Ho Ho Ho And A Bottle Of Arghhhh!

We are off on our first Cruise to the Norwegian Fjords in June and we are hopeful of maybe seeing some dolphins or whales which sometimes come alongside Cruise Ships so I have been informed but what I am not expecting to see is Pirates because it isn't 1680 and because you don't seem to get many splicing the main-brace or whatever they do in the North Sea.  
I imagine the passengers on the Cunard Cruise Ship, Queen Anne, are also hoping not to see any but a warning has gone out to passengers to turn off their cabin lights and close the curtains because of the risk of pirates in the area they are heading, the Sulu-Celebes Sea off the coast of The Philippines.
The problem with calling them Pirates is that for some reason, Pirates conjure up visions of swashbuckling adventure movies even if modern pirates don’t do any of the stuff the old, fictional ones used to do, like burying treasure or making people walk the plank or hobbling around on one leg with a parrot on their shoulder.
Modern pirates are not salty sea-dogs using flintlock pistols and saying things like Shiver Me Timbers, they are hardened terrorists using rocket launchers which isn't  really much fun at all and digging up recent Pirate attacks over the last 30 years, there have been over 13,000 attacks on vessels with the overwhelming majority in South Asia and off the coasts of Africa.
The trip to Norway and back then should be fine and Pirate free and the only ho ho ho and a bottle of rum will be in the bar. 

Too Much Of Anything Can Kill You

A common refrain in the world of science is: 'It's the dose makes the poison' meaning that almost anything can kill you, the question is how much it takes. Scientists at ASPScience have crunched the numbers and have compiled a list of just how much of something is enough to actually bring your living to an abrupt end.

11,000 Oranges
2,555 Skittles.
1,800 Cups of rice
588 Cherry Pips
480 Bananas
100 Apple pips
81 Cups of coffee
78 Espressos
48 Tablespoons of seasoning
47 Teaspoons of salt
40 Energy drinks
40 Bars of milk chocolate
29 Tablespoons of pepper
27 Big Macs
25 Green potatoes
24 Tubes of Toothpaste
14 Ounces of black licorice
13 Shots of alcohol in two hours
6 Litres (10 pints) of water
6 Cups of sugar
6 Carrots
6 Brazil nuts
5 Cigarettes (eaten)
0.5 Cigar (eaten)

Clocks Spring Forward Tonight

If there is a nicer couple of words to say than 'Circadian Rhythm' I haven't found them, i imagine it is something to do with the hard C in the first word and the pleasing mmmm sound at the end but if I ever changed the name of my blog, it would be that although what the rhythm of your body's natural 24-hour clock has to do with the tree hugging lefty stuff I put out I would need to work on but with the clocks due to go forward in the UK tonight, Circadian Rhythms are in the news.   
It may seem like a minor adjustment, we lose an hours sleep tonight but apparently scientific studies show that the alteration to our alarm clocks can take days to adjust to and for some people the transition period can last for weeks.
As usual, it all comes down to the brain and in particular the bit that regulates hormone release, body temperature and metabolism and if your  circadian rhythm is out of kilter, those things will be disrupted too.
Exposure to natural light is one of the most important factors in helping the body adjust to a new time so the more morning sunlight a person gets, the faster their circadian rhythm realigns.
German researchers monitored 50 healthy adults for four weeks before and after each transition and found that Spring losing an hour adaptation took longer than the Autumnal extra hour adaptation but even more worrying they found that the seems to create a slightly increased risk for those with life-threatening health conditions and a 2024 study analysing 14 million deaths in the US from 2015 to 2019 found a slight increase in all deaths after the spring transition but a decrease in mortality after the autumn transition.
In further news, i checked and i could not find a blog called Circadian Rhythms so...

