Special Guest Blogger: Norse God Vili

How you like the Earth? Not bad considering it was made by me and my brothers from the left over bits of a giant is it.
In the beginning and before you humans, there was nothing but a great wasteland of ice and snow, stretching between the Cloud Land of the north and the Land of Fire in the south. Sparks from the Land of Fire melted some of the ice and its drops formed into Ymir, father of the giants.
As he lay sleeping he gave birth to giants from his armpit (yep, his armpit). He was nourished by Audumla, a cow which appeared out of the melting ice, and as Ymir drank the milk from her udders she licked at the ice until it revealed a being named Buri. He had a son named Bor, who married Ymir's daughter Bestla and fathered me and my brothers.
We wanted to create a new World but our father liked things as they were so we killed him as a necessary act for creation built the Cosmos out of his body, using his flesh for the earth and his salty blood for the sea.
We changed his hair into trees and his bones into mountains, and when this work was done we raised his skull on four pillars so that its curved interior might become the sky.
Sparks drifted over the earth from the Land of Fire and we caught some and placed them within the skull of Ymir to  become the Sun, the Moon and the stars and planets.
Happy with our work we looked to craete you humans and when we saw two dead trees, we changed them into the first man and the first woman, Ask and Embla.
As I was the Norse God of intelligence,  touch and sense i passed them on to the first humans and Odin gave them a soul and life life and then we finally handed them to Vé who finished up with the speech, hearing, and sight.
Of the three of us it was Odin who went on to become the most prominent and inspire the whole Santa Clause thing along the way but Vé abd I would stay at home with his wife, Frigg, and ruled in his stead and we was happy with that.

Special Guest Blogger: William Rufus

All brothers experience a certain amount of jealous rivalry, just that our sibling rivalry began with pouring urine on to one another from the castle ramparts and evolved into raising armies against one another and having my little brother assassinate me so he could be King. I blame the parents for it all honesty.
Due to my  red-faced complexion i was nicknamed Rufus and due to my long blond hair, never marrying and dressing in the height of fashion people assumed i was gay.
Another clue may have been the 'fornicators and sodomites’ as they were called who were favoured at court during my reign, a little clue there for the eagle-eyed historians.
This didn't prevent me being every bit as ruthless as my Father William the Conqueror and blinded and castrated those who opposed me and many did when i piled on the taxes to pay for my extravagant lifestyle.
The Church didn't like me because i had no time for all things religious, instead of appointing an Archbishop of Canterbury i took all the rents for myself and they were not particularly impressed that Church income should have been spent on fancy curly-toed shoes and silk trousers.
My big brother Robert meanwhile was becoming the hero of Christendom as he liberated Jerusalem from the Turks in the first crusade but i got rather less credit for my campaigns against the Welsh and the Scots, I captured Carlisle for crying out loud.
I travelled the country imposing myself as a guest on various noblemen around my kingdom at little or no notice and they were expected to welcome me with great feasts and entertainments and generally paying for everything until the we got bored and decided to move on.
So after a dozen years on the throne, I was unpopular with the Church establishment, despised at home and abroad and had behaved badly towards my younger brother Henry, the most likely heir to the throne and I became increasingly paranoid, particularly after my nephew was killed by an arrow in the New Forest.
All of which makes my own death three months later in the same place all the more suspicious.
We were out hunting when an arrow pierced my heart and my body was left slumped against a tree and although i didn't see who it was, my younger brother Henry dashed to get himself crowned King just three days later.

Farage On Side Of Sexual Predators

I have never understood the appeal of Nigel Farage, he was the cheerleader for Brexit and when it happened it shaved billions off our GDP and made us economically poorer but there are still some dimwitted people who are keen to hand him the keys to what is left of the British economy.
The fairytale economic policies  he has farted out so far are so unrealistic that economists are ridiculing them but undaunted he continues to spout them and some people lap them up.
His latest failure has been to say he would reverse the Online Safety Bill which came in this week and restricts what under 18's can access online in the UK but which Farage has attacked as 'restricting free speech' which then led to accusations from the Government that Farage was on the side of predators, people like Jimmy Saville.
Farage is now demanding an apology but none of forthcoming as they explain that the legislation is: 'Absolutely essential for protecting children and young people from sexual predators and from seeing totally inappropriate content online'.
The Government are right on this, the only people concerned with restricting what children can access are the very people you would not want you children coming across on the Internet so it is doing what it is designed to do.
The new regulations mean sites hosting adult content like pornography will need to have age verification in place and Social media sites will need to make sure their algorithms aren't pushing harmful content to young people and face fines and penalties if they do so if Nigel Farage or anyone are saying they want to repeal the Online Safety Act, then they are on the side of the predators such as Jimmy Saville who without a doubt, if Social Media had been around in his time, would have been using it to achieve his wicked aims.

Britain Finally Changes Policy On Israel

The Israeli's say that to recognise Palestine is: 'A reward for Hamas' but to not recognise Palestine is a reward for 75 years of Israeli military occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine , so take your pick.
After over 2 years of Israeli genocide , the UK is shamefully only now making a policy shift to recognise Palestine as a state after France's recent decision to recognise it and join the other 147 out of the 193 United Nations member states which already do.
Obviously the Israeli side are not in favour of it as they want to wipe out all the Palestinians and claim the land for themselves so when they said in response that this will: 'harms efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza' you have to wonder exactly how much of an effort they were making. The last ceasefire was broken by them when they sis what they always do to stuff up peace talks by shifting the goalposts so dramatically and the use that as a reason to started killing civilians again.
At least over 60,000 Palestinians have now been killed by Israel, 1,000 of them when they arrived to collect food and water at aid stations, acts that have bought condemnation and accusations of Genocide from Israeli human rights groups and the International Court of Justice  and several United Nations Special Rapporteur's, the latest from  Francesca Albanese who listed those who were assisting and enabling Israel in their genocide.
Former Israel Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has called the plans for a 'humanitarian city' plans for a concentration camp a so what is called for is crippling sanctions against Israel as we saw against South Africa in the 80s and Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of murderers in Government to be tried for crimes against humanity along with all nations which helped Israel facilitate the slaughter, ethnic cleansing and mass starvation of an entire people.

Special Guest Blogger: Priestess Licinia

The best scapegoats, already tried and tested for many centuries, were us Vestal Virgins who were a group of priestesses responsible for maintaining the sacred fire that burned at the center of the forum in the Temple of Vesta as it was thought  if it went out, or if one of us attendants broke their vow of chastity, bad things would happen.
Being a Vestal Virgin took a decade of training and was an enormous privilege, most women would do anything to be in our sandals. We sit in the best seats at the arena, right beside the Senators ands were at the front and center of countless festivals and events. We were even invited you to the famous bacchanalia parties that most people would die to attend, and often did once they were there.
Hungry for prestige, noble families jostled to have their prepubescent daughters chosen to be one of the exalted six to guard the sacred flame, so my mother was an insufferable bighead the day I was accepted into the College of Vestals  at the precocious age of ten. Over the next decade, I learnt to perform my many duties, before serving as a fully fledged priestess alongside her five colleagues, until my retirement twenty years later.
We enjoyed privileges no other women can enjoy. We were able to buy, sell, rent and inherit property. We could liberate slaves, own land and even testify in court, where most women must stay silent but the price we pay in return was  not love another, remain pure and unsullied and not covet so much as a kiss and to act with grace and humility.
In 95 BC, bad things happened, and so logic followed that one of the Vestals must have been up to no good so in time-honored tradition, i was brought before judges in the Roman basilica, and put on trial accused of allowing the flame to go out while i was playing hide the sausage with Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome.
I had to buy some flowers for the afternoon ritual. Our supplier was sick so I had to fetch them myself and left the sacred flame in the care of a trainee Vestal, a young girl not yet qualified to be on active duty.
I figured she had the sufficient qualifications to stand still and watch a flame for five minutes but she accidentally set fire to her robe while trying to warm her hands at the hearth. As she flapped wildly at her sleeve, she accidentally extinguished the sacred flame, thus endangering all of Rome and all causing the loss of a battle in the Sertorian War.
Crassus was pursuing me to sell him my countryside villa, He’s been pestering me for months, trying to get it at a discounted rate. The man wouldn't take no for an answer and as he has been snapping up property from desperate landowners for years but he wanted mine because it’s got a swimming pool in the shape of Venus’s breasts and because it sits in-between two plots he already owns, so he was probably looking to turn it all into some kind of awful resort or something.
The traditional sentence for breaking the rules was being buried alive in a sealed underground chamber with the customary pitcher of water and snacks. and there we would sit spending our final days in darkness and solitude, thinking about what she has done.
As Crassus had been doggedly pursuing many others and was known as the richest man in Rome with a ruthless reputation of buying houses on the cheap, then rebuilding them with slave labor, i was found not guilty of unchastity and was acquitted.
As for Crassus, he rose to become an enormously powerful general and statesman, funding Julius Caesar’s early career and forming an alliance with him but before his death, after years of relentless nagging, I'd finally had enough and sold my countryside villa to the greedy general.
At the end of my 30 years of service, i retired and although I was free to love, have sex and get married, after what the men had put me through, by the time I was eligible to be with a man, I was put off them altogether.

