Banned!!!

Wow, those Gun Nuts can hold a grudge. I used to run an annual feature here where i would advertise the annual Christmas photo shoot of Santa and high powered guns at the Scotts Dale Gun Club, you know those wholesome family photo's of Mum, Dad and their children grinning inanely as they stand behind Santa holding a huge weapon.
Obviously being American i even threw in a bit of religion that nothing says peace and goodwill to all men quite like an AK47, the gun baby Jesus himself would ask for and even gave them a free byline, 'Putting the fun back into fundamentalist Christian' but were they grateful? Hell no, they banned me from visiting their website.
Scotts Dale did stop doing the Photo shoot back in 2018 when they began receiving negative media attention and they disappointingly decided that peace and goodwill to all men means not selling high-powered weapon of death that can blow a big hole in another person (or themselves) at Christmas and maybe, you know, instead of a semi-automatic weapon, as used by Americas most devastating mass killers, buy your relatives a pair of slippers or a pair of pyjamas instead.
I was reminded of the Gun Clubs annual Photo Shoot today and wondered if 1) They had restarted doing them and 2) If i was still banned after all these years and the answer to 2 meant that i never did find out about 1 so I have no idea if gun toting parents believe that the greatest gift they can give their child this year is to indoctrinate him or her into the world of automatic weaponry before they are able to walk
Anyway, if you are in Arizona and find yourself in desperate need of an AK47, grenade launcher or assault rifles for those last minute stocking fillers, pop down to the Scottsdale Gun Club, 14860 N Northsight Blvd, Scottsdale, AZ 85260, United States where you will be greeted by friendly staff who can guide you and offer advice on their Family Firearms Safety Course for introducing firearms into the home which is a slip of paper with the words 'INTRODUCING FIREARMS INTO YOUR HOME!!! ARE YOU FECKING MAD!!!'
You can also visit the website at https://scottsdalegunclub.com/ or at least you can if you are not an English Blogger taking the piss out of American bat shit mad gun nuttery.

Ye Olde Christmas

There is much to do before the 25th December which means many of us turn into a Yuleshard (Someone who leaves Christmas preparations to the last possible moment) such as all the cooking, buying presents and just in case people drop by unexpectedly, a quick bout of Scurryfunging (Hastily tidying the house).
Obviously all that has to wait until the Pourboire (Money set aside specifically for drink) has been spent although due to the cost of Christmas, many decide to be Bummocks (brew for specifically Christmas) to save a few quid .
Not that it is a thing where I live on the South Coast where it can be very Blenky (Snow sparingly) but if i woke up in December to a Ningiud landscape (Snow Covered) and cold enough to get Clinkerbell's (Icicle's), I would be Meggling (walk through snow) and Hogamdog (roll a snowball in the snow) to make snowmen with although i understand some people don't like those conditions and prefer to Hiemate (Stay somewhere warm) wrapped up in Mufflements (Warm clothes) but that's up to them, they are denying themselves a good old 'Apolausticism'  (Enjoying yourself).
To me Christmas is more about the build up rather than the day itself but that isn't to say I'm not happy to see someone 'Doniferous' (Carrying a gift) and although i won't partake of Bubbly-jock (Turkey) due to being Vegetarian, i fill up on Vegetables instead and can still get the Crapulence (feeling full) and spend the afternoon on the sofa waiting for the Overquat (uncomfortable feeling having overeaten) to pass while the rest of the family Crawmass (Picking through remnants of a festive meal).  
Once all the commotion of the day is over I do like to sit outside, look at the Yulestarn (Bright Christmas star) and have a nice Nog (Strong, dark beer) with the family and promise not to be so Yuleshardy next year.

Tis The Season To Say Strange Things

Christmas really is the most wonderful time of the year and it is so special that we seem to have words which we only hear uttered this time of year.
At no point in the other 11 months of the year do we deck anything, in January to November we just decorate, adorn or even furnish our hall but in December it is specifically 'Decked' and Figgy Pudding sounds like something full of Figs, which it isn't, no Figs were in it whatsoever but why we sing about it in the song and not change it to Christmas Pudding is a strange one, both have four syllables so swapping out Figgy for Christmas would still scan.
We don't listen at Christmas, we 'Hark' be it we are harking Herald Angels sing or the neighbour singing 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday' in such a way that Roy Wood would sue them.
An animals feeding trough is a manger for the month and we turn our dictionaries back to the 16th Century version to say 'Ye' and how 'Tis the season to be Merry' which leads to the question why can we only be Merry this season? Can't we be Merry in Summer or Spring or can we only be Happy in those Seasons?   
Wassailing sounds like some sort of torture although if you had me me massacre 'O Holy Night' then you would probably agree but Caroling sounds much better and how much jollier would the News sound if was called Tidings.
It is also the only time of the year that you can hum along to a Cliff Richards song without dying of embarrassment if someone over-harked you. 

