Special Guest Blogger: Jewish God Lilith

You probably know the story of Adam of Eve but how about Adam and Lilith? Didn't think so, they keep that particular story quiet so hardly anyone knows that Eve was actually the second attempt at a woman, i was the first but the religious crowd had a zero tolerance policy when it came to their women acting like they were all unique and independent so wimpy Adam wet his big boy pants and complained to the big guy that i wasn't obedient enough for his liking so they binned me and bought in a more subservient one instead.
Obviously i wasn't going to take that nonsense so i decided to ruin their little game of happily ever after by getting them to make a mess of things in the Garden of Eden so i turned myself into a snake and sidled up to Eve one day and told her that those apples look mightily tasty and the simpleton went and ate one.
After that they got booted out of the paradise garden so with my work done and not caring that much for all that gardening by myself, that and the fact God had sent a bunch of angels, Sanvi, Sanssanvi and Semangalef, to drag me back to God knows where, i slipped off to buddy up with a bunch of demons and when they caught up with me, my new demonic pals and i told them to sling their hook or i was going to find employment as a vampire who spealised in sucking the blood of babies.
We did reach a compromise of they would leave me alone in exchange for an agreement that if the parents name-checked either of the three angels, those babies would be spared so if you have worries about a new baby, all you have to do is scribble the Angel names on a scrap of paper and tape it to the baby’s head.
So my final words are to you ladies, don't measure your self worth in relation to a man, do physical labour, cut your hair short, grew out your body hair, drink pints of cider and get a tattoo, don't get sucked into their hopeless patriarchy.

Beginning Of The End For Boris

Nobody is really expecting to see Boris Johnson lose the confidence vote in Parliament today, sitting Prime Ministers just don't lose these things but we are expecting a big wedge of his own MP's to say that they don't support Boris and that is where the danger comes from for him because although he will remain as party leader and Prime Minister and be immune from another challenge for a year, he will know that many of his MP's are against him.
Theresa May survived a confidence vote in 2018 with two-thirds of Conservative MP's supporting her but the other third so tied up her Premiership that she had to step down just five months later which shows that an arithmetic win is not the same as a political one.
When the result is announced around 9pm, we will all know how many of his own party want the prime minister out but as well as Johnson waiting nervously, so will most of his cabinet who know they will not be included in any new cabinet, tainted by their association with the law breaking Prime Minister .
The best case scenario for me would be for Johnson to just about drag his carcass over the winning line and stay in office up until the next election where, as plenty of Conservatives are saying, they would lose.
If the Tories had any decency about them they would remove him, his blatant lies, partying and awful policies should be enough but the thought of them losing the next election, and their own jobs, may spook enough to look elsewhere in their party.

Special Guest Blogger: Zhang Heng

After 200,000 years of living in caves and bopping each other over the head with clubs, us homo-sapiens finally got our act together and began using our large brains to make specialist tools, develop cities, agriculture and trade.
Considering the dinosaurs were around for over a hundred million years and never invented anything at all and never evolved beyond walking around and eating each other, us humans have not done bad and i was lucky enough to be born in a time in China when inventing things and catching smallpox were the only pastimes.
I improved on Pi, tinkered with the Chinese calendar to make it more in sync with the seasons, invented the ode-meter and an Earthquake Siesometer before turning my attention to astronomy and documenting 2,500 stars in an extensive star catalog and explained that the Earth, Planets and Sun were all spherical and tried to explain eclipses to people who considered it so far out of the box that i would have to invent binoculars for them to actually see the box.
I began with how the Moon merely reflects the light of the Sun and sometimes the Earth gets between the two, eclipsing the light of the moon so a lunar eclipse and sometimes the moon gets in the way, or eclipses the light of the Earth and Sun and that's a solar eclipse.
After a while of repeating light here, big thing in way, no light there to the local yokels, this got the attention of the Emperor An who summoned me to his court and i assumed it was to relieve me of my head but he made me the Chief Astronomer and paid me a handsome salary of 600 bushels of grain.
Despite all my other inventions, my most satisfying was the earthquake weather-vane. China was prone to Earthquakes which we knew was down to the giant frog which was holding up the Earth twitching which shook the earth and when the frog's twitch manifested itself hundred of miles away, we wouldn't find out for days and by the time help arrived there, everyone was dead so i produced something which could indicate where an earthquake had happened.
It was a vase with an inverted pendulum that tipped in the direction of a detected earthquake, which triggered the mouth of one of eight dragons holding a ball to drop it, showing the direction of the tremors and luckily we didn't have to wait too long until a ball of the North Western facing dragon dropped, indicating an earthquake in that region.    
As there was no tremor felt in our location, my political enemies who thought me way too much of a smart-arse anyway, were briefly able to relish the failure of my device until a messenger arrived shortly afterwards to report that an earthquake had occurred about 310 miles away in the northwest region of Longxi, the same direction that my device had indicated.
I was later sent to serve as administrator of the city of Hejian, and briefly returned to the Emperor's court before my death months later but my earthquake invention was the first step in making frog related quakes more manageable and was light years ahead of those dozy Japanese who thought they were caused by a giant catfish living beneath the Earth's surface thrashing about, i know, a fish!! Those crazy Japs, so scientifically backwards.

