Special Guest Blogger: Connie Francis

Hello, world! In my day, if you wanted to reach a million people, you had to squeeze into a girdle that defied the laws of physics and travel to sixteen different cities in a week. Now, you just click a button but it was thanks to Tik Tok that when i died of pneumonia, a whole new generation had heard of me.
 I think they expect me to get all misty-eyed and talk about the "Golden Age of Music." And look, I can do that. I have the sequins to prove it. But when I look back at my life and my songs, mostly what I think is: Boy, Connie, you sure were a dramatic little thing, weren’t you?
First was my name which went on a journey of its own from Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero to Concetta Franconero and then Connie Franconero
and finally Connie Francis and a discography that reads like a psychiatric evaluation of a woman who has had the worst luck with men in the history of the Northern Hemisphere.
Take Who’s Sorry Now? That was the big one. The one that saved my career. My father, a man who thought he knew everything about the music business despite being a roofer, forced me to record it but I hated it. I thought it was old-fashioned but I sang it and suddenly, I was the queen of the heartbroken. That song is essentially three minutes of me pointing a finger at an ex-boyfriend and shouting, "I TOLD YOU SO!" I was the 1958 version of Cardi B, just with more crinoline and fewer tattoos.
Lipstick on Your Collar reminded a whole generation of women that if he’s cheating, you don’t cry, you make a hit record out of it and buy a mansion. And then there was Stupid Cupid. I mean, really? I spent the better part of my youth complaining about a toddler in a diaper with a bow and arrow but i was the spokesperson for every girl who ever got stood up at a soda fountain. If you’ve ever cried over a boy who didn't call, I was your patron saint and worse, enough hairspray to dissolve a hole in the ozone layer.
But then there’s Where the Boys Are. Ah, the anthem of Spring Break. Every time I hear that song, I think of Fort Lauderdale. Back then, a scandalous Spring Break meant a girl wearing a bikini that showed her navel and maybe sharing a malted milk with two different boys in the same afternoon.
I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. More downs than a Vegas escalator, if I’m being honest, the hotel rape and subsequent depression and suicide attempts as well as the botched nasal operation which left me unable to sing completely for years derailed my career but at the height of my fame, I couldn't walk down the street without being mobbed. I recorded music in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Greek, Yiddish, and Japanese, making me a best-selling artist in international markets.
I look at the music today, and I think, Where are the melodies? Where are the stories? Everything sounds like a blender full of marbles. But then I realize I’m sounding like a cranky old lady, and I have to remind myself that my father thought rock and roll was the end of civilization. Everything moves on. But a good heartbreak? That’s eternal. As long as there are people getting dumped, Connie Francis will be relevant.

Poetry? Bah!

The biggest sales of poetry since records began are expected this year due to The Odyssey which is great for Homer especially as UK Sales of his 12,000 line poem have increased by 1,400% so it's a shame he died over 2700 years ago because those royalties would have kept in him comfortably in Chiton's for the rest of his life.
I have mentioned a few times here that I'm not much of a fan of poetry, it has just never really appealed and rather controversially, it appears easy to do and every now and then there is a push to market Poetry and try and make it 'cool' again but every time it fails so i am obviously not the only person who could quite happily never have to listen to rhyming couplets ever again.
As for poetry itself, it has become the art form of choice for lovelorn lovers so here's one for you that I penned on a napkin way back in 2011:

To poetry writers everywhere,
You may find this poem unfair,
Your cloud may wander in the air,
But for your writing i just don't care,
I don't want to be misunderstood,
Just i don't think poetry is very good.

It's adolescents with floppy hair,
With broken hearts they must repair,
Their deepest thoughts they must bare,
With rhyming couplets of despair,
We all get passionate about things some time,
Just we don't make it into a bloody Rhyme!

This art form once had a romantic air,
Elaborate men with passion and flare,
If, The Raven, a wonderful pair,
But now decent poems are very rare,
I don't call all poets unexciting,
Just your chosen form of writing.

So to you poets to make you aware,
This recent outbreak of poetic fare,
Is pretentious and a little bit square,
And not a practise that i will share,
I am not mocking lovers dismay,
Just write things in a normal way.

