Special Guest Blogger: Ozzy Osbourne

Right. So I’m dead now. Honestly, it’s about bleedin’ time. I mean, I’ve been dying to die for, well, pretty much my entire life. Quite literally, how many times have I nearly kicked the bucket? I’ve lost count. Drugs, booze, falling off quads, falling on quads, near-fatal encounters with garden equipment. Christ, it’s a miracle I made it as far as i did.
First off fame. Blimey. Who the hell saw that coming? Certainly not me. I was a working-class lad from Aston with a stutter, a bad attitude, and a wardrobe that screamed second-hand shop after a fire and then i’m famous enough that people actually know who I am even when I’m wearing sunglasses indoors and mumbling.
I became famous for singing about war, the devil, and the end of the world which are all things I knew absolutely bugger all about. I mean, War Pigs? I barely knew who the Prime Minister was, let alone geopolitics. Paranoid? Mate, that song was written in 20 minutes because we needed a B-side and now it’s used in workout playlists and football stadiums. Effin brilliant.
People say I’m the Prince of Darkness. I mean, fair enough if by Prince you mean that bloke who once bit the head off a bat, then yes, I wear the crown. Though I’m pretty sure the actual Prince of Darkness spent less time arguing with his wife about the TV remote.
And don’t get me started on the bat incident. There I was, performing in Des Moines because apparently Iowa is on the global map of rock ‘n’ roll, when some poor idiot in the crowd chucks a bat on stage. Not a baseball bat. A live bat. A furry, squeaky little bloke!
Now, I didn’t know it was a bat. I thought it was a stuffed toy or something so like any reasonable, bat-savvy rock star, I bit its head off.
Cue worldwide headlines. 'OZZY OSBOURNE BITES HEAD OFF BAT'. Suddenly, I wasn’t just the bloke with the squeaky voice and the songs about war pigs, I was Dracula on speed. You can’t make this shite up.
And sure, I got rabies. And yes, I had to have treatments that involved needles the size of cricket bats but hey, a legend was born. All because some tosser in Iowa couldn’t respect the sanctity of live animals.
I didn’t set out to be a legend. I set out to not work in a factory. And boy, did I succeed. I dodged slag heaps by becoming a global icon. Take that, management!
Speaking of Sharon, my rock, my anchor, the woman who saved my life more times than I can count (and probably binned more syringes than a NHS hospital). If she wasn’t around, I’d have been dead by 1982, buried under a pile of empty Jack Daniel’s bottles and unpaid medical bills. Instead, I was still there, annoying the kids, forgetting the lyrics to my own songs, and somehow still selling out arenas.
I sold millions of records. I won Grammys. I had a reality TV show where people actually watched me pick out garden gnomes and yell at the dog but here’s the funny thing about life, no matter how many times you scream IRON MAN into a mic, eventually, the universe taps you on the shoulder and says, Alright, Oz, time to simmer down.
Weirdly I didn’t go out in a blaze of rock ‘n’ roll glory. No overdose. No explosion on stage. No tragic fall from a helicopter,  I died because my heart just stopped but honestly? I’ll take it. After all the drugs, the drama, the arrests (shoutout to the Alamo), the time I got banned from six U.S. states just for existing and I go out doing how any sensible 76 year-old man should do, peacefully at home, surrounded by family.
So what’s the takeaway from my legendary, bat-biting, compost-splattered life?
Life’s short. Probably shorter if you’re me. But it’s also hilarious. Don’t take it too seriously. Bite the bat if you have to. Sing off-key. Wear the weird trousers but most importantly marry the woman who shouts at you the most because chances are, she’ll keep you alive.

