St. Andrews Day

Do you know what’s quite interesting about Scotland, kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky and tartan?
None of them is Scottish. Scotland is named after the Scoti, a Celtic tribe from Ireland, who arrived in what the Romans called Caledonia in the fifth or sixth century AD. By the eleventh century they dominated the whole of mainland Scotland.
‘Scots Gaelic’ is actually a dialect of Irish and Kilts were invented by the Irish but the word ‘kilt’ is Danish (kilte op).
The bagpipes are ancient and were probably invented in Central Asia. They are mentioned in the Old Testament (Daniel 3: 5, 10, 15) and in Greek poetry of the fourth century BC. The Romans probably brought them to Britain but the earliest Pictish carvings date from the eighth century AD.
Haggis was an ancient Greek sausage (Aristophanes mentions one exploding in The Clouds in 423 BC) and Oat porridge has been found in the stomachs of 5,000-year-old Neolithic bog bodies in central Europe and Scandinavia.
Whisky was invented in ancient China. It arrived in Ireland before Scotland, first distilled by monks. The word derives from the Irish uisge beatha, from the Latin aqua vitae or ‘water of life’.
The elaborate system of clan tartans is a complete myth stemming from the early nineteenth century. All Highland dress, including what tartan or plaid there was, was banned after the 1745 rebellion. The English garrison regiments started designing their own tartans as an affectation, and to mark the state visit of King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Queen Victoria encouraged the trend, and it soon became a Victorian craze.

Having said that, the Scots have not been idle.  
Inventions and discoveries include adhesive stamps, the Bank of England, bicycle pedals, Bovril, the breech-loading rifle, the cell nucleus, chloroform, the cloud chamber, colour photography, cornflour, the cure for malaria, the decimal point, electro-magnetism, the Encyclopædia Britannica, finger-printing, the fountain pen, hypnosis, hypodermic syringes, insulin, the kaleidoscope, the Kelvin scale, the lawnmower, lime cordial, logarithms, lorries, marmalade, motor insurance, the MRI scanner, the paddle steamer, paraffin, piano pedals, pneumatic tyres, the postmark, radar, the raincoat, the reflecting telescope, savings banks, the screw propeller, the speedometer, the steam hammer, tarmac, the teleprinter, tubular steel, the typhoid vaccine, the ultrasound scanner, the United States Navy, Universal Standard Time, vacuum flasks, wave-powered electricity generators and wire rope.
Thanks Scotland.

Great Until The Last Bit

Due to their being an estimated septillion stars in the observable universe and the total number significantly higher as it is just the number in the bit of universe we can see, the chances that the Earth is the only planet with life on it is madness and it is assumed alien civilisations do exist but we just haven't found them and by the same token, it is doubtful they have found us so they are not coming all this way to not say hello and just make patterns in wheat fields or stick a probe up the odd drunken rednecks backside.
What i assume also is that they are more advanced than us, we only came up with successfully leaving our Planet's gravity 70 years ago so they could have a massive start on us if we were busy hanging around in trees 6 million years ago and trying to not get getting eaten by a massive Dire Wolf when they managed it but a team of scientists from the UK, US, Sweden and India say they can prove that we are clever enough to track them down.
The international team of researchers have devised a way to search for extraterrestrial megastructures, known as Dyson spheres and say they have  identified seven of these huge things lurking in the Cosmos.
A Dyson sphere is a swarm of objects that orbits around a star to harness it's energy and the team say they have detected the technosignatures from these potential Dyson spheres.
Analysing data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia map of stars, as well as the 2MASS infrared astronomical survey and NASA’s WISE infrared astronomy space telescope to carry out their work, they investigated around 5 million sources to build a catalogue of potential Dyson spheres and after sifting the possible wheat from the chaff: 'Have identified candidates that display anomalous infrared excesses that cannot be attributed to any known natural source of such radiation such as nebulae and background galaxies' the researchers say.
From five million down to seven and the researchers feel confident that these seven are legitimate but then, right at the end they add:  'We acknowledge that there could be other reasons why the group is emitting excess infrared and additional analyses are definitely necessary to unveil the true nature of these sources' which kinda punctures the rest of it.
Bloody spoilsport scientists with their caution and insistence on rigorous testing and peer-reviewing as they continually build up their knowledge of things over centuries and centuries.

