Lucy Museum of Musicians - Sex Pistols

Qualification to The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians is they must have a minimum of three songs which would make me turn up the radio if they came on.

Sex Pistols
Qualifying Songs: Anarchy in the UK, Bodies, Pretty Vacant

Hard to think of a band who achieved so much in such a short time but within the year that they were around, the Sex Pistols changed everything and influenced so many others.
Cramming a whole career into 12 short months the Sex Pistols influence is still reverberating today and 'Anarchy in the UK' sums up the whole Punk thing sweetly, a pounding three and half minutes of amazingly angry noise and snarling lyrics.
If anything, 'Bodies' is an even angrier song and the fastest and heaviest song in the Sex Pistols back catalogue and based on a true story about a fan who turned up once at John Lydon's door wearing nothing but a clear plastic bag and holding an aborted foetus in a clear plastic bag. 
With it's constant swearing and subject matter it's never going to appear on the BBC's Desert Island Discs but it's pure Sex Pistols.
I always had my suspicions that 'Pretty Vacant', with Rotten's emphasis on the second syllable of Vacant, was just a way to squeeze out a swearword on the radio. The video took three days to film as the band were thrown out of the studio for throwing cans of lager at the cameramen and according to bassist Glen Matlock, the song's main riff was based on 'S.O.S.' by ABBA.
Everything the Sex Pistols did laid the foundation of generations of musicians to come and as in that infamous Bill Grundy interview, they were indeed very clever boys.

Israel's New Iran Evidence 13 years Old

When you show up at the United Nations with a picture of a cartoon bomb as evidence to show how dangerous another nation is, then you tend to be a tad disbelieving of the nation pointing the finger but unperturbed by looking like an idiot last time, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu is at it again and trying to pick a fight with Iran.
Without the Roadrunner style ACME graphics, this time he has presented 'new and conclusive proof' that Iran have been hiding their nuclear weapons program.
'Iran lied, big time' he said saying that he had tens of thousands of documents that showed 'Iran is brazenly lying when it said it never had a nuclear weapons programme'.
That would be the tens of thousands of documents that were new once, in 2005, as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) explained they were reading and included in their presentation in 2008 which formed their decision that work on the Iranian nuclear project ceased in 2003 and found no evidence of further research activities after 2009.
The IAEA have already dismissed Netanyahu's 'new' evidence as something they have seen before and most of which they made public in 2011.
Israel have forwarded the 'evidence' to America where brains trust Donald Trump used it to attack the JCPOA which he is expected to pull out of shortly, saying 'it proved he was 100% right about the flaws of the agreement'.
That the chuckle brothers Trump and Netanyahu and America and Israel are putting their heads together to plot a path to war with Iran is not a thing to fill anyone with confidence and that they are faking the evidence of non-existent weapons of mass destruction has echoes of the last time a particularly dumb American President was trying to pick a fight with a Middle Eastern country and
that didn't turn out too well.
Netanyahu and Israel should stick to what it does best because those unarmed Palestinian civilians aren't going to shoot themselves.

Lucy Museum of Musicians - Sam Cooke

Qualification to The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians is they must have a minimum of three songs which would make me turn up the radio if they came on.

Sam Cooke
Qualifying Songs: Nothing Can Change My Love For You, Wonderful World, Summertime

Back in the mid 80s Levi's 501 made a run of commercials with a 1960's theme and it was from those i was introduced to Sam Cooke and the glorious 'Wonderful World' which on the strength of the commercial, re-entered the UK charts at number 2.
I then got a Sam Cooke's greatest hits album and wondered why i had never come across him before. 'Wonderful World' is a perfect 60s song and just right for flogging stonewashed jeans.
'Summertime' is among the most covered songs in the history of music, the Cooke version is by far the best i have ever heard, the lethargic snare drum and guitar sending your mind to a hazy summer day, on a row-boat on a still river with your hand trailing lazily in the water.
'Nothing Can Change My Love For You' is lyrically faultless, the sort of end of the night slow song when you and your partner hold each other tight and move around in slow circles while the lights come on and the bar staff go around collecting the empty glasses.
He sang many gospel type songs which i don't much care for and it is better to gloss over his death but it it hadn't been for a jean advert in the 1980s i would never had discovered him or a kindred soul who also doesn't know much about trigonometry or algebra.

