16 Photographs

Us humans are capable of creating things of immense beauty as well of being capable of depraved cruelty to each other and create inventions which can immeasurably improve all our lives as well as invent horrific weapons to wipe out millions of souls in the blink of an eye.  
Photographs possess a silent power that offers a poignant portal into moments forever suspended that do not merely document the past but provoke profound contemplation by confronting us with the fragility of human existence, the weight of historical choices, and the capturing both immense tragedy and quiet hope.
I have picked out 16 photographs which still make me ponder now on the cruelty, beauty and horror of us and our Planet.

Xmas Day 1914

I have often wondered what would happen if two armies facing each other said no, we are not going to fight each other and just laid down their guns and got together for a game of football instead.
This picture from 1914 shows exactly when that did happen and the German and British armies got together in No Mans Land on Christmas Day, sang some carols, shared beer and cigarettes and had a game of football.   
Reports and photographs of these unofficial ceasefires reached the papers back home and the military authorities declared that  informal truces with the enemy were to cease and any officer or non-commissioned officer found to have initiated one would be tried by Court Martial with harsh punishment for any man caught refusing to fight.
The small truces of 1914 never happened again but amidst the bloody and horrific slaughter, a rare glimpse of human kindness.

Special Guest Blogger: Hulk Hogan

Alright, brother, let me tell ya something! You know, when you’ve been slamming giants, inspiring millions of Hulkamaniacs, and generally just being the greatest American hero to ever tie a bandana, a life lived at 110 decibels. And let me tell you, when you’ve lived the life of Hulk Hogan, there’s a lot
to unpack. It’s like a gym bag full of sweaty bandanas, old championship belts and a few questionable supplements from the 80s,  you know, just vitamins.
First things first, the fans, the Hulkamaniacs! Bless their patriotic little hearts. Without you, I’d just be Terry Bollea, a guy with a magnificent mustache and an even more magnificent tan, probably selling insurance in Tampa. But with you I became a living, breathing, bicep flexing embodiment of the American dream! I taught kids to say their prayers, take their vitamins, and believe in themselves. And by vitamins, again, I mean… well, it was the 80s, dude. Things were different.
And speaking of prayers, my spiritual journey, brother, has been just as wild as my wrestling career. From the moment I stepped into that ring, I knew there was a higher power guiding my leg drops. God, you see, he’s always been in my corner, even when I was powerbombing people through tables,
which, let’s be honest, probably wasn’t exactly what the good Lord had in mind. But hey, it was for entertainment! And I always thanked Him for the victory, even if I had to cheat a little to get it. Sometimes, God works in mysterious ways, brother.
But life ain't all sunshine and bandanas, dude. There have been a few speed bumps, moments when the spotlight shines a little too bright, and maybe catches you in a moment you’d rather forget. Like when you’re caught on camera in a sex tape with my best friend's wife saying things you absolutely, positively should not be saying about my daughter sleeping with a black man and liberally using the 'N' word to embellish my point of view. . Woof, brother. That was a rough patch. Not my finest hour, not my finest minute, honestly.
It made me realize that even a superhero like me, a man who could bodyslam the world, could still stumble. And when you stumble in front of a billion people, man, it creates a crater. But you know what? Even craters can fill with water and become beautiful lakes… eventually. It was a learning experience, a humbling moment that made me reflect on a lot of things. And it taught me that even the biggest, strongest, most tanned dude in the world has to be accountable, brother. And hey, I owned it, I apologized, and I came back stronger, with a renewed sense of purpose. That’s what Hulkamania is all about, right? Falling down, and then getting back up, picking up a microphone, and telling everyone you're still the greatest of all time!
And speaking of political aspirations, remember when I threw my bandana in the ring, not for a championship belt, but for the Vice Presidency? Oh, yeah! I told my good buddy Donald Trump, 'I'm your guy'  He’s a smart dude, that Trump, he chose Mike Pence but he probably just didn’t want me
overshadowing him with my sheer charisma and larger-than-life presence. Can’t blame him, brother.
I was the dude who brought wrestling into the mainstream, a man who wore a feather boa and sunglasses indoors like it was totally normal but it's all about fighting for what you believe in, even if what you believe in is occasionally controversial and racist.
It’s about that fire in your belly, that desire to win, that feeling that you can accomplish anything if you just train hard, say your prayers, and, well, maybe take a few more of those special vitamins than the average person.