Greenland's Own MAGA

The first words of the American Vice President, JD Vance, when he landed in Greenland was to mumbles that: 'It's cold as shit here' so to go with his cold fingers and toes was a cold shoulder which was delivered courtesy of the Greenlander's themselves who had their own idea of MAGA, their's was 'Making Arseholes Go Away' which they did in a hastily rearranged trip.  
The initial plan was for Mrs Vance to pop over with her son and attend the Avannaata Qimussersua dog sled race and grab a few photo ops of her interacting with smiling and happy looking Greenlander's to promote the boneheaded narrative that Greenlander's want to join the U.S. which they are openly trying to annex.
Everything changed though when the organisers of the dogsled race said the Americans weren't invited and a reported advance-party of officials were unable to find a local family who would be pleased to welcome them and suddenly the Vance offspring had to stay at home and go to school so dad and his friends would be going instead.
Rather than tasting Greenland culture and seeing the welcoming faces of the locals, due to angry locals protesting about the taking over of their country by the Jaffa Caked coloured moron and his best friend (who apparently no longer thinks Trump is an idiot, reprehensible and comparable to Hitler like he said a while ago), the visiting party were greeted by their own troops while making a whistle-stop tour of an American Military Facility and then swiftly danced out again before they got dinged on the head by a snowball.
While the rest of the World look on at the people running America now and making that universal sign of twirling your finger around your temple and making cuckoo noises, Donald Trump's new best friend and cheerleader in the Kremlin observed that:  'America’s plans in relation to Greenland are serious. These plans have deep historical roots. And it’s clear that the US will continue to systematically pursue its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Аrctic'.
While Vance was avoiding meeting people in Greenland, Donald Trump was making a speech where he said that with regards to Greenland, America needs it for: 'National security purposes' but he didn't explain who they needed security from, surely they don't need to be safe from those nice Russians do they?

Partal Eclipse

Scrabble players should pay particular attention to the Solar Eclipse today because you will probably hear a word to tuck away in your memory banks and is worth 25 points, Syzygy.
Pronounced Siz-ə-jee, it is a Greek word which means a roughly straight-line of three or more celestial bodies which is what is happening around 11am today in the British Isles as the Moon manoeuvres itself partially between the Earth and the Sun.
From where I am sat on the South Coast of the UK, approximately 30% of the Sun will be blocked so it isn't a total eclipse but should still be impressive if the weather plays along, which it is forecast to do.
It is a strange quirk which never fails to impress me that the Sun is 400 times bigger than the Moon but at this moment in time, the Sun is 400 times farther away so both are the same size but as the Moon is inching away, our future relatives will never experience a full Solar Eclipse as the Moon will appear too small to cover the Suns disk.
It should be emphasised that looking directly at something with a surface temperature of 5,500°C and a brightness of 35,730,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lumens (imagine sitting directly in front of your car headlights and switching them on full beam and it still doesn't match the Suns brightness) might not be the cleverest thing to do so and your run of the mill sunglasses won’t cut it, you need eclipse glasses which are specifically designed to allow you to look at the Sun safely.

Coming Soon: More Special Guest Bloggers

Ever since I started this blog in January 2007, I have had a healthy number of posts written ready to post for when I didn't have time to scratch out something.
There was also many half written ones or a few paragraphs to expand on and some ideas for blog posts but the Folder on my Desktop is becoming very bare as I haven't really had the time to replenish them.
I have been writing a bunch in one sitting when I get the chance and post dating them so some of the Christmas ones from last December were tapped out in the Summer and the idea is always to use them and fill in the gaps with freshly written topical ones but for the first time in 18 years, I am running out.   
Not running out of ideas, I have plenty of them and there is no end of things to write about but it is finding the time to do them.
The posts which were most time consuming were the Special Guest Blogger ones although I did enjoy doing them, the Rev would email me the person and all the highlights (and lowlights) of their lives and I would arrange it into a 500 word satire of them and the Rev would nick the best bits on the Saints and Religious figures for his Services as a thank you.  
The number we wrote hit 720 and people seemed to like them and to be fair they were lots of fun to write, he even arranged them into some sort of order and created some free Ebooks for people to download and so we are doing some more with the idea of making up the round 1,000.
Whether we can think of another 280 dead people to write about is another matter, i kinda think we have hit all the main people from Kings and Queens to Actors, Musicians and even Saints and Deity's but trawling around for famous dead people is his job, mine is to try and stay as historically accurate as possible while making the posts entertaining to read by, basically, taking liberties with them and their achievements.   
I imagine we will delve into mythology quite a bit as they are the most fun ones to write but we plan to start posting them around Summer. 

Happy Now Rev?

