Today Is...English Colonists Establish First Permanent Settlement

Of all Great Britain's children, Canada is the one we boast about to other nations, the clean cut polite one of our offspring that everyone likes, the sort of country that would excuse themselves from the table to do a spot of vacuuming and washing up.
Australia has always been the child that we are wary of wanting to show to polite company, lest it would belch loudly and try to set light to it's own farts at the lunch table.
America has always been the one we try and forget about springing from our empirical womb, the sort of country that us parents would receive phone calls from the school inviting us up for a meeting as it has been stealing the other countries lunch money and has been trying to look up the skirts of the girls.
As Britain was at the start of its Empire Building years, it found America and decided we'll have it and in 1607 a bunch of colonists left the green and pleasant land and after five months of puking over the side of a ship, turned up in what would become Virginia and met the local Native Indian inhabitants.
Rather than bringing supplies like any sensible people, the colonists relied on the prayers to their man in the clouds to keep them fed and healthy but God told them to sod off so they ended up begging off Native American's which went ok at the start but they eventually got on like a house on fire with lots of screaming, panic and people running for safety although the Colonists were doing a good job of messing up things themselves by keep dying and stupidly burning the place down and the leader accidentally set off a powder bag which was in his lap and severely charring his own nads so he had to return to Blightly for treatment.
Despite the first lot being complete numpties, America went on to free themselves from the chains of the oppressive British, land a man on the moon and give us Buffy the Vampire Slayer but one can't wondering though, if America hadn't got all cranky and just paid the extra tax and not thrown all that tea into the harbour, would it have become another loved and respected Canada and not...well, America?

This Summer 's Heatwave

Despite all the sophisticated equipment, weather can only be forecast accurately for the the next 48 hours and after that it is a best guess based on probability on conditions that could change so to ask a weatherman if the below average temperatures for May is a sign that summer isn't going to be
as oppressively hot as last year when the record 40.3C was hit in July, is met with a shrug and a 'dunno'.
What we do know is that Summer is on it's way and the temperatures will rise so the MET Office modelling system takes all the information from recent historical data, global weather, La Niña, the effects of climate change and the typical conditions we'd normally expect to create a seasonal outlook and present the probability of weather conditions for May to July.
The temperature outlook for May to July 2023 is that there is a 5% chance this period will be cool, a 60% chance it will be near average and a 35% that it will be hot so based on that, the best chance is we can expect average temperatures in this period with a much greater chance of it turning out warmer (35%) as opposed to cooler (5%) than normal.  
As for if we are due to get a heatwave, that depends on where you live in the country as a heatwave is three consecutive days above 25°C in Scotland and Northern Ireland and between 26°C and 28°C in the rest of the UK.   
What this all means is we can expect a average or above average temperatures this summer and you will need to check your weather app to see which days are going to be average or above average but it is unlikely we will break any heat records this year.
The MET Office state that the 40.3°C of last year was a once every 1000 years event but as the climate continues to warm and weather records tumble, we are finding that these weather events are happening alarmingly less than once a millennium now.

Today Is...The Eurovision Song Contest

Today is one of the best Saturday's on the calendar because love it or hate it, the evening's television will be dominated by the Eurovision Song Contest and by midnight we will know which country are the top songsters and can expect hordes of brightly coloured Eurovision fans piling into their nation next year, as they earn the honour of hosting it.
As the contest now includes non-European nations such as Israel, it is becoming more of an international affair and with an audience of over 250 million, the Eurovision song contest is quite right to call itself the 'Worlds Largest Party' and a few years ago the spangly invite went out to Australia to join in.
Not exactly a hotbed of musical talent, Australia may seem a strange choice but it turns out that Eurovision is massively popular in Australia and has been broadcast annually to the country probably farthest away from Europe for the past 30 years.
The Eurovision purists don't like it and say that they should start their own song contest with New Zealand and the Soloman Islands if they like it so much.
It's been two decades since the UK won the Eurovision song contest and we haven't bothered the top of the leaderboard since and wheel out the 'It's not about winning but the taking part' mantra but in all honesty, winning it would be nice and last year we actually had a very good song but had the bad luck of picking the same year that Ukraine was invaded by Russia and they won the song contest despite having a song which would in normal circumstances see them finish the night on the right hand side of the final scoreboard.
Ukraine may have won it but we are hosting it this year due to Kiev being not the safest place to host a song singing competition at the moment.
So the UK probably won't win it this year and will invariably find ourselves on the wrong side of the screen with the other spotty, wheezy unpopular kids such as France and Moldova but i will still be on my sofa with my homemade scorecard and a blind optimism that this year, the UK can win the bloody thing which will last about 10 minutes into the voting section when it will become obvious that we won't.