Sums, Math's, Arithmetic Or Numeracy?

I was never very good at math's a school, i zoned out of so many lessons about triangles and fractions that half the time i was looking out the window and the other three quarters i was scribbling things about George Michael on the front of my math's book but the Government are considering making changes to make the subject less challenging by changing the name to numeracy.
According to someone in Government responsible for these things, the name mathematics is 'too academic and scary' and what teachers with patches on the elbows of their jackets should be teaching is 'real world math's' which apparently is math's we use in our everyday lives and never to my knowledge have i been stood in a shop, bank or anywhere desperately trying to remember what pi or calculus is so i have always assumed that all those lessons i missed, didn't really matter.
My view is as long as you have a working knowledge of the times tables, can divide, subtract and add, are able to find a percentage of something you will always get by and as most things have a calculator included, don't fret.
Of course if your career depends on math's then do fret, nobody wants a building or vehicle designed by somebody who said: 'Whatever, that's close enough' but otherwise, you can always get by with a basic knowledge of Sums, Math's, Arithmetic, Numeracy or whatever they call it, i would say getting a proper grip on English is more important, the amount of people who get there, their and they're wrong is embarrassing.

Special Guest Blogger: Blaise Pascal

We’re not the fastest, strongest or hardiest of species, how we weren't all eaten as soon as we dropped out of the trees by things with bigger teeth or claws is anyone's guess but we are the best at dreaming up ways to make life more livable.
In a blink of the eye in planetary timescales, we’ve gone from chasing things with pointy sticks to landing humans on the moon and every invention started out with someone saying 'It sure would be neat if that thing existed' and then going and inventing it and my invention didn't keep us safer, more comfortable or any healthier but it made cheating at math's a breeze.
While the Pilgrims were landing at Plymouth Rock and Europe was dealing with various plagues, i ignored the struggles of everyday life to use projective geometry to figure out how air pressure and vacuums work and it was while hearing my accountant father complain about how working out the pages and pages of figures gave him a banging headache that i thought i would help by putting my big brain to help him with a mathematics machine.
Using a box with dials that could be twisted, i came up with a machine that he could use to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and display the result.
I built 50 of them for him to hand out to his accountant friends and i called it the Pascaline but it never really took off and instead went off to ponder on what became known as Pascal's wager which states that a rational person should live as though God exists because if he does then they stand to receive infinite gains in Heaven against if he doesn't.
On less theological matters, one my last designs was creating a route for a carriage with many seats for Paris that would move passengers around a fixed route for a fixed price but my bus idea was 200 years too early as was a cure for my tuberculosis and i finally got an answer to my wager aged only 39 but no spoilers here, you will have to wait and see for yourself.
My legacy then would be the number 18 to Sudbury & Harrow Road and the schoolkids sat on it writing 58008 and 55378008 into their Pascaline's and turning it upside down.