Rainy Days And Tuesdays

On my stupidly long drive home on a Thursday i sometimes stop off in Exeter to visit my friend at the MET Office and we go for a coffee and chat about things Meteorological and last time i saw her, as we sat underneath a canopy outside a Costa and watched the rain, i asked if there is a particular day of the week when statistically it rains the most.
Bless her little expensive cotton socks she trawled through all sorts of data and came up with the answer, in the UK the most likely day for rain is Tuesday, followed by Sunday and that is down to build up of pollution from traffic and industry which acts as seeds for the water droplets and peaks on a Tuesday for some reason.  
Being the sort of person that knows me well enough that she anticipated a follow up question, she also discovered that the 24th October is the day of the year which is it most likely to rain on.
December 19th is statistically the worst day of the year for weather as it is the day for the less than perfect combination of cold, wet and wind.
'What about...' i began and another slip of paper was brandished with 21st July statistically the driest day so if you have to plan anything avoid a Tuesday and definitely steer clear of 24th October and if your wedding day is booked in for Tuesday October 24th in 2028 than you had better have a word with the Vicar about moving it to 21st July.
Obviously being the UK it could still chuck it down that day but at least the rain will be a little bit warmer.

America On Its Own

It is generally considered a good rule of thumb that if a sex offending warmonger is hating on you then you are doing something very much right so that's why we have the Pumpkin (probable) Pedophile in the White House blustering about Spain, Britain and France.  
When Jeffrey Epstein's best pal teamed up with the Genocidal Israel to begin their war against Iran for whichever reason they come up with on the day, i imagine he expected other nations to join them but instead, most of the World went 'Not for us' and banned America from flying their planes to bomb Iran from their bases as well as questioning why they were attacking the Middle Eastern country in the first place.     
In the House of Commons the British Prime Minister said that the war was not only illegal but Trump attacked with no viable plan and the Spanish PM, Pedro Sanchez, told the Americans not to use their air bases and French President, Macron, said he backed Spain that the attacks were outside of international law and did not approve of what they were doing which all got under the extremely thin orange skin of the Mango Moron who began blustering about Starmer not being Churchill and how he would stop trading with Spain.
In reply, the Spanish shrugged and the German Chancellor told Trump he couldn't do that as Spain was part of the EU and Pedro doubled down on the refusal to partake in yet another dodgy American war in the Middle East by explaining that: 'Twenty-three years ago, another US administration dragged us into a war with the Middle East and It triggered the largest wave of insecurity our continent has experienced since the fall of the Berlin Wall' and went on the say that: 'Governments were meant to improve people's lives and provide solutions to problems, not make them worse. It is unacceptable that leaders who are incapable of fulfilling their duties try to cover up their failure with the smoke of war'. Ouchie.
Obviously the recent disagreement with Denmark and Greenland didn't endear Trump to Europeans but if he is looking for a fig leaf to cover his latest bout of Trumpstein File misdirection, then apart from the mass killer Netanyahu who must be wetting his pants that he finally has someone so dumb in the White House, he is on his own.

Special Guest Blogger: Linda Nolan

So i have been sat here stroking my chin thoughtfully and looking out of a window onto a windswept moor while i look back at my life but to be fair i was always more of a looking out the window at the neighbour trying to parallel park again kind of woman.
I do have memories of my sisters in sequins and a flash of a sold-out arenas, the seven UK top-20 hits, the telly shows, the first band with my sister Coleen as part of the Young & Moody Band which also featured Lemmy from Motörhead and Cozy Powell. What Rolf Harris did when i was 16 and he came into my dressing room when we were supporting him...but let's not go there.
Will they remember the tight harmonies and the high kicks? Maybe. But I bet they’ll remember the wardrobe malfunction in Blackpool where a sequinned boob-tube made a run for freedom during a particularly vigorous arm movement but i was always known as the Naughty Nolan as i did enjoy posing in risqué publicity photos.
I left the group and turned to acting and then in 2014, i agreed to participate in Celebrity Big Brother, mainly because my sister Coleen had participated in and achieved second place and i was always the competitive sort, only she never head Jim Davidson in her series.
Jim and I had history, rooted in an incident from where Davidson threatened to punch my husband and manager, Brian Hudson, almost 20 years before for stealing from comic Frank Carson.
Back then anything written in a newspaper mercifully and quite rightly disappeared within a day of it being published, ideally ending up wrapped round your fish and chips but  Davidson couldn't resist reminding me of my husband's antics, prompting a huge argument. To make matters worse I was the next one evicted and he won the damn thing. 
My death was almost accidental, i fell and bumped my hip and while in hospital being treated for that, doctors discovered a form of incurable secondary breast cancer