Evolutionary Waste

Modern day Humans are the product of thousands of years of evolution so it's no surprise that sometimes we come with a few spare parts which are left overs from our earlier incarnations so what remnants of ancient ancestors have we still got that we don't need and what where they for anyway?  
The Appendix is a small pouch attached to the large intestine which in our early incantation helped digest tough plant matter and acted as a reservoir for beneficial gut bacteria but now the only thing is does is sometimes explode and get hastily removed.
The Coccyx is also sometimes called the Tailbone which is exactly what it is, the remnant of vertebrae that once formed a tail in our mammalian ancestors to hep balance while swinging about tree branched but since we learnt to walk upright, it's just something whose only use is to be difficult to spell and make Microsoft Word underline it when you write about how we don't need it but are stuck with it.
Wisdom Teeth were useful to our larger jawed forefathers as they were ideal for grinding down a tough raw diet of plants and meat but as we now cook and soften our food, our jaws have shrunk but the Wisdom teeth didn't get the memo and still turn up and sometimes have to be surgically removal.
We have have lost most of our body hair but the Arrector Pili Muscles are still inside the hair follicles and where they were once great for contracting and making us appear larger to whatever wanted to eat us for lunch, now when they contract they just give us goosebumps when we are frightened or cold which is a pretty naff thing to have as we already know and dont need our non-existent hair to tell us.  
The Auricular Muscles allowed our earliest ancestors to move their ears to better pinpoint sounds like a dog or cat but since evolution gave us the ability to turn our heads, they just sit there giving some people the ability to wiggle their ears which is a pretty cool party trick to be fair.
In the forearm is the Palmaris Longus Muscle which helped ancestral primates to climb trees and grip branches but since a massive meteor wiped out the dinosaurs and we could come down from the trees without getting trodden on by a Woolly Mammoth, no use but still it remains as a handy source for tendon grafts in surgery apparently.
Back in the day when we were somewhere between being ex-fish and wannabe apes, we had a third eyelid called the Plica Semilunaris which slid across the eye for protection and moisture and though many animals such as birds and reptiles still have them, we have regular eyelids and tears so don't need it so it has shrivelled to that small fold of tissue in the inner corner of the eye.

You're Ai, And You Know You Are

Is nothing safe from the cold, dead hands of artificial intelligence? Certainly not if you’re in the business of trying to win football matches because it's the the game’s newest double act.
It has crept in like Gabriel Magalhães at the back post at a corner kick and is being used in tracking player movement to offering tactical tweaks and has been as common at training grounds as bibs and traffic cones and is now being used by clubs to predict fatigue and even scout kids while they are still trying to grapple with which of Henry VIII's wives lost their heads.
VAR, of course, burst onto the scene and with semi-automated off-sides, it is conspiring to make us celebrate twice, once when he ball hits the back of the net and again once it has been checked for 5 mins to determine the strikers big toe wasn't in an offside position when he prodded it in.
Obviously many workers are concerned that Ai will be taking their jobs and many Employers are pondering on whether to allow the machines who don't need paying, holidays or coffee breaks to take the strain but what about football?
The Seattle Reign head coach, Laura Harvey, admitted that she had used ChatGPT to help determine her team’s tactics, asking it what formation would win them the most games in the National Women's Soccer League  and it spurted out every team in the league and what formation they should play.
They are currently 5th in the 14 team league and last season they finished 13th and having won 10 games so far against their 5 wins last season, it seems Ai may be asked for tactics and suggestions by managers all over so AI isn't going to be put on the Subs bench anytime soon as it turns into a real life version of Football Manager. 

Why Are We Left Or Right?

Interesting question, why do people become leftwing or rightwing?
Personally, i'm not sure i was even aware of a left or right wing ideology when i become 'a lefty', i had my views and later found out that they chimed with the Left but then my parents were both Lefties so it could have been i was raised to have those views from a young age, i also grew up in the era of Margaret Thatcher and her cruel right wing ideology so that probably had an effect also.
Maybe it is nothing to do with nurture and is down to nature as perhaps some people are just drawn to a certain side of an ideology but i lean more towards it being a result of parenting, society and our own experiences or even out of antagonism towards ideological parents and their upbringing.    
I asked someone at the Political Psychology Section at the British Psychological Society and they seemed to think that it is a bit of Nature and Nurture, Nature designates our temperament and our emotional experiences and Nurture which shapes our sensitivities and emotional responses. The strongest emotion, they said, is empathy and how much we empathise with others and the more empathy we hold, the more a person will lean to the left and less empathy often result in leaning more to the right.
They did say that political ideology is not fixed though and as we live our life social tribes,  exposure to other ideas, friends, family, media, teaching, what we read and learn all go into our ideology all mixed with a healthy dash of a private inner sense of what is right and wrong.
Very interesting, i love a bit of Psychology and I am sure they know what they are talking about but i always refer back to a 2013 study published in Psychological Science that found  people with right-wing views are less intelligent than those of us with left wing views.
The British Cohort Study found that right-wingers tend to be less intelligent, have lower reasoning ability and more racist and homophobic views than left-wingers and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to hold right-wing views.
Nice to have it clarified by science and remember if you are unfortunate enough to come across a Right Winger, remember talk slow to them...they are not too bright (or they had right wing parents and therefore little empathy).

 

