Pornographic And Indecent Bible Ban

 As it says in the Bible, you reap what you sow although not that schoolchildren in Utah will be able to see it because it has been banned in a brilliantly hilarious bit of reaping and sowing.
As the right wing famously like to do, they ban books that may open peoples eyes to the absolute nonsense they spout and Utah’s Republican lawmakers decided to clamp down on pornographic or indecent texts in school books and the law was written so vaguely that any parent could object to any book and they would have a look and remove it but where the Utah numpties had all things LGBTQ+ or race related in mind, one switched on parent took full advantage and said that there is one book which is full of objectionable material, the Bible.       
Armed with eight pages of examples of incest, masturbation, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape and even infanticide, the parent presented their case, the Governors reluctantly agreed that there is some really messed-up stuff in the Bible and removed it from its elementary and middle schools.
Got to love that.

Today Is...Alan Turing Committed Suicide

A few years ago the BBC run a programme over several weeks where viewers were asked to vote for the 'most important and influential person of the 20th Century' and the Finalists came down to Alan Turing, Nelson Mandela, Ernest Shackleton, David Bowie, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Muhammad Ali, and Pablo Picasso.
Alan Turing won it which is fair, it was he's mathematical genius which led to modern computers which dominate our lives today.
That he was treated so atrociously by the British Government for being homosexual after doing so much to win the Second World War that he ended taking his own life today in 1954 is shameful and it doesn't even begin to make up for it that the British Public agreed and voted him first.
On his team was Ian Fleming, who'd later go on to write the James Bond books and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang but they didn't really get along and not just because of Fleming's stupid idea of a movie about our fine four fendered friend.
Turing used his smarts to design the Bombe machine and suddenly, secret German communications were no longer secret and shortened the war by up to four years with the irony that by ending the war prematurely, it bought about his own demise even quicker as back then homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain.
Rather than be celebrated, they took his machine, won the war and then accused him of gross indecency for being homosexual and sentenced to either imprisonment or chemical castration which as rewards go isn't great so he went for the third option and bit into an apple that he had injected with cyanide and i assumed invented the Apple Logo right there.
I had assumed wrongly because it's actually a nod towards Isaac Newton sitting under his tree with an apple dangling above him and over time they simplified it to just the Apple logo with a bite taken out of it so it wasn't mistaken for a cherry.
While not wishing to relegate Isaac Newtons achievements, the Turing idea was much more poetic and fitting for a computer company. I will file it in 'things i wished i hadn't found out' along with raspberry flavouring comes from beavers backsides, the red smarties are made from crushed beetles and Hotel California is just a rip off of a Jethro Tull song.

Today Is...The Battle of Stoney Creek

Way back in 1812, Great Britain was fighting a war with America and a key battle was going on today at Stoney Creek in Ontario which the British won and forced the Yankee's to retreat out of Canada to the other side of the Niagara River and keep Canada out the hands of the burger eating war monkeys.
Things may have been very different and Canada could have become part of America and missed out on 200 years of the metric system and visits from very iffy Royal Prince's and it is all down to a bunch of hysterical cock-ups one moonlit night in June.
Backed by a large group of Native American Indians, the chisel jawed British set out to make a sneaky attack on an American camp as they were heavily outnumbered and a surprise attack was their best chance of success against vastly superior numbers of Yankees but the Native Americans did their war cry as they approached which is apparently a thing with them but it alerted the sleepy Americans who put down their burgers and hot dogs and formed a line of defense as best they could, which turned out to be not that good at all.
A melee ensured and one American General, John Chandler, rode his horse out into the bedlam to try and direct his troops but rather predictably his horse wasn't bullet proof and was quickly shot out from under him and he fell to the ground.
Exposed and in the middle of a huge fight with musket balls zinging around his ears, he decided that his muddy breeches offered very little protection so dashed back behind the lines to try and rally his men to stand strong but when he got there he noticed that he didn't recognise any of the men and that they were all speaking with British accents who couldn't believe their luck and politely informed him that he was under arrest for the crime of being an American and that it would be best for everyone involved if he just came along quietly.
The second in command, William Winder, was now bumped up to the job of top American banana and was now even more determined to beat the devastatingly handsome British so strode heroically into the emplacement to direct the artillery only to hear the words: 'Oi mateys, cor blimey me old china, we only got us another one of these yanks fella's' as he was surrounded by the British gunners whose base he had walked straight into and he was captured in the exact same fashion as his predecessor only minutes before.
Now with no leadership, the American troops decided they could just win it without Generals and attacked who they thought was the British but was actually another American troop who was rushing to their rescue.
The British stood on the side, supping tea and dunking biscuits while watching as a fierce battle ensued between the same side for an hour until both decided that they could not defeat this 'British army' and finally retreated leaving the British to look at each other and ask 'WTF just happened?'
America decided to leave Canada to the British after that and concentrate on their own country and Canada went on to become the nation we know and love today and act as a constant reminder to American's that if hadn't gone warmongering mental all those years ago, Canada is the country that America could have been.

