Today Is...National Dentists Day

The most famous dentist in history was probably Doc Holiday who did a bit of crown work and filling teeth between outlawing, gambling and gunfighting which wasn't bad for someone with Tuberculosis who could barely get out of bed in the morning without vomiting up a gallon of lung tissue.
L Ron Hubbard received his inspiration for a new religion whilst sat in a dentist chair and John Lennon was introduced to LSD by his dentist and who knows if the drugged up Beatle would have written quite such inspirational songs if he hadn't have been whacked out of his gaud afterwards.
While waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect recently, my dentist was talking to me about how the amount of youngsters visiting her surgery has increased and when i asked why, after wiping the dribble from my cheek, she put it down to selfies.
It seems that the proliferation of teenagers taking pictures of themselves and posting them online has led to a surge in them overly worrying about their appearance.
Having the pearly whites buffed and polished is not the only symptom either, all sorts of cosmetic surgery from nose jobs, jaw shavings and boob jobs have increased and it's men as well as women although women 'getting work done' vastly outnumbers the men.
Us young women have always looked to squeeze every inch out of what nature gave us with make-up, push up bras, false eyelashes, perfume and stiletto shoes but the younger generation seems to have taken it one step further and now actually get their bodies surgically and chemically sculpted.
Skin whitening is a thing and i don't even want to think what anal bleaching entails but i have seen it offered as part of a package for a 'beautiful body' like those advertised in the magazines and on television.
The NHS does not offer cosmetic surgery and going private is beyond the purse of most youngsters, £5,000 for breast enhancement, £4,500 for liposuction and £4,500 for nose surgery and these come with a disclaimer that results are not guaranteed.
I get that young people, women especially, want to look their best but where in my day it was hair dye, a whole case of foundation, a little red dress and padded bras, today it is a whole other thing altogether including actually going to the dentist voluntarily which never happened in my day unless of course you had the same Dentist as John Lennon and come away with a bit more than a sticker saying you had been a very brave girl.

Boris Lying Over Not Lying

Not sure why it took an inquiry to work out of Boris Johnson lied to Parliament, his lips moved so obviously he did but that's the way we do things here so an expensive, time consuming inquiry it was and the interim report doesn't make good reading for the former Prime Minister as it laid out four reasons why
he misled Parliament and the Public.
Johnson, for his part, went the full Trump and decided that being found guilty on four occasions of lying vindicated him that he did not break any rules which even had his supporters backing away from him and only the most sycophantic even attempting to stand by him.
Mr Johnson, who has already been fined by police for breaking his own Covid rules, is due to give evidence to the MPs in three weeks and his defence seems to be that nobody told him that him and his Advisors were breaking the rules although the Committee seemed to have pre-empted that by including the line that it should have been obvious that he was and has him even saying at one event that it was 'probably the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now'.
He could face suspension from the House of Commons or if his suspension is over ten days, would trigger a by-election in his constituency but he appears to be becoming more and more isolated and desperate and it couldn't happen to a nicer lying scumbag. 

Today is...The Day Joseph Stalin Died

At first there were three Russian Revolutionaries at the head of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin and Trotsky were the brains and Stalin the brawn but after Lenin died from a series of strokes and Trotsky went down with a bad case of ice pick in the head, the only one left was Stalin and with the two intellectuals of the Revolution having left the scene, he quickly set about reducing the Soviet Union population by 42,673,000 and putting himself third in the Worlds Biggest killer list between Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan.
With the death bell sounding for any notion of the Marxist ideals that the revolution were based upon, as well proving an economic boon for Soviet era undertakers, he put the right willies up the West, especially America who feared an Anarchist Socialist revolution and still today wonderfully confuse Communism, Socialism and Marxism and warn of a coming Commie pinko take over.
During one of the many times of famine, when asked what he was going to do to get more food on the shelves, he replied that shops should build bigger shelves, that was the level of the man who, just in case you missed the earlier sentence, was not the brains of the operation.
Thankfully he died of a cerebral hemorrhage before he could overtake the Mongol leader but he did leave something to at least one member of Soviet Society, someone nicked his hat as he laid in state as well as providing a certain English writer with inspiration for a cartoon about Pigs who overthrow their ruler and corrupt their ideological goals where everyone is supposedly equal and for tens of millions under Stalin they were, all equally dead.

