The Russian Bogeyman

 Today, the Russian army is locked into a bloody stalemate not far from its starting line four and a half years ago, despite losing over one million soldiers, dead and wounded, but although Ukrainian's losses are also horrific, the stalemate works in Ukraine’s favour because Putin must win a decisive military victory to achieve his war aims, while Ukraine needs only to avoid defeat.
As many current and previous World leaders thought as they faced a supposedly weaker foe, Putin assumed he would win a swift victory and Ukraine would collapse under the weight of the Russian assault.
Putin’s Ukraine war is on a par with other military blunders this century such as Iraq, Afghanistan and today's Iran War but given Putin’s dismal record of incompetence and wishful thinking in the Ukraine war, it is absurd that Russian armoured columns might one day pour unstoppably into Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. This is most unlikely since Russian tanks have so far failed to advance the 20 miles from the Russian frontier to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city.
Why then is he portrayed as a mortal threat to the West? Undoubtedly the nations of the West want to wrap the national flag around themselves while armies and intelligence services furiously demand an astronomic increase in their budgets at the expense of other Government Departments and tax payers cash and because the West need a bogeyman, and Russia is it, however incompetent they are.

Trump Rules For World Cup

I don't know who wrote this but they should be given a medal by someone at FIFA for it because it is brilliant.

Donald Trump has unveiled plans for the World Cup which is to be hosted jointly buy the USA, Mexico and Canada (or the USA and Mexico if Canada becomes the 51st state before then)

Mexican Teams to be refused entry into USA and Israel invited to turn up.
In the event of a free kick, American players to form 'bigly, beautiful wall'.

The Mexican wave to be renamed The Wave of America.
In the event of Russia V Ukraine match, Russia to kick off  but Trump to insist that Ukraine started it. Russia to be allowed to keep possession of the ball.

Canadian team to be tested for drugs and found guilty of bringing fentanyl into the country and sent home with Israel invited to replace them.
Texas to host the so called 'Group of Death Penalty' including China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Americans made to pay 25% tariffs for all European goals scored in the USA.
If the game ends in a draw, there will be extra time for a deal to be negotiated.

All pitch invasions to be blamed on Ukriane.
President Trump to constantly move the goalposts.

In the event of an American loss, President Trump will not accept the result and will demand a recount of goals and the referee will be sent to Prisono Maximo in EL Salvador.
USA to win the final and Trump to take 'beautiful gold' World Cup trophy home to install in his ballroom.

Stadium speakers must immediately blast a 30-second loop of 'Y.M.C.A' after every American goal.
Taco not to be sold in or around any USA stadiums.

Absolutely brilliant, credit to whichever genius came up with this. 

Special Guest Blogger: Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy

Much like undergarments, beginnings are vital so let's start there and a family tree so tangled I’m fairly certain I’m related to at least three popes and a badger. Such are the perils of royal inbreeding and I say this with pride, naturally. We held grudges like we were storing wine, we age and treasure them. The Savoys could feud through five generations and still complain about a slight in 1287.
So what exactly did I do? Allow me to enumerate my contributions to society.
Being an Italian princess is harder than it looks. You’re constantly being stared at, expected to be graceful, and advised not to vomit into the Versailles fountains and then get married off which i was at aged 16, to Louis Alexandre, Prince of Lamballe who was proof that the word Prince does not inherently mean charming but the heir to the greatest fortune in France softened the blow rather.
He had more mistresses than wigs but luckily Widowhood quickly came knocking when he died young from venereal disease. I wasn’t heartbroken at becoming a widow aged 19, but I was relieved. Now I could wear black and inherit a fortune. Mourning never looked so profitable.
Becoming Superintendent of the Queen’s Household meant i was Marie Antoinette’s personal assistant, party planner, and emotional support and we were as thick as thieves, except I did actually steal her ribbons. She never minded. I was the only one who dared tell her that her hair looked like a startled poodle had nested in it.
Unfortunately Marie Antoinette's political instincts were those of a particularly confused duck which leads us to the messy French Revolution.
As the revolutionaries stormed Paris, I remained loyal to the queen and as we know, loyalty is the noble trait that usually ends with you very dead.
I stayed by her side during imprisonment, offering what comfort I could by sewing buttons and whispering gossip but eventually, they separated us. I was imprisoned in La Force prison, where the accommodations were rustic with no silk sheets or footmen and then came the September Massacres of 1792.
The mob came for us. I wasn’t afraid, exactly. More resigned. Like when you realize you’ve stepped in horse dung and it’s going to take ages to clean. Only instead of dung, it was revolutionary fervor and it got real gory.
They cut off my head and then paraded it around on a pike before sticking it in front of Marie Antoinette’s prison window, one minute she was doing embroidery and the next, her bestie’s face was bobbing past the bars like a particularly morbid piñata.
So what i did was become a martyr and I didn’t regret a thing. I lived extravagantly, loved fiercely, and died memorably. Most people don’t even get one of those. I got all three so if i had the chance to do it again i would, only maybe next time I’m choosing a country with better weather and slightly less guillotine enthusiasm.

