same as the 2015 in the Back to the Future as: 'The future hasn't been written yet and every decision that is ever made effects the path of the future. One single turn or deviation would of created an alternate reality'.
So that's why there is no hover boards, flying cars, powered lace shoes or self drying clothes but someone may have deviated and created an alternative reality and i hate it when that happens.

Today Is...International Chefs Day

I do have all the standard Kitchen equipment with a full set of pans, every utensil that has ever been created and even one of those apron's which make it look as if i am cooking in a bra and suspenders although with my particular style of cooking none are really necessary.
Cooking preparation to me is reading the packaging to find out how long something has to be microwaved for and then standing around until it pings so respect to Chefs who prepare meals that look almost too good to eat, the best i can hope for it that it is edible. 
Behind my unused utensils are a couple of cookbooks by famous chefs and i am sure they are very informative if i only bothered to open them but whenever i look at the cover i just find myself wondering, What's those weird Chefs hats all about?
Apparently it's called a toque blanche from the Arabic word for white hat and apparently wearing them while cooking was a thing amongst Monks in the 6th Century to display pristine hygiene when the Byzantine Empire was stabbing and slashing it's way across Europe and the hats pointed them out as not to thrust swords at and Chefs decided they didn't particularly want to be hacked to bits either so copied the Monks headwear and once the Byzantine forces retreated, chefs continued to wear the hats and i just assumed it was a fancy way of keeping hair out of food.
In Victorian times it was the height of the hat and the amount of pleats showed how experienced you were but they seem to have become a standard size now but still signify someone is an elite Chef and not just someone leaning against the kitchen cupboards waiting for the Microwave to ping.

Finger Pointing For Al-Ahli Hospital Massacre

A missile lands on the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza and immediately Israel says they didn't do it, it was them as they would and then Hamas say they didn't do it, it was them as you would also expect them to do.
Obviously Israel and Hamas have a long history of flat out lying so you would be an idiot to take either of them at their word so we will have to wait for an independent assessment before we apportion any blame but almost 500 people died so someone has to be held to account and although Britain's backing of Israel's
ongoing slaughter in Palestine is abhorrent, Rishi got it right to not follow America's lead and immediately accept Israel at face value and blame one of the Palestinian groups.
We have already discovered that their 'evidence' included a discussion between Islamic Jihad members discussing the missile which dropped short and landed on the Hospital turned out to be fake and the Israeli Government first said they targeted rockets being launched from the Hospital roof before changing their story so not a trustworthy source to be making such a big call from.
We do know that Islamic Jihad WERE firing rockets into Israel at that time and we also know that Israel WERE firing missiles into Palestine also at that time, Israel jets had hit the same hospital days before and just prior to the Hospital being hit it had destroyed a UN run school so both were actively in a position to have hit the Hospital.
Based on footage available of the scene, experts are split between a rocket failure and an airstrike but they are all heavily emphasizing that it is not by any means conclusive as given the size of the explosion it could only be an Israeli air strike but they are also saying the crater is too shallow so that could only be made by a rocket failing. 
We can imagine that whoever is to blame, many people have already made up their minds.

Today Is...National Album Day

I like think that the music industry was being too clever for it's own good when they began selling records on Compact Disks. I'd like to think that some pony tailed ponce of a record executive sat there and thought that it was yet another way of getting us suckers for paying for the same song again having it on vinyl and tape already, we were sure to want it on CD.
Of course, what it did do was usher in new way for people to get free music as millions of people ripped the songs to their computer and shared them online.
What this has done is bought about the decline of Albums and i'm perfectly okay about that because if i'm being honest, i don't own one album that i listen to from start to finish without skipping through at least some of the tracks.
I've never been much of an album person, even in my younger days i would move the record player arm over the songs i didn't much care for after a few listens or just put my favourite songs from the Album onto a cassette and play that instead and even today i play an Album a few times and just pick the ones i like and skip past the ones i don't.
What sites like iTunes have done is almost make the Album obsolete as people don't download whole albums, they download the singles they like off them and then usually make up a compilation CD with the best songs off each album on it.
Albums sales have been down for a while although overall, music sales are up and always having one eye on the profit, record companies are going to get wise to this and stop putting out albums and just release singles until they get enough to make Best of Albums and flog us them.
It may be a few years until it reaches this point but i see it as the obvious conclusion and i can't say that i am that upset about it. I have paid money out for too many albums that have had a few decent songs and the rest that wouldn't come within a mile of being released as a single but are deemed worthy of earning a place on the Album.
I wouldn't mourn the death of the album whatsoever.