Shock Celebrity Photo In Epstein Release

The Department of Justice's website was so busy yesterday that journalists were placed in a queue for access to the released Epstein files although once we got there, we seemed to be staring at more black rectangles than anything else but all the expected names and faces were there and nobody was surprised to see the likes of  Bill Clinton and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor but there was one celebrity that bought sharp gasps in the newsroom.
There with his arm around a smiling Jeffrey Epstein was the beloved children's favourite, Winnie the Pooh.
Obviously it goes without saying that inclusion in the Epstein files does not suggest wrongdoing but it is hard to see how the Hundred Acre Wood resident can survive this association with one of history's most prolific convicted child sex offender's who died in prison while awaiting sentencing in 2019.  
We have approached Mr W. Pooh  for comment but have yet to receive a statement with regards to this unsettling revelation.

Hiya 3i/ATLAS

It's the closest approach of what we have come to call 3i/ATLAS which is an interstellar comet...or is it?
Speculation has been growing that rather than a massive ball of ice careening around the Milky Way for the last few billion of years, the thing 168 million miles away is actually 'a hostile alien threat' according to Harvard Scientist, Professor Avi Loeb.
He has pointed out the changing colour and acceleration as well as the parallel jets which indicate technological propulsion which when taken all together, points to an alien spacecraft which is on a trajectory to study the Planets of the Solar System while staying far enough away to avoid close detection by Earthlings armed with powerful telescopes.
So are we going to wake up today and discover lots of little green men with red glowing fingers asking us to 'phone home' or not I asked Open University's Physics and Astronomy Department and apparently it's a firm not.
'This object is a comet. It looks and behaves like a comet. All evidence points to it being a comet' explained the spoilsports so how do they explain the changing colour?
'Oddities in nucleus properties like composition, shape, or structure which would have been acquired from its host system or over its long interstellar journey' which makes sense i guess so maybe we don't have to worry about that question I have often pondered on if they ask to be taken to our leader.
Then again, if i was an alien coming to Earth to have a nose around and see if we need to be vapourised out of existence then i would make my Spaceship Comet shaped and behave like a Comet until the moment i landed and began herding humans into cages so who knows.
I would avoid the UK though because it seems like everyone here is going down with colds and Flu and we know what happened in War of the Worlds when the advanced Alien invaders were defeated by people sneezing at them so maybe we should keep some snotty nosed kids on standby, just in case.

America Back On Regime Change Trail

Donald Trump has been threatening a land strike on Venezuela for months and while the military build up off the coast continues, he shot in the face everyone who argued with me that it wasn't about oil by saying: 'They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back' which in my reckoning makes it all about oil, apology accepted warmongering right wing dingbats.
Removing Maduro and installing a much more USA friendly leader such as María Corina Machado who will get the oil pumping towards Washington seems to be the call then but if the US goes down the regime change road, it will not be for the first time.
In the last 80 years, Washington has overthrown many foreign regimes and found the removing part easy but not so much the getting the expected outcome they wanted and in recent memory we have had the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Removing them were easy but after two decades of insurgency they left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs and with the Taliban back in power and Iraq became a hotbed of terrorism and gave birth to ISIS as well as being a gift for Iran.
Military intervention in Libya in 2011 removed Muammar Gaddafi but it is yet to become a viable state as it is now controlled by the very people they were fighting against in Iraq and now we are waiting for the Venezuelan misadventure to begin and if the plan is for an invasion party happens, then that would require the US to prepare to pay a hefty price in American and Venezuelan blood.
How would a forced change of regime affect the character of Venezuela who it is unlikely will greet America as a liberator and more likely a murderous bully going to war to control their resources.
The buzz is that the much anticipated attack will come within days as a way to bury the bad news of the Epstein Files which are to be released imminently and will incriminate Trump even more than it already has so on we go onto the latest bout of American regime change in oil rich countries under the flimsiest of justifications.  

Merry Crimble??