Special Guest Blogger: Benjamin Guggenheim

I started out working at my fathers copper smelting company and we were very wealthy which is how i ended up on the RMS Titanic on it's maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.  
I had a reputation of being the perfect gentleman and i was, i always picked up a few trinkets for my wife back home on my business trips and always treated my mistress to the best of things also and on that particular trip i bought her the finest things in the ports of Southampton, Cherbourg and Ireland and picked up a few trinkets for the wife back home.
My wife never joined me on the Titanic trip so it was just me and my valet and obviously as my wife was at home, i took my mistress Leontine who was a pretty famous French Opera Singer at the time and after Ireland it was full steam ahead for New York and tea and crumpets at Macy's only things took a bit of a turn.
Just after midnight on 14th April i was awoken by a steward screaming in the corridors of the first class suite that the ship had hit an iceberg.
My initial reaction was to say shut up you damn fool, the ships unsinkable, it said so right here in the brochure.
The shouting continued so we went to investigate and sure enough, the few life boats we had on-board were being filled with women and children and being lowered down to the sea so i made sure Leontine was on one and as the boat was being lowered i shouted out not to be concerned, the ship will be repaired and we will soon see each other again tomorrow.
The way the ship was listing it was obvious that it had more holes in it than a teenage Goth and as the last of the lifeboats sailed away, i turned to my valet and asked him if he fancied a drink.
We returning to our quarters and donned our finest evening suits, went to the bar and poured ourselves a brandy and took a cigar and went and sat on the deckchairs on the upper deck.
As the water slopped against our ankles, then our knees, then our chests we drank and smoked until the water put out the cigars and then our lights as the ship slipped to the bottom of the Atlantic.
In life i was very much at the top but in death i was at the bottom and as far as i know, apart from a few fish nibbles, i kind of stayed there.

No Win Game For Scotland

The Scotland football team doesn't usually generate much sympathy this side of the border in England but even we see that they are in an unwinnable match later tonight as they are playing Ukraine in a play-of for the right to play Wales and therefore in turn play us at the World Cup in Qatar.
Facing one of the home nations at the big festival of football in the desert makes the World Cup even more special so i am hoping that Scotland win and then whoever triumphs out of them or Wales, us English are guaranteed a British Isles match in November but it seems it is just Scots and the English (and probably Russians) hoping it is  Steve Clark's boys celebrating this evening because everyone and his dog wants Ukraine in the first competitive match they have been able to play since the declaration of war to qualify.
Scotland is the nation that has historically been bullied by a tyrannical neighbour but this time it is they who face the charge of  kicking a blind man’s stick away if they beat Ukraine who have had next to no preparation for the game and by all rights Ukraine should be in for a proper rogering and Clarke said that while he symapthises with the Ukrainian plight, 'We’re here to win a football game'.
Tonight's winner plays Wales in Cardiff on Sunday with the winner taking the last slot in the group with England, USA and Iran so it's 'ach aye the noo Scotland' and then 'Lan hogia cymra' so we can get some to some STUFF 'EM ENGLAND in November.

Special Guest Blogger: Hindu God Yama

People can be quite intimidated when they first meet me, i'm a Death God afterall but i sort of got the job by default, as the first human i was also the first to die so with no other candidates i just got handed the job.
Being the first dead person in the Underworld was very strange and very lonely at first but there was no shortage of mortals arriving to keep me company since and my job is to have a bit of a nosy at what you did in your life and then decide one of three fates for you based on Karma.
So what can you expect when you finally get here? Well my porter Vaidhyata will take you to my two attendants Kalapurusa and Chanda who will usher you to me for an audience and then my scribe Citragupta will read all your worldly deeds from the Agrasandhani where everything you have ever done, good and bad, are logged.
Then it's my job to weigh it all up from my throne of judgement, or Vicarabhu, allocate you a score and consider the three options that i have at my disposal.
Depending on how good or bad you have done when the score is totted up, too low and i escort you to the 21 levels of Naraka which is our version of hell where you are tortured for a bit and then once you are suitably rehabilitated, you come back to me.  
If your Karma score is not too shabby or you have been through Naraka, i offer a route back to the World in the form of a re-birth so you can have another go but be warned it may not necessarily be as a human, you could be a cow or a chicken or whatever i feel like that day.
The highest scorers get the best option which is to be given immortality by drinking Soma made from mushrooms and sent to live forevermore with the wise and saintly spirits of the departed ancestors of Hindu culture to enjoy eternal happiness and shine as stars in the celestial heavens.  
You are probably now worrying about all the things you have done and yep, they have all been written down but there is a loophole to spare you the justice of my court, you just need to make sure that you die in a holy place so as long as you can arrange to draw your final breath in a Temple then that time you stole all that stationery from work or scribbled your ex-boyfriends telephone number on the toilet door in the local pub need never be mentioned.