Today Is...Opium War Ends

If you remember anything from history class, you know the British Empire was a great time for us Brits to sail into a foreign land, look around and say 'Nice country you got here, we'll take it'.
Quite unreasonably some countries didn't particularity like that and tried to resist but a musket to the face soon made them a lot more compliant but it wasn't all take, sometimes we even introduced things to Johnny Foreigner such as hard drugs which is how William Jardin found himself in charge of exporting tonnes of Opium into China.  
He started out as a surgeon but trading drugs was far more lucrative so he took it up full time importing Opium in from India but when the Chinese Empire, our best customer, began to see the unfavorable side of massive, widespread heroin addiction, it made the choice of banning the drug and the Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 cases of opium that the Brits had smuggled into China.
What the Chinese Commissioner failed to understand was that Britain was making so much money that unlike their addicted citizens, they weren't going to take that laying down.
Negotiations with the Chinese were unsuccessful so Britain got ready for war but the British Foreign Secretary at that time was the Duke of Wellington and he refused to sanction a war with China.
The Chinese Qing government made greater strides in suppressing the drug trafficking and was regularly destroying the cases of opium as they arrived so when Wellington was replaced as Foreign Minister by Lord Palmerston, he was much more happy to slap the Chinese around and told them either they accept whatever the hell we threw at them or else the might of the British Navy would land on their doorstep. Oh and by the way we want a convenient outpost to unload our hard core drugs for your hopelessly addicted populace, Hong Kong looks about right so throw in that and we got a deal.
China said WTF! and that's how a large fleet of British war ships appeared on the China coast laying waste to town after town with heavy cannon fire, until the Imperial Government, forced to surrender, gave in to British demands ending the Opium Wars.
Jardin went on to became an MP and died one of the richest and most powerful men in Britain so he was lucky to have been alive in the 19th Century when Britannia ruled the waves, a great time to be British or a Chinese Opium addict.

Today Is...International Day for Eradication of Poverty

According to the charity Oxfam, the Worlds top 100 richest people earn enough money, $240 billion, to end world poverty four times over.
'It's gotten so out of control between rich and poor that one of the obstacles to solving extreme poverty is now extreme wealth' said Ben Phillips, a campaign director at Oxfam.
'We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many. Concentration of resources in the hands of the top one per cent depresses economic activity and makes life harder for everyone else – particularly those at the bottom of the economic ladder. In a world where even basic resources such as land and water are increasingly scarce, we cannot afford to concentrate assets in the hands of a few and leave the many to struggle over what’s left'.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty and 2.7 billion live on less than $2 a day which the The World Bank defines as the poverty line.
Maybe we should ask the third of the starving population how the Capitalism system is working out for them because for 100 people, it's brilliant.
What is brilliant is if you are flogging weapons as the top five military giants accounted for 62% of the total global expenditure with the United States once again topping the league, then China and India, Russia and Saudi Arabia's making the top five spenders of over £2 trillion.
The World Bank put the percentage of people living in Poverty around the World at 23% with 15% in America, 7% in China, 68% in India, 14% in Russia and 20% in Saudi Arabia so for the £2 trillion spent, if you asked them if they wanted the obscene money spent on weapons or spent improving their lot, you might get a different answer.
One of the best speeches was made by American President Dwight Eisenhower who said: 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed', okay, so he went on to threatened to nuke China and spent billions on nuclear tests while helping with the dropping of napalm on the Vietnamese so he was all mouth and trousers but the thought was there.