Christmas goes by many names – from the traditional shortening ‘Xmas’, to the French ‘noel’ and the Germanic ‘yule’, through to informal nicknames like ‘Crimbo’. But a new YouGov poll reveals that not all these terms fill everybody with festive cheer.
68% dislike hearing it called Crimble, 58% Yuletide, 57% The Festive Season', 55% Holiday Season, 48% Xmas and 40% dislike the term Crimbo.    
89% of Britons celebrate Christmas with 34% saying they 'love it' 39% saying they like it but 9% say they dislike the whole thing.
The most acceptable time for shops to start putting up displays is late November, but for people’s own homes it is early December and 76% have an artificial tree and 18% a real one and 15% of Brits will forego the washing up and dine out on Christmas Day
Over half (53%) of parents will buy their kids clothes, shoes and accessories this year and 39% will buy Board games, card games and puzzles, books, journals and diaries.  Only 14% of parents will be buying musical instruments.
62% say they watch at least 1 Christmas film and 57% will eat Turkey on the big day and 41% will have Christmas pudding for dessert,
Silent Night is the nation’s favourite Christmas carol, All I Want for Christmas Is You the favourite Christmas song, and Elf the favourite Christmas film.
The average spent is £550 and 40% say they are worried about the impact of Christmas on their personal finances and it is split 50/50 with whether to call the Jolly present bringer Santa Claus or Father Christmas.

Smiley/Sad Face

I find anything to do with Computers mind-numbing and really don't care how or why they work but years ago i sit in on a lecture by the British Psychological Society (BPS) about 'Psychology and the Virtual World' because i thought it sounded interesting. Turned out it wasn't because it was all about how websites can use Psychology to make themselves more appealing, something they called Cyberpsychology.  
This must have been mid 2010's i guess and looking at my notes it seems i either fell asleep or noticed something more interesting out of the window because they are very sparse but piecing together my scribblings i can see that Cyberpsychology is the scientific study of our psychological experiences with digital technologies and aspects of the internet.
Yep, a yawnfest indeed but according to them: 'It is important because in contemporary society, technology and the internet form such an important part of our everyday experiences. Technology is very much a part of how we socialise, how we entertain ourselves, how we work, and how we learn. Psychology is all about understanding human thought and behaviour, but critically we want to know how this works in 21st Century society. This is where cyberpsychology can give us a unique perspective about contemporary human behaviour.' Apparently.
I did have notes on emoji's and how we process them because they are a significant part of online communication and people’s expression of emotion.
According to whoever it was, we process them in the way we do with other emotional stimuli such as faces or emotion words. We can use methods from other areas of psychology such as cognitive psychology to test this experimentally. Generally, what we are finding is that on an unconscious level, we don’t seem to process emoji like other emotional stimuli. And that’s really interesting in itself'.
To them maybe, not so much to me because i drew a little smiley face which was more ACIIIIIIID from the 90s than the smiley emoji face they were thinking of but certain personality traits seem to be related to the type of emoji people use based on extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and neuroticism.
The most common used Emoji and Personality Clues to the people who use them are:

Happy/Smiling Faces (😊, 😄): Often linked to being agreeable, conscientious, and open; they add positive emotional tone, making communication clearer.
Heart Emojis (❤️, 🥰): Strong indicators of high agreeableness, showing warmth and affection.
Positive Emojis (🔥, 🎉): Indicate an energetic, enthusiastic, and hype personality, bringing energy to messages.
Negative Emojis (😠, 😥): Can correlate with higher neuroticism or mood instability, though they're also used to avoid awkwardness.
Thinking Face (🤔): May suggest deeper thought or intellectual curiosity, although not always linked to specific Big Five traits in studies.
Praying Hands/Monkey (🙏, 🙈): Can suggest a tactile nature.

I hardly ever use emojis which apparently shows 'discomfort with intimacy and distance themselves from emotional expression in digital messages', or i'd go with feel that there are no need for them if you write the email clearly in the first place.

What Happened Don?

Don't know what could have happened but over the last 12 months the Global view of the U.S. have worsened and views of China have improved
Surveyed by Pew Research on what they think of the two leaders of both Superpowers  to do the right thing regarding world affairs, the obese, orange sex pest in the White House is dropping faster than shares in a Trump Casino at 22% and the last time the American President was less trusted than the Chinese President, currently 25%, was in 2020, the last year of the first Trump Presidency.   
The small handed criminals reputation is worst in Germany where 18% of Adults have confidence in Trump but 25% trust Xi and he didn't come out much better when asked who was the biggest threat to Peace , in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom, the U.S. is the second-most commonly named threat after Russia). People in Spain name the U.S. as their top threat about as often as they name Russia. The U.S. is the most commonly cited as the greatest threat in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico and i would expect Venezuelans are not keen on him if they were asked.
In Australia, Japan and the U.S., people name most frequently name China as the country posing the greatest threat.
The pussy grabbing liar doesn't fare much better in his own country with most Americans (63%) not trusting Trump and even his own AI Truth Social chatbot calls him a liar so bit awkward for him when asked  about whether he is trustworthy, replied that 'Major fact-checkers, courts, and official investigations have documented numerous false claims by Donald Trump over many years'.
Not to worry though, only another 3 years if he lasts that long and judging by the many medical diagnosis by amateur medical medics online, he will be lucky to see New Year.