Today Is...Global Running Day

Usain Bolt has been called many things at various Olympics including the fastest man on Earth as he currently holds the 100m record of 9.58 seconds which we were reliably informed makes him the 18th person to hold such a record.
The first was an American called Don Lippincott who ran 100m in 10.6 seconds in 1912 and over the last 100 years the time has come down gradually but at some point we will reach the natural limit that the speed the human body can move at and people in white coats have done the maths and worked out that the limit for any human being to run the 100m is 9.26 seconds.
The way that our bodies are put together means that man is physically unable to run faster than 30 mph, with the fastest speed ever recorded by a human credited to Canada's Donovan Bailey who hit 27.07mph in winning the 100m title at the 1996 Olympics in a then world record of 9.84 sec.
That said, they explained that it is impossible to predict with any real accuracy the limits of our capabilities because of the freakishness of athletic talent at the extreme margins of humanity. Bolt for example.
'Studying the body types of the top 45 100-meter sprinters in the last 15 years, almost all conform to a certain short body type with fast-twitch muscles which allows the body to accelerate quickly but Bolt combines the mechanical advantages of a taller men's longer stride with the fast-twitch fibers of the smaller men'.
Another consideration is improvements in track surfaces and running shoes as have advances in training methods and nutrition but we're very close to the edge; they say.
So that would seem the end for the smaller sprinters, the only person who could run faster than whatever time the world record stands at the time is someone who is not only blessed with the same freaky, physiological make up of Bolt, but is also slightly taller.

Universal Basic Income Refusing To Go Away

Thomas Paine supported it, Napoleon considered it, Richard Nixon tried to make it law, Martin Luther King Jr advocated introducing it and Elon Musk thinks it is inevitable and it seems to
become a Left Wing cause and while i am generally in favour with anything that side advocate, i just can't seem to get behind the idea of a Universal Basic Income which is an idea which refuses to go away.
Two area of Britain have now been picked to receive £1,600 a month for two years on the condition that they can be observed to understand the effects on their lives.    
Universal Basic Income is an old idea that is gaining momentum, especially amongst those with a left-wing ideology now that Ai is threatening to reduce the opportunities for paid employment for all and while i can see plenty of benefits, moistly reducing poverty and inequality, i always ask, and never really get answer to, how is to going to be paid for?
To pay every one of the UK's 33 million working citizens £19,200 a year would cost £633 billion while the UK's current tax intake is £786 billion, an amount which would reduce if you handed them £19k a year and some stopped working or reduced their working hours so less tax paid.
In 2018, Finland held a two-year basic income experiment, paying €560 per month to 2,000 randomly selected working-age people and found that recipients were happier and healthier but decided to not proceed with expanding it and i can't see anyone else rushing to give it a go either.
Amazingly, there are some on the right side of the ideological fence who deem it worthy of having a look at although for very different reasons to the left, they see it as a way to dismantle the welfare state and reduce Government bureaucracy
Some say that looking farther down the road, the threat of technological unemployment will mean that Universal Basic Income is inevitable and The World Economic Forum predicts increased automation by 2025 will mean 43% of businesses reducing their workforce but until someone explains to me
how it won't be ruinously expensive to a nation, i can't support it whatsoever.

The End Of The International Space Station

What goes up must come down and that is true even if the thing going up is as big as a football pitch and weighs 400 tonnes but after circling the Earth every 90 minutes since 1998, plans are being made to bring the International Space Station to as graceful a decent as you can make for something which is travelling at 17,500 mph and heavier than 250 elephants.
Our record with bringing down massive hulks of Space Station isn't great, Skylab overshot the Indian Ocean and Aussies in the Western part of Australia were picking bits of it out of their garden and the Soviet era Salyut 7 unexpectedly found it's new earthly home to be the lot less Ocean-like Argentina   
As getting the calculations even slightly wrong could result in people waking up and saying i'm sure there used to a country between Austria and Romania, they have started the planning stage 8 years before what they hope is the splashdown in the Pacific in 2031 using a Space-Tug which is using another space-craft to gradually nudge it back into the Earth's thicker atmosphere where it will slowed down by atmospheric drag before plopping down in the Pacific between New Zealand and South America.
'It is a significant challenge' says NASA, 'A 400-tonne object falling out of the sky at Orbital Speeds is not great' but they think that after the re-entry forces does it's thing to melt and disintegrate large sections of it, what is left of it will be significantly less and pose no risk to human life although the 'we think' bit isn't a confidence filler.
If you happen to find yourself drifting across a seemingly uninhabited expanse of the Pacific in 2031, keep an eye out for a shower of molten hot debris raining down on Earth from space and if you are in New Zealand, you may want to keep your pets out of the garden that day.