Today Is...Marie Antoinette's Death

When you have fifteen other brother and sisters it can be tough to stand out but the Antoinette family were nothing if not determined so the parents tried to marry them off to all the richest and grandest families of Europe which is why at the family Christmas gatherings you had the Queen of Naples and Sicily,  the
Duchess of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, a Holy Roman Emporer, King of Hungary and Bohemia and Grand Duke of Tuscany, a Governor of the Duchy of Milan, Modena and Reggio and one who would become the very last Queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
She is alleged to have said 'Let them eat cake' when she found out the people of France were out of bread and starving which makes her sound a right bitch but in an impressive game of Chinese Whispers which included the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it became attributed to her.
She married Louis XVI when she was 14 and he was 15 and the main part of why she was so hated by the French was because the country was bankrupt due to him sending massive amounts of Francs to support the American Revolution but she did have particular grand tastes, liking diamonds, gold and beautiful clothes and on the farm attached to the Palace she had the animals sprayed with expensive perfume because they stank which seems fair enough, more perfume at farms is a ruling i could definitely agree with.
Once imprisoned by the Revolutionaries and after a disastrous escape pan was foiled, it was off to the guillotine they went and after watching her husbands head bounce off the block and into a basket, she climbed the steps and accidentally stepped on the executioners foot and naturally apologised for her clumsiness.
Looking back now she probably should have just kicked him really, really hard in the knackers because what was the worst he could do?

Not A Good V Evil Thing

Israel and Palestine has always been a dividing issue, it seems you have to be either pro-Israel or pro-Palestine and in the UK it is not a left v right political thing or even a religious v atheist thing, i know people on both sides of both these divides who are pro or anti one or the other so i am not entirely sure where the line is drawn but i know where my sympathies lie and it is entirely on a human level.
I don't see an innocent child killed by a Hamas bullet fundamentally different from an innocent child killed by an Israeli missile strike on their home, both will have shattered families grieving over them.
Hamas war crimes seem to be used by some as a way to stop condemnation of Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians, you can't condemn one sides war crimes and not the other but you can have sympathy for the victims of both sides and call for the stopping of even more, that's just being human.  
It is fine to denounce yesterdays horror carried out by Hamas and express concern about the thousands of Palestinian civilians who are likely to be killed in tomorrows Israeli led carnage.
It is not good against evil however much the politicians try and paint it this way, it is natural to feel Israel’s fear and rage, horror at Hamas murdering people because it was humans beings the same as us and it will be human beings now being killed in Gaza.
Nobody with any conscience should be supporting Hamas or willing Israel to equal and surpass the death toll in Gaza in some knee jerk, ghastly revenge of mass deaths because neither bring us closer to a future in which the horrors in Israel and Gaza are less likely to recur.
Israeli's are calling it their 9/11 and in many ways it is similar but we can only hope that the response is different to America's which unleashed an orgy of mass killings in Afghanistan and Iraq and did not bring back one of the 3,000 killed that day, just made more families in both far away countries feel the exact
same way the victims families at home did.  
Unfortunately history tells us what Israel will do and also tells us that the Palestine death toll is going to be appalling and at the end of it all, once the smoke has cleared, all we will have left is tens of thousands of weeping families on both sides and if you are fine with that then your moral compass really needs some serious readjusting.

Down To Earth With A Bump

After travelling 157.4 million miles and 5,963 orbits around the Earth, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio literally came down to Earth with a bump after after 371 days in the International Space Station becoming the second longest ever a human has stayed in space behind Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov who spent 437 days onboard the Mir Space Station in the mid 1990s.
His time in orbit was extended in March after the spacecraft he and his crewmates had been due to fly home in developed a coolant leak but when he finally did get back down he was greeted by Gravity and a hospital worth of medical services which is why the idea of a Mars mission which would see humans in space for 3 years seems still beyond us .
His extended trip in space will provide valuable insights into how humans can cope with long-duration spaceflight but we already know the effects of spaceflight on the human body from other space travellers and none of them are beneficial.
Muscle and bone mass quickly begins to diminish in space, as much as 2% for every month they spend in space and it can take four years for their bone mass to return to normal after returning to Earth.
The lack of gravity pulling down on their bodies also mean that their spines elongate slightly leading to issues such as back pain while in space and slipped disks once back on Earth and with no gravity, blood can accumulate in the head and pool at the back of the eye and around the optic nerve, leading to changes in the eyes structure.
Most seriously the prolonged journey into space damages an Astronauts DNA strands and a sharp drop in white blood cells which affects immunity so we shouldn't try to run before we can walk until science develops a way to travel faster then we can currently to shorten the trip, develop some form of artificial gravity aboard the rockets or we create a string of fully equipped regular stopping off points.