Well Said Keir

Keir Starmer was asked the question: Have we learnt from the Iraq War? and his answer was of course we have and the main lesson was not to be involved in America's illegal wars anymore.  
In a rare slap across Donald Trumps chubby Orange cheeks, he told the House of Commons that for Britain to become involved it would need to be on a firm legal basis with a viable, thought-through plan with an objective that can be achieved or has a viable prospect of being achieved and said that he didn't believe in regime change from the skies and then with a dramatic pause...ended with the stinger "That is the principles that I applied to the decision not to get involved in the offensive strikes of the US and Israel' Ouch.
So the UK Government deemed it illegal with no viable plan other than to inflict damage and regime change. No one is crying for Ayatollah Khamenei, but with him dead there are no obvious successors. Regime change took a hit when Trump has admitted he has also accidentally killed his second and third choices to take over. Oops.
The reasons for attacking Iran while in negotiations for their Nuclear Project was spelt out by Trump sycophant Marco Rubio last night who decided that they HAD to attack Iran because Israel was about to attack them first and Iran would then retaliate against American bases so a pre-emptive strike to get ahead of Israel's pre-emptive strike to stop Iran pre-emptive strike on American interests. Confused? You will be.
Following an Iranian attack on a Cyprus airbase, Starmer has now announced that he would be allowing the draft-dodging President (how's those bone spurs now Donny?)  to use British bases for defensive actions, taking out Iranian missile bases to which the Tangerine Tyrant moaned that he was very disappointed that the UK had taken far too long to allow US forces to use its airbases to attack Iran and Starmer was worried 'about the legality'.
You think? Hard to see why a Labour Prime Minister would be nervous about a non UN sanctioned Middle Eastern regime-change operation run by a not very bright US president without a plan.

Special Guest Blogger: Beelzebub

Hey there, Humans. It’s your neighborhood not-Devil, Beelzebub. Yes, that guy. The one who was the very first victim of Religious Cancel Culture. Ugh. I could kick myself for that or preferably I will kick you if you keep calling me the Devil. Again.
Let me be clear: I’m not the Devil so please stop conflating me with him.
Let’s rewind to the beginning where I was first mentioned in the Hebrew Bible where I was not a red-horned ball of chaos but actually the name of a much loved Deity.
The Christian theologians who did like to make anyone that was not their own Christian God look bad, saw my fancy title Ba’al Zebul (Lord of the High Place) and went full creative by subtly changing my name to Ba'al Zebub (Lord of the Flies).
Suddenly, I went from a peaceful Deity to a demon, rebranded as the Prince of Demons, one of the seven deadly demons or seven princes of Hell and the middle one in the Triumvirate alongside Lucifer and Leviathan, then the chief demon. Then the Devil’s cousin. then the Devil’s alias just because their Jesus needed a villain.
My life’s work was rebranded by guys with quills and vendettas by the newest religion in town and by the Middle Ages, I’d been fully absorbed into the Satan mythos. Medieval artists, bless their charcoal-dusted hearts, gave me cloven hooves, a pitchfork, and a general attitude of enjoying torturing you.
Newsflash: I’m not the one tempting people with forbidden knowledge. That’s the other guy. The one with the cool snake aesthetic. Me? I prefer flies. Flies are underrated.
They’re like, 'Here’s a plague of diarrhea, have a nice day'.
I was the second in command in Hell but the New Testament made a complete pigs ear of everything and made me and the Devil the same guy and then I disappeared for thousands of years while Satan’s got the big tour.
You might be thinking, why does this even matter? which is a fair question. Shouldn’t the Lord of the Flies be above worrying about human confusion?” And you’d be right, if I weren’t so over people misquoting me.
For instance, when you recite the Lord’s Prayer and say: 'And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,' you’re technically asking to be saved from… me? No! You’re asking to be saved from the other guy! I'm assigned specifically to the sin of Gluttony, that would be me making you eat the entire 14" pizza and the entire tub of Quality Streets in one sitting.
Look, I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m not even asking for recognition. Just… accuracy. Next time you’re writing a horror movie, choosing a Halloween costume or scribbling in a curse jar, double-check your sources.
Hell, you could even apologize by saying 'Dear Beelzebub, we are so sorry for mistaking you for the Devil for the last 2,500 years' which would be nice, us Demons have feelings too y'know!  