Today Is...National Cheese Day

I never knew there was such a difference in cheese between us and the Americans, i wrongly assumed their cheese was the same as our cheese but by all accounts even American's don't like their cheese and are not even allowed to call it cheese, it is legally known as a 'cheese product'.
Apparently the United States has an overwhelming surplus of cheese and the answer the economically repressed dairy farmers came up with as the price of their product tanked due to overproduction was to increase the amount of cheese product they made.
I, again wrongly, thought why don't they send some this way, Europeans love Cheese but then someone pointed out that they do export it here, those little square Kraft blocks that taste like you have forgotten to remove the plastic wrapper is American Cheese, or rather 'Cheese product'.
Reading the comments at some American sites, it appears that the problem is that Americans think American Cheese Product tastes like sh...not very nice which is why there is too much of it knocking around so America is drowning in plastic stuff that pretends to be cheese.
My initial solution was to make a massive pizza and send it to the World's starving but apparently the cheese doesn't melt, just sort of gets warm and bubbles a bit so my second idea was to pack it into a convoy of rockets and fire it at the Sun which seems a win-win all around.
As for the proper cheese the rest of us eat, i have had a long running dispute with the rest of my family that the mouldy bit on cheese can be cut off and the rest eaten because after all cheese is just mould anyway.
There counter-argument is that i don't know what i'm talking about and they wouldn't eat it if i held a gun to their head which would make dinner-time easier but is frowned upon by several of the Child Protection Societies so we all watched the documentary 'Trust Me, I'm a Doctor' with interest when the subject turned to 'When is mouldy food still safe to eat'.
After going through bread, jam, various fruits, nuts and seeds and we got to Cheese with the verdict being it is entirely safe to cut off the mouldy bits of hard cheese and use the rest.
My jubilation and shouts of 'IN YOUR FACE' to my family members were short lived though as the expert moved onto the soft cheese which can do you real harm if eaten when mouldy and should be thrown away.
So an amicable score draw and an agreement that mouldy SOFT cheese sandwiches won't be making it's way into their lunch boxes anymore although those black banana's that have been in the fruit bowl for a fortnight could well be putting in an appearance.

Today Is...World Bicycle Day

The government have a plan to get more people cycling in Britain and will spend £316m over the next five years by creating more bicycle lanes and bicycle shelters.
The UK's largest cycling charity, Cyclists Touring Club, are not impressed though, saying more is needed to be done to bring us up to the standard of the country with the best cycling facilities, the Netherlands, saying that: 'The UK lags 250 years behind the Dutch on cycling'.
My calendar shows the year is 2023, Wikipedia shows the first bicycle was invented in 1817 so according to the Cyclists Touring Club in cycling terms we are at the level of 1773 which at that time we were gazing at two wheels, a chain and a couple of pedals and saying: 'Well i'm buggered if i know what to do with it'.
Obviously, as i narrowly manage to avoid killing several cyclists each day with my car as they weave around me, we have moved on from that stage so either the Cyclist Touring Club have been wearing their helmets too tight or the Dutch were careering around Amsterdam on bicycles in 1773 narrowly avoiding handcarts and flicking v signs at horse and cart drivers.
Maybe someone at the Cyclists Touring Club should spend less time squeezing into too tight Lycra shorts and worrying about tightening their dust caps and spend more on working out how a calendar works.

Boris And His Phone

We are in the strange situation of the Government taking to court the inquiry that it set up to prevent it handing over information regarding their Coronovirus strategy (honestly, they do say they had one) but Boris is coming to the rescue saying he will just hand over his Whatsapp messages and diaries
to the  judge leading the inquiry anyway, all those Whatapps after April 2021 anyway.  
Boris can’t give the phone he used for most of the pandemic to the Covid inquiry because of security reasons, it is a security risk to turn it on because he was dozy enough to have his mobile number on the internet and now nobody can turn it on because heaven knows what it would unleash, it's probably
got more virus's than a Wuhan Laboratory so he got given a new phone and that;s the one he wants to hand over.
That all the national lock-downs and various Covid policy catastrophes were done and dusted by then is a happy coincidence for him but the Government are concerned that the messages the inquiry does receive will show Rishi and the rest of the Cabinet in a very bad light, Boiris reputation is on the floor
anyway so he has nothing to lose.

Today Is...The First Crusade

The First Crusade in 1098 was a military expedition launched by the Catholic Church who wanted to show the Muslim Seljuk Turks that there was only room for one religion of peace and love and they were going to kill as many of them as possible them to show it was Christianity.
All the main players in Europe, promised money, land and titles by the Pope if they were successful, got their armies together and 80,000 of them stomped off to Anticoch passing through Germany where they indulged in a bit of massacre practise by killing 2,000 Jews in the Rhineland.
Hacking and slashing their way around the Mediterranean, they finally arrived at Antioch and showed how loving the Christian God was by ransacking it and massacring the citizens before arriving at Jerusalem and sent the Muslim hordes running away with their tails between their legs, those that still had legs anyway, and claimed the Holy land for Christianity.
Obviously that didn't last very long because the Muslim Forces took it back and there were a further seven Crusades and it all ended in a 4-4 draw with Jerusalem swapping hands continually over the next few hundred years and ending up in Muslim hands as the Christians decided that Pagan countries were easier and less painful to invade and concentrated on them instead.
Experts say the Crusades cost the lives of 1.7 million people but thankfully the Middle East is now a hotbed of democracy and peace and Western nations no longer turn up with large armies in the Middle East and shoot big holes in the natives, not since 2020 anyway, now we just sell the weapons to them to do it themselves.