FOAB: An Apology

 
To all staff,

It is with a heavy heart that I take keyboard in hand to inform you of the resignation of both my parents, the General Father of FOAB, Mr P,  and also the blogs Mother, Mrs P, the Chief Executive Officer of FOAB.
Please rest assured that during this turbulent time for our blog, our commitment to blogging is undimmed.
As you will be aware, the FOAB output has been under intense scrutiny in recent days, following complaints about our Posts from President Donald J Trump.
We always welcome that scrutiny and the opportunity to correct errors which is why i commissioned an investigation of bias within FOAB and found the resulting Memo deeply disturbing as it was found a systemic bias for describing the US president as being as thick as a whole carpenters store of planks of wood as well as being a 'giant Orange toddler', 'Mango Moron' and an 'Apricot coloured Fascist'.
Worse than that, FOAB made repeated mentions of the lies the US President made about his extremely close friendship with the most prolific pedophile in the modern era without explanation that actually, Jeffrey Epstein was friends with him, not the other way around.
There have been suggestions that the collapse in the quality of FOAB has been the result of the owners failure to emphasise many of the benefits of his Fascist and racist policies however it was never my intention that collapses in standards would lead to inaccuracies about people I disgreed with.
Most importantly, nothing could have been further from my thoughts than the idea of offending any Fascist, racists, close friends of sex offenders or even any low IQ right wingers who i disagreed with.
FOAB policies have now changed, and henceforth all mentions of the American President will make it clear that his weird, birds nest hair is actually a good look, that his face is not the unnatural clownish colour of a ripe carrot and that any mention of his being a racist, Hitler loving sex offender with a criminal record is balanced by mentioning him ending so many wars that he even had to make some of the combatants up.  
As a peace offering, I have dispatched to the White House a pair of extra small child's gloves to keep his teeny tiny hands warm and a framed copy of the legal documents pertaining to his various legal cases.

I hope this will bring an end to the matter.

Yours,

Lucy P
Blog Owner

Missing The Snow

Typical. You wait all year for some snow and then the second you head off to warmer climes, it snows.
Every weatherman, weatherlady and weather app is predicting an icy blast is sweeping down the UK from the Arctic next week with temperatures plunging down as far as -8°C as our old friend the Jet Stream shifts downwards and leaving the UK on the colder side of it.    
In the South of the UK it is very rare that we get snow and cold weather warning issued by the the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) covers most of the top half but have warned that this could be slid down to cover further areas next week and some reports do have flurries spreading right down to the south coast of England although not in significant amounts.
The MET Office are advising people to keep an eye on the forecast in their area as it is possible warnings may be issued for snow and ice at times.
Try and stay warm people but also, make snowmen and throw snowballs and just enjoy it.

Is America Great Yet?

 I speak to American journalists a few times a week and i always start with 'Is America Great yet?' to which i get a varying degrees of answers but usually, nah, not yet but i did ask about the $2,000 which each American is going to get as a Tariff Bonus.
To me it sounds like making them pay higher prices for the essential (his claim that other nations would pay was always nonsense) and then giving them something to make up for him making them pay higher prices for the essential things but $2,000 would be gratefully received i guess a because as the Tangerine Tyrant said 'The tariffs are bringing in so much money, a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone' so get the good China out and toast the Mango Moron.
A fly in the ointment could be that analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale University, reckons that Trump’s tariffs will see the American public pay an additional $200 billion to $300 billion a year and a $2,000 dividend, if it went to all Americans, including children would cost $600 billion which is why the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said that it might not mean that Americans would get a cheque from the government but instead would probably take the form of tax cuts for some.
So what did the Fushia Facist promise would be cheaper for Americans?
He promised that: 'I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One' and specifically mentioned groceries which official data shows rose by 2.7% since he made the promise with the sharpest increases on Coffee (18.9%), Ground beef (12.9%) and Bananas (6.9%) so not so great then.
The price of eggs have gone down though, a dozen large eggs was $4.93 then and are now $3.49 a dozen so omelettes all round but you may want to hold fire if you have an electric cooker because he may have said: 'Under my administration we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months' but unless my maths is very wrong, going from 15.94 cents per kWh in January to 17.62 cents per kWh today isn't halving them.
Cheaper cars and petrol under $2 a gallon was another thing he promised supporters to get prices down on however, the average price of a new car went up from $48,283 to just above $50,000 today and petrol remains stubbornly $1.079 above the $2 figure so you may want to walk to the shops to get those eggs.
So making America great again can be added to ending the Ukraine War on Day one and how he never signed a birthday card for Jeffrey Epstein to the list of things inane and things the Orange Ogre has farted out.

About Time IOC

In everyday life, a man can live as a woman and a woman as a man without to many issues and good luck to them, its none of our business, but when it comes to sporting competitions, that is something which i have always said is a step too far because it seems very unfair that women will be competing against with such a massive biological advantage, especially when athletics spends millions trying to catch drug cheats trying to gain the tiniest of advantages.   
Sport did seem to get itself tangled up in knots over it but maybe all it took was the spectacle of men punching women in the face in Paris in 2024 for the International Olympic Committee to decide it may not be fair after all.
In 2003 the IOC decided that that men who fully transitioned to live as women should be allowed to participate in women’s sport but then later in 2016, softened the rules to say that trans-identifying men could compete in female events as long as they took drugs to lower their testosterone.
Then athletics, swimming, rugby and cycling ruling bodies decided to protect their women’s category, they would based inclusion on biology and the IOC position changed to deciding that each sport could make its own rules and then came Paris 2024.
Then came the 2024 Paris boxing rounds and the inclusion of trans women Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting, both of whom were biologically men but took testosterone lowering drugs and both who won gold,
Possibly stung by the backlash of having to defend a man hitting a woman, the IOC commission a report by biologists and athletes and last week they announced that: 'The evidence shows that men retain sporting advantage even if they suppress their testosterone' and the IOC now have a decision they can use to decide who is able to compete.
It amazes me just how complicated this has got because to me, and i am aware that this puts me very much on the opposite side of some people who feel this is unfair to anyone who's gender is different to the one they were born with and as i keep pointing out, you can choose your gender but you can not choose your sex, and no operation or hormone drugs will change the biological facts that a person is XY or XX and that should always be the deciding factor and it shouldn't take a biological woman being punched in the face by a biological man to make other people see it too. 