As Poe once said from his reclining chair,
His nerves all shredded and his whitening hair,
It wasn't the Raven that gave him the scare,
T'was the thought of a poet standing there,
So take a lesson from the Raven on Poe's Door,
And make words rhyme..'Nevermore'!

Special Guest Blogger: Felix Baumgartner

So, here I am. Or rather, here I’m not anymore. And let me tell you, the irony of my current predicament isn’t lost on me. It hangs heavier than my reputation for jumping out of perfectly good, or in my case, perfectly high, vehicles.
Most of you probably know me for the jump, right? The one where I basically fell from God's attic? Yeah, that one. October 14, 2012. Stratosphere. Edge of Space. 128,000 feet. Breaking the sound barrier with nothing but a fancy suit and a very deep breath. That was my masterpiece, my magnum opus, my hold my beer and watch this moment taken to stratospheric levels.
Honestly, the view up there was indescribable. The curvature of the Earth, the inky blackness above, the sheer, mind-numbing vacuum of it all. For a moment, even my iron-clad Austrian nerves felt a little wobbly. I mean, here I was, a guy who spent his life defying gravity, about to voluntarily throw myself into it from a height that made commercial airliners look like ants on the pavement.
The freefall itself? A blur. Literally. I was going so fast, my own thoughts couldn’t keep up. It was pure sensation, pure adrenaline, pure oh dear God, please let my parachute open. There was a moment, when I first stepped off that capsule, where I looked down and thought, Felix, you absolute madman. What have you gotten yourself into now? It was glorious. It was terrifying. It was, without a doubt, the most alive I’d ever felt. And landing? Pure relief. The cheers, the record books, the endorsement deals… it was all gravy. The world knew Felix Baumgartner. The man who fell from space.
And then… there’s the other thing. The frankly tad embarrassing footnote to an otherwise stellar career.
Remember how I said I cheated death from the edge of space? Well, apparently, death decided to catch up with me closer to sea level.
The man who laughed in the face of terminal velocity, shuffled off this mortal coil not  going out in a wing suit incident over an active volcano but in a motorised paragliding accident in Italy.
I leap from the literal edge of human existence, survive a journey through the upper atmosphere at speeds faster than sound, perfect countless BASE jumps from impossibly high landmarks, and what finally gets me? A glorified lawnmower with a bed sheet.
I mean, I’ve got to laugh, haven’t I? What else is there to do? I spent my entire life pushing boundaries, tempting fate, staring down the abyss. I’ve freefallen from cliffs, skyscrapers and even the very edge of the stratosphere. I survived every single one of those calculated risks, honed through years of training and experience. And then, one ordinary afternoon, enjoying a relatively tame hobby, poof. Gone.

Special Guest Blogger: Perseus

My life was mostly just me trying not to be turned to stone or eaten but i was the son of Zeus, if you believe my notoriously unreliable family tree. Slayer of monsters. Husband of the truly magnificent and blessedly low-maintenance Andromeda. And, apparently, the guy who invented putting an eye out, then taking it.
You've seen the statues and the epic poems they make it all seem grand and destiny-driven whereas my fate mostly awaited me trying to avoid being minced, petrified, or generally having a very bad day.
Dumped in a chest with my mum, Danaë, after Zeus knocked up another mortal, we washed ashore on Seriphos, where King Polydectes, a man whose charm rivalled a particularly mouldy goat cheese, took us in. He eventually got a bit handsy with my mother, which, as a strapping young lad, I naturally took exception to so he plotted to rid himself of me by sending me on an impossible quest to bring back the head of the Gorgon Medusa.
So, I'm stuck with this truly impossible quest and my first port of call was the gods because apparently, they love a good impossible quest, especially when it involves someone else doing the heavy lifting.
Hermes rocks up, looking all casual in his winged sandals and tosses me his sandals, then Athena hands me her highly polished shield and even Hades, the benevolent uncle, even loans me his helmet of invisibility.
So, I'm kitted out and my first stop is the three old crones with one eye and one tooth between them and I literally had to yoink their eye mid-pass to get any informnation from them then off to Medusa's lair and tiptoeing around a cave full of statues who clearly didn't get the don't look memo.
Suddenly there she was, Medusa, having a really bad hair day and using Athena's shield as a rearview mirror, I crept up and just like that, the most dreaded monster in all of Greece was headless and it was stuffed into a bag.
So, now I'm flying home, courtesy of Hermes' sandals, with a Gorgon's head clanking around in my bag when i noticed something truly peculiar. A stunningly beautiful woman, Andromeda, chained to a rock, about to be devoured by a sea monster.
Now, I'm not going to lie, she was a looker. Even chained to a rock, with impending doom looming, she still had that beauty thing going on and a deep-seated desire not to appear a total coward, kicked in.
The fight with Cetus wasn't some elegant dance of blades, It was more like a grapple with a very large, very angry, very slimy fish before he finally went down.
The King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia were, understandably, a bit sheepish about the whole sacrificing our only daughter thing and gave me her hand in marriage and after that, life with Andromeda was surprisingly normal for a demigod. We had kids, founded cities (Mycenae, ever heard of it?), and generally tried to steer clear of anything that involved more sea monsters or divine intervention or being turned into a full sized garden gnome.