Arsenal: Campione, Campione, Ole, Ole, Ole

It did look a bit touch and go for a while there but Arsenal are officially this seasons Premier League Champions after three years of being the runner up.
Shame the ceremony took place at Crystal Palace's ground and not at the Emirates but that's the way the fixtures fell so nothing could be done about it although i don't blame the Crystal Palace fans who made a quick exit after their own end of season presentations, i wouldn't have hung about to see another Club awarded the trophy either so that's fair enough.
With the Premier League Trophy safely stashed away in the cabinet, next up is Saturday Evening's daunting European Cup Final against PSG in Budapest, Hungary where PSG look for successive Big Trophy wins and Arsenal go hunting their first ever but as all football fans know, in a one off game anything can happen we may spend 90 minutes screaming 'JUST CLEAR THE FECKIN THING' at the TV but as thew FA cup shows every year, the best team doesn't always triumph.
Shame that the final relegation place was between West Ham and Spurs and it ended up begin the Irons who play in the Championship next season but for the Spurs players and fans who celebrated their survival in the top league by finishing 17th as if they had won the FA Cup, they may need to reflect on that unless the objective now is to just not being relegated.
With Pep's era at Manchester City now over, he was sent away with the Aston Villa fans singing to him about the 115 FFP Charges against his team and questioning his parentage but after promising to be around for another year, he ran off like his arse was on fire with the decision coming this summer (apparently) so yeah Pep, as the Villains fans sang, you didn't play fair and do you know who your father is?
With Villa already the UEFA Cup Champions and Crystal Palace playing in the European Conference Cup this Wednesday, there is a real chance that the three European Cups are all held by English Clubs which is a great advert for the Premier League so up the Eagles and come on your Gunners!!

Just Let America Surrender Already Iran

As the Moronic Donald Trump is finding out, it is much easier to start a war than end one, especially if the other side is not quite so keen to buckle under which is why the Tangerine Tyrant is desperate to make Iran submit to their demands but the Iranians are saying, hold on, not so fast fatso.
Over the last few weeks the (probable) pedophile has been talking up peace talks and promising a deal is to be reached imminently only for Iran to dismiss them and hand over some more demands of their own.
We are not party to what the demands are from either side but each are saying the others are unacceptable except the Trump team keep saying the Strait of Hormuz must be opened and Iran must not have nuclear weapons although anyone with a memory that goes back further than a few days will remember that the Strait was open before Netanyahu found the gullible suckers in an American Administration he had dreamed of to attack Iran and killed the Ayatollah who forbade Iran ever owning Nuclear Weapons.
Now Pakistan is running backwards and forwards between the two nations trying to broker a deal but every time Trump tried to bounce Iran into it, the Iranians just shake their head and make a counter proposal.
As we are now 87 days or 12 weeks and 3 days into a war which Trump said would take four to six weeks and has said on numerous occasions they have already won, its about time that Iran let Trump surrender and we put all this behind us and get back to the Trumpstein files and Trumps close relationship with the Pedophile ring he paled around and (almost certainly) participated in for over a decade.

The Myth Of Drinking Hot Drinks When it's Hot

As the Met Office are talking about 31C and record breaking May temperatures, i thought this would be an apt moment to revive a post from a few years ago regarding staying cool by drinking a hot drink which is something I have already heard mentioned this year.

Good luck trying to get to sleep this week in these hot temperatures but you could try a fan if you can stand the whirring noise or throw open a window if you don't mind an insect party in your bedroom.
I go for the pillow case in the fridge for 60 mins before bed tactic which works fine if you drop off in the first 30 minutes or so and a cold water bottle helps but something i hear a lot but never understood is drink something hot to cool down.
A while ago I asked some people from hot countries if they drink hot drinks to cool down and the resounding answer from people who should know was WTF...ARE YOU MAD!!!!
The science behind it, as it is, is that by drinking something hot, you bodies core temperature increases so you sweat and sweating cools you down but as the sweating only cools you down to the temperature you were before drinking the tea elevated your temperature in the first place, it's quite pointless and if someone hands you a hot cup of tea when your hot, you would be better off waiting for it to cool down and pouring it over yourself.