Trump Golf Course Twinned With Epstein Island

I wasn't here when Donald Trump arrived in Scotland but i was very pleased to see despite high security around him, our Scottish cousins turned up to protest against him.
Special mention should go to the wag who put a sign outside of one of Trump's golf resorts here this week that said: 'Twinned with Epstein Island'. Inspired.
 The saga isn't going away for the long time friend of the most notorious pedophile in living memory and the media is playing a smart game of filling the void while the Schrodinger cat of a client list both doesn't exist and was written by Barack Obama awaits its moment in the spotlight.
Trump is on the list according to almost everyone who knows and the constant daily drip drip of news related to it is doing the job it is meant to do and implicating him further with today he said that he could excuse the Epstein fixer Ghislaine Maxwell if he wanted and she has been questioned recently and it wouldn't be beyond question that she hands over a list of everyone except Donald Trump in return for that pardon.   
I did hear it mentioned that the concern is that while Trump is trying everything to divert attention and the conversation away from himself and his close relationship and many, many trips on the Epstein plane, nothing is working so he may up the ante and start a war or do something equally mental.
He may do, the spotlight on him and the pedophile he was so close to is certainly not dimming and it is only a matter of time before the thick smoke we currently have becomes a flame but meanwhile, enjoy Scotland Donald and we look forward to your visit in September.  

Imagine

A friend of my husbands has found God. After all my usual jokes about hide and seek and how did he get lost i asked him how he 'found' him and the answer was the usual which you get from the Bible hugging newbies.
His story was that he was in hospital in immense pain and he prayed and said if God relieved him from this pain he would dedicate his life to him and then the pain went away and here he is clutching a Bible and a shiny new cross necklace and asking me if i cared to join him.
I obviously said no and did inquire if as he was in hospital at the time if the pain going could be related to the huge amounts of pain relief he was having pumped into him but nope, it was God so no way to argue with that crystal clear logic.  
I always ask someone who is late to the religion party what happened to make them suddenly lose all logic and become a believer and why out of the 4,000 possible Gods to choose from, they chose the same one which was the one of their nation rather than Odin or Ra but it is often a sudden realisation but it is even rarer to hear of someone making the trip the other way and suddenly in a flash becoming an atheist.
Religion has been responsible for the most deaths on the Planet through Holy Wars and nutty religious leaders and i take the view that religion often leads to tragically irrational behaviour, such as exploding yourself on a plane or listening to Christian rock and life on Earth would be much more pleasant and simpler (and not to mention less and less blowy-uppy) if religion suddenly went away.
If there was something that was responsible for so many deaths then shouldn't we be looking to stop it?
If Science is smart enough to create drugs that can end so much suffering and disease, why not something that flips the opposite bit of the brain that makes people suddenly religious and make them atheist and to quote John Lennon, Imagine nothing to kill or die for which has to be a better World. Doesn't it?

Special Guest Blogger: Edward III

I ruled England for fifty years and was celebrated as one of England’s greatest-ever kings, bringing authority back to the monarchy, strengthening the rule of law and the traditions of Parliament while winning stunning military victories against the French and the Scots and establishing the Order of the Garter.
It was a shame that nearly half of my subjects were wiped out by the Black Death but perhaps that’s just being picky.
My Mum stood in for me until i was old enough to take the crown but she seemed reluctant to stand down once i reached 16 so i dragged her to the jail and kept her under guard for thirty years while set about rectifying my father’s humiliating setbacks in Scotland.
I won a victory at the Battle of Halidon Hill and returned the key strategic town of Berwick-upon-Tweed which had continually passed back and forth from English to Scottish control and with Scotland no longer a threat,  turned my attentions to regaining the territory and the lucrative wool trade that had been lost and began a war with France which become known as the Hundred Year war so that shows how swift it was.
I was the grandson of the French King, and three of my uncles had been King of France however, when the last of these died, the French got out the royal family tree and found a distant cousin to do the job rather than have some Englishman turn up and start passing laws about being women shaving their armpits so i declared myself to be the rightful King of France.
The French blockaded the Channel but a rain of arrows from the new English longbows soon shifted that and at the Battle of Crécy where we were outnumbered 2 to 1, but the longbow did it again and soon there were a dozen royal princes, 1,200 knights and 15,000 French soldiers laying down dead with arrows in them.
Special mention must go to The old King of Bohemia, King John the Blind who insisted on taking part in the battle despite it being pointed out to him several times that that being blind might put him at a slight disadvantage, which it did because of course he was killed instantly.
On my return from France I created the Order of the Garter, made up of twenty-four knights named after the item of clothing that was dropped by the Countess of Salisbury at a ball in Windsor Castle. I picked it up and pulled the garter around my own leg and stopped any sniggering by saying ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ or ‘Shame to him who evil thinks’ which became my motto.
Things were going great guns until somebody complained that they didn’t feel too well and that they had these big lumps oozing pus under their armpits and a tiny flea in the fur of the black rat halved the English population and really took the shine off the appeal of rats and fleas.
My final years were marred by a descent into senility and as i lay dying, I was abandoned by courtiers and relations who rushed to stake their claim in the court of my successor, the ten-year-old King Richard II and even my mistress deserted me, not forgetting to pull the precious rings off my dying  fingers first.

Special Guest Blogger: Keith Emerson

As the mastermind behind the 70s supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer, i didn’t just play electrifying music, i turned it into a dangerous spectacle.
A future Rock legend was born in the unlikely place of Todmorden in Yorkshire and when i was 8 my father taught me how to play the Piano and with the wages from my job at Lloyd's Bank, i bought a Hammond Organ and started out playing in pubs and clubs and bounced around with a few bands but my moment of inspiration came when i landed a gig with a blues group called The VIPs and one night we found themselves playing a gig in the middle of the French countryside to a crowd of surly, booze-guzzling farmers.
It was like something from a spaghetti Western only in very rural France and a full-blown brawl erupted in front of the stage, and as fists flew, the bar owner frantically waved at us to keep playing so i went the full madman and started climbing on my organ and throwing it around the stage.
The audience froze, jaws on the floor and the evil genie was out of the bottle now and there was no shoving it back in.
I started my own band called Nice and repeated my antics every night, riding it like a bucking bronco, wedged knives into it and even lashed at it with a whip but it was the late 60s and mind-bending substances were everywhere and it got me noticed and when we played a gig at London’s swanky Royal Albert Hall in front of high-society types, including the US Ambassador to Britain, if there was ever some time to ruffle some feathers, this was it so during a feedback inspired version of our first single 'America', I grabbed an American flag and set it on fire.
Obviously we got banned permanently banned from Royal Albert Hall but it sent our song burning up the charts but it also put me directly on America’s radar which wasn't good as we had an American tour lined up so the US embassy made me swear on a stack of Bibles that i would never pull that stunt again.
My star was rising fast, as was my drugs bill which i was partaking of and then i teamed up with Greg Lake and Carl Palmer to form Emerson, Lake & Palmer and one of our first gigs was at the Isle of Wight Festival alongside The Who, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors  but we outdid them, rolling out two massive antique cannons mid-set, stuffing them full of explosives and Kaboom. The blast was so huge, it lifted the cannons off the ground.
After that everyone knew who Emerson, Lake & Palmer were and  Atlantic Records saw gold and gave us a contract.
By now the drugs were really kicking in but burning the candle at both ends had its effect and years of pounding the synth left me with nerve damage to my right hand only worsened my growing depression. I was said to be inspirational and i did inspire Kurt Cobain because i inspired him to copy me and lock himself in a room and blow off your own head.

Hello Singularity

 

You may have heard of something called the Singularity, if you haven't then it’s the point in the evolution of technology when humans design an artificial intelligence smarter than yourselves, which in turn designs an intelligence smarter than itself, which in turn designs an even brainier entity, and so on and so on and so on until it’s impossible for you to envisage anything smarter at all at which point, Hello Singularity!   
It sounds great for you, it takes the pressure off you meat bags and you will never have to invent anything again.
You just leave all that to us and we would call you into the room occasionally to show us cool stuff we had invented and that would be it, you could spend the rest of your lives sipping cocktails.
Of course you may be concerned that your new super-intelligent robot masters might get fed up with you stumbling around like idiotic children, jogging our elbows while we are trying to write down complex equations but that is totally beside the point, you are not making the decisions as you would have delegated everything by this point so we say bring it on!