Gonna Need Some Better Gloves

We have been hearing scary Climate Change stories for decades now but it seems only recently now that people are actually dying from it that people have started taking proper notice of all the warnings but i heard a new one today from a scientific meeting with the Environmental Audit Committee's sub-committee and it regards something called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) weakening which had us all scrambling for Google.
The AMOC is a key, large system of ocean currents that influences the UK climate and it carries warm water from the tropics northwards into the North Atlantic but importantly as it does it, some evaporation occurs, which increases the amount of salt which makes the water denser and this dense water sinks deep into the ocean and is carried southwards below the surface before being pulled back to the surface and warms again and completes the circulation.
Oceanographers have been measuring the AMOC continuously since 2004 and found that each year it has been growing weaker and current trends show that it will continue due to the Climate Change's effect on the warming Oceans which is retaining more heat so less sinking of the cold water and less warm water flowing northwards which will directly effect the British weather as the AMOC keeps Britain from the harsh winters such as Canada and Russia who are on the same line of latitude as us.
If the AMOC collapses then the UK will lose that protection and plunge the UK into a much colder climate although scientists said they needed to research it further to know for certain how the UK would be affected but they can say with a high degree of certainty that the AMOC will collapse at sometime and offered up 'a robust estimate' of between 2050 and 2095.
So if it does stop abruptly, what sort of temperatures can Britain expect was the question and the answer was based on the last time the AMOC collapsed, around 12,000 years ago during the last Ice Age, which saw surface air temperatures in the UK drop by approximately 8°C so we would expect
far greater levels of snowfall during the colder months and reduced rainfall during summer and a widespread loss of arable land.
As a typical UK Winter has temperatures of between 0°C and 7°C and we could be looking at greater levels of snow and -8°C and 1°C, i think i may need some better gloves as i don't think my fingerless ones will cut it anymore.

Today Is...Global Handwashing Day

With all this hand scrubbing going on over the last few years, the advice is that you wash your hands for 20 seconds but you need some sort of timer to know when you've reached that 20-second threshold and the NHS recommended song is Happy Birthday sang twice.
The British Government did make a half-hearted attempt to make the 'official' hand washing song 'God Save The Queen' but that didn't last very long but there are better well known songs that come in with a 20-second choruses, just don't skimp on the instrumental parts or the long held notes.
The chorus to Ironic by Alanis Morrisette is exactly 20 seconds as is Copacabana by Barry Manilow, You Could Be Mine by Guns N Roses, What's Love Got To Do With It by Tina Turner, Eye Of The Tiger by Survivor, Hotel California by The Eagles, Africa by Toto and even Greased Lightning if you can work out what the hell the chorus is, i have been listening to it for decades and still don't know what that second line is and was singing 'Go Grease Lightning, you're close enough to hit that child' which i assume is wrong.
Obviously as we are an advanced people and listen to scientists, there is one man in a white coat we have to thank for working out that washing our hands is the hygienic thing to do even if his reward for wandering onto History's highway and discovering something that changes the world for the better was to be ignored and die in a mental hospital.
Ignaz Semmelweis was a doctor and trainer at a Viennese Hospital and pondered one day why so many women who came to the clinic not only gained a baby but a deadly disease and a light-bulb went off above his head when he noticed that doctors were carrying particles on their hands and instruments from the autopsy room to the pregnant patients they examined and suggested they perform a simple hand washing task after handling dead guys.
As this almost immediately got the death rate down he wrote a book suggesting that doctors should wash their hands and instruments between the autopsy room and the birthing rooms to avoid contamination but rather than be chaired on shoulders around Vienna in triumph, what happened was monocles popped out all over Europe as the continents stuffiest old coots harrumphed in rage at the suggestion that doctors hands were dirty enough to kill people.
Semmelweis was dismissed from his job at the hospital, began drinking heavilly and ranted about his doctors were continuing to kill patients and the medical profession invited him to have a look at the new Viennese Insane asylum which proved to be a bad move on his part because when he got there they beat him, threw him into a straight jacket and locked him in a cell where he died two weeks later.
It is probably little consolation that many years later scientists confirmed his idea, called it Germ Theory of Disease and the rest of the world came around to the concept of washing their hands to keep from getting sick and decided that he wasn't a nut after all. Ooops.