Favourite Royal Award To The Queen

You can't turn around without risking your eye being poked out by a Union Flag as Britain gears up for the Queens 70th Jubilee celebrations and Johnny Rotten may have called it a fascist regime and the Queen ain't no human being but she is the nations favourite Royal according to  an IPSOS poll with 45% of Brits who were asked to rank the Royal family.
Next favourite is the Duchess of Cambridge Kate, or The Duchess of Cambridge as she is also known, is the second most popular family member, with 32% of the nation voting for her which will give her bragging rights in Buck House as she is ahead of her third place husband William, the Duke of Cambridge who polled 28%.
The next King, Prince Charles, got half as much as his eldest son with 14% but above his other son the Duke of Sussex with Harry scraping to 11% then Camilla the Duchess of Cornwall and then the other Duchess, the one of Sussex, who got approval from just 6% of her mother-in-laws subjects.
The Queen's other children, Edward and Anne polled under 5% and the numbers for Prince Andrew were not given but after his recent headlines, to quote the Sex Pistols again at him, no future, no future, no future for you.

Sometimes Conspiracy Theory Is Conspiracy Fact

The secret to a good conspiracy theory is that it has just enough of a grain of truth in it that it makes people go 'hmmm...i wonder' but it seems that the conspiracy theories doing the rounds these days are just too far out, 5G spreading Covid and the earth is Flat for example, that they are easily dismissed and nobody but the most gullible will wonder about them.
By and large most conspiracy theories don't get out of the starting blocks so the idea of the US Government spraying San Francisco with disease to replicate a biological weapon attack or deliberately putting poison in alcohol which killed over 10,000 people or even releasing 300,000 mosquito's infected with yellow fever into Georgia to test a new weapon are the rantings of a lunatic...or are they?
You may want to keep filling your bunker with canned goods and keep that tin foil close by because while most conspiracy theories are nonsense, there are a few that actually aren't theories at all but actual history because they actually happened.
The US Government DID spray Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria over San Francisco in 1950 in Operation Sea-Spray to determine how vulnerable the city was to a bio-weapon attack and this was duplicated by the UK Government but they went one better and mixed phenol and anthrax to their dosage when they sprayed it across south Dorset in 1971.
While the people of San Francisco were receiving treatment for urinary tract infections, South Georgians were fighting off the 300,000 mosquitoes infected with yellow fever which their Government, in Operation Big Buzz, had kindly dropped on them to test using the insects as weapon as war.
In 1920's America, the Prohibition laws were in full swing and the Government really wanted to dissuade people from drinking alcohol so they thought if some people got really, really sick the rest would stay well clear although they possibly got the mix wrong because at least 10,000 people did stop drinking permanently as well not breathing or actually living, killed by their own Government.    
At least the 6,000 babies they used to perform atomic tests on in the 1950's and 60's were already dead and snatched from hospitals without parental consent although the 300 men, women and children in a black area of Oklahoma were not until after the US Airforce dropped incendiary bombs on them in the 1920's when they rioted over a black man being accused of rape.
At least in the Gulf of Tonkin attack they left their own people alone and faked an attack on their own warships by the North Vietnamese to give them the cover to go to war with the Communists so next time that person in the pub mentions chem-trails or Bill Gates injecting us all with Covid so he can take over the world, it may be easy to laugh at them and congratulate ourselves for being smarter than they are, but sometimes the stupidest conspiracy theories might actually have more than a grain of truth in them.
The overwhelming majority don't of course, but occasionally...