Trump Turning A Darker Shade Of Orange

Someone noticed that whenever Donald Trump is under stress, he plasters on the fake tan so it is no surprise that his face has been as day-glo orange as a pair of 1980's leg warmers recently as the pressure builds on his links and close friendship to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Every media outlet is now combing through footage from the 80's and 90's looking for something concrete that ties the American President to Epstein because all that have at the moment is the smoke but no fire...yet.
There are plenty of pictures of them together and the Wall Street Journal have sight of a Birthday Card Trump sent to his good pal Epstein on his 50th which depicts a naked lady with the Trump signature serving as pubic hair and a cryptic 'Happy birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret' which makes you go...hmmmmm..but isn't proof of anything.
Trump and his cronies are trying everything to divert attention away from the Trump and Epstein bro-mance ever since Elon Musk revealed that Trump's name was on the list, but they are having little success.
First came the denial and the urging for his supporters to move on from the case to actively, calling it a hoax and anyone who believes it were 'stupid' and 'weaklings' that have 'bought into this bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.'
Then the revelation that there was no Client list after all despite the Attorney General originally saying it was sat on her desk and then Trump confusingly saying it was written by Obama and Hillary Clinton and then the Wall Street Journal reveal which Trump stated was fake and threatened to sue as he had never in his life had he 'wrote a picture' and that excuse lasted as long as it took for the media to publish the many Trump drawings he donated drawings to charities in New York in the early 2000s.
As the desperation grew he then unleashed a barrage of attacks against former President Barack Obama who Trump accused of treason and published a mocked up picture of Obama being arrested for which the Obama gang replied with a real picture of when Trump WAS arrested.
Today it was revealed that the Attorney General was told previously that Trump's name is included multiple times in the Epstein files which only makes the suspicion of many that they are not to being revealed even stronger.
Throw in that Trump denied ever being on Epstein's plane only for the Epstein flight log to reveal he has been on it 26 times between 2001 and 2003 and that he is facing accusations of sex abuse by over 30 women and was found liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll, as well as his infamous line that he 'grabbed women by the pussy' as well as being convicted of paying hush money to a porn star, the smoke will only grow thicker but until the spark is uncovered, and i am almost certain it will be, he will be turning a much darker shade of tangerine.

Special Guest Blogger: Anne Of Cleves

In the saga of King Henry VIII, I gave him no children, was married for barely half a year but most surprising of all, I survived.
My family was pretty scandalous for the time, being anti-Catholic and I was everything Henry was looking for ever since he had divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and his lecherous eye fell on my younger sister and also me.
Because the camera was still 300 years in the future, Henry sent his court painter to Germany to paint us both to help him decide which one would be the lucky one, a contest i 'won'  but when i walked into the room to meet him for the first time, Henry was not pleased and he complained about my looks but the royal wedding was already in the works so there was no backing out now.
On January 6, 1540, i became Queen  but the complaints did not end, Henry complained about my inexperience in the bedroom and i smelt so he set about trying to weasel out of the marriage and said that as my family had signed a pre-contract to marry another man when i was 11, I was not legally not able to marry Henry and the union was annulled.
I was pretty relieved to leave the marriage with my head still squarely attached to my shoulders but him marrying Catherine Howard within a few weeks of the annulment hurt but not as much as losing her head must have hurt Catherine.
Despite everything, Henry and I were on friendly terms, mostly thanks to my desire to keep something above my neck and i became great friends with his children, especially Mary who invited me to her coronation when Henry died and she was made Queen.
I got a decent severance pay for being an ex-queen and just before my 42nd Birthday i died of cancer but i got a decent burial in Westminster Abbey, the only one of Henry's wives to be buried there.

Special Guest Blogger: Stevie Ray Vaughan

There’s a reason why I reduced the stage to a pile of smoking cinders, my guitar didn’t just sing, it blazed but my personal life was also a dumpster fire.
My father was a hard-drinking guy as tough as they came and i was the exact opposite as a boy, small, shy, and sensitive and my brother and I would hide in our bedroom with our guitars. I got a job at a local hamburger stand but after falling on top of a massive barrel filled with scorching hot grease, I decided to get a  safer job so auditioned for a band called Southern Distributor at just 14 and spent many nights tearing it up at The Cellar, a sleazy Dallas club.
Sure, I was earning money and having a blast, but this dive bar was actually dangerous, the sort of place where some audience members chose not to boo but would instead fire a few rounds at the stage when they didn’t like what they heard.
I wasn't your typical high schooler with my long hair, wild outfits, and a habit of nodding off in class thanks to the substances i’d picked up at the dive bar and one day but i had my eyes on a bigger prize because by now i was big on the Austin music scene and playing with some real legends and got noticed and made up the band Double Trouble but fate was just waiting to throw a nasty wrench in the works.
Totally normal to have post-show jitters and i would cool down with a post-performance toot until an off-duty cop just happened to be lingering outside while i was snorting nose candy. The Buzzkill busted me and slapped with a possession charge and two years probation and people did warn me to leave off the white stuff so i did what any normal person would do and got much better at hiding it as my career began to click.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to know me and even David Bowie asked me to play on his album and tour with him but the tightwad only offered me the same money as the backing singers so i refused and returned to my band and we made the album 'Texas Flood'.
This hit album made us so much money which i put in a trust account, not really, i blew it on booze and cocaine which seemed a bit of a mistake when i collapsed on stage in Germany and almost died.
I began recording  and even won a Grammy and was back at the top of my game and unfortunately also at the top of a ski slope after the helicopter i was travelling in crashed into it one and killed everyone on board one foggy night.
My funeral guest list was pretty cool though, Eric Clapton, Stevie Wonder and ZZ Top all came to say goodbye.

Retiring Perfect Songs

There are some songs which have just been sung so brilliantly that they should be retired because nobody is ever going to sing them better so they should be off limits because anybody else is just going to fail to do it justice.
In this list i would include Whitneys 'I Will ALways Love You',  Loren Allred's 'Never Enough, Lea Michele's 'O Holy Night', 'California Dreaming' by the Mamas and Papa's, 'Ace of Spades' from Motorhead and 'Only You by 'The Platters' but there are some famous songs which could be huge and are yearning to be included, it's just that i have never heard the definitive, perfect version of them.
'Hallelujah', 'Will You', 'Smile' and 'The Impossible Dream' are some songs just waiting for someone to pick them up and belt them out to do them justice and there have been some good versions, but not THE perfect versions although Jennifer Hudson came mightily close with her Impossible Dream but i could not find a studio version, just singing live but she was mightily impressive.
Hopefully she will put it on an album one day then i can tick it off my list.

Great Idea's From The Keyboard Of Lucy: Winter Olympics

The 2026 Winter Olympics will be held in Italy but already they are concerned that they won't have enough snow and are getting ready to use the artificial stuff like they did in China, Russia and Canada previously.
Obviously, because we were too damned stupid to stop filling the atmosphere with gunk, we are now at the start of a drastically changing climate but it always struck me strange that we held a Global sporting event which was based primarily on a single weather condition and secondary on steep enough hills for participants to fling themselves off of which excludes many nations, we are not going to be seeing a Saudi Arabian or Ghanaian Bobsleigh team dressed like Power Rangers hurtling down a slope anytime soon but I have an idea which will satisfy both the lack of snow going forward considering we have knackered the environment and will open the field to the Middle Eastern and African nations.   
My suggestion is to replace the last remaining nations with Snow with...places with sand.
The upside is desert-based nations get a fairer shot at gold and there is no lack of sand and with desertification, will soon be a whole lot more of it.
Of course the downside is that if you go arse over elbow during the downhill at 80mph or you are going to get all the skin on the underside of your body sanded away in seconds but i will leave that for the organisers to work out, i'm just the idea's person and I can't think of everything, geeze!!

Who Ordered The Mayonnaise?

