Special Guest Blogger: Mrs Santa Claus

It is nice that i have been asked to contribute, it's normally the husband that gets all the questions at this time of year but i guess i am more well known for making cookies with the elves, caring for the reindeer and preparing toys with my husband but i am also do all the public relations bits.
I am responsible for working out all the sponsorship deals, the one with Coca Cola continues to be very lucrative but the one with Lucky Strike cigarettes was not my best moment, it was the 1950s and we didn't know cigarettes were really bad for you so the message we aimed for was: 'Kids, if cigarettes really caused cancer, would Santa smoke them?' Well yes seeing as he's immortal but we really didn't think that one through.
You can now see Santa's face on everything from toilet seat covers to condoms but all the materials for those toys for boys and girls is not cheap and we have an army of hungry elves to feed and as the elf diet is mainly candy, cakes and cookies, keeping the North Pole Medical Centre stocked with insulin shots to treat their type 2 diabetes is expensive and not to mention the undernourishment and dental bills for rotten teeth.
All of Santa's little elves spend the whole year working and i join in building the toys for good little boys and girls but when i'm not spot welding mountain bikes for children, i also help out Santa with his naughty/nice list through the year but i do worry when he sets out to do the present run on Christmas Eve, it's the thought that he is 5,000 feet above the Earth's surface trying to steer his mystical toboggan led by a bunch of supersonic caribou but i am sure that him perverting the space-time continuum in frightening and unimaginable ways just so he can deliver a £10 gift certificate for Amazon is appreciated.
All that flying at supersonic speed does get him all riled up though and he comes home on Christmas day morning all full of energy and it's no use me saying i have a headache or pretending to be asleep, as everyone knows he knows when you are sleeping and he knows when your awake.
So Merry Christmas, everybody and remember to put out your milk and cookies for my husband, nobody wants a skinny Santa and remember to buy that Santa toilet seat cover and ensure that the Elf's stay fed.

You First Mr Morgan

The vaccine we have all been waiting for has been given the green light and the Government have said that shirt sleeves should be rolled up as injecting should start next week but quite rightly people are asking how safe is it as the UK is the first country in the world to approve the vaccine.
I have my own concerns over how a process that usually takes a decade was managed to be done and dusted within 9 months but the regulators have been sending out reassuring notices that it's all safe and have provided a timeline of the safety procedures.
The testing procedures have gone through the stages and only ever moving on to the next stage of testing if there are no outstanding safety concerns so starting with lab trials on human cells, they moved through animals and then onto humans with around 40,0000 individuals injected and no side effects before today's announcement by Dr Raine of the Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) that: 'The public can be absolutely confident that the standards we have worked to are equivalent to those around the world'.
The regulator used a rolling review to complete its assessment of the vaccine in the shortest time possible, with hundreds of experts poring over more than a thousand pages of data and the the clinical phases of the trial were completed in an overlapping fashion, with separate items working in parallel to deliver the review in such a shortened time.
It has been confirmed that NHS Staff, Care home residents and their carers will be first in line to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in the UK, then all those aged 80 and over, followed by the over 75's and clinically extremely vulnerable individuals and then the rest in a phased timetable taking us up to April 2021. Pregnant women and children under 16 will not be immunised at all.
It's impossible to know if there are any long-term adverse health effects associated with the drug and i know it has been tested and approved as safe but....hmmmm, i don't know but it is nice that Piers Morgan has volunteered to be given the injection live on air on Good Morning Britain next week to show how safe it is which means for the first time ever when he is on screen, he won't be the biggest prick in the studio.