Climate Change = Crap Tasting Coffee

Climate Change is bringing some scary things with Mother Nature getting ready to ramp it up further but if the thought of us all being wiped out by floods, droughts and extreme weather doesn't do it for you, maybe the thought of missing on on your morning coffee will.
The snappily titled 'UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment' have been pointing to the findings from World Coffee Research that found that by 2050, the land area suitable for Arabica coffee production could shrink by 50% with all of the main production nations in Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia and Colombia becoming increasingly hot and dry and unsuitable for cultivation due to Climate Change.
'Without swift and substantial action, the viability of coffee as a global commodity could be in jeopardy. The impacts are already being felt with global coffee prices surging , driven by weather disruptions in major producing countries' they explained.
Coffee experts (who knew they were a thing?) warn that without both climate mitigation and serious adaptation, coffee will become scarcer and more expensive, with supply chains disrupted and quality eroded, or 'flavour-flation' where taste suffers.
Another snappily titled office, 'The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service' has described Brazil as enduring its: 'most intense and widespread drought in history,' with serious consequences for coffee flowering and yields in the 2024–2025 season and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agree that their own study found that since 2000, increased evaporation driven by higher temperatures underscoring that climate change is intensifying drought beyond simple rainfall shortages.
Dr. Ernesto Méndez, co-director of something called the Institute for Agroecology and professor of agroecology at the University of Vermont, spelt it out that: 'There’s no question that climate change is affecting coffee regions and communities around the world. Coffee shrubs are very sensitive to weather conditions for their development. For a coffee plant to flower, it needs to have just the right amount of moisture and temperature. The right conditions are also necessary for the flowers to set and then become the coffee cherries that are harvested.'
There you go then, join the fight against Climate Change or face the very real prospect of paying much more for a crappy tasting cup of Coffee.

Far Right Religious Crusade

For some reason, the right wing seem to have a monopoly on being religious, to be fair most of the left wouldn't touch it with a 10ft Prayer candle and are far too busy trying to make the World a better place through drinking latte and wearing T-Shirts that say: 'No-one has been stoned to death by atheists', but i always assumed that if Jesus was alive today, he almost certainly wouldn't be right wing.
For some reason it is the political right who have adopted the beardy one and his dad for their side which is a bit puzzling and a view echoed today by the Church of England Bishop who said that the carol service in central London orchestrated by Tommy Morrison to 'put Christ back in Christmas' is an attempt to: 'Subvert the faith so that it serves his purpose'.
Robinson (real name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon) apparently found God while serving in prison for perverting the course of justice again and is now trying to spread the word that what God really wants is for him to organise an event in his name and for him to sell other right wing mugs St George’s flags and Santa hats.
Attendance figures have been out at 1,000 by MET Police but approximately a third of them were 'Stand Up To Racism' protesters who were reminded by Yaxley-Lennon that: 'I want to remind everyone this is a religious celebration, this is not a political event'.
Without doubt Jesus would be part of the crowd jeering him alongside the army of priests who were heckling the speaker (Jesus was a migrant etc etc) and going around the crowd handing out leaflets to attendees which gave details of who to contact if they really wanted to speak to learn about Christianity.
Does seem to have become more of a thing on the hate spreading far right with the likes of Donald Trump hoping his dalliances with a renown pedophile and numerous sex assaults he has conducted are overlooked by the big guy and though religion and Brits go together as well as a bacon sandwich vendor outside a synagogue, the do seem to be trying to make Christian nationalism a thing.
Nigel Farage, recently surgically removed from Donald Trump's Colon, has began to talk up his affinity with conservative Anglicanism and has hired an American theologian suggested by JD Vance to act as an adviser but if him and the likes of Robinson think that going down the religious route will attract more supporters, they are very much barking up the wrong tree because the evidence is that Church attendance is bulked out mostly by immigrants and they are the very last people who would go anywhere near the far right hate spouting groups who want them deported.
Still,  I am sure the right wingers enjoyed their little sing along yesterday, just hope that the carols they picked didn't have too many long words in them because they are not the brightest.