Today is...World Obesity Day

The Red Cross has a shocking report that states more people in the world are now dying from obesity than malnutrition with 1.5 billion dangerously overweight people worldwide last year, while 925 million were underfed.
The US sits top in the OECD Obesity Table and Britain 7th and both of our nations have recently had leaders who were the exact opposite of being shining examples of weight maintenance and both were more likely to have found a Unicorn in their kitchen than a diet sheet but Jolly Johnson and Plump Trump are not the only overweight World leaders though, there are many who you wouldn't want to be in the way of when the buffet opened.
During the Coronovirus pandemic Boris Johnson said he had a lot on his plate and he certainly did which is why after he came out of hospital having contracted Coronavirus he vowed to lose weight to avoid any further health complications but having seen him lately that went about as well as his idea of not looking like he had been dragged through a bush backwards and then fed through a combine harvester.
It doesn't help when we are bombarded by advertisements for fast foods and sugar filled drinks but despite the cost to the NHS of obesity running at £5 billion, approximately the same as smoking, when was the last time we saw an advert urging us to eat less KFCs?
The idea of losing weight is to take in less calories then you expend during activities so if you eat or drink 3000 calories a day but only use 2000, that's a dress size up after a few weeks but if your hairdresser said eating chocolate for breakfast was good for you then it would be wise to take it with caution but when a scientist says it, wahey, shove the Corn Flakes where the Sun doesn't shine, where's that big bar of Aero!!
Spanish researchers have discovered that dark chocolate appears to make the metabolism work harder, offsetting the fat that otherwise might hang around. They also found dark chocolate had a positive effect on circulation, blood pressure and heart health and Tel Aviv University suggesting that eating dessert for breakfast supports weight loss.
Conclusive, cast iron proof then that combining chocolate with breakfast is beneficial so if anyone asks why you are stuffing your face with chocolate cake at 7am, it's part of a scientifically backed diet program.
That said if a scientist tries to give you advice on a layered crop with a softly arched fringe i'd check with the hairdresser.

Today is...St Augustine's Feast Day

If we had a time machine and went back to 6th century Italy, we could see a little Catholic Bishop saying some very unChristian things about the Pope because while he was just pottering around in Rome doing everyday religious things, the Pope came up with the great idea of sending him over to England to convert the whacky Anglo-Saxons from believing whatever nonsense they believed in and start believing in his particular flavour of Christianity instead.
Obviously the last thing he would have wanted to do was leave Sunny Italy for the rainy, windswept island off the coast of mainland Europe to try and convert a bunch of smelly Anglo-Saxons and halfway here, he got cold feet and decided to send a messenger to say he was coming back and Gregory sent his own back saying no you ain't and that's why two years after he left, he turned up in Kent to be met by King Æthelberht who decided not to balance his head on a pike and gave him some land in Canterbury to use as a base.
Considering still having a head a bonus, he still had to go around and tell the people who built huts out of their own dung that Jesus was the guy for them so he came up with the idea of sneakily allowing all the old, heathen festivals and beliefs to remain intact, but superimpose Jesus and Christianity on them.
It worked a treat because when he rolled up to a dungy hut he knew all the English cared about was getting as drunk as a newt and stuffing their ugly faces at certain times of the year so they didn't care who it celebrated so gradually, the main heathen feasts became days honouring Christ or one of the Saints who we had handy for any eventuality.
Over several centuries, all the big piss-ups were converted to Christian festivals including Easter and the 12-day festival of Yule at the end of December which became Christmas, the celebration of Christ’s birth although he had to fudge the dates a bit for that one.
He did such a good job that he was made the very the first Archbishop of Canterbury and kick-started the whole rubbing out the original Gods and pasting in their own guy thing.