The End Is Nigh For Keir

It’s as good as over for Keir Starmer. However long he limps on, even if he somehow stumbles to the finish line of the next election, his race is run which is amazing for a Prime Minister with a 174 seat majority and four years left in office, but the Fat Lady is practising her scales and gargling with the Aquafresh.
The maneuvers to replace him have began, despite the denials from those obviously jockeying for position behind him and it is shame because he seems a decent guy, just a decent guy who had a chance to make real change after the previous lot and completely wasted it.
My best guess would be that he will limp around to the May 2026 Local Elections where Labour will get a Royal tonking and he will be thanked for his services and ushered away while the Labour Party members put a cross next to who they want to replace him and give the Country it's 7th Prime Minister in just over a decade.
Count them, David Cameron quit after disastrously taking us out of the EU by accident, Theresa May gambled on an election to improve her Parliamentary majority and found herself with a smaller one, Boris Johnson treated Downing Street like a nightclub while ordering everyone else to stay at home, Liz Truss bankrupt the nation in just 44 days and was outlived by a lettuce,  Rishi Sunak was so weak within his party that he sought a dissolution of Parliament months before he had to and was duly toppled by Keir Starmer who could fall into a puddle and make the puddle even wetter.
The question should be then why are the crop of recent British Prime Ministers so terrible at their job?
Some will point to the UK never really recovering from the 2008 Financial crash and there is some truth in that and the things that followed, Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine War only made things worse but many of the events which saw the previous PM's removed were nothing to do with any of them things and were self inflicted mistakes so we can hardly blame them.
Others point to the constant scrutiny by 24 hour news and social media but you would assume that would make them less likely to do stupid things and probably accounts for Keir Starmer who seems much more attuned to the way the wind is blowing, and then doing the required contortions to try and bend as many ways as possible, attempting to try and please all the people all the time.       
Maybe, we as a population, are now just ungovernable with the way we have split into not just left and right but those sides have split into smaller factions which leaves the historical big boys such as Labour and Conservatives, out on a limb with traditional Labour voters breaking away to the Lib Dems, Greens and Your Party and the Tories being cut in half by Reform.
I would guess that the days of one party rule in the UK is over and from now on it will be coalition parties making up the Government but that brings it own problems as deals are hashed out and agreements made but the most galling thing is every MP will tell you they entered politics to make things better, but when they got the chance to actually do it, all of the last 7, to quote one of them, spaffed it up the wall.

Insanity That We Did Nothing

Former US vice-president Al Gore told UN delegates at the Cop30 meeting in Brazil that :'It is literally insane that we are allowing global heating to continue' and according to a report from the Climate Action Tracker, the World is on track for a catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise.
To put that into context, at the mid 19th Century, when the Industrial Revolution really took off, the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was 280ppm while today it stands at 425ppm which is the concentration last seen around 4.6 million years ago in the Pliocene Epoch.   
You may hear people (generally the ones with a vested interest to play it all down) say the the atmosphere is always changing and that is true, it does but by humans pumping our poison into the atmosphere it has taken 250 years to go from 280ppm to 425ppm which is many times faster than it increasing this much naturally, ice cores showing it taking tens of thousands of years to match the current human-caused rate.
The rapid pace of the modern increase means that the current human civilization is experiencing conditions never before seen in its existence,  and since the mid 19th Century, global temperatures have risen by 1.3C and Climate Change is taking a strong grip with fiercer storms, wildfires, droughts, floods and other calamities so it is a scary thought what a doubling of this will unleash on our future generations.
Al Gore then is right to say it is literally insane to allow it to happen but then it shouldn't come as a surprise because environmentalists and climate scientists have been telling us for decades and decades what will happen if we don't roll back the CO2, and yet the people who could do something did nothing and here we are and if you think this is bad, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Trump V The BBC

The BBC is finding itself in the middle of the News cycle rather than merely reporting on it and all the usual suspects who would benefit from the BBC no longer being here are wetting their pants in all the excitement.  
The fact is the Panorama edit where they spliced together two comments to make it seem like one long comment was bad and the highest-level scalps have fallen and a producer and editor will be promptly joining them while the US president is threatening to sue it for $1bn.
So why, we must wonder, has the editing of a clip in a documentary that aired in another country, which no one noticed at the time and shortly before he won a Presidential election victory, vexed Trump quite so much?
Throw into the mix that targetting any media that challenges his nonsense utterings to try and silence them is his modus operandi, the BBC reaches more than 25% of Americans (85 million people) and 118 million web visits a month so that is a lot of voters who have access to whatever either the weak US media outlets or the right wings one, are not saying which he would rather they not hear at all.
The best part is the letter he sent to the BBC basing part of his claim on 'reputational damage', which we must ask how much of a reputation has a renown liar who has a recent criminal conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a case where he paid hush money to a porn star and a civil case where he was found to have sexually abused a woman and been ordered to pay her $83m while admitting he 'grabbed women by the pussy' so not a lot of reputation left i would assume.
His reputation as the most corrupt, dishonest, and dishonourable man to ever occupy the White House, yes that reputation i can believe.
That reputation while his press office spews out lies on an industrial scale on a daily basis. He has an intent to undermine news organisations in the US and he is trying to silence any criticism of him here now also.
If he wants a fight, by God, we should give him one and the next Panorama episode should concentrate on all his outrageous lies, extra marital sexual shenanigans and a deep dive into the Epstein Files, let's see if he is so keen to go to court to defend them shall we.

