Special Guest Blogger: Roman God Sterculius

Romans had an almost uncountable number of gods to be bribed or flattered if life was to proceed smoothly. Virtually every action, event, or object in Roman life was governed by some god or other, we had Spiniensis who presided over the clearing of thorns from gardens, Cardea the goddess of door hinges and Robigus who was the go-to guy for mildew and rust but i was the God of what i liked to call organic fertilization...or poo.
It may seem a strange career choice for an eager young deity so while being the emperor of excrement may not have been a very prestigious gig and you might have even gave a little chuckle that it was what i was in charge of but then did you enjoy your cereal this morning? That stuff literally grew in manure so in the nicest possible way you can eat shit along with the unholy chemicals and pesticides.  
Rome was a very agricultural society and when everything was organically grown good quality fertilizer was essential and extremely important to farmers who valued my blessed fertilizer above all things.
Along with my son, Picus, i taught the use of manure in agricultural processes but the Gods decided that being the son of the Grand Poobah of Poop was not so dignified so the Roman's rewrote our family tree to declare their boy the son of Saturn although personally i would have gone with Caelus, he was called Uranus originally.
Sure it was a dirty, (and smelly) job but someone had to do it if we wanted ripe crops but i always taught farmers at the beginning of their career that agriculture is very much like the manure production and you only get out of it what you put into it.

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas Sullivan

Howdy Limeys, now i know that drinking Tea is your thing so it must really annoy you that it wasn't a pasty faced Brit who invented the tea-bag but a yankee.
Now you may know that way back in the late 18th Century, demonstrators boarded British ships in Boston harbour and threw the cargo of 342 chests of tea into the sea. The British government responded by not allowing America to be part of your empire anymore (Boo Hoo) so you would assume that ever since Americans have an aversion to drinking tea as it is associated with Boston, King George and the dastardly 18th Century English shooting at them.
We did have Iced Tea before tea bags, you may think that Iced Tea was one of those things that just happened to sound like it was made from cold tea, like Dr Pepper isn't actually made by doctors or contain peppers, and that's true but we add lemon slices and fresh mint to the cold tea and believe me that's better than the piss weak stuff you limeys serve but anyway, i'm here because in 1908 i accidentally invented the tea bag.
I was a tea and coffee exporter and at the time tea drinkers used a removable device to easily make tea in a mug such as tea eggs and tea balls which were perforated metal containers which were filled with loose leaves and immersed in boiling water, and then removed using an attached chain.
Needless to say, us American's are a lazy bunch and to keep the tea samples i sent out from leaking everywhere, i began to send samples of tea to my customers in small silken bags and some assumed that these were supposed to be used in the same way as the metal infusers, by putting the entire bag into the pot, rather than emptying out the contents.
Customers complained that although the new tea-bags were great, the mesh on the silk was too fine and it was hard to get out of the cup so instead of rolling my eyes and calling them dumbasses, i had the idea of developing bags with less fine mesh and added a string so they didn't burn their stupid fingers and tea bags were born.
I then sold my tea-bag idea back to you Brits where you can enjoy the convenience of tea making with more time for arguing over whether the milk or water goes in first and then over stir the liquid, not that it does anything to the flavour of the tea but it seems you Brits do like the constant chinking of the spoon against the cup which is just really, really annoying to everyone else but it's your thing, you do what you like.