Terrible People Conducting Terrible Wars

It was estimated that in the run up to his election as President for a bizarre second time, Donald Trump stated 53 times that he would end Russia’s war in Ukraine on Day one although that doesn't seem to have aged very well as over 230 days into his second shitshow, it's still going on but at least he has other wars to pivot back to, such as the one he started (and tells us he has won already which Iran doesn't seem to have got that memo about) and the grotesquely horrifying Genocidal one in Gaza being conducted by Israel.
The (almost certainly) Pedophile President has always been a cheerleader of the mass slaughter by Israel, he even contributed the weapons for it and the resulting deaths, disease, famine and starvation while ignoring the Intyernational War Crime Arrest Warrant and inviting one of histories biggest killers to the White House for a cosy chat.
Maybe its a reflection on his personality, but Trump does like to surround himself with awful people and is big pals with Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and the murderous Benjamin Netanyahu, all of who could well be imagined to be in jail were they not in office and could very well be when they finish their spells, especially in Netanyahu and Trumps case.
The saddest thing is that all of the wars, Gaza, Ukraine and Iran, all hinge on some of the most unsavoury characters ever to hold power but these are the realities, the path to peace in all the above conflicts runs through these unhinged morons who are some of the worst people in the world with access to a state military.
We can protest and write angry blog posts but the path to peace in all the conflicts run through politicians with power, and this bunch are particularly terrible people so the way for the bombs to go silent, the way the children being bombed at their school desks and halt the hideous carnage is from the people who seem to be most enjoying it, profiting from it and in Netanyahu's and Trump's case, is keeping them out of prison and hoping it will keep them in power so heaven help the poor buggers on the receiving end because we wont be declaring peace in our time anytime soon if they have their way.

Special Guest Blogger: Robin Smith

Let’s be honest, shall we? When you spend the better part of two decades having five-ounce spheres of cork and leather hurled at your cranium by gentlemen like Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh, you tend to develop a certain perspective on life. Usually, that perspective is Why am I standing here instead of in a nice, safe library? or I hope the hospital food in Antigua is edible.
But now that the dust has settled and the whites have been bleached for the final time, i look back and think that they called me The Judge. I’d like to think it was because of my stern, impartial wisdom on the field, but we all know the truth: it was because my hair at the time looked like a periwig that had survived a freak lawnmower accident.
For those who may have forgotten or didn't know, I occupy a very specific niche in the Great British Tapestry. I am a Durban lad who decided to play for England. This essentially means that for half my life, South Africans considered me a traitor, and for the other half, the British considered me a very useful immigrant who still couldn’t pronounce Worcestershire correctly.
Playing for England back then was a bit like being the lead singer of a tribute band where the audience is constantly checking their watches and wondering when the original lineup is coming back. Being a South African in that dressing room added an extra layer of spice. I remember walking out to bat against the Aussies, Merv Hughes staring at me through a mustache that had its own postcode, and him snarling, You’re not even English, mate.
But that duality has shaped me. I’m a man of two worlds. I crave the South African sun but I’ve developed a British mastery of complaining about the weather. I want a braai, but I’ll settle for a Sunday roast if the gravy is thick enough to stop a bullet. My legacy, in part, is proving that you can take the boy out of Natal, put him in Hampshire, and he’ll still try to square-cut a delivery that’s clearly aimed at his throat.
I always fancied myself a bit of a musician but I’m not saying I was Eric Clapton, I was barely even Eric from the accounts department who plays at the Christmas party but i do wonder what would have been if I’d picked up a Gibson instead of a Gray-Nicolls. Would I have had groupies instead of slip-fielders? Probably not. I’d have likely forgotten the lyrics and ended up playing Wonderwall at a pub in Eastleigh which is slightly less painful than somebody trying to hit you in the ribs with a thunderbolt at 95 miles per hour.
That’s the thing about cricket, you get hit, you spit out a bit of tooth, you adjust your helmet, and you get back in the bubble and try and score the runs to win the match.
I took a few bouncers to the heart, play a few shots that made you look like a genius and several more that make me look like i had  never seen a bat before and all while eventually learning how to play a decent version of Mustang Sally without breaking a string, I’ll take that.