New Stuff And Old Stuff

The wonderful Brain Cox was on TV and stated that nothing is new and even the atoms making up our bodies have been other things before over the course of life on Earth so our arm may contain part of a plant that the first fish trod on as it left the Ocean and our left ear could contain some of the water which our tree dwelling ancestor peed out over a squirrel which is now in our little toe.  
All very mind bending i know to consider that we could be breathing in oxygen and drinking water that dinosaurs and ancient plants used millions of years ago but such is the circle of life that we eat plants and animals and their atoms become our bones, blood, and skin and when these atoms which make us will go back into the soil and air when we die to become new plants, animals or even part of a motorway pillar at some point in the far future.
He also said that at some point around 900,000 years ago 98.7% of the human population got wiped out due to extreme climate changes, severe droughts and dropping temperatures in Africa which caused extensive loss of vegetation and a sharp decline in the grazing animals that early humans relied on for survival, leaving just around 1,280 breeding individuals to keep us going and it took millennia before we got going again so while some species bounce back, others don’t, but we’re probably the first ones endangered because we did and then stupidly stuffed up the air, water and ground we need to live.  
All this got me thinking, if nothing is actually new and things are made from previous things why do we have a problem with waste because everything that goes to make more stuff is made from the other stuff we dug out from the ground such as coal which is a fossil fuel which means setting fire to dinosaurs.
With recycling we convert the raw materials of old into new stuff but there is still a good proportion of new things that we have to dispose of but if nothing is extra to what we started with, so why is the new stuff not being used to fill the holes we made digging out the stuff to make it.
We must have massive holes all over the place we can fill and the new stuff isn't going to weigh more or occupy more space than what we started with because it is the same stuff but then maybe my Cerebral Cortex is part made from atoms which were once a Conker Tree because i'm obviously missing something here.

Healey U Turn

When John Healey resigned as defence secretary in a blaze of righteous fury, he grandly declared that a cast-iron commitment to spend 3% of GDP on defence was the absolute minimum required to keep Britain safe in a perilous world.
Less than three months on, and now Chancellor under Andy Burnham where he is in control of the nation’s purse strings, he doesn't seem quite so keen on throwing billions more at the Department to spend on warfare and his first budget in October, he is to defer the target of spending 3% of GDP on defence to a later date 'due to fiscal constraints'.
Strange how being responsible for finding and distributing the money to all of the Government departments means that he won't be upping the military spending he was so desperate for a few weeks ago which led him to resign in disgust when it wasn't forthcoming from the former Chancellor, Rachel Reeves.
Maybe, with a budget already of £65.4 billion to spend, he didn't really need the money after all because once he was in the position to give it and deemed absolutely necessary, he hasn't.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

It seems that Donald Trump will not be confirmed as a pedophile until he is out of office by which time America will realise that many places and things in America will have the name of a notorious child sex offender on their buildings and rapidly change them such as the Palm Beach International Airport which has been renamed the President Donald J. Trump International Airport and given the three letter International airport code DJT.
You can now fly from Holguin in Cuba to Florida and your ticket will say HOG DJT or go from Florida to Gaya International Airport and your ticket will say DJT GAY.
Many long haul flights have stop overs so for example if you go from Palm Beach and stop off Sioux City and land at Kokkolain in Finland your ticket would state DJT SUX KOK.
For our holidays this year we are going on a whistle stop tour of the globe so we are starting off in Antsiranana, Madagascar and then it's on to Fresno California and over the Pacific to Fukishama in Japan and then down to Pendopo Airport in Talang Gudang Indonesia and then finally over to West Palm Beach Florida which is a lot on one ticket, DIE FAT FUK PDO DJT.
Going to be a long trip but should be good.