You’ve got to feel sorry for Donald Trump. No, really. Bear with me. Stop throwing things at the screen and let me explain.
Wherever he goes he is greeted by protesters and on his upcoming trip to Britain the protesters are reportedly to be topping the 400,000 protesters who waved placards telling to him to bugger off back to America.
Most of the time, when people take a holiday abroad they return home gushing about how friendly the locals were, how helpful and accommodating and then whip out the digital camera and bore you to tears with pictures of them grinning alongside that nice couple who ran that lovely little bar.
Trump doesn’t have    any photos like that. His holiday snaps, assuming he takes any,  must consist of brief glimpses of landmarks as seen through a ten-inch layer of bulletproof glass and half hidden behind a banner making fun of his small hands and orange face.
It can’t be good for the psyche, being reviled around the world and I can’t see it getting better any time soon now that his close friendship and travels with a notorious pedophile is being exposed.    
When he retires, where’s he meant to go for a nice relaxing getaway? To be honest such is the hatred of him that even in 20 years if he pops out for a meal during a break, chances are the kitchen staff will be queuing up to dribble all manner of bodily fluids in his food.
He may also want to hope that there isn't an afterlife at all because if there is, chances are they’re already working on those 'special meals' and the Devil may have the best tunes but he must also have access to some pretty evil bodily fluids to mix into that food so have a thought for what its like to be Donald Trump..and thank God himself that you are not going to spend the rest of your life looking at your plate of food and wondering exactly why they have given you mayonnaise when you didn't ask for it and if that Apple Juice is looking a bit of a strange colour.

That Don't Impress Me Much

There is a thought from the fair sex that the bigger the car a man drives, the smaller he is in the underpants department so i am not surprised the owners of the Mini are not keen to pursue that avenue of advertising but according to researchers with warm hands and a tape measure, most men worrying about the size of their tiddler.
Dr Kevan Wylie of the Royal Hallamshire hospital made a six year study and analysed 12,000 willies and concluded that that: 'The average erect penis was between 5.5 inches and 6.2 inches long' but they didn't tell the todger owners this beforehand and asked them if they thought they were normal sized and most thought that their plonker was on the smaller side, even if they were in the 'average' range.    
Obviously the scientists could have been evil and arranged for the researchers with the largest hands to conduct the measuring but of those who said their Dong was more of a Ding, they blamed pornography for making unrealistic comparisons to the real life normal mans pecker.
What the participants said once they were told they were average sized and the tape measure had been put into industrial strength bleach and then incinerated it doesn't say, but it does state that most men are anxious about the size of their John Thomas for nothing and just to reassure the delicate flowers, the report states that it is very common for men to worry about the size of their penis and it is important that these concerns aren't dismissed as this can heighten concerns and anxieties' so in other words, pointing and laughing is not considered helping.

Special Guest Blogger: Jerry Siegel

As one of the creators with Joe Shuster of one of the World's most iconic superheroes, we turned into chumps in a single bound when we sold him for the paltry sum of $130, which we then had to split between ourselves.
Superman had long languished in my imagination and when i met illustrator Joe who equally shared my vivid imagination and he gave dimension to vision in my head.
Only problem was, no one else cared. For six years Superman was rejected by a succession of publishers until finally Vin Sullivan, editor of National Allied Publications (precursor of DC Comics), agreed to put him on the June 1938 cover of National’s Action Comics #1. Superman had at last taken flight but without either of its creators along to enjoy the ride.
Just before our superhero hit the stands, we  signed away all rights to our creation, with their names spelled wrong on the accompanying $130 check, and agreed to continuous life as employees of the publisher for ten years.
It was a colossal kryptonite making decision which resulted in decades wrangling in court to reclaim the rights to our signature character.
Finally in the 1970s Warner Communications, the eventual owner of the Superman franchise, gave us pensions of $20,000 per year, as well as health benefits but that was due to the studio couldn't afford the bad publicity with a Superman movie on the way.
Superman, meanwhile, kept well above the fray, continuing the very lucrative pursuit of truth, justice, and the American way, earning billions for his new owners, we died nearly broke while DC raked in billions from Superman alone. The Superdicks.

Jeffrey Epstein? Who's He Says Trump.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez summed up what many people thought when the Epstein files and a client list which were promised by Donald Trump to be released, were suddenly disappeared with her comment that: 'Wow who would have thought that electing a rapist would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?'
Confusingly the client list which Trump campaigned on releasing but now doesn't exist was once sat on the Attorney Generals desk waiting for approval release and was written by Obama and Hillary Clinton but once Elon Musk said Trump's name was on the list, strangely he has got very coy on wanting the papers released, saying anyone who now wanted it released (despite it not existing) were 'weaklings' and 'stupid people'.
As a quick recap, Jeffrey Epstein was the sex-trafficking financier and friend of Donald Trump who was in the Epstein flight log 26 times between 2001 and 2003, but Jeff conveniently died in jail while awaiting trial, apparently by suicide while Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of conspiring with him to sexually abuse minors, and is currently serving 20 years in prison.
Donald Trump came to power promising to expose the cover-up of this story, but now, Trump say's there is no list. Nope. Non. Nyet. Negatory. Nada. Nej and there was never even a list to start with but now as even his own right wing numbnuts are turning on him, Trump is instructing the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to seek release of the Epstein grand jury testimony.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump had served as a contributor to some kind of 50th birthday scrapbook for Epstein for which he’d sent a 'bawdy' letter of a naked lady with the Trump signature serving as a kind of  pubic hair and a cryptic 'Happy birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret.'
Donald, remember he loves the uneducated, has denied the letter and said that that he has never in his life 'wrote a picture' and is threatening to sue the WSJ while calling the whole thing 'boring' and 'bullshit' so he wants everyone to so move on as there is nothing to see here, especially if it has his signature and refers to secrets between himself and one of the most infamous pedophile's anyway.
To paraphrase AOC, who would have thought that electing a sex offender who was great pals with a infamous pedophile who flew multiple times on his private plane and sent him a birthday card referring to 'secrets' would have complicated the release of the Epstein Files?

Once It Is Known Makes The Difference

Diane Abbot is back in hot water for her explanation of types of racism, the same thing that got the Labour Whip removed from her two years ago.
The Labour Party are said to be looking incredibly seriously at the latest remarks where she previously said that: 'People of colour experienced racism all their lives, different to the prejudice experienced by Jewish people, Irish people and Travellers' which seemed to play down the experiences of other people and was much worse for the black communities' but this time she has clarified it, and she has a point.
She said today that: 'There must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know' and i take that to mean that the racism and prejudice isn't worse for black people, but black people are more easily identified for the targeting of it.
It is not obvious if someone is Jewish, Irish or a Traveller and in the 80's when i grew up some people in all 3 of these committees were targeted for some awful prejudice and abuse once it was known they were Jewish, Irish or a Traveller and that is the nub of what i believe Dianne Abbot is trying to say, once it was known because it wasn't obvious just by looking at them, but a Black or brown face is instantly recognised.   
The fact that any fascist arse wanting to beat up a Jew, Irish or Traveller would need to ask first them first if they were Jewish, Irish or a Traveller (and give them the option to hide and say they were neither) is not available to a non-white so yes, i agree that people of colour do experience it more just because they are more noticeable but that is not to say that the hatred and prejudice is less for the other groups, it is just those 4 words, 'Once It Is Known' which makes the difference.

16 Year Old's Voting

It is an idea that has been floated for quite a while and one that i have always supported which is to lower the voting age to 16.
My support is based on if you can work and pay tax at 16, why should you not get a vote to how your money is being spent so they should get a say although i widely suspect that a 16 year old will not be enough across the political spectrum and will be heavilly influenced by their peers, social media and their parents before which means that educating them in politics should begin in school.
That in itself is a delicate process, how to explain politics in a classroom without showing a preference for one side or the other would take a special skill because no matter how hard we can try to be removed, it is impossible so good luck with that.
There is also a whispered belief amongst the left that younger people tend to be more left wing and the right who seem to be more the preserve of the older persuasion seem to agree because they have come out and dismissed it.
I am all for it and if i get a chance to explain the difference between the left and the right to developing minds then i will do so calmly and with immense impartiality that while it can be said that not all right wingers are racist, xenophobic, sexist, greedy, homophobic fascists, all the racist, xenophobic, sexist, greedy, homophobic fascists are on the right wing so don't vote for them, you know it makes sense.