So there you have it, according to Science and colleagues who live in countries where it is hot most of the time, avoid hot drinks unless you really want to be a sweaty mess.

Special Guest Blogger: Enrico Fermi

My childhood in Rome was a mix of gelato and geometry, my father taught me two things that stayed with me for a lifetime which was never trust a neutron that looks too calm and never skip that second Espresso.
While other kids were busy playing marbles, I was busy counting them and that was when I realised that numbers could be both a hobby and a weapon, my mother would say, 'Enrico, you’re a genio, you’ll solve problems faster than a pizza delivery guy on a Vespa and i did end up creating the famous Fermi calculation or the quick‑and‑dirty estimate.
My University life in Pisa was a blur of chalk dust, late‑night debates in the caffè and an early fascination with the big questions such as what are atom's made of and why does my non‑na always forget where she put her glasses?
In 1921, I was invited to a conference in Rome. The room smelled of tobacco, fresh coffee and the faint perfume of caffè latte which is the holy trinity of any Italian academic gathering. There, I met a young, disheveled man named Niels Bohr and we spent the evening discussing quantum mechanics, my favorite pizza toppings (pepperoni, of course), and the best way to convince a committee that a theory was worth funding.
Fast forward to 1938, when I finally received the Nobel Prize in Physics for my work on induced radioactivity and a job on the secretive, top secret we‑don’t‑talk‑about‑it‑at‑family‑dinners Manhattan Project because then the world was in a heated race to harness nuclear energy both for power and, unfortunately, for weapons.
In a desert outpost bustling with the brightest minds of the era, all hunched over blackboards covered in equations that looked like they were written in a different language, my job was to provide quick, back‑of‑the‑envelope calculations that could tell the project leaders, 'Yes, that implosion will work, or no, we’ll blow our stupid selves up.'
Skip on again to 1950 and the moment which made me famous, explaining why, after all these years, we still haven’t gotten a postcard from the Martians which still confounds scientists, sci‑fi writers and late‑night Bloggers.
I was sitting at a lunch table in in the cafeteria of the Los Alamos laboratory, enduring a less than perfect espresso while watching a group of young physicists argue about the feasibility of interstellar travel and one of them asked me if the universe is so old and so vast, why the heck haven’t we heard from any aliens yet?
I sipped my espresso, stared at my sandwich, then at the ceiling, and thought: 'If even a tiny fraction of those stars host technologically advanced civilizations, why haven’t we heard from them and said, 'Well, let’s do a quick back‑of‑the‑envelope calculation. Suppose a civilization could colonize the galaxy in a million years which is a blink of an eye compared to the universe’s 13.8‑billion‑year age. If even one out of a thousand planets develops intelligent life, then we should be swimming in alien radio signals by now, right?
They looked puzzled so i continued, 'If we assume each civilization lasts for a hundred thousand years then the galaxy should be teeming with active civilizations. Yet all we hear is the cosmic background radiation and the occasional glitch from a faulty satellite. Hence, the paradox is the universe looks quiet despite all the reasons it should be noisy so where are they?'
And that is the Fermi Paradox, named after yours truly because I was the first to raise the question at the Astrobiology conference at Green Bank, West Virginia. I didn’t invent the paradox, I just voiced it and the rest is Astrophysical history.
To answer my own Paradox, it could be that  the space between Worlds is just too great or that maybe we’re looking in the wrong wavelength, like sending an email to a group that are still communicating by smoke signals, or they have seen us and seen just how warlike we are and sensibly swerved us or even they are here observing us but we just cannot see or recognise them or, just maybe, we really are alone in an infinite Universe.
There could be someone looking up at the night sky in another part of the Universe wondering whether someone is out there and pondering the same paradox but after spending so long working alongside nuclear material, my body was wracked with Cancer and I died aged 53 and never did get the post card from the Martians so whether you’re a physicist, a poet, or a curious kid who thinks Fermi is a type of Italian cheese, remember that the next time you see a flicker in the night sky, it might just be an alien trying to figure out why we keep asking, “Where are they?” while we’re busy arguing over whether the pizza topping should include pineapple (It shouldn't by the way).

Hot, Warm or Very Warm?