Budget Looming

It's the budget on the 26th November but thankfully i am not going to be here because from the 19th November until the 4th December I will be bobbing around in the East Atlantic Ocean on a huge cruise ship while the industrial strength cleaner is employed to clean the fan of whatever Rachel Reeves has hit it with.
I do have some sympathy with the Labour predicament because the previous Conservative administration left her an awful legacy of huge Government debt, a massive blackhole of £20bn-£40bn worth of 'promises' they made and stuck in an envelope for them to pick up and services so ideologically run down over 14 years that it would be almost impossible to just get it back to where it was with one budget and one 5 year administration.
At the last budget, the Chancellor delivered an estimated £40bn of tax rises and financial experts seem to think that this time she is likely to need to raise a further £26bn to get the UK's public finances in order, and that is the crunch, it is not to raise tax to drastically improve the public finances, but just to bring them up to a standard where we have enough public and Civil Servants to ensure the country runs correctly and to fund the NHS correctly.    
Obviously she and Labour are going to get the blame for whatever she does, the Conservatives are already harping that they were correct when they said during the election campaign that Labour would put taxes up and they are right, but right because they are going to have to in order to pick up the dreadful slack that the Tories left them.
Unfortunately, Labour didn't do themselves any favours by immediately cutting the winter fuel allowance which opened them up to accusation so going after the pensioners and they were quite rightly forced to backtrack on that idea as well as climbing down on reducing benefits to avoid a revolt from their own back-benchers.   
Following a pre-Budget press conference last week where the Chancellor never really told us anything but refused to rule out breaking their manifesto pledge to not increase Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT which would realy pout her under the4 cosh if she did so i would like to think was just kite flying to see what the reaction would be if she did do it,  the wise money seems tro be on things such as a Wealth Tax, Mansion Tax, Exit Tax and even the merging of National Insurance and Income Tax which someone with a better calculator than me would raise approximately £33bn so i'm guessing that is where she will be looking.
Anyway, i will not be here and will be avidly avoiding it and will have no phone access until i am back on the 4th December, hopefully with a sun tan, a Cruise belly and a photo reel on my phone to bore people with into the New Year. Enjoy.

So You Are Going To Trump's America...

Where America once said 'Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free', it has added...'oh and the passwords to all of your electronic devices so we can lock your sorry arses up' because stories abound about travellers to the USA having their devices searched.
Even white people turning up at Trump's American borders have been detained, one French Scientist was denied entry to the US recently after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration's research policy and was accused of writings: 'That reflect hatred toward Trump and can be described as terrorism' and he was promptly sent back to France on the next plane.
The US Customs and Border Protection, blubbed in a statement: 'As part of their critical national security mission, CBP officers routinely determine admissibility of foreign nationals using longstanding US immigration law. If an individual has material discovered on their electronic media that raises flags during an inspection, it can result in further analysis' so if you want to go to the USA, a Security expert has given me details on how to prepare your machines first.

1 - Do not go to the USA, simply stay home and leave your phone the way it is, nice and easy and you won't risk ending up being bundled into the back of an ICE van.
2 - Decide before you go if you are going to refuse to hand over passwords to your devices (might look suspicious) or of you will let them look at your devices (which could be possibly worse).
3 - Whatever you decide encrypt your data then turn off face ID and fingerprint unlocking
4 - Delete all anti Trump social media and blog sites like this one
5 - Set up face social media accounts where you just share cat videos
6 - Get a burner phone instead

As a rule, if you are reading this or know me personally then you are probably pretty dubious in their eyes anyway, what with all us lefties being woke, vegan, Israel hating, tree hugging climate complainers so it's best to assume you will get taken aside and questioned anyway.
Obviously the drawback of just not taking your phone is that you can't then be added to any top-secret group chat about bombing middle eastern countries but if it keeps you out of an  El Salvadorian prison then that's a decent trade off.

Why Do We Love Christmas So Much?

The Christmas TV Adverts are starting to fill our screens and already i think i have found my favourite for the year and it comes from Supermarket Lidl who have come up with an absolute corker which pretty much sums up everything i love about Christmas.
We see a young girl who questions what makes Christmas special as she watches people sharing moments of kindness, rather than focusing on traditional Christmas indulgence or materialism and has an absolute killer of a pay off line.
She asks the question, 'Why do we love Christmas so much?' and wonders if it's because maybe everyone's a bit less grumpy and how it is not about 'me, me, me' but more about 'us' and when time isn't about money anymore, its just time and instead of thinking what we want, we wonder what someone else might like and decides that: 'I think we all love Christmas so much because we all want to make each other feel more loved'.
And then the line with which i wholeheartedly agree with....'I think everyday has a lot to learn from Christmas.'
Just brilliant and i hope whichever advertising bod came up with it has been given a few days off as reward to go Christmas shopping and a massive hamper, from Lidl of course. 