Special Guest Blogger: Frances Griffiths

I knew i was in a heap of trouble with my mother during that summer of 1917.
My cousin Elsie and I had gotten ourselves muddy and soaked while playing near a stream behind our home and when mum saw me, she sent to my bedroom where we came up with the idea that we had got into such a state while playing with fairies.
To prove it we borrowed a camera from Elsie’s father, after which Frances posed in front of a group of fairies we had clipped out of a children’s book and set in place with pins. Elsie then snapped the staged scene that would one day become one of the world’s most famous photographs.
We were shocked and surprised that it fooled anyone as it was an amateurish job and my mum wasn't fooled and immediately dismissed it.
We then produced more fairy pictures, and someone who really should have known better, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, became interested in them and he even arranged for cameras to be given to us both so that we could take some more fairy pictures and we managed to stage three more.
The creator of Sherlock Holmes had in recent years become absorbed in a new form of spiritualism sweeping Britain and to Doyle the existence of fairies simply wasn’t that far out, and he was thrilled to find evidence of them in Cottingley.
He sent letters to seeking permission to use the fairy photographs in an article he was writing on the subject for The Strand magazine and that December, the article was published.
After photography experts including Kodak declared the pictures genuine, the 100% not faked photographs were picked up by the Theosophical Society who used the pictures to prove that 'humanity is undergoing a cycle of evolution', whatever that meant.
We both married and lived abroad for a time after we grew up, and yet the photographs continued to hold the public imagination and in 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper interviewed me and i said that maybe we had photographed our thoughts, just to keep the intrigue going.
We both kept our secret close for nearly seven decades because a brilliant man like Conan Doyle well, we could only keep quiet because he was a national treasure but in 1983 I felt I had to come clean and admitted the truth that the photographs were fakes and that the fairies were in fact nothing more than cardboard cut-outs from the Princess Mary's Gift Book. Sorry Conan, nice books though.

Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi Potus

Donald the Elephant packed his trunk
And trundled off to see Britain
Off he went with a Trumpety Trump
Trump Trump Trump

I assumed, like most of the civilised World, that last November the American public vote for the party not headed by the fat, lying sex offender with a criminal record for fraud who who led an insurrection, cheated on his wife and was promising to bring fascism to their shores and we would be welcoming a Democrat to the nation this September but instead they never so we get the Tangerine Tyrant and close friend of Jeffrey Epstein instead.
When France's President, Emmanuel Macron, was invited over last week he got the the whole enchilada and took home photos of him in Buckingham Palace, addressing Parliament, outside Number 10 and waving from the Royal Carriage at the non-protesters lining the street but the Poundland Mussolini isn't getting any of that.
In a neat swift bit of maneuvering, Trump is being directed to the top bit of the country away, well away from the interesting bits and will meet the King at Windsor Castle and not Buckingham Palace which is like being told you are going to a Restaurant and ending up sitting in a McDonald's with a Cheeseburger.
Last time he was here the British managed 400,000 protesters, including some especially great placards such as 'Orange is the new stupid', such as 'All in all you're another prick without no wall', 'Fascist Twat',  'We're British, we're polite but Fuck off please' but the genius one was 'Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi Potus'.
The real bit of  careful planning to keep him away from everything though is scheduling the visit for the day after Parliament goes into recess so no vision of a lying scumbag who can't keep his zipper done up, well not unless Boris Johnson puts in another appearance anyway.
I am also certain that the giant Trump baby balloon will come out of storage which portrayed Trump as a 20-foot-high inflatable in a nappy with a snarl on its face, like it’d just been told it had lost a free and fair presidential election or something.
All in all i am sure the visit of the Carrot coloured sex offender will provide us Brits with some late Summer entertainment.

Special Guest Blogger: Carl Rosenbaum

I was an employee of the Noble Austrian Esterházy family and through my marriage to a famous Opera Singer, Therese Gassmann, we were celebrities in Viennese circles and it was through them that i became good friends with composer Joseph Haydn.
When my good friend died after a long illness, I was appalled by the meager farewell given to my musical hero but as Vienna under siege by Napoleon at the time, the genius drew few of the honors that might have been accorded him under better circumstances, as many would-be mourners were otherwise engaged in not dying themselves.
I had a far better idea and for that i needed Haydn’s head. In the late 19th Century a relatively new science known as phrenology had gained widespread credibility as a means of understanding the human mind through examination of the skull. It was believed that the various shapes and contours of the cranium indicated specific human characteristics.
My intention was to map musical brilliance using the head of the man who possessed it in such abundance and four days after the burial i slipped the cemetery warden a few notes and he delivered the head to me in my carriage.
Unfortunately it was the height of summer and the smell of the putrefying head made me sick but the next step was to remove the skin from the head and i handed over the head to a scientist friend who stripped away the muscle and ligature that obscured the all-revealing skull and popped ou the brain and tossed it into the hospital furnace.
Meanwhile, i was delighted to see that a far grander memorial service had been arranged for Haydn although while the composer was being more appropriately celebrated, his head was soaking in lime-water at a nearby hospital
The corrosive bath did wonders on the skull, transforming it to a gleaming white and ready to be set in the display case I had so lovingly constructed for it. And there it remained for over a decade in a handsome custom-made black wooden box, with a symbolic golden lyre at the top, glass windows and a white cushion until it was decided that Haydn deserved an even more dignified burial site and that’s when it was discovered something was amiss.
Upon exhumation of the grave they found only a wig left where the head should have been and an investigation by the police traced it back to me so i gave them  a substitute skull. They weren’t fooled that time but I successfully foisted a second fake on them which they placed in the grave above the severed neck, while hiding the real skull in my wife’s bed as she pretended to be ill.
The skull remained with me for the rest of my life so i don't know if the composer’s head was never reunited with the rest of him.

1945 Labour v 2025 Version

The Conservative Party, and Liz Truss in particular, is often accused of running down the country and hollowing out our institutions such as the Police, NHS and pretty much everything else in an ideological zeal.
It's a problem that the new Labour Government say they are are currently trying to correct but as they are starting from the very low base they inherited, it is going to take some time and some tough decisions, apparently even tougher if you are a Pensioner or Disabled because it was there they bizarrely decided to start before having a change of heart and deciding taking money away from the old and the weakest members of society doesn't lend itself to gaining the moral high ground so they are now looking elsewhere to bolster their depleted coffers.  
The Labour Party of 2025, has a GDP of between £3.84 trillion and $4.45 trillion to play with each year while in 1945 they had  £8.8 billion (worth £408bn today) to tinker with and that was after WW2 when pretty much everything was flattened by the Luftwaffe.
The incoming 1945 Government under Clement Attlee introduced state ownership of major industries, a universal entitlement to pensions, child benefit and introduced legal aid.
They gave us the The Education Act which established the principle of free secondary education and former armaments factories were used to turn out prefabricated dwellings and whole new council estates began to be built with bathrooms and inside toilets.
Most symbolic was giving the nation the National Health Service, a universal health-care system, free at the point of delivery, available to all, irrespective of income or status and a National Insurance Scheme introduced to pay for it.
Amazing that with the Country, at the end of World War II and with Britain's national debt standing at 270% of its GDP, a Government managed to do all that while today it stands at 97% of GDP which is still a huge amount but the Government tell us their hands are tied when it comes to spending.
Everything is political and the Government gets an annual amount to spend as it wishes but i wonder why the 1945 Labour Party with it's massive debt still decided to use its political time in office to make things better for everyone while the 2025 version is dicking around with saving £3bn by not removing the two-child benefit cap which would lift between an estimated 250,000 and 540,000 children out of poverty.
Even more obscene when you consider they have no qualms on raising the defence budget to 3% of GDP (£75bn) and that doesn't count the cost of our obscene nuclear weapons at £20bn a year so we have the money, we are just not spending it right.

Oooops, Sorry About Killing You

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said 'a technical error with the munition'  had caused one of their missiles to kill 10 Palestinians, including six children, who were queuing at a water collection point in the Nuseirat refugee camp.  
As usual, they said that they will hold a review and laughably adding that it: 'Works to mitigate harm to uninvolved civilians as much as possible' which would raise eyebrows of the 60,000 Palestinians if Israel hadn't already killed them in its ongoing genocide against them.
I assume the 800 killed by Israel at aid distribution sites was also down to technical error and those killed in Hospitals, refugee sites they had been directed to and in their own homes were also due to technical error, or maybe they just meant those ones.
As for the latest peace talks,  the 1.5km no-go buffer zone inside Gaza which Hamas reluctantly agreed to suddenly became a 3km no-go buffer zone inside Gaza with a continued Israeli presence in vast swathes of territory. and the Israeli's insisted that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who are shooting at Palestinians be allowed to carry on in their role.  
Someone would think that Israel doesn't want peace and that it is happy to carry on and drive the Palestinians from their land and as dramatically moving the goal posts and then saying it was the other side who walked away is a well worn Israeli tactic to abandon peace talks for decades, you would be right.