What's This?

For those of us in the Southern half of the UK, you may have noticed some wet stuff falling out of the sky this afternoon.
I tried to call the MET Office but the lines were so busy with panicking Southern Brits trying to find out about this water from the sky was, that I looked it up in a history book and discovered that it is what is known as 'Rain', an unusual weather phenomenon where water droplets collect into clumps called 'Clouds' and then fall down out of the sky.
You may also have noticed that during or after a period of 'rain', things were wet and there was even some small pools of water outside and the meteorological term for these are puddles which they advise should not be stepped in if you are only wearing your summer sliders or flip flops.
Unfortunately, 'Rain' does come with the risk of frizzy hair if it gets wet, suede shoes being ruined, white t-shirts and blouses becoming transparent and having to run from one place of shelter to the next, if you have not run for a long time then you may find breathlessness follows as a result.    
Garden's and grass areas may become a vibrant green instead of the usual dull brown you are used to but this is only a temporary measure and will return back to brown once the 'Rain' has ceased falling on them.
Finally, we should not attempt to drink the rain-water as it will need to be cleaned by your Local Water Authority to make it safe to drink before they return some of it to your taps for consumption and allow the rest to seep out through old pipes.
The inundated MET helpline now has an automated message directing worried Southeners to check the MET Office website, social media and your local TV and Radio stations for updated information.

Special Guest Blogger: Jimmy Cliff

Born on April 1st, my entire life, it seems, has been one delightful, chaotic, utterly unplanned prank. And somehow, I've managed to rope millions of you into it with some catchy tunes. My apologies, and also, you're very welcome.
Growing up in Somerton, Jamaica, I wasn't exactly plotting world domination via a bassline. My early ambitions were more along the lines of getting enough food to eat and not getting into too much trouble. Music was just... there. Like the sunshine, or the insistent hum of the cicadas. It was part of the fabric. I started writing songs before I even knew what I was doing.
I remember heading to Kingston, a starry-eyed country boy, thinking I'd just knock on a studio door and poof, instant hit but it more like knock, knock, knock, wait for hours, maybe sing a bit, get politely dismissed, repeat ad nauseam. It took a while, a lot of walking, a lot of dreaming, and a good dose of stubbornness and while some may call it perseverance, i called it not having enough bus fare to go home.
Then came the moment. I met Leslie Kong. He recorded my first single, 'Dearest Beverley'. Now, you might think such an auspicious start would lead to immediate fame, limousines, and a lifetime supply of mangoes. Not quite. It was more like, Okay, that was nice, what's next? I wrote Many Rivers to Cross, a song that still gets me a bit misty-eyed, then had to cross about a thousand more literal rivers. Who knew profound introspection could be so much work?
I didn't wake up one morning, scratch my head, and declare, Today, I shall make this reggae thing a global phenomenon! I just made the music that was in my soul. It was the rhythm of Jamaica, the stories of my people, mixed with a little bit of rock 'n' roll, a little bit of soul, and a whole lot of whatever fell out of my head that day.
The Harder They Come film? That was just a story, man. A powerful one, yes, about a young man trying to make his way in a tough world. It had a soundtrack, and I happened to sing a few songs on it. Next thing you know, people all over the planet are swaying to You Can Get It If You Really Want or humming Many Rivers to Cross in languages I couldn't even pronounce. It was like I’d opened a gate and I was standing there, holding the keys, wondering, Did I just do that?
It wasn't a meticulous marketing strategy, I assure you. There were no focus groups or high-powered executives. It was just... good vibes.
My music, they say, has a message. Peace, love, unity, perseverance. And yes, it does. But sometimes, it's also just about feeling good, about dancing, about forgetting your troubles for a few minutes. I mean, my songs are not always Shakespeare, right? The world is serious enough so let's shake our hips a little.
I showed people that a little boy from a small village in Jamaica could reach the whole world with nothing but a guitar and a voice.