Ahmed al Ahmed: Bondi Hero

I went to bed watching news of yet another mass shooting in America and woke up to watch one in Bondi Beach in Australia.
Horrific scenes with 11 dead and 29 injured at what is being called a terror attack on a Jewish Hanukkah event but one man stopped the gruesome death toll being much worse, Ahmed al Ahmed.
The 43-year-old Ahmed al Ahmed, was seen in a video running up to one of the two attackers from behind and then grabbing the shotgun from his hands before pointing the weapon back at him and once the gunman ran away, placed the gun beside a tree and raised his hands for assistance.
Mr Ahmed, a father-of-two and owns a fruit shop in Sydney, was shot in the tussle and is due to have surgery but his brave actions potentially saved many lives.
Chris Minns, the premier of New South Wales state said: 'That man is a genuine hero, and I've got no doubt that there are many, many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery' so we wish him all the best and a speedy full recovery and hope that Australia hand him the highest bravery award the country has.
At the same time a slow and painful recovery for the gunman in custody and currently in a critical condition in hospital.

Christmas Cards

We wouldn’t be truly celebrating the Season of Santa without handing over expensive folded cardboard to each other and receiving them from close relatives, friends, colleagues and  from firms that are actually a leaflet disguised as a card which go in the corner of the kitchen worktop along with the pile of old receipts and unopened letters from the bank until January when they’re unceremoniously chucked away.
We also receive e-cards from businesses and they usually go straight into my spam folder but you can’t decorate your house with e-cards and we usually prefer a genuine, physical bit of card, folded in half, that we can stick on a door frame but when you walk into a card shops in the High Street, you can become completely card-blind such is the sheer variety on offer.
There are weirdly rude cards (Bet you can't guess the picture on the one with 'The Human Santapede' written across the top), those  black-and-white 1950s Scene Cards and TV Cards which seems to always be of Mrs Brown or Only Fools and Horses.
There are Insulting Ageist cards, voluptuous woman in a bikini or hunky men in budgie smugglers Cards, arty Cards with photograph of a Christmassy animal, glittery Cards that will cover you hands with shiny bits that you will see on it forever and some really specific ones such as 'To my nephews second husbands mother'.
Some people do it themselves and you get a lovely Family photo Cards with Dad standing at the back in his best blazer, hands on his wife’s shoulders, his two children looking suitably embarrassed as they know they’ll be cringing at their hair in twenty years’ time.
There is also the people who tell you that: 'We’ve decided to give money to charity this year instead of sending cards' which has you thinking have they really given money to charity or they just being tightwads because a box of 20 costs about £1.99 and i know Charities say give what you can afford but come on, do both you tight git.
My personal choice are usually fairly traditional with a snowman or a festive Gonk on it and as part of my 'Keep Religion Out Of Christmas Campaign', not a baby in a manger or a stable full of animals in sight although i did get something close for my brother in law, it's called a Santapede, well, they are wearing Christmas Hats!  

Masks Debate Resurfaces During Super Flu

 
With the Christmas social season just getting going this is the best time to be a virus as people mingle and spread god knows what to each other which is why the NHS are warning that a record number of flu patients are currently in hospital and people should weigh up the merits of wearing face coverings.
Downing Street have said only that wearing a mask to help prevent the spread of respiratory illness: 'Was something people can consider' but they are urging those who haven't already had the flu jab to drag themselves somewhere with a nurse waiting for them with a syringe.
The problem this year seems to be that the Flu version currently doing the rounds is particularly transmissible and i have heard it referred to as a 'SuperFlu' by medical professionals a few times already which sounds scary as anyone who has had a non Super Flu will know, it is not fun and can be downright dangerous and have long lasting effects so if we can do something to prevent giving the misery to others, why not?
Wearing a mask when in close proximity to others is something simple we can do and as we found out in the Covid years, getting vaccinated, washing and sanitising hands, wearing masks and keeping our distance works and shouldn't be controversial although there are some whack-jobs who will try and argue otherwise but we know how that ends up, ask Meatloaf but you would need to do it via a Medium because just after wanging on about Covid being a hoax and all the precautions unneeded, he sadly discovered it wasn't a hoax and they were very much needed.
So what is so super about this particular variant when flu season it is an annual event anyway?
Professor Meghana Pandit, NHS national medical director, explained that this partuclar variant, influenza A/H3N2 to give it the proper title,  has been around since 1968 and there have been over a dozen such changes in that time but what is so special about this type is that it has started earlier than normal flu season which usually peaks after the Christmas get together's but this time has reached the numbers you generally see peak in early January and that means it is much more in circulation before getting its Christmas Bonus of parties and get together's.
Based on the data from the UK Health Security Agency, it is younger people getting infected more as their immune systems are less experienced at dealing with flu viruses and this particular strain is great at finding an immunity gap in children that isn’t present in other age group so adults are less likely to become infected overall, as they typically have an immune system which is more experience and resistance with the influenza, having already been exposed to many flu viruses over their lives.
The recommendations from the NHS this year are therefore getting vaccinated is still the best thing you can do to protect yourself and if you are sick, stay home and rest and take sensible precautions to avoid spreading the virus to others which includes masks which as we found out during Covid, are worn not to prevent you from catching a virus but to prevent the wearer from expelling virus-laden respiratory droplets into the air when coughing, speaking, or breathing for some other poor sod to breath in.