Today is...World Teen Mental Wellness Day

As i get older i do find myself saying the things which my parents said like 'she should put on some more clothes' when a young girl walks by in a skimpy dress on a cold night and don't even get me started on today's music.
The truth is that today's youth has got it much harder than we ever did, if we had social media back when i was a teenager then one look at my Facebook page back then would have seen me shunned by polite society and banished to the unemployment queue until i reached retirement age.
Luckily it wasn't and my teenage indiscretions are lost in the mists of time along with my bare-faced lying so we never had the pressures teenagers have today with their mood swings, obsessive crushes and social anxiety played out in front of the whole World on social media.
Where the only place we wrote that we loved Roger Taylor from Duran Duran for example was the margin of our Maths exercise book, now it is on the internet and that crap never goes away, ten years time when you are sitting in an interview you know that the prospective employer has looked up your Facebook profile and know, and you know that they know, that not only did you had a thing for 80s drummers but he has read your poems about loneliness and how you hoped a bus runs over Jason
Clark because he said he couldn't go see Footloose with you as he was going to see his Grandma that evening but was actually seen in the Wimpy with Karen Fisher that night. The cheating Bastard.
Anyway, according to a report, a staggering 49.5% of today's kids aged 13-17 meet the diagnostic criteria for mental health disorders, with 31.9% of them experiencing anxiety disorders, 22% of the kids in that study classified as exhibiting severe impairment or distress, and 42% met the criteria for a second disorder.
That's a lot of teenagers but the usual response by cranky old farts of my generation is to 'get over it' and to promise that 'If you think it's tough now, wait until you get older' which is nonsense.
If you think it gets tough as you turn into adulthood then you are not doing adulthood right as the National Institute of Mental Health reports that 25.8% of people aged 18-25 suffer from mental illness, and that number plummets as people get older, with those over age 50 reporting a much reduced 13.8%.
As you get older you develop your own coping strategies so somebody having their 200th panic attack at age 40 knows how to cope with it better than a 14-year-old having their first or second.
As bad as things seem now, they will get better or at the very least you will be better equipped to handle them and you will look back at the crush on new wave band members with a smile and feel quite glad that the number X400 didn't roll over Jason Clark, mostly because you saw him recently and he is now fat, practically bald and was wearing a purple shell suit and nothing cheers you up more than seeing the boy who spurned you 35 years ago is bloated, hairless and clad from head to toe in cheap, nylon sportswear.

Today is...World Music Therapy Day

Music can be powerful, the right tunes can lift our mood, calm, motivate and comfort us and over our lifetime we develop a taste for certain genres of music and we all have our go-to songs when we need a bit of a boost but Dutch cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Jacob Jolij, recently ran an expansive survey of songs ranging across all genres to compile the top feel-good songs that scientifically make people happy.
The science bit is that to be a mood changer the song must have a high tempo, positive lyrics and the listener should be able to sing-a-long to it and for your mood enhancing pleasure the top song is Queen's Don't Stop Me Now but before you upload it onto your MP3 player and become a shooting star leaping through the sky or a tiger defying the laws of gravity or even a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva, consider the results of this other study from BBC Gardeners Time of all places.
King Charles has often been lauded as a ruby short of a crown for talking to his plants because rather than talking to them he should have sang some Black Sabbath instead.
In an experiment, different genres of music were played into four greenhouses and the ones that grew up to be the biggest and healthiest was the blooms that had the heavy metal directed at them.
Hilariously, the greenhouse that had the soothing tones of Cliff Richards played to them all died, i'd like to think it was suicide, but yet more human research shows that if you favour a more Heavy Metal strand of music then you are actually a lot less aggressive than your T-Shirts lets on, being gentle, intuitive, creative and introverted so listening to Metallica in the queue at Tesco could actually reduce your desire to use the box of PG Tips in your basket to beat to a pulp the man who is holding you all up as he looks for his debit card.
Listening to Pop music can increase confidence as can hearing hip-hop such as 'The Message' by Grand Master Flash & The Furious Five which boffins at the University of Cambridge have said can help soothe a troubled mind as they generally offer a message of hope and whatever your music of choice it can certainly be very emotive and can stir some deep emotions so the Cambridge boffins are probably on to something and it may be rap music for some and Beethoven for others.
Personally, i find listening to Christmas songs at any time of the year a massive lifter and has the added bonus of telling my family if they can hear 'Frosty the Snowman' coming from the CD player in July, it probably isn't the best time to ask for a favour.

The Left Sharing Views With The Right

I was asked if there is any right wings views that i could support and after giving it some thought and consideration, i concluded that i hadn't been dropped on my head enough times to find myself supporting anything the racist homophobes on that side believed in and it would be a sad day in the Lucy household when i was forced to hand back my hippy, tree hugging lefty card and throw my lot in with the awful right wingers.
Then i happened across a YouGov poll which have three views which are supported by the political left and right, the support for nuclear energy, believing that the criminal justice system is too lenient and that the House of Lords should be elected.
Firstly, i wouldn't say i support nuclear energy, obviously it is cleaner than what we already have but whereas it isn't stuffing billions of tonnes of carbon into the already heavily polluted air we breathe, it is instead stuffing it into the ground with nuclear waste making that part of the planet uninhabitable for 100,000 years and that's just the low level less dangerous stuff, the high level waste is hazardous for a million years and that's without looking too hard at the health implications of living close to a nuclear site or if one goes Chernobyl, Three Mile Island or Fukishima.
When we have a free source provided by solar, wind and tides the choice of nuclear is strange so support is a bit strong, i would go with better than what we have but immensely worse then what we could have.     
The Criminal Justice system being too soft i do agree with although i think we get to the same conclusion for different reasons. Whereas i see prison as a way to remove someone from society for our safety until they are fit to return to it, the right see it as a punishment and it should be bread and dripping and hard labour which is why they are always banging on about how 'soft' prison is.
I don't get concurrent sentences, what's the point of that, but serving your debt to society and a second chance i am all for as well as serving a whole sentence, if you get 10 years then you should serve 10 years, not 5 and out for good behaviour so again we get to the same place but through very different streets.
Thirdly, the House of Lords being an unelected chamber elected by whoever the Prime Minister decided worthy is a farce. It is full of Lords who have got there for donating millions to whichever flavour of Party is currently running things and as they have a say in our Democracy, they should be decided by us, not by someone as a reward for having deep pockets.
I make that one and a half views that i share with my right wing enemies so i was preparing to give a tree one last hug and nail my lefty card to it before going to look for some migrants to harangue for being lacky feckers coming over here to live the life of riley on my tax pounds and then i thought, hang on, maybe it's not me having some slightly right wing views but maybe it is them having some lefty ones which is more than likely because lets face it, nobody would want to be a right winger and hold abhorrent views on purpose do they?
Welcome to my side right wingers, help yourself to some lettuce and you are welcome to borrow my Communist Manifesto anytime you want.