Obama Knows But Isn't Telling

We should have been doing stuff and messing about on the Moon for decades but today China's Chang'e-5 mission lander has sent back its first colour photos from the surface of the Moon.
When it has finished with the selfies, its mission is to gather samples of rock and dust to send back to Earth, the first for 44 years and hopefully we will not be so negligent of our cosmic neighbour and start building moon bases and launch pads for further space exploration or a parking lot for visiting alien spacecraft.
When i become a World Leader the first thing i will do is crack open the UFO files which is exactly what Barack Obama says he did when he become President, only he isn't telling us exactly what he saw.
Personally, i take that as proof that there was evidence in the files he saw, if there wasn't he would just have said there isn't anything but by refusing to deny it, it makes me think we are not alone in this universe and Obama knows exactly where to point his telescope each evening.
Bill Clinton once said that 'he would not be surprised if aliens exist' and that comes from a guy who would have seen the same thing as Obama.
The question of intelligence in the Universe has now been dealt with, and as i and Mulder and Scully always suspected, the truth is out there so now if only they could find some intelligence inside the current White House, that would be a more surprising thing.

Your P45 For Christmas

It's only Wednesday and so far this week we have lost Debenhams, then Aracadia Group (Burton, Top Man, Evans) and today Bon Marche has fallen into administration and between them almost 30,000 jobs have been lost just before Christmas.
The blame is being put on tough trading conditions and long-standing difficulties exacerbated by the Coronavirus pandemic and stores having to close for lengthy periods during the year but the truth is people don't want to go to shops anymore in the hope they'll have the required item when you can order it online, usually cheaper, and get it delivered.
This may well be the long awaited start to the death of the high street, in my town center alone we have empty spaces where Mothercare, BHS and several now defunct shops used to be and once Debenhams and Burton close their doors, that's pretty much half the town center gone or converted to a Charity shop over the last decade.
Its not the owners i feel for, this morning's pictures of Arcadia owner Philip Green on his billion pound yacht in the tax haven of Monaco while his staff face the immediate worries of buying Christmas Dinner while 25,000 of them are poured out into an already tough jobs market, makes me hope Karma is a real thing.
Unfortunately, the Job Center queue in January is going to be one of the longest we have seen since the days of 'Maggie's Millions' in the 1980's.

Pardon Me...And Him and Him and Him and Him...

There are some things concerning the US of A which i never really understood, bat-shit crazy gun laws and the refusal to change them even while burying the 24 little kids from Sandy Hook being the main one, the 40,00 guns deaths a year and the regular massacres are obviously still not enough of a price worth paying for the freakish second amendment.
Another thing is why there is such a large gap between the Election day at the start of November and the next President taking over towards the end of January, that only gives the old guy 78 days to plant as many banana skins and landmines as possible before he hands over the keys.   
The third is the ability for the outgoing President to grant pardons, conditional pardons, commutations of sentence, conditional commutations of sentence, remissions of fines and forfeitures, respites, and amnesties as per Article Two of the United States Constitution (Section 2, Clause 1).
Apparently a pardon can be rejected by the intended recipient which is pretty unlikely, Wikipedia only has one case when someone refused it and that was in 1833, the rest for the last 187 years have been cartwheeling their way out the prison gates.
It was always obvious that Donald Trump would set free all those incarcerated for his own shady dealings and there is even talk of pre-emptive pardons which would absolve anyone of prison time if they are later found guilty of any a bit iffy but whether he can grant a pardon to himself is a moot point, but it won't stop him trying if he thinks he could especially with a swathe of offences against him that were parked as they could not be actioned against him while President.
President Bill Clinton's issued 140 pardons on his last day in office including his own brother, Roger Clinton, so if Trump ever gets to drag his bloated backside out of the White House, his last day will be spent issuing more pardons than a bunch of kids at a burping competition.