When he isn't out using his TESCO CLUBCARD to stock up on the WINTER STORMS COMING or buying supplies for EID 2025, the Rev is my blog partner, I just do the writing and pass it to him and he does all the geeky bits because before he began baptizing babies and marrying people he was an IT Professional with an alphabet of letters after his name and he understands these things so when he said I really should include keywords or 'Search Engine Optimisation' as it’s known, I did what I always do when someone mentions geeky things to me, I say: 'yeah whatever' and ignore it.
I know that Print Journalists are encouraged to include often searched for phrases in their copy but newspapers have always jazzed up dull print articles, the tabloids do it with photographs of attractive female stars so you get a sexy picture of MEGAN FOX in a teeny tiny bikini to illustrate a report about the weather being quite warm this weekend or a hunky, topless dripping wet Adonis like DANI ALVES to embellish a staid report on the state of Britain's fountains or something .
Apparently, when you write your blog content you don't just throw in keywords willy-nilly, you should take care about their placement so they go into the title, first paragraph, somewhere in the middle and in the final paragraph, like here but the top person trending is HARRY REDKNAPP after his Nazi salute thing and that's not easy to wangle in, it would be easier to go with this weekends SOLAR ECLIPSE 2025.
I do know that the average reader quickly scans each page in an ‘F-pattern’ so reading along the top first, then glancing halfway along the line below, before skimming their eye downward along the left-hand side and if there’s nothing of interest within that golden ‘F’ zone, they quickly nick off elsewhere which seems  a lot of effort to try and position it all in precisely the right place.
Google Trends has a list of all the most searched for words over the past days and the top words today is MYANMAR and then PAUL O'GRADY,  TOURIST SUBMARINE SINKS IN RED SEA and GREENLAND so there you go Rev, hope you're happy and this blog post is now Search Engine Optimised up the wazoo.

Our Lives On Holiday

Since New Year things have been a bit busy at work, there are Filipino Fishermen who come home and almost collapse after 18 hours on the waters, only to rally themselves when their wives say: 'Think you had a tough day do you? Do me a favour, you’re not LucyP.  She's been at her desk for 3 hours and only had time for 1 Coffee ya lazy bugger'.
I am off next week for my Birthday and we have six days in Cornwall booked on a 'holiday' but we don't really seem to go on holiday anymore because unless you leave all your devices in your drawer, the internet makes it too easy to communicate with the folks back home so you end up bringing the folks back home on holiday with you.
It used to be the case that you would go away and hear no news or read any newspapers and you would be wondering how your team got on or what's happening in the World but now, even if you avoid the News websites, friends will text you if anything happens which is nice but do you really want to know that Brian has been nicking milk from the fridge again or that really awful juggler on Britain's Got Talent made it through to the Final.   
As usual i will leave the message that I am only to be contacted if there is an emergency or something really, really, REALLY important but I know it will be about anything and I know that I will answer that email or text because even on holiday, there’s no escaping our lives and in some ways it's frustrating but in other ways it's quite nice.

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Child Friendly Smartphones

Smartphones have worked their way deep into our lives and have become indispensable for work and socialising but many children want them too and that brings a whole host of problems with kids accessing inappropriate and harmful content.
Australia's government are ahead of the curve on this one and are introducing legislation to ban children under 16 from social media although the details on exactly how they will do that are sketchy but it is an idea being picked up by other Governments.
Some say it should be down to the Parents to police what their children access online and you may be able to do that on a computer in the front room but on a phone it is very difficult so it should fall to the Social Media companies themselves but as we know, they won't do it and age verification is easy to circumnavigate so that only leaves phones which restrict access to the internet and social media so they can only access services that are appropriate for them.
Many polls show that parents and teachers and even some children would like an effective restrictions on use of phones but a survey about when children receive a smartphone says most have a smartphone by the age 10 but as they cant possibly buy their own at that age, it must be given to them by the parents so the parents must hold some responsibility.
It is mostly agreed then that social media platforms and having 24/7 access to the Internet can be harmful to children but the only way i can see to prevent them is for the phone companies to  step up and sell phones with limited access to the harmful content and someone, somewhere must be developing it and I am sure would make a killing if they can get it right.