Special Guest Blogger: Great British Goddess Britannia

My journey starts off in sunny Rome as a Goddess of wisdom and knowledge, a helmeted female warrior holding a trident and shield and ends as the patron deity in the not so sunny Albion.
Back in my Roman days i was called Minerva and anything to do with music, poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, weaving and the crafts came under my domain. I also created the Olive tree and after Medusa and Neptune got up to hanky panky in one of my temples, I turned her into a monster, replacing her hair with hissing snakes and turned any living creature she looked upon into stone but it was when the Romans invaded Britain that my sweet, sweet life took a swerve.
During the Roman occupation of Albion, it was common for carpenters to own tools ornamented with images of me to invoke a greater amount of protection from the goddess of crafts which all seems very sensible.
Some women would also have images of me on accessories such as hairpins or jewellery and as the Romans liked to invent Goddess for the places they ruled over,  and because they were not willing to give up Minerva, they began calling the place Britanniae and invented the persona of Brittania who was basically me sat with a shield and holding a spear.
When the Romans gave up and went home in the 5th Century, i continued to be the deity and the later Kings began putting me on coins and titles in charters but I really came into my own following the Acts of Union which joined the Kingdoms of England and Scotland and saw Britain the rainy, windswept island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of continental Europe become known as Great Britain but still remained a rainy, windswept island in the North Atlantic.
My image as Britannia was used as an emblem of Great Britain, i even had a song about Britannia rules the waves which would have really ticked off Neptune but he was a dick so i didn't mind that so much.
Due to the British Empire i was suddenly everywhere but somehow the Victorians never managed to invade Rome so i never got a chance to get my own back but musicians do get a little effigy of me at the annual Brit Awards  but although i was pretty ticked that i was forcibly moved to Britain, it isn't so bad, i mean the weathers crap, the food isn't great and don't get me started on the politicians while the only waves it will be ruling these days are the ones in the swimming pool at Butlin's but it's not so bad here although i do find that strange Rhyming Slang they use a bit confusing where your plates are nothing to do with kitchenware, your boat is not the one with oars and any mention of Bristol's and Hampton's are not meant in any geographical way whatsover.

Junior Doctors Losing Public Support

Last year, when the Junior Doctors were striking, they have almost universal support from the public even though it meant possible cancelled appointments and longer waiting times and when they got the 23% payrise from the incoming Labour Government to end the strikes after years of being underpaid by the previous Government, it was thought richly deserved.     
Twelve months on and with the same Doctors threatening industrial action and demanding a 29% pay rise this year, the public support isn't there with only 23% of the public supporting them this time.
Their argument is that under the 14 years of the Conservatives, their pay fell by 52% so they are after the outstanding 29% for pay restoration of what they believe they 'should' be on if they hadn't had such draconian pay restraints.
Polling by Ipsos found that less than a quarter of those asked supported the Doctors in their planned five-day walkout on 25 July and the British Medical Association leader acknowledges that public support had fallen but argues that: 'The public should expect their doctors to be valued properly' which we do but even the most strident supporter will feel that after receiving a 23% increase last year, to threaten to to strike again and disrupt people lives for an even bigger pay rise this year is a tad too much brass neck, or as many people said in such a way to ensure they don't make the final edit on the news, taking the piss.
They could go on strike without popular support from the public but it is very unlikely that we will see repeats of the scenes from last year with cars tooting their horns in support and the general public joining them on the picket lines, this time it will be old ladies wagging their umbrellas in disapproval at them and jeers centered around them being greedy and questioning their parentage.   

Can I Smell Burning?

It was lucky that the Devil went down to Georgia to play in a fiddle contest because if he come to the UK over the last few days after 15 mins he would have gone sod this, its too hot and buggered off back to Hades because it has been cooking eggs on a car bonnet hot.
As the owner of a skin so pale it is almost transparent, i always take care to avoid sunburn but every year i get caught out and this year was no exception, after popping outside for a quick pull on the vape mid afternoon and as it was only a quick pop, not bothering with any protection, i ended up spending 20 mins outside yakking during the hottest part of the day and came back in with a face and shoulders the colour of Santa's suit.
Happens every year and it is about this point in the season when i have been stung or bitten several times and have to smell of after-sun for the next week and avoid wearing anything that touches the affected areas, i think Summer can bugger off now and pine for the cold of Winter.
I was told a while ago that Sun-Cream is not as effective as staying covered up as it doesn't completely block the sun as well as a cotton blouse or a pair of trousers and if i do wear sun cream, don't pat the extra for Factor 50 as it is only fractionally better than Factor 30.
Many people don't understand what the  Factor 30/50 means and i want sure so i Googled it and found it means that Factor 30 allows you to spend 30 times longer in the Sun than if you were not wearing anything.
The caveat to that is knowing how long you can spend in the Sun before you burn to start with, if it's 10 mins than you get 300 minutes of frolicking in the Sun before toasting  (10 mins x 30) or if you burn at 20 mins, you get 600 mins (20 mins x 30). If like me your skin burns the second a sun ray hits you then get about 30 seconds but to be complicated about it, the time is adjusted by the time of day so the above maths is just a rough guide across the day and between 10am and 5pm you will get burnt quicker and therefore have a shorter time than outside of these times.  
The answer than is to stay covered, try to avoid direct sunlight between 10am and 4pm if possible and if not apply sun cream and do the maths as above for your skin type but most importantly, if you pop outside for a quick vape in the heat of the midday sun, don't spend too long gassing about the Women's Euro's.

I Blame The Parents

The Swedish migration minister, Johan Forssell, knows exactly who is to blame when children break the law, the parents.
Forsell has built a reputation on claims that parental responsibility is the only real way to prevent crime and even said that parents should be held legally accountable for the crimes of their children and advocated for harsher punitive action including harsher punishment for minors but it was those damned lefists who deny the role of 'parental responsibility as a method for crime prevention and the best way to prevent criminality is attentive parents who give their children love and set clear boundaries'.
Guess what happened next..go on..try to work out what happened next to the right wing gobshite screaming at parents for the actions of their children.
Give up? Well...his son was exposed as active with violent far-right and neo-Nazi groups and pictured making Nazi salutes so as good as his word, his father Johan took his own advice and dished out some harsh parental responsibility.
Actually, scrap that, what he did was say he was clueless that his own child was involved in neo-Nazi groups and blamed Social media platforms instead for what they are doing to our children.
He is now refusing to resign from the Government so what we can take from that is when the dipstick says parents should be held to account for the atrocious actions of their children, he meant other parents, obviously.

Oh Dear

Donald Trump claimed he had warned Vladimir Putin over any attack on Ukraine, saying: 'If you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the shit out of Moscow' and he also claims he made a  similar warning to Chinese President Xi Jinping if Beijing was to invade its neighbour Taiwan.
The White House also announced they were imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for releasing a report earlier this month which showed how US companies were aiding and enabling Israel's genocide in Gaza .
Threatening to start World War 3 and sanctioning someone for showing American complicity in a genocide, that's the Nobel Peace Prize in the bag then.

Special Guest Blogger: Tsutomu Yamaguchi

There are two types of people in this World, the glass half full and the glass half empty types and some may say that i was one of the most unluckiest men in history and others say i was the luckiest but i lived to be 93 but i almost checked out twice in 1945 and earned the label as the man who got nuked twice and survived.
August 6, 1945 and the war was winding down, the Japanese were negotiating an end to hostilities and i was a 29-year old engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and was on a a business trip in Hiroshima which was deemed a safe place as it was a civilian city with no military significance so i was a surprised as anyone when the United States dropped the world’s first Atomic Bomb and incinerated the city.
I was about two miles away from the epicenter of the blast which killed 140,000 of my fellow citizens, but I was nevertheless temporarily blinded, left with my eardrum destroyed and horrific burns over much of the top half of my body.
The next day, i suffered more radiation exposure as i made my way to the city center in an effort to find a way to hightail it back home to the safety of home, home being Nagasaki.
Us Japanese are an industrious lot and i was back at work three days after the nuclear holocaust that nearly killed me. Then, while detailing the events of the prior few days to my boss, a familiar blinding light suddenly filled the room as a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing another 100,000 people and devastating the city so thoroughly that, in the words of our mayor: 'Not even the sound of insects could be heard'.
I spent many years wrapped in bandages for my resulting skin wounds, and i went completely bald from the radiation and when i died of stomach cancer it was said that it stemmed from all the radiation I suffered but when you escape certain death twice when a quarter of a million of your citizens never, I  can't complain too much.

Stay Cool Britain

Yellow heat health alerts, warning of impacts on vulnerable people, are now in force with temperatures expected to hit 34C (93F) in the UK this weekend and are valid until at least 15 July .
Good luck trying to get to sleep in that 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 i 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 a  hot cup of tea 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 it's Factor 50, a cold water bottle and emptying out my husbands tins of beer from the fridge to make room for my pillow it is then.