Gonna Need A Bigger Tele

 
My iPhone camera is 48 Megapixels which is exactly three times that of the 16 Megapixel Hubble Telescope launched in 1990 which is taking photographs of the Cosmos for the education of mankind while i am using mine to take pictures of our cat so arguably not so important to warrant the high quality although it is 15MP less than the James Webb Telescope launched in 2021.
Now we have another camera telling the Universe to say Cheese because the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is on it's way beyond the Moon and that has a whopping 300 Megapixel camera onboard which would take some amazing cat pictures.
NASA are saying that the extremely wide angle high definition images of the universe from the telescope will be so vast that there's not a 4K TV on Earth capable of showing it all so i'm guessing that is next on the NASA to-do list because it is due to do a survey of our own Milky Way galaxy and find 20 billion stars so that's a really big screen required.
As well as the ultra-high definition camera equipment, it is also carrying the first active coronagraph to be used in space, which blocks out the bright light of a star so researchers can observe the Corona and see what that reveals.
The Roman Space Telescope is named after NASA's first female chief astronomer Nancy Grace Roman who was the main advocate of telescopes in Space and convinced Congress to fund one which led to the Hubble and later telescopes queuing up on the other side of the Moon, well away from the light of the Earth and it's satellite.  
The journey to its place which will keep it constantly on the night side of the Earth is an estimated 90 days and the telescope’s first images are expected in early 2027 which doesn't give them much time to invent the television to look at them on so that's your next job eggheads.

You Can Relax Olympians

This weekend saw the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing and after years of scientists teaching robots to play sports, they still suck at it.
That said, in the 100-meter sprint a humanoid robot achieved a result of 9.39 seconds, beating the human record of 9.58 seconds set by Jamaican athlete Bolt in 2009 but after completing the course it ran into a wall and exploded which Usain never did and in a standing high jump one was able to reach 2.88 meters which is well above the 2.45 meters best result by one of us meat bags with a run up.
In the other events i am glad to say they failed miserably and one scientist explained that robots are great when they have one instruction to follow but when they are asked to do more, they get confused and either fall over figuratively and in some cases physically.
The two sports they do excel at is chess and table tennis which they regularly whup our arses at but as most sports rely on more than one thing happening at the same time, our Olympians are not in danger of being replaced just yet. 

What's The Time Villain?

Weird how it's a word I use multiple times every day but it wasn't until yesterday that i found out what it actually means and why we say it.
The word is o'Clock and apparently it has nothing to do with the dial or ticking hands part of the clock to start with, it was the bell that told us what time it was.
According to a time historian, when mechanical clocks replaced sundials around the 1300's, they were named Clocc's from the Old French word for Bell as it was this which told them the time, ringing out on the hour alerting townsfolk so six chimes would mean it was six of the clocc, later Clock as the English bastardised the French word.
Over time the 'of the clock' part got shortened to 'O'Clock' and was cemented into the language in the 16th Century by Shakespeare in his plays and 'o'Clock' quickly replaced the longer phrase and so today we use a 14th-century word which means something different to what it does now which made me wonder, any other words from then we still use which actually mean something else?
According to Medievalists.net, there are plenty such as 'silly' which started out meaning 'blessed' or 'fortunate' and nice which was used to mean someone who was foolish or stupid, a villain was a farm worker and Hell was just a place with a cover over it while all females were wives regardless of marital status and Meat was any type of food.
If we ever manage to go time travelling, the 14th Century would be a minefield and it would probably be best just to stay quiet as telling someone to have a nice day could see you in the stocks with all types of rotten meat being thrown at you.  