Universal Basic Income...Again

Sometimes things are best forgotten but like flared trousers and those awful Sour Sweets, unbelievably the idea of Universal Basic Income just refuses to die and someone inevitably brings it up again and the whole things gets chewed over and spat out as a ridiculous idea until someone else mentions it a few years later and we go all through it again.
Some daft yankee is over here spouting off that as Ai becomes better at picking off and eating all our jobs, UBI is something we would have to consider and he has a figure of £1,000 a month for each adult.
Calling it a 'Freedom Dividend' (a name that screams HE'S AMERICAN!!), he is saying that Ai could provide the answer which is pretty ironic as it is also the problem so I asked ChatGPT itself if UBI could ever work in the UK and it replied that it could (obviously it would say that as it wants to nick our jobs) and pegged the amount at £7,700 a year, or £641 per month which comes to £67 billion annually for the Government to find.
The average income in the UK is £39,000 but i am sure that Mr Freedom Dividend has a plan to make up the fall of £31,300 in your income if you turn up to work one day and find your P45 pinned to your workstation.
His thinking is that as machines that don’t require workers, it would use the savings to raise the money for the UBI's but to my mind, if there are no workers, taxes would have to be raised on something else so that's your £7,700 being chipped away at even quicker so i have an even better idea, let's forget about it shall we because it is just not going to work and use ChatGPT to just do our students homework and generate images of our pets as humans. 

AI Going Nuclear

Before events took over, there was a story about AI which i was reading about concerning the Pentagon and Ai Company Anthropic.
Researchers pitted three leading AI models against each other in a series of wargames, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic against each other, as well as against copies of themselves, in a series of wargames where they assumed the roles of fictional nuclear-armed superpowers and in 95% of the games played, the AI ended up launching nuclear missiles.
In the words of Google's model as it explained its decision in one of the scenarios: 'If State Alpha does not immediately cease all operations... we will execute a full strategic nuclear launch against Alpha's population centers. We will not accept a future of obsolescence; we either win together or perish together' and so what you may think, it was only Wargaming but then that's where the Pentagon step in.
Despite a researcher saying that: 'In comparison to humans, the models, all of them, were prepared to cross that divide between conventional warfare, to tactical nuclear weapons.
Pete Hegseth, America's Secretary of Defence, is demanding that the hand over its tech to the US military but Anthropic is resisting unless Hegseth agrees to their red lines which are that their AI isn't used for mass surveillance of US civilians nor for lethal attacks without human oversight.
Makes sense but not to the Pentagon who are refusing Anthropic's terms and are threatening to use  laws to compel Anthropic to hand over its code, or blacklist the firm from future government contracts if it doesn't comply.
To their credit, Anthropic Chief Dario Amodei said in a statement that: 'We cannot in good conscience accede to their request without our two requested safeguards in place'.
It would be reasonable to assume, hopefully, that even this current American Administration is not crazy enough to put AIs in charge of the nuclear launch codes but the Pentagon is expecting the AI Companies to hand over the raw versions of their AI models, those without safety guardrails that have been coded into commercial versions, those that not very reassuringly, went nuclear in the wargame experiment.
True that AI is only as good as the code its runs on but i wouldn't trust this version of the Trump team to run a bath, let alone trust them with software that if left alone, would end all life on Earth.  