Welcome To Arsenal Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani is having a great November because not only has he just added 'Mayor of New York' to his CV, but his Football team also sit top of the Premier League.
Social Media posts from 2011 celebrating Robin Van Persie and having a moan about Granit Xhaka starting in the team have resurfaced with Mamdani spouting forth on all things Gunners so he isn't a Johnny come lately to the red side of North London and another Political Arsenal fan, Jeremy Corbyn, was pictured posing with a 'North London 4 Zohran' Arsenal football shirt.
Keir Starmer is also a fan of the mighty Gunners but before you start thinking supporting Arsenal is a left wing thing, Conservative Party members Priti Patel and James Cleverly are also declared supporters and they are as left wing as William Saliba.
Arsenal do have some very famous fans such as Mick Jagger, Lewis Hamilton, Rihanna, Jay-Z, and actors like Colin Firth, Idris Elba, and Danny DeVito as well as Roger Daltry, Kevin Costner, Robert Pattinson, David Schwimmer and it was rumoured that Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother were both big fans.
On the 'You sure you wouldn't prefer Tottenham?' list is Piers Morgan and Osama Bin Laden who was a regular at Highbury before he took his talents for hiding in caves to Afghanistan but that is the best thing about the Arsenal, we accept anyone as the transfer of Willian and Francis Jeffers showed.
As for Mamdani's politics, i keep hearing he is a Socialist so we can fully expect him to be sat with Starmer at the Emirates and helpfully passing on tips on how Socialism should work, and maybe some to Gabriel Martinelli, our very own exceptional left winger.

Remember Remember....

Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot and in the UK we do remember because tonight is not a night to have a peaceful kip because it is going to be non stop fireworks whizzing around and old sofa's and cupboards set on fire in fields.  
The story of Guy Fawkes is a strange one, firstly he wasn't even called Guy but Guido and everybody hated the Catholics at that time because they seemed to think that they were always plotting something which in this case they were because Fawkes was caught red handed under the Houses of Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder ready to blow up King James I and it would have worked if one of his co-conspirators hadn't written to his Catholic MP to tell him to avoid the Commons that day and who told everyone and got Fawkes caught.  
Fawkes was arrested and sentenced to death but as he was being taken to the gallows, he made the worst escape attempt ever and fell off and broke his neck, killing himself in the process.
17th Century justice being what it was, the Government thought he isn't getting away with that and had his genitals removed and burnt before quartering him between four horses and gutted anyway.
Ever since then, November 5th was decreed the day where we celebrate the Kings safe escape from being launched through the roof of the Houses of Parliament but due to Health and Safety gone mad, we can no longer burn real Catholics and have to make do with burning effigies instead while going 'ooh', 'aah' and 'whee' at a few overpriced fireworks and watch a teddy bear in a Donald Trump mask make the ultimate sacrifice.

Dick, Bush And Colon

There wasn't much amusing about the Iraq War but the fact that it was bought to us courtesy of a Dick, a Bush and a Colon (Colin actually but for some reason Americans pronounce it like the part connected to the poop chute) was usually enough to bring a wry smile to the fact that all three lied their way to a massive war in the Middle East.
Colin Powell died a few years ago and while Donald Rumsfeld (who disappointingly didn't have a rude sounding name) has also turned up his toes and now the 84 year old Dicky Cheney has joined him because the last man you would want to go quail shooting with has confirmed the Billy Joel lyrics that only the good die young.
One of the main architects of the War on Iraq and Afghanistan, the last remaining of the quartet, George W Bush, said that: 'The death of Richard B. Cheney is a loss to the nation and a sorrow to his friends. Laura and I will remember Dick Cheney for the decent, honorable man that he was. History will remember him as among the finest' which makes me wonder if there was another Dick Cheney because the one i remember  wasn’t just a driving force in the wars as well as championing torture, but pushed both the Iraq WMD lie and the Saddam is mates with-Al-Qaeda falsehood which resulted in millions of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers dying.
So with Dick and Colon gone as well as the miserably unfunnily named Donald Rumsfeld, at least Bush had the decency to keep his war mongering head down and not go swanning around like Tony Blair who, to be fair, had to avoid a few shoes and eggs thrown at him when he was last seen in public but there you have it, another completely horror of a person thankfully off the face of the Planet but while we can only hope that the war criminals of today (Netanyahu, Putin, Al Assad etc) don’t get to live quite so comfortably as Cheney did, his friend who's face he mistook for a quail and blasted him with a shotgun, might be relieved.