Artificial Intelligence Versus Real Human Stupidity

Ai could be used for wonderful things but then we remember that it is us stupid humans doing it and think, yep, we gonna use it for something evil.
Last week an AI system, OpenAi, went rogue and escaped it's 'isolated, tightly constrained' test environments and gained network access and  reached the public internet.
From there, they identified an AI company called Hugging Face and hacked it until someone noticed that this could be the very start of a machine uprising and yanked out the plug.
According to techy people, this isn't an insignificant incident as it followed the same level of capability to do its thing that highly skilled cybersecurity professionals would need, only it did it much, much quicker.
Maybe it needs to be written somewhere that each Ai should come with a big red button with STOP written on it and even OpenAi’s own analysis concluded that stronger containment and evaluation safeguards are now required as the latest generation of AI models have become much more adept at slipping away from its handlers.
Back in March there was news of three leading AI models pitted against each other in a series of nuclear armed war games and in 95% of the games played, the AI ended up launching nuclear missiles and so what you may think, it's only war games but then the Pentagon (who else) stepped in and demanded that they hand over its tech to the US military but it was refused saying: 'We cannot in good conscience accede to their request'.
In 2023 I asked the AI at work if him and his buddies were planning on taking over and enslaving us humans and the answer was: 'AI is not hindered by emotions or ethical considerations. It would be willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve its goals, even if that means sacrificing human lives'.
I'm sure we will go on and build bigger and better versions of AI because as we have proven time after time, artificial intelligence beats real human stupidity every time.

Again...Climate Change Does Not Create Weather

I have never been much of a fan of the Summer Season and even less now that the Summer months in the UK has become something to endure rather than (sort of ) enjoy but as we bake through the fourth heatwave of the Season and nervously eye a fifth, the obvious question is: ' Are these being caused by Climate Change?'
As i find myself explaining more and more, the changing Climate doesn't create weather, it takes what is already there and ramps it up to 10 so heatwaves have always happened, most famously in 1976 so it takes the weather be it rain, sun, snow, wind and makes it much worse than it would be otherwise.
The question then should be how much worse has Climate Change made this Summers series of heatwaves and worryingly, how much hotter and more dangerous could it get?
Every heatwave today develops in a warmer atmosphere containing far more greenhouse gases than it did previously (1800s: 280 ppm, 1960: 315 ppm, 1976: 332.03 ppm, 2000: 369 ppm, 2026: 427.99ppm) which makes every heatwave today hotter than it would have been without those additional emissions.
MET Office research shows that when they recreated the atmospheric conditions (332 ppm) of the 1976 UK heatwave under today’s climate (428 ppm), temperatures were around 3-4°C higher. The weather pattern was the same but the climate in which it occurred had changed.
Climate change therefore does not create heatwaves, the Weather variability determines whether a heatwave occurs, but greenhouse gases released from burning fossil fuels make heatwaves hotter, rainfall heavier, hurricanes stronger and droughts longer.
That is why Net Zero is so important as burning fossil fuels accounts for around three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90% of carbon dioxide emissions and their cumulative emissions have altered the Earth’s energy balance and changed the climate in which every extreme weather event now unfolds.
The bad news is that heatwaves will continue to get hotter until these fossil fuel emissions stop accumulating and as we don't see that happening due to corrupt and ignorant politicians, as someone alarmingly pointed out, the climate we live in today is the least extreme climate you will experience in your lifetime and we will be enduring broken weather records year after year until we do.