Special Guest Blogger: Queen Olympias

Admittedly at first read i may come across as a tad cunning, brutal and bloodthirsty but i not only gave birth to the mighty Alexander the Great, but i also taught him everything he knew and anyway it didn't end quite so well for me anyway in what was a brutal and bloodthirsty time.   
As the daughter of the King of a Grecian tribe in Epirus, everything was sweet until he died and my Uncle Arymbas took over and shored up his power by marrying me off the new King of Macedonia, Philip II, and his royal household was already crowded with three other queens so as Queen number four i had my work cut out to stand above the others which i did by joining him in the Ancient cult of Cabeiri, which sounds kinky but was more to do with celebrating the Great Gods of Samothrace.
That ingratiated me to him and when i gave birth to a son and heir, that would be Alexander, and then we also had a daughter named Cleopatra, but with a son i was almost the main Queen but the issue i had was that their was another male in line for the throne before him, Arrhidaeus.
I kept a watchful eye on Arrhidaeus and as luck would have it he stupidly ate something someone carelessly slipped into his meal which gave him brain damage and dropped him down a few rungs in the inheritance chain but my husband decided why have 4 wives when you can have 7 and i really didn't like sharing my hubby with younger, more fertile women and the seventh was a native Macedonian and Philip's courtiers began circulated that any sons she bore Philip would get precedence over my liddle Alex.
Philip agreed and after a big bust up i left him and took Alexander and Cleopatra back to Epirus where my brother Alexander I, was now ruling but my husband was a douchebag of the highest order and signed a marriage deal for Cleopatra with none other than King Alexander I of Epirus, Cleopatra’s Uncle.
I bided my time and when everyone who was anyone gathered to celebrate the nuptials of my brother and his niece, the happy father of the bride could see that i wasn't happy and if my evil glares didn't show it, the guard i paid to stab him between the ribs certainly did.
Immediately after hubby demise, the Kingdom pondered if my Alex was the rightful heir as the next king as wife 7 had two babies who could argue the case, or they might have if they hadn't been brutally murdered by a certain mother and son team and wife 7 was so grief stricken she killed herself so with Alex now undisputed King and me the official Kings mother, i could kick back and relax as Alex got married to a lovely girl called Roxana who had a boy they called Alex junior, but i wasn't ready to embrace a lifestyle of idly sitting on my arse talking gossip with the neighbors so i just caused more mayhem.
As Queen Mother to Alexander the Great, i kept telling him to sack his regent Antipater and i would do his job but then during Alexanders Babylon campaign, things went horribly wrong.
Alexander perished and seeing my cushy job slipping away as the country tried to decide between crowning Alexander’s baby heir or his dullard half-brother Arrhidaeus as the next ruler, the decision was to be made by my old pal Antipater's son, Cassander, and he picked the brain damaged Arrhidaeus to be the new king.
I did what any self respecting ex-Queen Mother would do and marched into Macedonia with a few heavilly armed friends and gave Arrhidaeus the respect his role afforded by executing him but his wife, Adea Eurydice, i offered a choice of dying by poison, hanging or stabbing herself with a sword.
She chose the noose and then i went after Cassander but he was in hiding so i captured and executed his brother and in return he kidnapped both my grandson Alexander Jnr and Roxana and then drove the knife home by executing them both.
He swore he would spare my life if i surrendered and to be fair he never killed me, instead he rounded up the family members of all the people i had hurt while in power, and they were all too happy to stone me to death and wipe out the line of Alexander the Great.
So if anything, my tale should be a warning for two of life's great truths, the first being to not let your sex stand in your way of fighting for what you believe and secondly it is a really good idea to avoid marrying people you could go halfsies with on your relatives birthday presents.

Special Guest Blogger: Chevalier d'Eon

You know how some guys grow their hair long and they look like rockstars, and others they just look like ugly girls? Well i looked pretty damn feminine which is how i got enrolled by King Louis XV to his secret spy network, the Secret du Roi.
I was an excellent student, graduating in civil law and canon law and became secretary to the intendant of Paris, serving as his secretary when the spy network came knocking with a secret mission to meet the Russian Empress Elizabeth and conspire with the pro-French faction.
At that time the English and French were as usual at war, and the English were attempting to deny the French access to the Empress by allowing only women and children to cross the border into Russia so i changed my name to Lady Lia de Beaumont and the English didn't look at me twice and i served as a maid of honour to the Empress.
I became the assistant to the French ambassador to Russia and served in that role for 4 years until the Empress died and then i returned triumphantly to France where i ditched the petticoats and was sent to London to draft the peace treaty that formally ended the Seven Years' War.
I stayed in London and spied on he English for the King and then a new Ambassador, Guerchy, arrived and that is where my story really starts.
The guy really didn't like me and tried to get me deported and when that didn't work he tried to poison me so i published much of the secret diplomatic correspondence about my role under the King an bitched about Guerchy and the French Government came gunning for me but i had held back the juiciest documents and threatened to release them if they didn't allow me to return to France as a free man and with a pension for my service.
The French had a law where women are pardoned for most misdemeanors and we came to an agreement that if i was to resume my role as a female, everything would be pardoned so i agreed if they threw in expenses for a new wardrobe of women's clothes and spent the rest of my days living as a female, saying that i felt free to let out my big secret that i had been a woman all along and had only pretended to be a male. I even wrote my memoirs explaining it all.
When France began to help the rebels during the American War of Independence, i trying to start up a division of women soldiers but the Government refused the offer and then my pension was ended by the French Revolution and i died in poverty and at my post-mortem they found out i had a penis the whole time which left everyone thoroughly confused.