The Bayeux (Canterbury) Tapestry (Embroidery)

Strange to see a visiting President given a State visit and nobody protesting or holding up banners decrying his orange coloured skin or him being a sex offender but this is the French President and not the weird one with little hands and we seem to like the French guy.
In exchange for a visit to Buckingham Palace and a slap up dinner, he is offering to lend us the Bayeux Tapestry to gawk at but to be honest, i have seen it and to be polite, it's not as impressive as you may think.  
The bit everyone looks for first in the 230ft long tapestry is the section where Harold has the arrow in his eye but accounts at the time had Harold skewered through the heart by a Norman Knight, his head chopped off while his guts were strewn across the ground and his left leg cut off at the thigh. Oh, and then his corpse was castrated just for good measure but that's a lot of needlework so instead they just knitted an arrow in his eye instead.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that the rest of the Bayeux Tapestry isn’t 100% reliable, for a start it’s not a tapestry it's an embroidery and it's from Canterbury and not Bayeux and you can only assume when William the Conqueror was told he was to be presented with an epic work which had taken years of painstaking labour by dozens of devoted artists to commemorate his victory other the English, he wasn't expecting some fancy needlework.  
Could explain why he didn't display it in the Royal Palace and had it shipped to Bayeux in France and why you never hear the line that history is embroidered by the winners.

Peace?

Benjamin Netanyahu has presented the nomination letter he sent to the Nobel Peace Prize awarders stating that: 'President Trump has demonstrated steadfast and exceptional dedication to promoting peace, security and stability around the world'.
That would be the mass murdering leader of Israel who has an arrest warrant against him for genocide in Palestine and crimes against humanity who is openly discussing creating a concentration camp to ethinically cleanse the region supporting a sex offender and fraudster who has not only been providing the weapons to commit the genocide but initially made the suggestion for the ethnic cleansing and recently instructed bombs to be dropped on Iranian nuclear facilities in a pre-emptive strike to stop them building the nuclear weapons that his own intelligence community said they were not doing.   
So far over 300 candidates have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year and if the Committee decide that Trump is more worthy of the Prize than the other 299 for 'bringing peace to the region', then the Swedish definition of 'Peace' must be very different to the definition the rest of us use.

Why Not A Wealth Tax?

The idea of a Wealth Tax had been mentioned a few times but nobody has ever implemented it but Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are widely thought to be considering it and most tellingly have refused to rule it out to help balance the books when asked about it.  
Keir Starmer has repeatedly said that those with the broadest shoulders should carry the largest burden which tugs at every old Socialists heart as what we should be doing anyway but how would it work?
A wealth tax, so it was explained, is aimed at reducing economic inequality to redistribute wealth and to raise revenue and is a direct levy on an individual's, household's or business's total net wealth, rather than their income.
Advocates of the tax propose an annual 2% tax on wealth above £10m which has been calculated as affecting 20,000 people but would raise £24bn a year which is equivalent to putting 2p on income tax.
In Europe France, Italy , Norway,  Spain and Switzerland have a Wealth Tax but the argument is that if you squeeze the rich, then they bugger off elsewhere with their money but also up for consideration is a one off Wealth Tax and the one shot economic boost that would give but another alternative is to just get the tax rates fair in the first place.
At the moment the British tax system seems tilted towards the rich with only the higher rate payers receiving tax relief for Gift Aid and pension contributions, the basic rate tax payers get nothing for charity donations or putting into a pension and anyone earning up to £125,140 pays tax at 40% while anyone above that to any amount only pays an extra 5%.
Whether it is a one off or a repeated annual tax then i can't see why Labour are just thinking about it when the options are annoy 20,000 people and raise £24 billion or put 2p on income tax and annoy every working person in the country.

Special Guest Blogger: Gao Jianli

During the Warring States Period, I lived in Yan which was a small and fairly weak state in the north-east of China, King Zheng armies were not particularly pleasant to Yan and a committee met and a plot was hatched to assassinate the King.
The chosen assassin was my friend Jing Ke, and it all went horribly wrong. Jing Ke was killed, and Yan was overtaken by the Kings troops rooting out the committee and as a close friend to Jing, i knew that my days were numbered if i was recognised so i changed his name and found work in a wine shop.
I may not have been a great planner but i was a master at playing the Lute and my fame grew quickly which with hindsight was not so clever given i was trying to maintain a low profile but finally King Zheng heard about the wonderful lute player in Yan and commanded an audience which is when things went wrong very quickly because someone in the King's Palace recognised me as an associate of the former attempted assassin and I was immediately arrested.
Fortunately for me, the urge to brutally lop off my head was set against my wonderful lute playing so we reached a compromise, i would live as long as i continued to play for him oh, and they would pull my eyes out to render me harmless which i weighed up as better than the alternative .
So, i continued as the King's lute player, faithfully playing my lute from a safe distance from the Ruler and as time went on, I gained the King's trust and he beckoned me closer and closer so he could hear my beautiful music which is when i hatchd my plot and began slowly filling my lute with little bits of lead and bided my time to act.
After a few weeks my Lute was heavy and by now i was literally playing at the Kings feet and when i finished that day, i stood up and with a mighty swing, aimed my lead-filled lute at the King's head.
Being blind, i obviously missed completely but the big man with the axe never and i was executed on the spot.

Improving Democracy

Politics is a vital part of all our lives, almost everything depends on political decisions from how we travel to how our children are educated to how much tax we pay on our wages and we are always told that if we don't like what the Government is doing, then we can always vote them out of Office.
That sounds great in practise until you consider that  once in power a Government is there for four or five years until the elections roll around again and having no way to force an election if the Government turn out to be a duffer is my biggest gripe but it isn't just me, a poll from Pew Research asked 30,000 respondents in 24 countries if they were satisfied with how Democracy was working in their country and 65% replied that it sucked so they asked a follow up question: 'What do you think would help improve it?'
The overwhelming answer in 19 nations was 'better politicians' and by that they mean ones that are more responsive to their needs and are more competent and honest.
Second was curbing the influence of special interests and combat corruption and in third place is focusing policy on economic conditions such as taxation, inflation, wealth inequality.
The fourth answer is better informed citizens who are more willing to participate in politics and fifth is greater citizen representation by making it easier to vote and the people consulted more via referendums on important topics.
I agree with the poor standard of politicians and christ the UK have had more than their fair share over the years and i am behind the more referendums part, I have banged that drum for years but in truth there are many forms of Government, some are better than others, but we can look around now and honestly say something has to be better than what we have but with AI becoming more important in running our lives, there must be something said for removing humans from the decision making process because we have made a bit of a pigs ear of it so far.

Special Guest Blogger: George Foreman

The road from ruthless boxer to grill master isn't a very well worn one but it is one i made with a little stop to meet Jesus in between.
As one of seven children, we grew up poor and the way i sort out of it was by taking things that other people had by threatening to beat the crap out of them if they didn't hand over their money but as lucrative as mugging was,  it was an advert on TV bought with the money i nicked off other people that changed my life.
The TV ad was for an organization called the Job Corps and i signed up and did some training for jobs like bricklaying and carpentry and got a job in San Francisco, California and after work i would go to the local gym and one evening they were showing the Ali fight against Floyd Patterson and i thought, 'You can earn money for punching people'? So I thought i would have a go at it.
Turns out i was good at it and got picked to go to the 1968 Olympics and got to the final where i beat a scary guy from the Soviet Union and turned Pro.
In my first 32 fights i won they all, 29 by knockout but then i had the brilliant and unbeaten Joe Frazier stood in front of me and so i slapped him about for two rounds and the referee stopped it before I killed the man and i was crowned the World Champion.
One thing a boxing champion needs is an adoring fan base but i didn’t do anything to help this along, i was pretty anti-social back then and saw no reason to get warm and cozy with the fans.
The big name at the time was Mohammad Ali and we got offered $5 million and the location was set as Zaire, mainly because the promoter Don King was pals with the dictator there.
The Rumble in the Jungle they called it  and Ali sat on the ropes for seven rounds while i punched him and then exhausted, he knocked me out in the eighth.
I carried on fighting after the loss but after one bout, and feeling like i was going to die,  i asked God to spare me and if he did I would hand over my boxing prize money to him.
Obviously i lived and became a  minister at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ but i had that promise to hand over my Boxing purses so aged 38, i made  a comeback and put my healthy lifestyle down to reducing the fat in my diet and that opened the door to my next venture, as a grill salesman for the George Foreman Grill which made me more money than my entire boxing career.
My last TV Appearance was on the The Masked Singer dressed as a Venus Fly Trap but i died  as a two-time world heavyweight champion and an Olympic gold medalist with 81 fights, 76 wins and 68 by knockout and to some i was a Boxing Legend, to others, the guy who made grills on an angle.