Eurovision Says Leave The Ladder At Home

Countries from all over Europe - and a few from outside Europe - will soon be taking part in the Eurovision singing competition, the 63rd time the contest has taken place.
Lots of lucky people will be able to go to watch the contest live at the Lisbon Arena in Portugal but organisers have released a list of items that audience members won't be allowed to take in with them.
On the list of banned items are things you might expect, such as firearms, knives, syringes, and scalpels, toxic substances,  flares and pyrotechnics. However, the extensive list also includes some puzzling items, including golf balls, ladders, trolleys, chains, crowbars, umbrellas, rope and adhesive tape.
The UK’s entry is SuRie and as the UK is one of the biggest financial backers of the contest, SuRie will automatically go through to the final which is very handy because we wouldn't get there otherwise as our song is what the Portuguese would politely call merda.

Peace Prize For Trump

The sounds of the people on the left's heads exploding will be deafening if Donald Trump is handed the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in bringing peace to Korea.
The fact that he was threatening to kill every man woman and child in North Korea with nuclear missiles a few short months ago is not the drawback one may think as neither is the missiles lobbed into Syria or the support for Israel as it continues to murder unarmed Palestinians.
Henry Kissinger got it while bombing Vietnamese and Cambodians and Obama was handed the prize just months into his Presidency and then went on to wage war in Libya and increase the amount of drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan which set the precedent that you don't actually have to be peaceful to win the Peace Prize.
According to Nobel, the Peace Prize should be awarded to the person who in the preceding year: 'shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace'.
Maybe the name Donald Trump will join those of Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. on the role of honour and Ladbrokes put the odds at 2/1 that he will get the award which strangely is only slightly better than the 3/1 that he will be removed from Office (removed covering all eventualities) and the 7/4 that he will be impeached.
A monkey banging enough keys on a piano will at some point accidentally make a tune and just possibly the Norwegians will think the orange faced monkey has banged enough keys and has accidentally done something good in Korea even if you have to ignore the whole him being a racist sexual predator thing.

Religion: The Last Day on Earth

As those of us who have looked these things up know, religions are forever nicking bits from other religions to sex their own up and as Christianity was a Johnny come lately in religion terms, it pretty much went around and took the best bits for their own religion and changed the names. 
One of the things it took and put their own spin on was the belief regarding the end of the world and the triumph of good over evil aka Judgement Day.
What the Christians tell their followers is to keep an eye out for four men on horses charging across the world, spreading War, Famine, Pestilence and Death and then amidst tornadoes and earthquakes, pretty much every comet in the universe will hit the planet while Satan walks the Earth as Jesus puts in a second appearance and hoovers up into heaven anyone 'good'.
As the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism is the oldest known religion, it was also the first to come up with the idea of Judgement Day that all the others borrowed. They say that a comet named Gochihr will strike the Earth releasing waves of holy lava ripples across the entire surface of the world with those who have been good wading through it blissfully but all the bad people melting in agony.
The Hopi tribe of Native-Americans believe that there are a number of Worlds with each getting destroyed by a comet when humanity gets too corrupt, with only the Hopi getting preserved and moved to the next planet to try again.
Aztec mythology has us all coming to a grisly end at the bony hands of the Tzitzimime, who are skeletons who will arrive during a total solar eclipse lasting forever caused by angry Aztec Gods who have given up on mankind because it is they who keep the Sun glowing and is only the Sun saving us from the Tzitzimime.
Norse Mythology is particularly imaginative with Norse bad boy Loki escaping from ropes made of his son's intestines and hijacking a ship made of dead men's toenails before awakening the World Serpent who rises from the oceans and spews poison across the lands and skies until Earth sinks into the ocean leaving just two humans to repopulate what's left of the Earth.
The Hindu's also have a horse-led judgement day but where Christians have four they only have one, Lord Kalki, who armed with a sword, slashes and hacks at wrongdoers before the world ends.
Islam sees an increase of natural disasters, an orgy of violence, bloodshed, anarchy, and sexual immorality before a day of reckoning, in which the dead are reunited with their bodies and handed a book containing one’s accumulated deeds. Those who led good lives will be admitted to heaven, while those who were sinful are sent to the fires of hell.
Finally, Buddhism doesn't have men on horses or comets but people just forgetting the Buddha's teachings and generally being awful to each other. Then Maitreya, comes along to re-teach humanity about the 10 non-virtuous deeds and the 10 virtuous deeds before six more suns show up and boil off all the rivers, lakes and oceans before the Earth explodes into a massive fireball. 

Whichever one of the religions deities turn up to end things, none are particularly nice so maybe what we need is another religion, one where it doesn't all end in killer skeletons or Gods arriving in ships made of toenails to kill us all.