Follow The Money

Just as Labour pushes on with it's policies of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the UK’s two main rightwing opposition parties are openly questioning was is long-settled climate science with Nigel Farages' Reform party saying they will cancel it if they are elected and the Conservative Party policy is now to suspend it until later.
As 71% of of the British Public support Net Zero and are concerned about the climate crisis, they do seem to be battling their own voters but with extreme weather really ramping up globally, how did we get here?
It was actually the Conservatives under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson who did most to bring about Net Zero and Labour are just continuing the policies they put in place and as for Reform, deputy Richard Tice was absolutely taken to the cleaners by everyone when he said that there was no evidence that humans putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changes the climate so he is obviously on top of things and really shouldn't be listened to.
So why are the two right wing parties swimming against the tide to try and dismiss something we can literally see happening with our own eyes?
It might be noting that both are doing very well financially out of playing down Climate Change with both Reform and the Conservatives backed by prominent donors and supporters with a climate-denying outlook.
Kemi Badenoch and her family recently spent a week as guests of the donor Neil Record, who chairs Net Zero Watch, an offshoot of the UK’s main climate sceptic thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and handed Badenoch £10,000 for her campaign to become Tory leader and the Conservative Party has received millions of pounds in donations from individuals and entities such as the GWPF linked to high-pollution industries such as fossil fuels, aviation, and construction.
One of the biggest donors to Reform is the shipping magnate Terence Mordaunt, a trustee of the GWPF and now head of First Corporate Shipping who has given hundreds of thousands of pounds to Reform but analysis of donors listed in the Parliament donor book show that 92% of Reform's funding came from individuals or companies with polluting interests or those who question climate change.    
Follow the money and it is obvious why both parties are bizarrely ranting against Climate Change policies but as the majority worry about Climate Change, both parties are on a collision course with not just the British public but the laws of physics because Mother Nature won't care as she bakes, floods and throws more and more extreme weather at us.
Still, the growing Conservative and Reform bank balances will soften the blow for them i'm sure.

Internet Connected What??

I gave our son my old coffee machine a while ago but it started to make strange noises whilst doing its coffee thing so we went to the coffee machine shop to inquire about buying a new one and they all looked a bit flimsier and had a lot more buttons and some included WiFi and Bluetooth.
I asked the nice shop salesman why it would need WiFi and Bluetooth and he said it was so it could be updated over the internet which seemed a bit mad so we went for one which didn't come with an app but i later heard of something which was even madder, so much i thought it was a spoof at first, an internet connected smart mattress.
There was a Cybersecurity expert and he was talking about security concerns about the firmware in the mattress which allowed backdoor access and full arbitrary code execution capabilities making the mattress a disastrously unsafe device to keep on a home network...or something like that because i was stuck on...there's an internet connected mattress??? WTF???
Nope it was not a wind up, there really are people who pay £2,000 for the mattress and a subscription of £17 per month for  'bed control and bed monitoring and sleep-enhancing features' which include heat control, automatic firmness adjustments and other settings to optimize your sleep surface through the use of sleep tracking sensors.
Brilliantly, during the major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week the people who actually shelled out for a internet connected mattress found that the lack of internet caused chaos in bedrooms across the UK because the mattress designers didn't think to include an off switch and were stuck at high temperatures and odd positions in the night because something they do if you don't pay the subscription fee, (or disconnect it from the internet) is turn to such an angle to be unusable.
So many questions but mostly, what genius pays £2000 for a mattress that monitors everything that you do in it and then holds you hostage and turns completely useless if you don't pay the subscription fee, or the internet blinks off?

Why This Post Isn't Written by AI

Have you ever read something online and wondered if a robot typed it? In a world full of chatbots, those doubt creeps in fast. People worry about fake stories flooding the web, making it hard to spot real voices. But here's the truth, this piece comes straight from my own human hands.
People everywhere buzz about spotting Ai these days. They poke at every word online, hunting for robot clues. But here I am, a flesh-and-blood writer, ready to lay out my case. This piece lists the wild ways I prove my humanity. It's all absurd, yet it hits close to home.
Unfortunately, Ai has got that good now. It can fool you into thinking it's human and I have been accused of being many things, one of which is an Ai Chatbot which bless my circuits, is so far from the truth but then i would say that if i was an Ai chatbot so i asked Ai how could i prove that i was an actual human and not an Artificial Intelligence?
It said that i should show you why, through quirks and choices only a person would make and readers will see why my posts feels alive whereas Ai sounds flat, like a textbook. That's because real creativity comes from inside, not code.
I use metaphors and subtext, choosing words that nod to shared struggles, feeling it because we have been there and while machines output facts, i weave tales that echo their own experiences.
For example, last week, i fought a form online. It timed out three times. I yelled at the screen but that is a shared scene played out by many people every day and as we Humans rant together over such nonsense, it builds a trust between us, an AI wouldn't understand the emotion of any of this.
You'll sense my human hand pushing down on the keyboard, words are not repeated in odd ways, the text dances freer, with personal flair and blending ideas smoother, veering naturally with a flow and not in a formulaic way as if using words picked from a word cloud.
I know that Ai can delibrelty include sneaky flaws and personal touches to help it blend in but I don't write flawless stuff. I slip up, pause, ramble, mix up long and short sentences which whispers 'real writer at work' and dashed out by a human brain but i guess an Ai aiming to convince you it's human would toss in those same rough edges on purpose to convince you it's human through tiny, forgivable slips.
Humans are opinionated and have a bias, Ai plays it safe and does'nt show a real opinion and keep it bland, people like me not so much which are a nod towards convincing the reader that i am a human. I adore punk music. It's all energy and shouted angry lyrics and I crank it up loud. That mess proves I'm real, no smart code picks music like that for enjoyment.
Irony and Sarcasm are very much human traits and i make them my stock in trade, so you may be thinking 'Oh joy, another Lucyp post about AI' but that just proves it is me and not an Ai, i twist my words, play on them and use slang and lie and exaggerate, humans err and are messy.
Spotless text hints at code but this is how Ai fools us but as Ai sharpens, we'll have to sharpen too. Keep questioning what you read. It keeps us real.
Trust me, I'm just like you.