Today Is...International Nurses Day

Nurses always top all the most trusted profession polls while Government ministers, estate agents and journalists not so much and as we all need a nurse at some point in our lives, i consider them one of the most important people we will ever cross in our lives which is why it is so shameful the way they have been treated by the UK Government, we can only hope that when any of the politicians denying them a decent payrise are in hospital, the nurse responsible for their pain relief is off sick that day.
Due to the awful treatment of our nurses, NHS bosses are concerned that Nurses will be upping sticks and taking their bedside manner somewhere where they will be more appreciated and some are looking across the Atlantic to where they are looking for nurses to fill the estimated shortfall of 100,000 nurses at US hospitals.
The average wage of a nurse in the USA is £40,000 while in the UK it is £30,000 so it is understandable why some of the caring profession could be lured abroad which is ironic considering we poach them from all around the world in the first place but why should a nurse decide to ignore the call from Uncle Sam. Let me explain:

1: Wild Animals. In Britain the most dangerous animal we have is a hedgehog while in America they have wolves, bears, rattlesnakes, sharks and something called fire ants. Stay here and it's picking hedgehog needles out of someones foot. Go over there and it's sucking snake venom out of a sweaty Texan's backside.    
2: Tea: You will never get a decent cup of tea, they drink it cold and the don't use kettles. Make a cup of tea, leave it for two hours and then drink it and that's what you will be drinking for the foreseeable future.  
3: Driving. Americans drive on the opposite side of the road and they don't have roundabouts, instead they have a complicated system of crossroads. If you make it to work with your car intact you can consider yourself fortunate. Stay here and it's mirror, signal and manoeuvre and a leisurely drive at 20mph behind a Nissan Micra.
4: History: Britain gave the World modern nursing and has a rich history. There are beds in British hospitals that were built when the Pilgrim fathers were still on friendly terms with the Natives.  
5: Spelling: While Britain gave the Americans their language, they decided that 5 vowels was one vowel too many and dropped the letter 'u'. Good luck trying to explain that to the man with the ulcus cruris or pustuled uvula .
6: Guns. America has completely mad gun laws so while in Britain it's fluffing the pillows of the man having his gall stones removed, in America you will be dealing with multiple gun shot wounds all day every day. On top of that you will have to live among a community with a larger arsenal than the 16th Air Assault Brigade.
7: Humour: You won't be at work all the time and at some point you will have to turn on a TV. Do that in Britain and it's Blackadder, QI, Red Dwarf, Monty Python, Downton Abbey. In America it's Seinfeld and repeats of the X-Files all day.
8: Prince Harry: He is still there which means he isn't here.

So that's your choices Nurses, go over to America and drink cold tea, get eaten by a bear if you survive the crossroads and have Prince Harry on yet another national tour of TV studios bemoaning his lack of privacy while you relax or stay here, use the letter u and marvel at normal non fatal ants.