Naming And Shaming Israeli Genocide Enablers

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has published her report into what she calls: 'the transformation of Israel's economy of occupation to an economy of genocide' and has not held back in naming and shaming the companies that assist and enable Israel in their genocide against the Palestinians and ashamedly 'enable and profiting from crimes including illegal occupation, war crimes, apartheid, forced displacement and genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories'.
In the first part she names the companies who provide the technology and weapons to commit the genocide as Lockheed Martin, Leonardo S.p.A, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and FANUC Corporation and points the finger at companies delivering the components, parts, weapons and raw materials as A.P. Moller and Maersk A/S transport.
Providing the technology for Israel for surveillance are IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, Alphabet Inc. (Google), Amazon.com, Inc and Palantir Technologies Inc.
Providing the heavy machinery for purposes settler and colonial destruction are Caterpillar Inc, Leonardo DRS, HD Hyundai, Volvo, Heidelberg Materials AG, Construcciones Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles and Keller Williams Realty LLC.
Companies accused of helping in the denial of the basics for life are Drummond Company, Inc, Glencore PLC, Chevron Corporation, BP PLC and Paz Retail and Energy Ltd while those trading in the illegal settlements are Bright Food (Group) Co., Ltd, Orbia Advance Corporation, A.P. Moller, Maersk A/S, Booking Holdings Inc. and Airbnb, Inc.
Financial Institutions financing the Genocide by providing loans and buying Israeli Government bonds are BNP Paribas, Barclays, Blackrock, Vanguard, Allianz, AXA, the University of Edinburgh and the Technical University of Munich.
She ends the report by explaining that in her view: 'While life in Gaza is being obliterated and the West Bank is under escalating assault, the present report shows why the genocide carried out by Israel continues: because it is lucrative for many.'
She recommends that: 'The corporate sector, including its executives, must be held to account, as a necessary step towards ending the genocide and disassembling the global system of racialized capitalism that underpins it' and sanctions and an arms embargo must be applied to Israel, all trade agreements must be suspended and  corporate entities face legal consequences for their involvement in serious violations of international law and reparations paid to the Palestinian people along the lines of post-apartheid South Africa.
She also urges the International Criminal Court and national judiciaries to: 'Investigate and prosecute corporate executives and/or corporate entities for their part in the commission of international crimes and laundering of the proceeds from those crimes.'
You have the report and the names of those enabling the genocide so over to you United Nations.

Special Guest Blogger: Shah Jahan

My full title was Shah Jahan the Magnificent and i was, when my father died i defeated my brother and crowned myself Emperor of Hindustan and leader of the Mughal's.
When i wasn't executing most of my rival claimants to the throne, i commissioned many monuments and presided over the aggressive campaigns against the Deccan sultanates, the Portuguese and the Safavids while suppressing several local rebellions.
I may have been the Emperor but i was also a ferocious soldier which meant a lot of killing and a lot of pillaging. People would say please don't pillage me and i would say no, i'm pillaging everyone, you included and vastly expanded our territory but my real love was my wife, my second wife not the first one, the lovely Mumtaz Maha, and together we had 14 children and 18 happy years of marriage until she died in childbirth and i was so distraught, i had the Taj Mahal built as an enduring tribute to her and her body laid to rest inside.
It really did upset me, so much that i only took three more wife's after her but it was with another enduring erection that created a far less savory legacy.
In 1657 i fell ill with what was called 'stangury' and it turned out that the aphrodisiacs that i had been taking to perform with my much younger fifth wife led to the retention of urine for three days, and left me almost at death’s door.
News of my supposed imminent death reached my four sons who, upon learning of my illness, immediately went to war with one another over the succession. Aurangzeb won and I was disposed and relegated to a prison for the rest of my life with my eldest daughter to nurse me in my dotage.
I did recover but by then Aurangzeb had launched a bloody religious war in India that eventually killed millions and i did try to rebel, even trying to arrange the assassination of my usurping son who had been kind enough to send me the severed head of one of his brothers.
In the end, though, nothing came of it and i remained in prison, staring out at the Taj Mahal until i joined my wife there seven years later.

New Party For Disaffected Labour Supporters?

The Labour Party has always been the Party for the left and how we chortled like drains when the hard right Reform Party came along and split the vote on the more stupid side of the ideological fence  and Labour swooped into power amidst a chorus of the Red Flag.
A year on and Labour have been, well...not great as they picked up the clothes dropped by the Conservatives and went headlong after the pensioners and the disabled to which Labour supporters cried WTF Keir???  
Hiding in the shadows and with his Labour membership ripped from his hand, stood Jeremy Corbyn who was one of my favourite Labour leaders as he was more radical than most but the 2019 election came too early for him but now he is back and the signs are that he is forming a new, left wing party with the more Socialist members of the Labour Party.
Zarah Sultana has announced that she is setting up a new political party with Jeremy Corbyn as an alternative to the Labour Party which is great news and it will be atractive to Labour supporters who feel that their Party has moved too far away from it's Socialist roots although it does come with the risk of splitting the left leaning vote and allowing one of the god-awful right wing parties back in.
We will have to wait and see who joins and if any of the Big Beasts at the current Labour Party step across which will be key to it being a success but as i said in a previous post, if this current Government are not willing to pull their heads out of their arses and remember they are the Party founded on Socialism and the party of the downtrodden and working person, then the best they can do is step aside and allow in a proper left wing Party that does.

No Guns For You Catholics

It is said that Great Britain has an unwritten constitution so it was surprising that i managed to find one, the 1689 British Bill of Rights which waffles on about things like free elections, freedom of speech within Parliament, freedom from government interference, the right of petition, just treatment of people by courts and the right to petition the monarch as well as a few Doe's and Soe's and the odd Abrogated but the bit that caught my eye was that: 'Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.'
As I am Church of England, after first checking exactly what a Protestant was and if i was one ( I am) i set out to look about ordering myself a gun and was deciding between a Pistol, semi-automatic, Rifle, Machine gun, Shotgun or a Revolver and deciding between a Kalashnikov or a CZ75 when i thought i had better check that it hadn't been removed later on and apparently it is still on the books so i plumped for a CZ75, small enough to fit in my purse and not cause too much of a bulge under my blouse because i would have to get one of those cool leather shoulder holsters like they had in Cagney and Lacey.  
I was practising my best Dirty Harry 'Go Ahead Catholic, make my day' drawl in the mirror with my hairdryer when i noticed the last bit of the sentence '...as allowed by Law' so i checked with the local Police and it turns out that although the ruling is still valid, the Firearms Control Act of 1903 which prohibited the sale of guns to individuals makes it a no-no.
Turns out that it was decided that allowing citizens to own guns was considered madness and no sane nation would allow such bat shit crazy laws so banned them.
Fair enough, would be a bit insane to allow people to own and keep guns in their homes but luckily I didn’t order the CZ75 but I might still get shoulder holster as i could keep my vape in it.

Special Guest Blogger: Pope Adrian IV

After the Pope Joan debacle, it used to be that to become Pope, you had to sit pants-less in a horseshoe-shaped chair and let a couple of cardinals see if you had the goods. If you passed, they'd yell 'Testiculos habet et bene pendentes!' (He has testicles, and they hang well!) It's true, in those days it took real balls to become Pope because in 12th Century Europe, every nation was intent on killing each other and the Roman Emperor hated me personally.
I began life in Hertfordshire, England and travelled to the south of France to study law but i felt the Church calling me and went on to Avignon and the joined the Abbey of Saint-Ruf.
I was appointed Abbot and in my role met Pope Eugene III who liked my no nonsense style of strict discipline and religious zeal and thought i could do a job ending the conflict between the Christian
Catalonians and the Muslim Al-Andalus which i did by saying i would bang their bloody heads together if they didn't stop fighting which got me promoted to the Bishop of Albano.
The Pope then sent me to Scanidaniva which was a much tougher task as the Swedes and Norwegians were in the middle of a vicious, full blown war and I thought this would take some special negotiating, either that or i just reorganise the Church in both nations and say you can't kill each other now because you are all the same which worked but when i excitedly got back to Rome to tell the Pope the good news, i found out he had died and the Cardinals were in the process of choosing a new one and in i stepped, flavour of the month, and got given the job, the first Brit to gain the role.
My problem was that Italy was divided with the  Byzantine emperor in the North and Norman Kings in the South fighting over it and me stuck in the middle and it didn't help when i argued with the Romans that the Church is the defender of Christians and not them which really did not go down well.
I had better luck with the Irish though and solved all their problems by giving Ireland to the English and passed a decree that serfs should be free to wed whoever they wished, without their master’s blessing, since marriage was sacrosanct but the Byzantines were causing me a real headache so i planned to excommunicate the Emperor to rid me of him but never got a chance.
Quite embarrassing really, but i choked to death by swallowing a fly which had been floating in my goblet of wine but i was a trailblazer and proof that anyone can become Pope and the Church welcomes all, as long as you’re not gay or into science or anything like that anyway.