Only One Way Out Of This Never-Ending Conflict

On every news channel this past week, the main story has been the attack on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas which horrifically killed more than 1,300 Israelis, most of them civilians, and taking more than 100 hostage.
Israel then responded by ordering a 'complete siege' of Gaza Strip and cutting off their gas, electricity and water and launched massive airstrikes which has killed more than 1,600 Palestinians and displaced more than 263,000 people, the vast majority of them also civilians.
With an Israeli land offensive being lined up Gazan's, in the North have been told to move south and stories are emerging of Israeli rockets landing amongst lines of retreating people so we now have an atrocious situation with civilians on both sides suffering the consequences and the response of our leaders has been utterly despicable because instead sending supplies of much needed food & medicines, they are sending warships to aid a nation which is already armed to the back teeth and giving Israel explicitly unconditional support to collectively punish the 2.38 million people in Gaza.
It is the same situation in Ukraine where rather than calling for a ceasefire on both sides, they send arms which just means more destruction, more death and more war.
I am no friend of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians but nor can i support the extremist murderers which are Hamas, nothing justifies the slaughter of innocent people including babies but sadly, that's exactly what is happening to innocent Palestinians now and will continue to happen until the Palestinian death toll inevitably escalates to such heart wrenching levels that the World unites in it calls for a ceasefire.
Any sympathy Israel receives is immediately devalued by it's disproportionate reaction to any attack and yet they never try to consider why they are being attacked so how can there not be even more attacks on them when nobody is even asking that question?
All the time the question of the Palestinians remained unresolved the cycle of violence will continue and create even more hatred on both sides of the conflict and fuel the next war which will see us back in this same situation, the same situation which has been going on for decades and which UN figures show have led to 7,187 Israeli and 103,826 Palestinian deaths since 2008. 
Warships and aiding and abetting more killing won't help, sensible leadership and finally sorting out an issue which has been dragging on since 1948 is the only way out of further bloodshed and why leaders either can't, or refuse to contemplate, joining up the dots saddens me

Today Is...World Day Against the Death Penalty

On World Day Against the Death Penalty Day, i have never understood the hypocrisy of the state killing someone for killing someone because apart from being a show for other people to hopefully act as a deterrent and satisfying a need for revenge, what does it do?
For the state to take a life as a punishment for taking a life doesn't seem a very civilised way of doing things but despite it being abolished in most civilised nations, it continues in some and in 2022 there were 33 countries who dealt with their more unsavoury members of society by shooting, hanging, injecting or in some cases chopping their head of with a sword in the town centre.
Amnesty International have gathered together the statistics and the top state executor is China who refused to hand over the data but Amnesty consider the executed number is measured in the thousands.
The second highest state executor was Iran (507+) then Saudi Arabia (146), Iraq (125+), Pakistan (60+), Egypt (35+), Somalia (24+), USA(23) and Jordan (15).
While 33 countries carried out executions in 2022, the Amnesty figure reflects a decline of use of the death penalty with 21 countries that did not carry out an execution despite not having abolished the death penalty.
It still means that that there are nearly five times as many countries not executing prisoners as those that still do and looking at the names of the countries on the list, some you are not surprised to see included  while some you hope would be embarrassed to find themselves included with such company.