Special Guest Blogger: Frederick Forsyth

People, bless their optimistic cotton socks, often asked about the "creative process." but i didnt write about feelings and fairies, I wrote about how a man, with sufficient ingenuity and a well-placed contact, might blow something up, or, more likely, prevent it from being blown up. My books weren’t born of artistic angst, they were born of a meticulous adherence to plausible reality and the pressing need to meet a deadline. One has bills to pay, after all.
Take The Day of the Jackal. Everyone goes on about it. The detail, the suspense! Frankly, I was just trying to write a believable story about a professional killer. I spent weeks researching French police methods, weapons, passports. Not because I’m some kind of literary martyr, but because I didn’t want some retired Gendarme writing me an angry letter pointing out the flaws in my fictional police cordon.
As for my life, it’s been a bit of a kaleidoscope. Pilot, journalist, spy  and then, rather unexpectedly, a best-selling novelist.
My younger self, clattering away on an old typewriter, probably wouldn’t have believed I’d still be writing decades later but then to be fair, my younger self was mostly concerned with finding a decent pint and not getting shot in some godforsaken corner of the world. Simpler times.
I did have some controversial views, like that time I vociferously supported Brexit The EU, bless their bureaucratic cotton socks, just didn't understand that some chaps prefer their tea, brewed exactly how they like it, without a thousand directives on the exact temperature of the water or the acceptable angle of the teabag. Common sense, you see. A rare commodity, it seems.
And then there's this climate change brouhaha. All this talk of the planet boiling, the ice caps melting, the end of days just around the corner, delivered with the grave pronouncements of a particularly gloomy vicar.
Now, I’m not saying it’s not getting a bit warmer, but the sky isn't falling, and frankly, I suspect the planet has seen a good deal worse than a few extra degrees. It's a rather resilient old thing, Earth. She's been through ice ages and volcanoes, and I suspect she'll manage perfectly well without us all running around in a panic, banning perfectly good cars and eating laboratory-grown steak.  
So, will histoerians mention the geopolitical thrillers or the fact that I thought leaving the EU was a perfectly sensible decision and that all this climate hysteria is a bit overblown? Probably both, knowing my luck.
Ultimately, I suppose, I hope they remember the stories. The ones where the good chaps, usually British, occasionally French, used their wits and courage to prevent some monstrous injustice. The ones where research was king, and a well-placed fact could be more devastating than a missile. The ones that, for a few hours at least, took people away from their own particular drizzles and worries, and plunged them into a world of genuine peril and cunning.
As for the rest of it, my opinions on the price of milk, the state of modern manners, or indeed, the baffling complexities of the European fishing policy well, those are just the ramblings of an old chap who’s seen a bit too much of the world to take much of it seriously anymore.

Too Much Money For Corrupt Politicians To Tackle Climate Change

With at least 675 confirmed deaths and 2,500 people missing following the devastation of Nepal caused by a glacier collapse due to global warming, Nepali Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal has called on the world to embark on: 'A global effort to tackle climate change'.
The first warnings that the CO2 emissions were damaging our environment came in 1824, an amazing 102 years ago, so it isn't as if it suddenly reared up unexpectedly but over the last century despite the warnings, we have carried on and even upped the damage so despite an overwhelming scientific consensus and increasingly visible ecological devastation, wealthy nations have consistently failed to implement the policies needed to halt climate change so you have to wonder why is that?
It could be that the leaders we have had over that period have been devastatingly incompetent (very much an option) but unfortunately I can think of other reasons.
There could be a fear that countries historically liable for causing the worst of the warming climate (USA, China, India, Germany, United Kingdom) could face admitting fault and open the floodgates to lawsuits and demands for climate reparations.
Due to burying heads in the sand and not doing it over time, the bill to transition away from fossil fuels would be immense and no Government wants to lose their grip on power by putting up tax to pay for it and have been happy to kick the can down the road to ensure their own short-term political survival.
All of the above is certainly in consideration but i would pin the blame squarely on lobbying by the high emitting industries.
Fossil fuel corporations, aviation giants and heavy manufacturers spend billions of dollars annually on lobbying, political campaign contributions and public relations campaigns designed to delay strict regulations, water down carbon taxes and even sow public doubt about climate science which unfortunately there are enough soft headed people around to believe it.
The administration of Donald Trump, who has rolled back over 100 environmental rules and regulations despite being the second worst polluter, received tens of millions from oil, gas and coal executives, alongside ultra-wealthy donors heavily invested in fossil fuels and they didn't pay this money out of the kindness of their hearts, hence the roll backs they literally paid for.
In the UK, the Conservative Party have received £3.5 million in political donations from fossil fuel interests, high-pollution industries and funders linked to climate science denial groups and have now pushed back against net zero have argued that they would roll back green policies.
Reform have received £2.5 million from those who would be affected by any change to environmental laws and are now actively promoting dangerous climate denial and dismissed the consensus on man-made climate change as: 'A con trick'.
With the devastation which environmentalists have been warning about since before i took an interest in the mid 80's now arriving, time is running out to avoid the worst of what Mother Nature has to throw at us and the people to blame are the ones who have taken money over saving the lives of the people on the planet and until we get proper leaders.
This is only the start but at least we know who to blame, 100 years of greedy, corrupt World Leaders so sorry Nepali Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal, a global effort to tackle climate change isn't going to happen anytime soon, too much money to be made by some to blatantly ignore it and instead just say how sad it is when 675 Nepalese souls are snuffed out by a collapsing glacier.