Today Is...Fair Trade Day

It wasn’t very long ago that a fruit or vegetable was just a fruit or vegetable and you didn’t know where they came from and you didn't give a second thought about the farmers who grew them or the amenities in their villages.
You just picked up your purchase and continued around the supermarket aisles, none the wiser until Fairtrade International came along and attempted to make the marketplace more moral.
It must have worked because 93% of British shoppers can correctly identify the Fair Trade logo and on the face of it who could possibly be against the buying and selling of products that makes certain that the people who produce the goods receive a fair price therefore bringing a better standard of living for poor farmers in developing countries.
The problem happens in the Supermarkets when consumers look at the price of their Fair Trade products and then fall back on the usual cheaper, conventional alternatives which means less sales.
In 2016, of all the coffee grown as Fairtrade, only 34% of it could be sold at the Fair trade price, 47% of Cocoa and 5% of tea. With no takers for the rest, the farmers had no choice but to unload the surplus into the standard market and receive the lower prices that the market paid.
Obviously the conventional price differential shows how much less the chocolate or coffee farmers are being paid against the Fair Trade price but the bottom line for consumers is the willingness or ability to pay the higher price to buy fair-trade products.
It is the same dilemma faced by consumers for organic vegetables, they are more expensive and the ultimate decision is always going to come down to cost so it's one thing promoting and supporting Fairtrade standards and even aiming your advertising at consumers asking them to consider if paying more for a product that has been sourced and produced ethically and consider the harm it may be causing to others when faced with a similar product on the supermarket shelf which costs 50% less.
Obviously it is a worthwhile cause but when you are on a budget, paying more for something you can get cheaper is always going to win out.

Today Is...Billy Joel's Birthday

With Billy 'Uptown Girl' Joel hitting the big 74 today (Happy Birthday Billy by the way), considering that he has banging out tunes over a 50 year career, he doesn't seem very appreciated in Britain where he has only had 5 top ten hits and 3 of them came in 1983 from the Innocent Man album so not a great return for him but two people who did appreciate him were my parents and it was an unusual day if we went without hearing a belt of Piano Man or My Life coming from the record player.
As my parents were fans, i sort of fell into his music by osmosis as i grew up and whenever i heard one of his songs in a Supermarkets, i always found myself singing along to his ditties as i priced up the cleaning fluids.
Before Uptown Girl reminded everyone that he was still around, his big song was Piano Man and it was only fairly recently i discovered it comes with a music video although it didn't help it much in the UK charts although it was probably the best number 136 we ever saw.
Probably my favourite Billy Joel songs is 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant', mainly because halfway through singing about Brenda and Eddie in the summer of '75, it changes to a completely different song and then ends up back where it started and the two in one songs always seem to appeal to me.
So there we have it, i have a soft spot for Christie Brinkley's ex-hubby (a magnificent bit of punching above his weight) and could probably happily sing along to most of his records and i blame my parents although it could have been worse, they could have been Country and Western fans.

Today Is...Ascension Day

If you are wondering why as an Atheist, i have so many religious days in this Today Is...series, it's because my writing partner is a man of the cloth and whenever i say hmmm..we need something for such and such a day he pulls out a religious day which is obvious really because the Church has more religious days than it has scandals but if we have nothing else then we go with it, such as today, if only to annoy him by making fun of it.
Today is Ascension Day because there is not enough Holy Days over Easter with Lent, Palm Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, they go and have one 40 days after Easter Egg Day and it is to commemorates Jesus going back home to heaven.
John Lennon got it right in his imagine song when he said 'Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky but at that time it was believed that the Cosmos was split into three distinct parts, Heaven above, Hell below and Earth in the Middle and for anyone looking up towards the sky, the blue sky was the floor of heaven but there was some frantic rewriting of all that when telescopes were invented and humans developed a Space Program and found only clouds and the ozone layer above our heads.
Now Christians believe that Heaven is not actually a physical place but a state of being but originally they believed that this world would be transformed into heaven but anyone who had read a newspaper recently or watched the New on TV knows that never happened or if it has then Heaven certainly isn't what they expected.
You see, the thing about Heaven is that Heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in Heaven, like singing, talking to God, watering pot plants whereas Hell, on the other hand, is for people who like the other sorts of things like adultery, pillage, torture, those general areas but my personal favourite out of all the many heaven's the differing religious folk have is the great big field of the Egyptians called the Elysian Fields.
It is a land of eternal peace, with magnificent crops and bread and beer which never goes stale and who doesn't like the idea of bread and beer that never goes stale so pencil me in for that one.