France Should Learn From Other Right Wing Governments

Something we know from history without doubt is that right wing governments are all sorts of terrible and a favourite saying of mine is that not all right wingers are racist, but all the racists are on the right wing and France has a massive racist bidding to pitch up in the Élysée Palace in the shape of Marine Le Pen.
It was expected that the current French President Emmanuel Macron would win comfortably and carry on ruling the French roost but the latest polls show that his lead has evaporated before Sunday's first round of voting and now stands at 27% with Le Pen closing in on 24% which is within the margin of error.
Blaming his drop on his attention being on the war in Ukraine rather than campaigning for is re-election, Macron is now frantically trying to paint Le Pen as the racist she is, pointing to her links with Russia's Putin and her latest anti-immigration speech where she pledged to ban the headscarf in all public spaces and make it enforceable by law.
The political talking heads are concerned that although Marine Le Pen won't attract many new people to her cause, Macron has lost many of his own supporters and they won't come out to vote which will allow Le Pen to sneak through.
The French voters only have to look across the Channel to see what a right wing government looks like and how they are dragging us down or look across the Atlantic to see how electing a racist into power divides a country so Macron may not be great, but he is easily their least worst option.

Trump The (Awful) Businessman

We know what the first two fattest Presidents of America have been doing recently but we haven't heard much about the third fattest but he has been busy setting up a new Media outlet called 'Truth Social' which as expected, has turned into another failed business venture to go with all his other failed businesses.
How a man who has been declared bankrupt on at least five occasions can pitch himself as a great businessman is a mystery but it appears that it isn't about to become the 'media powerhouse' as promised, it will enter the history books alongside his other great failures such as Trump Airlines which defaulted on a $245 million loan and surrendering ownership of the airline to his creditors.
There was also Trump beverages (abandoned before making it to market), Trump: The Game (discontinued after poor sales), Trump magazine (folded after 2 years), Trump Mortgage (defaulted), Trump Steaks (pulled after two months for poor sales), Trump’s travel site (folded after 12 months), Trump Communications Company (abandoned before launch), Trump Tower Tampa (collapsed after being sued by buyers), Trump University (shut down and facing lawsuits) and Trump Vodka (abandoned after poor sales) Trumps Cologne (discontinued after poor sales).
The ultimate business failure has to be Trump casinos which should be a licence to print money but ended in £3 billion debt and bankruptcy  so the theme seems to be if something has the name 'Trump' on it, avoid it because it's a dog.
As a businessman he wasn't great but as he took a $19.9 trillion when he took the Presidency and increased it to $27 trillion when he left office, he wasn't any great shakes at national economics either but as his weight went from a hefty 16.9 stone (244 pounds) at the start of his Presidency to a morbidly obese 17.4 stone (244 pounds) when his morbidly dense supporters rioted 4 years later, he was good for the profits of fast food outlets as well as spray tan vendors.
The fattest President was 340 pounds or 24 stones of William Taft followed by Grover Cleveland who broke the scales at 280 pounds or 20 stones but if we suspend belief and Trump does become the 47th President, he may yet have a success and be the fattest President ever to go with his successes in already being the dumbest and most perverted.