Special Guest Blogger: John Rich

I gave the world the Pantomime, oh no i never, oh yes i did, but i didn't invent it, the Italians had a version of it called Commedia dell'arte which were loud, colourful plays and i inherited a patent to run a theater and set up the Lincoln Theatre and put on plays but the finances were not good until i hit upon the bright idea of putting on my own version of 'Commedia dell'Arte' with dancing, music, tumbling, acrobatics and a cast stock characters including the central Harlequin character which i played, called Lun, who would dance but never speak.
We would perform comic stories combining a classical fable or folk tale such as Dick Whittington, Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella or Robin Hood in colorfully-dressed costumes and i was backed by some big hitters of the time such as William Hogarth, Samuel Johnson, Member of Parliament John Wilkes and the Prince of Wales.
It was the performance of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera which really got the money spinning and i used the proceeds to build a bigger and better theater, the Theater Royal, Covent Garden, and the Pantomime idea really kicked up a gear.
We introduced songs, gags, slapstick comedy, lavish backgrounds, special effects and dancing and started gender-crossing actors and began incorporating audience participation with the crowd shouting out phrases to the performers.
My pantomimes became a hit (hooray) although they were dismissed as vulgar by my rival and the villain David Garrick at the Drury Lane Theater (Boo, Hiss) who said they threatened the downfall of Shakespeare and the death of serious theater but the paying public loved them and it didn't stop him from nicking my idea and improving upon it (aawww) with a talking Harlequin and putting them on during the Christmas period, associating them forever with the fun and frivolity of the holiday season and my plays fell out of favour.
Something i did introduce which continues today is men playing women's roles and female performers taking male roles and supporting destitute and out of work actors in Pantomimes which is why to this day you get audience participation which includes, blimey, i thought he died years ago when that once respected actor comes onto stage prancing about in a tutu wondering Where’s my career gone? All together now: It’s behind you!!

Special Guest Blogger: Mother Nature

So you lot are the Human Race are you. There are a few things almost everyone agrees on, that water is wet, babies are cute, and humans are the absolute worst species that was ever created.
I don't roll with the punches like i used to. Nearly every environmental disaster over the past century has been your fault and it's easy to assume that just because every other time you idiots have recklessly forced the entire planet down a path of destruction, i would step in once again and clean your goddamn mess when you prove ourselves woefully incompetent.
You turned up with an entire planet at your disposal and what did you do? Filled the clear blue skies with pollution, the beautiful oceans are now teeming with plastic, the ground has toxins that will poison the earth for tens of thousands of years and you hunted many other species sharing the planet with you into extinction.
With the start you had you could have soared ahead in so many ways, but honestly, you should be a utopia already but it turns out you have not only always been dumb creatures, but you have been dumb in this exact same way for a staggeringly long time despite people pointing out how dumb you were being.
My job is to provide for and nurture the fragile ecosystem of all life on Earth and i have been doing a pretty dang good job at it too until about 200 years ago when mankind flipped me the bird and said you were better at doing nature in every way, and proved it in increasingly extravagant, overcompensating ways such as nuclear power station and chopping down the rain forests.
I give you awe-inspiring displays such as rainbows and sunsets and not such awesome ones with warnings about what you doing such as destroying your towns with surging flood waters or setting your forests on fire with a well-placed lightning strike as a constantly reminder that this is my World and you are only squatting on it until i eventually knock the lot of you off, which believe me, i will do.
Go ahead, see what you can do but remember i don't need you humans, your about as much use to me as a cat flap in an elephant house so you just go ahead and see if you can look after the place and each other because it ain't in my interest to keep you all alive, you lot are somewhat low down on my list of give-a-tosses.
I'll tell you what, the dinosaurs never caused me this much trouble.

Special Guest Blogger: Friedrich Nietzsche

With the exceptions of Aristotle and Socrates, i am probably the most-recognized name in philosophy a man who's insights were as awesome as my moustache implied but my prediction that some kind of master race would soon drag itself out of the slime and rule the world did provide the inspiration for Mussolini and Hitler so on some ways a big tick, in some other ways not so much.
Hitler, who might otherwise have faded out of history as just another failed art student with funny facial hair, picked up a copy of my book and was inspired by my talk of the rightful owners of the world being 'supermen' and anyone with a passing interest in modern history knows exactly where that line of thinking went.
If i wasn't too busy being dead by then, i would probably have had a few words with Hitler about the Fuehrer's liberal interpretation of my work, especially as i hated anti-Semites and anyone who hated on someone because of their religious beliefs.
My most quoted famous quote is 'God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him' comes from my seminal work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is not the cheeriest thing you would ever read but many people have tried to explain what i meant by it depending on whether they are religious or not but it really isn't difficult.
I wasn't saying that God literally choked to death on a peanut, basically i said believing in a supernatural realm and a belief in concepts like good and evil was holding man back and without a God to worry about, there could be positive new possibilities for humans to fully develop. The Christian God would no longer stand in our way and we will become more creative and understanding of our World.
I lived a full life and learnt some valuable lessons including that some human beings are nice, some nasty, some clever, some stupid but if there is a God and he can see the madness that is going on in his name and has for the past thousand years, God would definitely start favouring the ones who don't believe in him.