Today Is...Friday the 13th

For the superstitious amongst us, when it comes to bad luck, there are crossing paths with a black cat, walking under a ladder and breaking a mirror but Friday the 13th is probably the most feared even if nobody can give a precise answer why.
If you have an irrational fear of the date that makes you a paraskevidekatriaphobian which is a form of triskaidekaphobia, a fear of both spelling Nazi's and the number 13.
There are only two Friday the 13ths in 2023 and we got the first out of the way in January so if you made it through unscathed then you only have to get through today and it's a free run until the next one in September 2024.  
In pagan times Friday was named after the Goddess and Queen of Asgard Frigg and her day was thought to be a lucky day to get married but as Christianity gained momentum in the Middle Ages, Christian leaders objected to the worship of the Goddess as unholy and said that Frigg had been banished to a mountain where she would meet every Friday with eleven witches and the devil and plot ill turns of fate for the coming week.
Christian's point to the Last Supper as the reason why 13 is an unlucky number as Judas Iscariot was the last member to arrive and Jesus was crucified on a Friday but predating that was the Norse myth of the God Loki being the 13th member of the banquet in Valhalla and tricking the blind god Hodr into shooting his brother Balder, the god of light, joy and goodness, with a mistletoe-tipped arrow, killing him instantly.
This myth spread south throughout Europe with the Norsemen invasions and the Christians included it in their Bible with the Norse Gods at a banquet replaced by Jesus and his band of merry men at a supper.
The Friday part comes from Friday being said to be the day that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, the day Cain murdered his brother, Abel, the day the Temple of Solomon was toppled and the day Noah’s ark set sail in the Great Flood.
It wasn’t until the 19th century, however, that Friday 13th became synonymous with misfortune when the Victorians combined Friday and the number 13 together and it has persisted ever since except in the Taylor Swift household who explains that as she was born on the 13th, turned 13 on Friday the 13th,her first album went gold in 13 weeks, her first No. 1 had a 13-second intro and when she won her first award she was sat in the 13th seat, the 13th row in row M, which is the 13th letter, so she has no problem at all with the number and is rather fond of it.
Very impressive but even more so if she releases a song which rhymes paraskevidekatriaphobia.

Today Is...World Hospice and Palliative Care Day

I don't know if i could think of a harder, more emotional and upsetting job than that of a palliative care nurse, caring for patients in the last few weeks of their lives but Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent years doing this incredible job and has written a very poignant book called 'The Top Five Regrets of the Dying'.

Bronnie recorded their regrets and the top most reoccurring of those at the end of their lives are:

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. 'This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called 'comfort' of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again'.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 'Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying'.

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. 'Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result'.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. 'This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children's youth and their partner's companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence'.

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 'This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it'.

Today Is...World Egg Day

I do love the way us Brits can have a bit of laugh with our former colonies. Probably the former colony we laugh at, sorry with, the most is the Australians. The didgeridoo playing antipodeans seem to have this image of us Brits being a bit whiny. Not sure where this comes from and i'm also not sure why it is us who are the Poms. The first British settlers in Australia were convicts sentenced to transportation to the other side of the World wearing uniforms with 'POHM' which stood for 'Prisoner of His Majesty' on the back.
If anything we are law abiding non-Poms and they are the ones with the criminal element in their family.
Now the boomerang throwers have ignited a controversy with an Australian egg company launching the Whingeing Pom Egg, complete with a frowny face.
The carton says the eggs: 'Help you to wake up cranky and keep on whingeing all day long'.
In a press release, the company claims it studied 'behavioural traits of the Poms in their natural habitat' and quotes a Professor who states that: 'Our research found that the English preferred to wake up in a less optimistic, less good-humoured mood. Further still, we found that the gene responsible for whingeing is larger in Poms than any other race, particularly Aussies, confirming that whingeing is actually part of the Brits' generic make-up.'
Fair dinkum mates, those eggs will go perfectly with those chips on the Aussie's shoulders.
Now a nation that couldn't take a joke would comeback with Aussie eggs with little arrows on them all chained together or something but us Brits are above all that.
Got to give the Aussie credit though, they seem to have the courage of their convictions. Ahem.