Venezuela Moved Into Trump's Gun Sights

Donald Trump's proto-fascist government seemed to have moved on from blowing up ships off the coast of Venezuela based on the evidence that they are boats off the coast of Venezuela, to stealing their boats full of oil like modern day Pirates whilst making all sorts of absurd allegations that Maduro, the Venezuelan President, is some sort of kingpin in the drugs trade.   
Obviously no evidence is forthcoming which makes a change to the previous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when the evidence presented was just a made up fantasy but the American gunboat diplomacy against Venezuela continues anyway with promises of more to come.
I assume the end goal is the removal of Maduro and a nice, more American friendly President installed, one that will wave through the pillaging of the World's largest proven oil
reserves, estimated around 300 billion barrels  and the latest move to manufacture a war with the South American nation has gone down very well with Venezuela’s opposition leader and Trump patsy, María Corina Machado, who has poked her head out of hiding to say how she supports the US seizure of the oil tanker.
I imagine we will see a creeping of more warlike actions and it will eventually break out into a shooting war so what with providing backing for the Israeli genocide, attacking Iran and setting the military against his own civilians, will assure Trump has as much chance of winning his coveted Nobel Peace Prize as he has of winning the rear of the year award.

Oval Office Christmas Eve

Scene Oval Office,
Date Christmas Eve
Present are Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth: Sir, wake up, we got a southern border violation by an illegal alien

Trump: It's those damn narco-terrorists again from Venezuela

Hegseth: We have sight of an unidentified craft loaded with suspect packages.

Trump: He looks like a bearded male, about 300 lbs. What do we know about him?

Hegseth: Our intelligence shows that he plans one big shipment a year and he's going to sneak into every kids bedroom at night. What shall we do Sir?

Trump: Jeffrey told me sneaking into kids bedrooms at night is fine but i don't agree on this occasion. We got to stop him.

Hegseth: Missile fired and .....Neutralised. Woohoo.

Trump: Hang on, he's still alive and clinging to the side of his craft, looks like you just winged him.

Hegseth: My favourite, a double tap. Second missile fired and....Got him.

Aide runs into the Oval Office.

Aide: Sir, Sir, Mr President, someone just killed Santa.

Trump: It was him!!! I wasn't even here at the time.

Reverend Lucy #2: When the Wise Men Swiped Right

Welcome to this years Christmas Eve Service with me, Reverend Lucy, and i was thinking what Mary, Joseph, and a herd of donkeys would look like in a world of TikTok dances and smart fridges today so this is my reinterpretation of the Nativity story through the lens of 2025, or 'When the Wise Men Swiped Right'.
So here we are traveling in our minds back 2,025 years to a small town in the desert, but we’ll also stay right here because although the story may be timeless, but the Wi-Fi isn’t.
So the Angel Gabriel sent a text to Mary: ‘Your pregnant with the son of god, put a reminder in your Calendar for 9 months, December 25th' so Mary would have checked her schedule and realised she should have to cancel her yoga class and bring forward that Zoom meeting.
Next was the trip to Bethlehem and when then Joseph would have had to have rounded up a Donkey for the trek, today it would be an Uber to take them along the Dusty Road and Joseph frantically tapping 'Accept' on his smartphone.
Obviously no room at the Inn's and Mary would be nagging him for not booking an Air BnB in advance so we are back in the Stable but this one would have 'Smart Facilities' like charging points for the phone and Wifi if you paid the few extra Shekles but Mary drew the line at Livestreaming the birth on Youtube.
So in the soft blue glow of the phone charging light, the baby Jesus swaddled in a blanket embroidered with the phrase 'Made in Bethlehem,' and a QR Code was laid in a Manger while a group of Shepherds who had received a notification that the Lord and Saviour had been born, entered and with each holding a smartphone and texting about the birth and reminding people to subscribe for their podcast for further updates on the angels and the forthcoming announcement of peace on Earth.
The Stable was by now becoming more cramped than a flashmob in a toilet cubicle and the Angels were explaining how from this day forward our memes will be kind, our comments constructive, and let's maybe try and cut back on the emojis when three wise men arrived, or to give them there correct name, Influencers, who instead of having followers, they would have… well, actual followers and they would say that Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh was so 2000 years ago so would leave Amazon Prime subscriptions, Spotify playlists, and a smartwatch.
By now the 'Battery Low' icon on Josephs phone would be flashing so let's end this story by agreeing that the Nativity story is still relevant, miracles can happen in any era, even today, even when wrapped in Wi-Fi signals and notification pings which when we strip away, we find the same message.
And that message is may your notifications be few, your Wi-Fi strong and your hearts ever-open.
My final message is the original star that led the Magi was a beacon of hope, and our modern stars might actually be be GPS satellites, the screen of a phone or a LED fairy light on a Christmas Tree but so be it.
Merry Christmas!!