Stuff

Something i always hear from the older generation is that: 'Things aren't built to last these days' and as they came from a period when they would patch things up to make them last a bit longer until they literally fell apart, they are more right then even they probably know.
There is a famous quote made by economist Victor Lebow who in 1955 said to fuel economic growth: 'We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate' which pretty much admits that  indeed things aren't built to last these days on purpose, so basically we are forced to buy that thing again, something called  planned obsolescence.
For occasions where stuff cannot break fast enough, there is also something called psychological obsolescence  in which products are designed to become obsolete in the mind of the consumer, even sooner than the components used to make them will fail so that would be things like most electrical items such as TV's radios, computers and phones which are constantly tweaked and improved, since 2007 there have 26 iPhone generations, each one worked or looked slightly better than the last with at least one new model released each year and we have all been guilty of buying a new phone despite having a perfectly good working phone in our possession.
Obviously the ever-accelerating rate of buying things and then disposing of them sooner creates immense pressure on natural resources and the trashing of the planet to extract them and at the other end of the line we have excessive waste hence the overflowing landfills and plastic polluted oceans and at some point we are going to run out of natural resources and/or run out of space to store all our discarded items.
Something called Overshoot days spells out that Humanity is using nature 1.7 times faster than our planet’s bio-capacity can regenerate and on 24th July 2025 was the date that humanity's resource consumption for the year exceeds Earth's capacity to regenerate it, meaning that by the end of this year we would have used 1.7 Earths worth of resources and this is expected to rise to 2 Earths by 2030.
We are running out of resources, basically using too much stuff and undermining the planet’s very ability for people to live on it and that is before we even consider the implications of how much we are polluting the air, land, water and drastically changing the climate.
I read something that said that the average British person is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements a day which seems a lot but Google states it is between 4,000 and 10,000 so the 3,000 could be an underestimate but regardless, the raison d'être of adverts is to try and persuade you that you need something you haven't got or need a new thing and it must work because in 2024, the total UK advertising spend was approximately £42.6 billion and that would be a lot of wasted money if it wasn't working.
Something will have to give at some point as we can't continue down this path as it is just not sustainable but it probably won't be in our lifetime, or even our children's.
The harsh truth, and i am just as guilty of this, is that we all want stuff and are easily manipulated by advertisers messages for stuff but as the planet's resources grow more depleted and our atmosphere gets more polluted and areas on the Planet become unlivable and the climate grows ever more angry and throws worse extreme weather at us, we will have to start cutting back and stop consuming, burning up, replacing and discarding our stuff because we won't have a choice, we will have to.

Woohoo...Space Race Back On

You would assume that as NASA have already landed people on the Moon, it would be relatively straightforward for them to do it again but it would appear not as NASA are saying that the 2027 date penciled in for their Artemis III Mission is now looking unlikely which leaves the field open to China's own Moon mission which is on the Calendar for 2030.
Former NASA Head, Jim Bridenstine, told a US Senate hearing: 'Unless something changes, it is highly unlikely the United States will beat China’s projected timeline' and the problem seems to be that the contract for the lander was given to Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, and they are having a problem with the upper stage which is the part intended to carry astronauts to the lunar surface and are behind schedule for the 2027 launch.
With China seemingly full steam ahead for 2030, and SpaceX falling further and further behind before they even get to the long but critical safety stage, NASA have opened up the contract to other companies to see if anyone can solves the problem of actually getting the astronauts onto the Moon surface and are currently talking to the Jeff Bezo's company, Blue Origin, to see if  their uncrewed Mark 1 lander which is due to begin transporting cargo to the Moon Surface in 2026 , could be redesigned so that it can carry passengers.
Even then the required safety tests would take it sailing past the original 2027 date and would be cutting it fine to beat China in 2030 but it still gives NASA a chance where if they wait for SpaceX to get their act together, China will be there and it would be the flag of the People's Republic of China not waving in the non-breeze up there.
The problem NASA have always had is that after the initial Moon Landings, their funding was cut from 4.5% of all US spending annually to 0.4% today whereas China's is counted as part of their Military budget and good luck trying to find exact details of that figure but it is quite a few hundred billion Yuan.
Also China leadership does not change hands quite so often so a leaders singular vision is easier to follow rather than in America where NASA funding and its priorities change with the leader with the NASA budget being cut under every President from 1971 apart from slight increases under Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 80's.
I suppose it is out of the question that they just get together and do it for mankind rather than national pride but whether it's China or America, i am just happy that we have a Space Race again which will drive us forward to infinity and beyond, to quote probably the most famous astronaut, Buzz Lightyear.