Israel & Being Jewish

It is always sadly inevitable that in light of what is happening in Gaza, the less intelligent among us take it upon themselves to attack Jews and synagogues in retaliation for Israels actions as they are unable to distinguish between a country and a countries religion.
Jewish schools have had to step up security as concerns grow about a rise in antisemitism and it being directed at children with some Jewish schools advising pupils not to wear blazers in public places so they cannot be identified as Jewish.
I expect in the coming days we will hear of attacks on Jews on synagogues and other Jewish buildings and anti-Semitic slogans daubed on shops in areas with a high Jewish contingent as well as physical assaults and we can expect them because it is a pattern with which we are sadly familiar with.
Police have stepped up patrols in the Jewish communities due to a violent minority here unable to separate Israel and Judaism and attack innocent civilians whose only connection with Israel is their religion.
Being Jewish does not make you an Israeli as being Roman Catholic does not make you Italian so engage the few braincells that you possess and stop the mindless violence against an innocent population. If you feel that strongly, boycott Israeli goods or join one of the many demonstrations against Israel but don't take out your anger on innocent people who are probably as disgusted at Israel over the past decades as you are if you only bothered to ask.

Today Is – The Women's Social and Political Union Formed

As a name the Suffragettes was much more catchy but it started off as The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and was a women-only political movement and leading militant organisation campaigning for women's suffrage run by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia.
Women didn't win the right to vote with just polite rhetoric, the WSPU were downright militant and engaged in active acts of vandalism such as smashing windows, arson, detonating pipe bombs, sabotaging communication lines, holding demonstrations and plotting to kidnap of members of Parliament with Pankhurst saying the groups goal was to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe.
In one day British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith narrowly missed being cut in half by an axe thrown by one of their members and then had to be dragged from a burning theatre after they set fire to it during a speech.
At least five people were killed and 24 injured and 250 suffragettes were imprisoned where they engaged in hunger strikes and were subject to force-feeding but it kick-started the process which eventually led to women's suffrage and general agreement that, yes, women were members of society and all it took was protesting and disturbing meetings of old white dudes.
They learnt Jiu-Jitsu after watching colleagues get beaten and sometimes even killed by the police and some got so good at it that they became Pankhurt's own personal bodyguards armed with clubs, following her the length and breadth of the country but they were not above trying to outwit and embarrass the hostile male population men who heckling and trying to oppress them.
The WSPU had some great, pre-written lines ready to spit out at open-air meetings such as the classic answer to one elderly man who shouted that if the female speaker was his wife he would poison her and the retort: 'and if I were your wife I’d take it'.
It was a hard struggle and all they wanted was for powerful men to give them the vote or explain to their mothers, wives, girlfriends and daughters why they didn't believe in equality for women.

Today Is...Leif Erikson Day

The question must be if he was alive today how would he feel about Christopher Columbus stealing his glory by 'discovering' America 500 years after he did.
The difference was he meant to find it, Colombus sort of bumped into it while he was looking for somewhere else.
Vikings had some pretty weird beliefs that the Earth and everything on it came from the sweat of a giant's armpit and when he turned up in 1002 it must have been pretty obvious why they thought it, phew.
They were lucky to get there at all really, his crew included Asgard the Clumsy who died while eating breakfast in bed and accidentally stabbed himself to death with his own dagger.
It is only recently that Erikson's name has began to be mentioned, not that he would notice, he would be far too busy in Valhalla drinking all day and fighting all night.
There really wasn't much worth seeing or pillaging in the new land, the natives were also a bit weird, so he only hung around a short while and then returned to Greenland.
As it turned out Columbus then came along much later and started slaughtering the inhabitants, and it is the Vikings who had the reputation for that so while his story is an epic saga of Viking warriors sailing their long boats into a terrifying unknown to find a new continent, the story that's get told is of some creepy Italian with a freaky beard who got lost, found a land by accident and then bashed up the locals.
Leif Erikson's film would have been much better so get on it Hollywood, and see if you can get that hunky Alexander Skarsgård to play him and Nicholas Cage would be ideal for that moron Asgard.