Who We Are Arming In Ukraine

I don't know how supplying Ukraine with weapons to fight Russia with is not an act of war, it seems that if it isnt a British person in the tank or firing the weapon it doesn't count as us being involved but we are sending £100 million worth of rockets, guns and artillery to Ukraine to aid them in their fight against Putin's invading hordes.
As we have seen many times before, the problem with supplying weapons to a nation is that those same weapons can easily be turned against us as we found out with the Taliban who benefited from a decade of us shoving weapons at them only to see them forcibly shove them back at us when we fell out.  
The US Government estimated that between 2003 and 2016, the US unloaded 358,530 rifles, 64,000 machine guns, 25,327 grenade launchers and 22,174 Humvees to the Afghan forces it fought alongside, much of which ended up in the hands of the Taliban and ISIS which they used to bring such ruin to Iraq and Syria.
Obviously Ukraine is different to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan but there is evidence that one of the recipients of our military hardware is units like the card carrying Neo-nazi white supremacists Azov Battalion and Social National Assembly who said their mission statement is to: 'lead the white races of the world in a final crusade against Semite-led inferior races'.
Pre invasion, they were vilified for physically assaulting migrants, gypsies, the LGBTQ community and anyone who opposed their nationalist views and a report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHA) accused the Azov regiment of violating international humanitarian law but despite that they were drafted into the national Army to repel the Russian invaders although they were asked to remove the Nazi symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia from their uniforms.
The question to ask is when the war ends, and we all hope that will be soon, what happens to those powerful weapons which we have poured into a war-zone and is now in the hands of far right Nazi sympathisers?
Unfortunately, we have recent history to look at to see the horrendous answer to that question.

Nuclear Reactor Coming To A Town Near You

It has become obvious that Britain needs to generate more of its own power and on a windswept island surrounded by sea which would make it perfect for wind or wave generation, the Prime Minister has decided instead to build a nuclear reactor each year which will lead to: 'greater energy self-sufficiency with cheaper bills'.
They have already had a hell of a time finding sites for the nuclear reactors we already have as the locals protest about having a reactor near them not helped by a number of reports which concluded that there is an association between proximity of reactors and cancer risk and then despite all sorts of financial incentives, no council was willing to host the millions of tonnes of toxic radioactive waste from nuclear power stations which remains deadly to humans for hundreds of thousands of years.
Like most of our problems, the lack of energy problems go back to Margaret Thatcher and her right wing zeal to privatise the energy market and records show that since 1996, the furthest the records i could find go back, the average electricity bill has gone up by a third while the gas bill has gone up by just over a half but the real story is when we look at the average profit margins of the big six energy suppliers.
In 1996, the profits they made was just under 1% but in 2017 it was as much as 8.5% as a look at your gas and electric bill this year proves that when we were told that energy privitisation would 'Benefit British consumers and the competition would reduce prices and improve service quality' as Thatcher said hasn't turned out to be true.
The privatisation experiment has blatantly failed as it is obvious that it increase costs and lowers the quality of services because it is impossible for the private sector to deliver the same service for less and still make a profit and making a profit is the bottom line for businesses, the bloated increase in the profit margin of the big six shows who is benefiting and it isn't us but that's privatisation for you. Crap 'innit but still, you may get a shiny new nuclear reactor in your town, i just hope that the constant ticking of the Geiger counter doesn't keep you awake at night.