My Phone is telling me that it is 21°C today but over the next few days it could hit 31°C and technically for Spring that is 'Very Warm' but next week it would officially 'Hot'.
The Met Office has a classification of Terms used to indicate temperature which is basically how much above the average temperature for the season it is hence as May is Spring still, 31°C is  more than 7°C above the average of 18°C hence 'Very Warm' but in June, when it is Meteorological Summer, it will be 6°C above the average of 25°C hence it is 'Hot'.
Today at 21°C it is officially 3°C above the 18°C Spring average so they call it 'Rather Warm' which is the top rating for Spring but as we are heading towards Summer, when would we be technically correct for the temperature of the day?
The Average for a UK Summer is 25°C so anything from 33°C upwards is classified as 'Very Hot', 31°C/32°C is 'Hot', 29°C/30°C is 'Very Warm', 27°C /28°C is 'Warm', 26°C to 24°C is 'Normal', 22°C/23°C is 'Rather Cool', 20°C/21°C is 'Cool' and any days below 19°C are 'Very Cool'.
So now you know and you have the perfect answer to the idiot we get every Summer who says 'Hot Enough For Ya' by answering: 'Actually as it's 28°C today, technically it's not Hot, it's Warm Enough For Ya' which will leave you feeling an immense sense of inner pride.

Why Capitalism is Crap Example 7,946,727

This week was a great example of why we need more Socialism and why the Capitalist Pig Dogs are taking everyone for a ride.
First up was the Tesco Supermarket who announced profits for the last financial year of £2bn and then on the same day, the Nationwide Building Society reported a £1.49 billion profit for the same period.
As Tesco is owned by major institutional investors, the bumper profit will be shared out to its shareholders but as the Nationwide is owned by its customers (members), their profit is to be shared out amongst 4 million customers who will receive £100 into their Nationwide account.
Sums up nicely the Capitalism mantra of a business is there to to generate profit and maximise returns only for its owners and the Socialist mantra of collective ownership and spreading the profits amongst its members.
That is the problem with the Capitalist Society we have, it is run for the few while Socialism is run for the many so  just imagine how much better off we would be under Nationalised industries and you can blame Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives who in the 80's went on an orgy of
privatising the rail, utility, mail and water industries while selling us the line that it would make them more efficient, generate investment, lower costs and save jobs while in reality all it led to was large scale redundancies, prices sky-rocketed and the previous British companies are largely in the hands of a small group of investors who pay themselves billions in dividend payouts
We need more companies in our hands who will use the profits for the good of everyone and not just for the good of the few and that my friend, is why Socialism is good and Capitalism sucks.  

Special Guest Blogger: Alice Kessler

Ah, it's my turn to stare into the proverbial mirror and try not to scream at the reflections staring back. I say reflections, it's the plural because of course, I’m me, and also her. We’re twins. Identical.
Yes, it’s me, Alice. Or Ellen. Honestly, even we get it wrong sometimes. We’re the Kessler Twins, purveyors of high-kicking chorus lines, and the only women in 1960s Germany who could make lederhosen look vaguely sexy.
We escaped East Germany and our first big break came in 1957 when we were discovered at a Viennese opera house, where we were performing an interpretive dance routine to O Sole Mio in matching berets and tap shoes. The producer took one look at us flailing in unison and declared, 'Mein Gott, they’re like one person' and thus the Kessler Twins were born. Or re-born. Honestly, we were born in 1936. But nobody counts that as a career launch.
For two decades, we pirouetted, sang off-key, and smiled through our teeth at men who said things like, 'I could never tell you apart', touring the world! Well, Europe.
And Margate. And once, very briefly, a holiday camp in Blackpool where the audience clapped halfway through our opener because they thought it was over. A fair reaction, really.
We were asked to represent West Germany in the Eurovision Song Contest 1959, finishing in 8th place with Tonight We Want To Go Dancing and we graced the covers of magazines and we were offered film roles and during the 60's when we walked into a room, people noticed. Not because we were brilliant, mind you, but because we were exactly alike.
We never had children. Not from lack of trying mind you, but we were inseparable so instead of husbands we adopted a parrot named Klaus, who could swear in three languages. He outlived us both, which is frankly rude.
We died, you know. Quite uneventfully, at exactly the same time, of course, because we couldn’t even manage death individually.
For a brief, glitter-sprayed moment, we were seen. We came. We chorused. We confused people and bowed out together in a joint suicide pact.
Ellen had suffered a stroke and we both had heart problems so we slipped off to Grünwald, and an assisted dying facility and the magnificent Kessler Twins took their final bow, in unison as always.