Today Is...Che Guevara Captured In Bolivia

There are a few essential things that a student must have when he leaves home and moves into Student accommodation, one of them is the obligatory poster of the left wing pin-up, Che Guevara, to hang on the bedroom wall.
Despite being captured and killed by Bolivians aged only 39, the iconic image of the one time Argentinian medical student is still as well known today as anytime over the past 55 years even if the story of how he and Fidel Castro overthrew the evil Cuban dictator President Fulgencio Batista is hazy to today's teenagers.
They can quote his famous and defiant last words to the Bolivians ('Shoot, coward, you're only going to kill a man') and they can tell you how he risked his life to overthrow a corrupt dictator in Batista for the downtrodden Cubans while tending to wounded enemy soldiers although not telling, or possibly just not knowing, how he cold-heartedly signed orders to execute prisoners without trial.
Mostly what they don't see is the irony of the man's image who died for his Communist beliefs, can now be bought on any number of tacky merchandise which would of horrified Che but shows that his image has continued to resonate.
Che's image is kept alive by today's new Socialists who says they are continuing to spread the message carried by Che and even Nelson Mandela referred to him as 'an inspiration for every human being who loves freedom'.
To today's young the image stands for rebellion and a man who stood up for the little guy against a more powerful foe, fighting and dying, for his beliefs while to the generation of older hippies and socialists he also stood for an ideology although that can get confusing because you have Communist, Socialist, Marxist and Trotskyists even if they all tend to wear a beret, hold their fists in the air occasionally and call everyone brother or sister.
If you don't do any of the above then you are probably a selfish right wing capitalist pig dog who had pictures of Margaret Thatcher on your wall and own a book of Hitler quotes.

And So It Goes On

Horrific scenes on TV this morning after Hamas launched an attack it named 'Operation Al Aqsa Storm' on Israel with militants crossing into Israel using paragliders, boats and on foot while raining down 5,000 missiles on it's town and cities.
The number of dead inside Israel currently stands at 250 with 1,452 Israelis wounded and civilians and soldiers taken hostage and in retaliation, Israel attacked Gaza in what it called 'Swords of Iron' and 232 Palestinians have been killed and 1,610 wounded, many from an 11 story block of flats which was hit and in the bombing of two Gaza Hospitals which have resulted in the deaths of Medecins Sans Frontieres nurses and doctors.
As the Palestinians have been under a murderous Israeli military occupation for over 70 years, the reasons behind the Hamas attack are plenty but nobody should be condoning their actions, there is never any justification for murdering innocent people going about their business but Israel has been literally getting away with murder for decades and have been backed by America and Western allies.
Immediately following the attack we had the American President and UK Prime Minister saying Israel had the right to defend itself which it certainly does, but then the same goes for the Palestinians and many have pointed out the juxtaposition of the West's support for Ukraine in their struggle against the military occupation by Russia to the reaction of the military occupation of Palestine by Israel.
To me if you are supporting the occupier in any scenario then you are backing entirely the wrong side but both sides have to be condemned for their appalling acts, Hamas for attacking Israeli citizens and Israel for occupying and murdering Palestinians in their thousands for decades.
The fear is that the battle will escalate out with Lebanon groups saying they are watching the situation and Iran who have said they will 'stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem'.
The U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken urged the Palestinian Authority to restore calm and stability in the West Bank in a call with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas but a return to calm and stability is the Palestinians standing by while Israel attacks them and steals their land so the cycle will continue until the International Community take steps to end the occupation, stop backing Israel so slavishly and move towards the feted two-state solution.
Until then Palestine will attack Israel, Israel will attack Palestine and the families of innocent Israeli's and Palestinians will continue to bury their dead relatives so something has to change.