The Rishi Sunak Comedy Show

If i submitted a script of the going's on with the current Boris Johnson Government it would be returned as too unbelievable but over the last couple of years unbelievable is exactly what it has been.
We are still in the throes of Boris and his cohorts not following the Covid rules they imposed upon the rest of us and now we have a Chancellor and his family, the guy responsible for imposing tax laws upon us remember, not following them themselves.
With Boris hanging on by his fingertips as we wait for the MET to do their thing and issue him his fine for breaking lock-down rules, the Chancellor was seen as the natural successor but this week has blown any idea of him swapping number 11 for number 10 clean out of the water.
In what is beyond farce, the hapless chancellor just couldn’t get anything right this week with regards to his wife's legal, but highly unjustifiable, tax arrangements when it was revealed that she does not pay taxes in the UK on her annual millions due to her holding non-dom status.
That is to gloss over that some of her millions coming from Russia which the UK Government is sanctioning but the meat of the scandal is that she pays £30,000 per year to retain her non-dom status which means she doesn't have to pay tax to her husband in the UK.
Last week the gloves came off when he gave a mini-budget which he insisted alleviated the worst of the cost of living crisis but was immediately trashed by experts as not doing anything like it and then going to a petrol station and filling up someone else’s car, then tries to scan his card on the barcode reader.
Laughably bad for someone trying to appear in touch with the common man but worst was to come when it was revealed that the mega-rich chancellor persuading ordinary British people to do difficult things but couldn't even persuade his own wife, who is richer than the Queen, to pay her fair share tax.
To start with Rishi defended his wife saying that it is: 'how the system works for people like her who are international who have moved here' and then stated that it was unfair for the media to target his wife and compared himself to a certain Hollywood star, saying 'Both Will Smith and me, having our wives attacked'.
Then it revealed that both him and his wife held US Green Cards meaning they must pay US tax on their worldwide income and pledge that the US is their forever home, Rishi holding his for a year while he was employed as the Chancellor meaning he wasn't even paying UK Taxes while making the rules up for those of us who were.
Mrs Sunak has now said she will pay her fair share of taxes here going forward but too little too late because the Sunak family has united both the left and right against them, the left who object to her obscene personal wealth and using tax laws to avoid paying tax and the right who are frothing at the mouth racists at the best of times but even more now that they found out that she is not a British citizen but is Indian and paying her taxes either there or in the US (that's still not clear) and not patriotic enough.
At least with everyone getting so hot under the collar, it means people will use less heating so maybe we wont need that £200 loan the Chancellor is thankfully foisting upon us to pay our increasing heating bills.

Special Guest Blogger: Norse God Baldr

As Odin and Frigg’s son, i was a champion of goodness, innocence and forgiveness and was loved by everybody except Loki who really didn't like me and actually killed me although i was meant to be invulnerable.
I had a dream of my own death and my mother had the same dream so she came up with the idea of going to every single living thing in the Nine Worlds and have them each promise not to harm me, thus making me completely indestructible.
In fact, i was so impervious to injury that at banquets the Gods would amuse themselves by hurling sharp objects at me, not dying horribly was my hilarious party trick but Loki, who hated seeing anybody having fun, managed it.
When everything in all the world was promising not to hurt me, there was an exception. Mistletoe. Yep, mistletoe which was so insignificant and nonthreatening that mum didn’t even bother to ask it so when Loki found out and saw a chance to spoil the Gods fun, he made a spear of sharpened mistletoe and gave it to my blind brother, the god Höd, who threw it at me, killing me.
There was a resurrection clause, the Goddess Hel who ruled over the underworld realm, said that if all living things on Earth mourned me, I could be brought back to life but no, the old hag Thökk, refused to weep, saying i never did anything for her so why should she.
The old hag turned out to have be Loki in disguises and when my parents confronted him, he tried to escape by turning into a salmon but he was not slippery enough to escape and is currently chained in a cavern having snake venom dripped onto his face and bound by the entrails of his sons who the Gods disemboweled for the job.
My funeral was a grand affair, all kinds of beings from throughout the Nine Worlds attended the ceremony, there was gods, giants, elves, dwarves, valkyries and others and together they stood and watched as my body was placed on a mighty ship which was everything i could have wanted so they
set it on fire but it was so big and heavy that they had to get Hyrrokin, a giantess, to push it out to sea.  
There are vague plans for me to come back at some point in the future but until then i am spending my time in Hel and it isn't as bad as it's cracked up to be if you ignore the damp and dark conditions and ignore the howls of terror from people being murdered by serpent venom and dragons sucking the blood from their bodies. Apart from that it's okay really.