Reverend Lucy

Welcome to this years Christmas Eve Service with me, Reverend Lucy, and it is nice to see so many new faces in the congregation tonight as we celebrate the reason for the season as the young people say, the birth of a rather special baby in a stable 2025 years ago.
As there are so many of us tonight, some i recognise as regulars, some i haven't seen for a long time and some i am meeting for the first time, my philosophy is generally as long as you don't nick the candles or drink the holy water from the font it's all good but it may be worth issuing a reminder of Church etiquette before we begin.
Firstly, unless you got too close to a candle and you are telling someone that their hair is on fire, we prefer silence during the service as people are here to listen to tales of that first Christmas and they will struggle to hear the message from the pulpit if all they can hear is you discussing how you are foregoing the Brussels Sprouts this year as they give you terrible wind.
Secondly, as it is December and very cold outside, headgear is fine to be worn inside the Church although wearing a turkey or Christmas tree shaped hat will probably obstruct the view of the person sitting behind you.
Thirdly, Mobile Phone's should be put on silent as the sound of the 'Ride of the Valkyries' echoing around the building during Hark The Herald Angel is very off putting for the organist.
Regular church goers know that during the service there will be some standing during certain parts. There are reasons they stand up or sit down during the service, they are not just playing a game of musical chairs so just follow everyone else's lead.
As this is the midnight Mass and unfortunately the Nativity Scene can drag on a bit, the usual human reaction is to nod off but unless you have a medical condition, such as narcolepsy, could you please at least try to stay awake and especially if you are a snorer.
Finally, when the collection plate comes around remember to put in and not take out and make sure that you don't walk out with more candles than you came in with and no matter how thirsty you are, the font water is not drinkable, many babies heads have been dipped into it and it will taste of a mixture of baby shampoo and cradle cap.

Sad Faced Rev

My blog partner asked me if i was writing any Christmas themed posts this year and i answered that i must have pretty much exhausted every Christmas related aspect there is, from Atheism at Christmas to whether to say Happy or Merry Christmas so probably not so many which made him do his sad face because he was keen to nick whatever i wrote to include in his December services.
It's an agreement we have, i write the posts and he does all the posting and techy stuff and has carte blanch to pilfer the best lines for himself, sanitize them to remove the religious sarcasm and then passes them off as his own and gets all the 'Oh Rev, you are so witty/charming/inciteful' comments from the congregation.
Obviously, as this time of year is all about Santa, Snowmen and red nosed reindeer, his Bethlehem gang gets very little look in these days and when they do, it is in a pretty sarcastic tone.
I said there was a couple of posts i wrote in 2015, one in 2017 and another in 2021 which are Christmas Eve sermon's by the Reverend Lucy and he is welcome to bastardise them but as he said he already did.
Not to worry Rev, I got you covered if only to avoid looking at that sad little face all bloody December.