Today Is...When Greece Gained It's Independence From Turkey

The magnificent weirdo Andy Warhol said that everybody would have their 15 minutes of fame and the same is true for countries. At some point or other in history one country stood out above the others.
Unfortunately for Greece their slot at being top dog was almost two and a half thousand years ago when they gave us Plato, Aristotle and Alexander the Great but can now only rustle up a bottle of Ouzo and a plastic souvenir Acropolis with wonky columns.
It did have another day in the Sun in 1821 when it kicked Turkey out and declared itself independent then failed to do very much which is why it went hand in cap to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a €1.6 billion bail out a few years ago after making a half-arsed attempt at austerity to reign in the runaway economy but did the Greeks not like that so the citizens scraped together what little they had, purchased petrol, a box of matches and some empty bottles and throw it at the police instead.
Greece then defaulted on it's loan and cheekily asked for another €7.2 billion bailout so not only having their cake and eating it, but then going back for another slice.
The most alarming thing about the whole mess Greece got itself into was the comments that Britain could be the next Greece and as one, we all spluttered on our cream scones, rose up and shouted, 'Not bloody likely'.
Not that i have anything against Greece but we could never be another Greece. For one we are not hairy enough and we don't shout and wave our arms around like a windmill in a gale when we talk so if we are going to be like another country, why can't we be like one of those nice Scandinavians countries who are the equivalent of the retired gentleman tending his own patch of garden and tutting at the youngsters zipping about having wars and recessions.
Nope, we can't be Greek because us Brits are a different breed altogether and we have something they don't. The Elgin marbles.

Betelgeuse Going Kaboom Very, Very Soon

As with Uranus, there has been a subtle change with the way Betelgeuse is pronounced, when i was younger it was always pronounced as Beetlejuice but seems like to distance it from the film of the same name, astronomy types want to pronounce it as Betelgeist but that may be irrelevant because it may soon become known as a massive black hole 650 light years away because Betelgeuse is predicted to go supernova very, very soon.
A supernova is the extremely bright, super-powerful explosion of a star. In short gravity wants to crush it inwards but the outward pushing burning fuel inside the star keeps it from collapsing but when the fuel runs out...BANG.
It explodes and sheds all it's hots gas and what's left is the dense, gravity crushed core and the last Supernova seen from Earth was in 1604 and was described as bright as the moon during the day which sounds very cool indeed or at least very cool as long as the thing happens further than 100 light years, any closer than that and our ringside seat would not end with a ringside, a seat or any of us to say how lovely it looked.
The first step of a supernova is the Star has to dim as the gravity starts to win the battle against the outward pressure of the fuel and Betelgeuse has become noticeably dimmer since 2019 and as the light from the star takes 650 years to reach us, it meant the destructive process started in 1396 when England and France were only at half-time in their 100 year war.
The Hubble Space Telescope has also captured images of Betelgeuse starting to shed its outer layers and just getting ready to go the full kaboom and make a mess of the shoulder of Orion so get the deckchair, grab the popcorn and something wet...and then put it back again because to our normal people very, very soon means something very different than when an Astrophysicist says it because it will go supernova..sometime within the next 100,000 years, give or take.
It could be tomorrow, it could be the year 102,023 but i wouldn't hold my breath but i do find myself looking towards Orion in the Winter months just to make sure he still has his shoulder.

Today Is...Radio Day

If, on a pub quiz night, you were asked who invented the radio and you wrote Marconi, you would receive a big red tick but really you are just a victim of mass deception.
Marconi and Nikola Tesla were at each others throats over who invented it first, Tesla tried to sue the Marconi Company for infringement of his patents but was not in any kind of financial condition to litigate a case against a major corporation but while they were threatening each other with court writs, Russian Alexander Stepanovich Popov was quietly inventing his own and was declared the first person to invent a radio receiving device, in Russia anyway.
It was actually a German, Heinrich Hertz, who came up with the idea of radio waves and a Brit, Oliver Lodge, who came up with an experiment to receive these transmissions and Popov set to work to design a more sensitive radio wave receiver that could be used as a lightning detector, to warn of coming thunderstorms.
That his lightning detector doubled as a radio wave receiver was a happy accident, sending a receiving morse code from one side of his University to the other but as he continued to call it a lightning detector, it left Tesla and Marconi to argue over the first radio.
The Soviet Union were cool with it though and declared Popov later as the inventor of radio and marked it with a day of celebration which probably includes vodka.