May Risks Losing Her Amber Rudd Lightning Rod

It's hard to believe that Amber Rudd is still clinging to her job as Home Secretary in the light of her bare faced lies to the Home Affairs Select Committee where she denied being aware of deportation targets despite a leaked private letter to Downing Street that she had set an 'ambitious but deliverable' deportation target for an increase in the enforced deportation of immigrants.
Amber Rudd must return to parliament on Monday delivering yet another apology for her handling of the Windrush scandal after further revelations about her role in and knowledge of the 'hostile environment' for immigrants, a role that was created by the previous Home Secretary, Theresa May.
The under-pressure Home Secretary will now rightly face a stream of hostile questions from Labour’s benches and any defence that she inherited the toxic immigrant policy is sunk below the water line as she picked up the policy and gleefully ran with it.
At the moment Rudd is the lightning rod conductor for public discontent and has loyally made her repeated apologies without allowing the blame to fall on to the Prime Minister for the policies May set in her six years at the Home Office.
With fresh Windrush injustices emerging daily, and knowledge that the Government knew that others had been snared in the teeth of the 'hostile environment', Theresa May must be worried what her replacement will say which could switch the spotlight onto her. 
May is seemingly content to keep her head down and allow her Home Secretary to continue to take the incoming fire but how long Rudd is content to take the damage to her reputation and political ambitions to protect the person who created the problem in the first place is another question and May knows that if Rudd says she has had enough, the white hot spotlight will move onto her.

Update: Seems Amber Rudd was content to take the damage to her reputation for about 30 minutes after i posted. Oh well, over to you now Theresa.   

Not Respecting the Brexit Vote

The Brexit supporters have a way of trying to shut down any argument against the destructive coursed that the country is taking, they say that is remainers should accept the will of the British people and accept the result.
Putting to one side the argument that it is the will of 52% of the British people, not all of them, the idea that we should just quietly accept the result is nonsense.
I have never voted Conservative but many of my fellow Britons have so does that mean that we should accept the will of the British people and not argue against Theresa May and her cohorts, of course not so why should us Remainers just slope away and silently accept the result of just over half of the British people when it comes to the damaging Brexit result?  
If i had my way i would ignore the 52% and say for the good of the country we have to stay in the EU and leaving the largest single market in the World is extreme madness but the Conservatives are far too keen to press on regardless despite making a pigs ear of negotiations.
Now that it is becoming clear just what it will mean and the detrimental effect it will have on Britain, it is time to either push for a second referendum or to completely abandoned it altogether.
It is an awkward truth that what many people wanted when they voted Leave isn't going to happen without making everyone significantly poorer and the Government should have the guts to scrap the deeply flawed EU referendum before we are committed to it and Britain makes the most monumentally awful self-inflicted decision of it's life.

Lucy Museum of Musicians - Red Hot Chilli Peppers

Qualification to The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians is they must have a minimum of three songs which would make me turn up the radio if they came on.


Red Hot Chilli Peppers 
Qualifying Songs: Give It Away, Road Trippin, Scar Tissue,

Their appearance in the Museum is helped by the fact that Anthony Keidas is so damn handsome but the Chilli Peppers seem to fall between brilliance and meh but they are always fun.
Apart from 'Give It Away', it is the more serious grown up songs after the band cleaned up it's act and a couple of trips to rehab that get them turned up on my radio.
The lyrics to 'Give It Away' seem blatant enough, 'What i got you got to get and put it in you' doesn't leave much room for manoeuvre although i have heard Keidas say it was about selflessness and altruistic behavior but then the video with the camera angles and close up's of groin areas doesn't scream altruism to me although a close up of Keidas's love plums is always welcome. 
'Road Trippin' is a slower acoustic number and was only released in Europe while 'Scar Tissue' marks the line where the Band shifted to their new mellow guitar riffs and a softer sound and both are beautiful songs and a good example of a band growing and getting better as they mature and knock the taking of industrial amounts of heroin on the head. 

Russia Not The Biggest Dopers

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has published the Anti-Doping Rules Violations report for 2016 featuring 1,595 confirmed doping cases involving athletes representing 117 countries.
Seventy-nine percent of the drug violations registered by WADA in 2016 were committed by male athletes, with track and field being the most doping-affected sport, where 205 cases were revealed. It is followed by bodybuilding (183), cycling (165), weightlifting (116), and football (79).
As Russia has it's athletes currently banned from competing under their flag at major competitions due to doping violations, it is a surprise to see them sixth in the list so who was the biggest cheats of 2016?
The international doping watchdog said Italian athletes accounted for 147 anti-doping rule violations in 2016, the most recent year for which full figures are available.
French athletes accounted for the next highest number on the list with 86 cases while the United States was third with 76. 
Australia were fourth with 75 and Belgium fifth with 73. Russia and India were next with 69 cases each.