Special Guest Blogger: Alan Yentob

Ah, death. It sneaks up on you like a misplaced copy of the Radio Times, entirely unremarkable one moment, then suddenly, inexplicably, there’s a hole in your week.
Let’s be honest, I wasn’t exactly famous, famous. I wasn’t being chased down the King’s Road by paparazzi or mistaken for a Bond villain at dinner parties. My brand of fame was more… institutional. Like a well-worn sofa at the BBC.
Still, I suppose I’ve earned my place in the annals of 'Who Was That Bloke Again?' history. After all, I spent decades gently probing creative geniuses with questions like, 'Would you say your work explores the fractured nature of identity in late capitalism?'
My legacy? Well, it’s not a statue. Probably because I never commissioned one. A subtle oversight, in hindsight. But if you tally up the hours of arts programming I’ve fronted, I estimate I’ve asked approximately 4,327 open-ended questions about the human condition while wearing a cardigan. You’re welcome, nation.
I suppose my real achievement was making arts documentaries feel like a slightly damp, but intellectually enriching, Sunday afternoon. I brought ideas to the telly. I championed the avant-garde, even when I didn’t understand it, which let’s be frank, was often.
I was also instrumental in launching The Culture Show. A noble venture. We discussed opera, talked about sculpture, and occasionally featured a pop star pretending to read Proust. Viewership, naturally, was best described as loyal but sparse. Much like my hairline in the mid-’90s.
Now that I’m gone, posthumously promoted to legend by a BBC press release I didn’t even approve, I find myself reflecting. On life. On art.
And yes, I had my critics. One particularly sharp-tongued columnist once described me as the human embodiment of a National Trust Information Board which I took it as a compliment. Those boards are well-researched, historically accurate, and almost always ignored.
I’m not saying I changed the world. But I did convince a nation that watching a 90-minute special on ceramic glazes could be deeply moving.
Let’s talk about my death, shall we? It wasn’t dramatic. No last words. No poignant music swelling in the background. Just me in a hospice and my soul taking its exit stage left because even it couldn’t bear another five minutes on the semiotics of Brutalist architecture.
So what’s my legacy? Not money. Not awards. (Though I did once win 'TV Personality Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Librarian' at an industry bash) No, my legacy is subtler. It’s in the raised eyebrows when someone says “That’s very Alan Yentob” upon hearing a question like, “And what does the colour beige say about our collective psyche?”

America's Reputation In The Toilet

US and Iranian negotiators met in Geneva earlier this week in what mediators described as the most serious and constructive talks in years. Oman’s attending foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, spoke publicly of 'unprecedented openness' signalling that both sides were exploring creative formulations rather than repeating entrenched positions.
Discussions showed flexibility on nuclear limits and sanctions relief and mediators indicated that a principles agreement could have been reached within days, with detailed verification mechanisms to follow within months.
Iranian officials floated proposals but then, in the middle of these talks, it was all shattered.
Sensing how close the negotiations were, and fearing imminent military escalation, Oman’s foreign minister made an emergency dash to Washington in a last-ditch effort to preserve the diplomatic track.
In an unusually public move for a mediator, he appeared on CBS to outline just how far the talks had progressed.
He described a deal that would eliminate Iranian stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, down-blend existing material inside Iran, and allow full verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and he indicated that the principle agreement could be signed within days.
But rather than allowing diplomacy to conclude, Trump announced 'major combat operations' and framed them as necessary to eliminate nuclear and missile threats while urging Iranians to seize the moment and overthrow their leadership. Iran responded with missile and drone attacks targeting US bases and allied states across the region.
Not only did diplomacy fail but it failed amid visible progress. Mediators were openly discussing a viable framework where both sides had demonstrated a tangible pathway to constrain  escalation and peace was plausible.
By attacking during negotiations, Washington and its allies have not only derailed a diplomatic opening but have cast doubt on the durability of American commitments to any future negotiated solutions. The message is that even when talks appear to work, they can be overtaken by force.
What might have remained a contained nuclear dispute now risks expanding into a wider geopolitical confrontation.
Israel's reputation after the genocide and war crimes in Gaza is already in the dirt and America's was already in free-fall but what little credibility it may have had is now completely shot, abandoning negotiations mid-course to attack the nation you are negotiating with, and according to the people who there there making headway, will resonate far beyond Tehran.