Iran Eyeing January 20

Ever since he recklessly pulled out of the Iran deal, the American President has been desperately prodding Iran to try and get a reaction, possibly to justify military action but definitely to ruin any chances of the next President picking up the Iran deal again.    
There has been a few times such as the assassination of Qasem Soleimani when you just hoped the leaders in Tehran would not raise to the bait of the Orange Dotard and so far they haven't, hopefully in the knowledge that the cretin will be gone in January and a proper grown up will take charge who has said that he will rejoin with the EU, Russia and China in the Iran deal.
After news that Trump was talked out of attacking Iran by whoever was using the Trump Administration's brain-cell that day we now have the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh by Israel although Israel has denied it but everyone knows it was them, including Iran who are swearing revenge.
Israel has long been the problem in the Middle East, their 70 year genocide against the Palestinians is just one in along list of human rights abuses and they have always done it with the approval of America who fund their abuse and found an idiot in Donald Trump who did his level best to appease the Israeli's in a bid to shore up the ridiculous religious right in his own country.  
If Iran is building a nuclear capability, and there is no proof that they are, it is copying what Israel did back in 60's when they lied that the building in Dimona was a textile factory and refused IAEA inspections, the same guys currently all over the Iranian facilities.  
The problem is that America may be getting a proper, grown up leader in January but Israel will not be which means that Iran, in face of such provocation which may well increase in the fag end of Trumps time in office, will be tested again but we can only hope they keep in mind they only need to get to January 20th then it will be very much another game altogether.

Special Guest Blogger: Greta Garbo

The movie business is just like any other line of work, only the co-workers are better looking, the paychecks are bigger and you can't go outside without having adoring fans throwing themselves at you. But other than that, it's almost exactly the same. The main difference is that when office workers have a meltdown, they might sit in the bathroom stall for an hour or steal a hole-punch, but when Hollywood people do it, we'll pull out all the stops which is exactly what i did.
I had that Scandinavian temperament of not really caring a crap about very much so when i was asked to go to America to make movies i was like, 'ok, whatever' and when i was named by Guinness Book of World Records as 'the most beautiful woman who ever lived' i was all 'yeah, that's nice' and when my film company set up a lunch with Prince Wilhelm of Sweden i just said 'No Thanks, i’m not hungry'.
Every actress has it at some point in their career made a completely ridiculous movie and mine was The Two-Faced Woman, about a woman who pretended to be her own rumba-dancing twin sister to seduce her husband. I was at the top of my fame when it came out and the media gave it such a rubbishing, calling it 'my grave' so i refused to make another movie for the next 49 years, until i went to my actual grave.
I hated the spotlight and the press intrusion, i was deliberately prickly and off-hand with them, refusing to give proper answers. In my very first ever interview after i landed in Hollywood, i set the scene by answering 'I was born. I had a mother and father. I went to school' and then left when they asked me about my life.
I never signed autographs, answered fan mail, or gave interviews, refused to attend film premieres or awards ceremonies and famously said 'I want to be alone' but they still kept offering me film roles and sending invites to the Oscars, obviously leave me alone has a different meaning in America.
I only made 24 Hollywood films and none of them were classics but i made my money and then got out of the business, if only someone had pointed out to Nicholas Cage or Chuck Norris that 'doing a Garbo' was always an option.