Brit's Don't Do God

When it was rumoured that Tony Blair was of the religious persuasion his handlers quickly stepped in and tried to avoid the awkward questions by announcing that 'We Don't do God' because they knew that if a high profile figure comes out as a believer, they will be crucifed by the Press and Public.
As it turned out Blair was deeply religious and he and his fellow Bible hugger ignored the 'Shall Not Kill' Commandment and went on a war declaration twice in The Middle East.
One time Liberal Democrat Leader Tim Fallon stepped down when he got the awkward questions around gay marriage, deciding that remaining faithful to his religion and depriving gays of their equal rights was more important than running Britain's third political party and quit when continually pressed by journalists on his beliefs.   
With those examples it is difficult to see what the potential SNP Candidate and high profile evangelical Free Church of Scotland member Kate Forbes thought would happen when she announced she was running for the leadership.
What did happen was after a series of interviews which probed at length on her faith-informed views and she gave her opinion that children outside marriage is wrong, she isn't much of a defender of trans rights and marriage should only be between a man and a woman, many of her own supporters distanced themselves from her campaign and the SNP said that she doesn't reflect their views and should withdraw from the race.
Lesson hopeful learnt for anyone who want to run for political office in Great Britain, Brits don't do God and neither should you.

Yet Another Great Idea From Me

I think it is fair to say that if some nations had a choice, they wouldn't choose to be living right next door to their current neighbours so the solution is simple, a country swap.
Cuba for example would probably prefer to be closer to their ideological comrades Russia and China than the United States of America and it is probably also fair to say that the Israelis had the option, they would rather be living nearer the shores of North America than in the Middle East so they can swap.
America would be happy as it would prefer a more compliant Israel on it's border rather than the belligerent Cubans sticking two fingers up at them so all will be fine on that score.
Likewise, Israel has been at war with almost everyone of it's neighbours at some point in a little over 60 years and nobody in the area wants its stuck there in the Middle East anyway so no problems from that side also as well as the bonus of Cuba being an Ireland so no stealing land or neigbours to oppress.
One sticking point may come that it will be another decade at least until Israel steal enough land off the Palestinians to swap like for like but that's plenty of time for Cuba to wrap it's things up in newspaper and learn what 'Do you want to buy some cigars?' is in Arabic.
Scotland are desperate to leave the British Isles and us English would be happy to phone the removal vans for them and we have the perfect replacement in New Zealand who have a population almost identical to Scotland so its a perfect fit and New Zealander's seem a lot more friendly than the Scots and if they can bring that nice Jacinda woman with them, all the better.
South Korea and North Korea are almost permanently on the verge of knocking seven bells out of each other so i am sure that the South Koreans would love to move away and Iran would be happy to move their stuff and nuclear facilities closer to North Korea where they could test their nuclear capability until the cows come home and Hong Kong's population is close enough to Ireland's to make a move possible, the Hong Kong never wanted to leave British rule anyway and China would find a few million fesity Irishmen tanked up on Guinness less willing to take their nonsense.
Mexico is always being bad-mouthed by its more warmongery northern neighbour and the Japanese are forever having to duck as North Korea's missile tests whistle over their heads so both could be up for a swap and even America couldn't object, they dropped a freaking nuclear missile on them so they owe them anyway.     
The United Nations poo-pooed my other ideas but i think they may be up for this one as it comes with the bonus of not so many flashpoints around the World, someone get me Antonio Guterres on the blower.