Ceasefire In Name Only

The Qatar Prime Minister said today that the Gaza ceasefire negotiations were at 'a critical moment'.
Today alone seven Palestinians were killed in an Israeli drone attack and since the ceasefire was announced on 10 October 2025, Israeli forces have killed more than 360 Palestinians in Gaza so not much of a ceasefire then but Israel have always been murderously rubbish at not killing their neighbours during ceasefires.
Since the ceasefire with Lebanon in November 2024, Israel has killed more than 330 people, 127 in one attack last month, and maintaining forces inside its territory which were meant to have been pulled back.
What we have then is more of a reduce-fire from the Israeli's rather than a ceasefire although October's slaughter of 104 Palestinians including 46 children at a refugee camp in a single day doesn't point towards restraint although this was dismissed by the Trump administration as: 'a little skirmish' and that the peace deal was holding.
What is becoming apparent is that the ceasefire has led to a situation where Israeli forces can inflict outrageous violence on Gazan's and Lebanese without consequences which Amnesty International describes as: 'A dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal but what has in fact happened is a mere reduction of the scale of Israel’s attacks'.
The UN has noted that Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, which Israel continue to control 58% of, are suffering with aid trucks not being allowed to enter and attacks continuing with infrastructure continuing to be destroyed
UN Special Rapporteurs point out that Israel continues to operate beyond the agreed withdrawal line, in clear breach of the ceasefire terms and the International Force has not been agreed on yet so Israel continues to act with impunity and backed by the Americans who are bending over backwards to take whatever Israel stick to them, the Palestinians and Lebanese are expected to just humbly submit to their oppressors and accept a ceasefire which sees them continuing to be murdered.
Banning them from the Song Contest should be the very least we should be doing to a nation continuing to commit a genocide before our very eyes.

Sleepy Don

It is only 18 more sleeps to Christmas but more like 178 for Donald Trump because the guy seems to be falling asleep all the time lately.
My Facebook page is full of videos of him falling asleep at various meetings which once again has everyone talking about his health so i asked a doctor what did he think was wrong with the fat orange pedo's mate?
'He's a racist, abhorrent, misogynistic piece of shi....' began the doctor but i stopped him to say i meant specifically his health and why would he keep falling asleep.     
'Medically speaking' began the doctor, 'he is displaying obvious signs of cognitive and physical decline as well as being a racist, misogynistic piece of shi...' so i thanked him and checked my notes and saw that he is 145 and realised that was his weight in Kg and he is actually 79 and as well as keep falling asleep, we know he has elephant legs thanks to chronic venous insufficiency and there is that persistent bruising on his right hand which he has tried unsuccessfully to conceal with make up which shouldn't surprise anyone who notices that his make up choice tends towards Tangerine.
Trump has also undergone various medical checks including an MRI although he couldn't remember which part of the body was scanned and said he aced a cognitive test which he said was hard and it is, if you are unable to draw the time on a clock or knows what a camel looks like.   
Trump is apparently angry that so much focus is on his health and called the diagnosis that he is a mental and physical wreck 'bulls---t' but then he also said that he wasn't best buddies and hanging around with Jeffrey Epstein during his pedophile heyday so a man to believe obviously.

A Solution To Democracies Failings

Democracy has many problems, mainly that is only a Democracy for 1 day out of every 4 or 5 years but another is that every few years the Government changes and sets about undoing plenty of what the last lot did.
In the UK we have had The Conservatives and the Labour Party taking a wrecking ball to each others plans for decades but one thing which seems to have cross Party agreement is the UK's State Pension triple lock which is a policy to increase the State Pension by the highest of either average earnings growth, inflation or 2.5%.
The Tories introduced it in 2011 and Labour have maintained it since so if we could have cross Party agreement on Pensions, why not other things which are agreed upon by all parties and out of reach of whichever ideological party gain control?
There are some things which fluctuate such as taxation and pay awards so we couldn't tie that down and but we could have something like an agreement on the NHS Budget Triple Lock and the same for benefits and defence as well as Environmental targets which we do have but they are movable so we could tie them down securely.
If our main parties could get together and set in concrete some things which can only be changed by further cross party agreements, then we would be faced with such upheaval every 4 or 5 years and take the sting out of budgets every year.
I am sure there would be still be ideological differences and agreements between a very right wing Conservatives and the left wing Labour Party would be difficult (think Brexit) but the only alternative is to make terms longer so when a leader gets in they get a decade or two to build the nation they envision but that way lies something like a couple of decades of Boris Johnson and nobody wants that.
Then again, Democracy means that if a leader is a duffer, we get to kick them out but that brings me back to my initial point that the opportunity only comes once every 4 or 5 years and they can do a lot of damage in that time as we found out with Tony Blair and Liz Truss and she was only in charge for 44 days.
Maybe the solution is to remove humans from the chain of command and just plug in a computer and let Ai make the calls because i do believe that that day will come, maybe not in our lifetime but certainly someone will try it out somewhere.

A Smaller Eurovision This Year

Three cheers for Spain, Netherlands, Ireland and Slovenia who have pulled out of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest in protest at Israel being cleared to compete despite their genocide going on in Palestine.
The United Kingdom's Eurovision Committee  has said that it was aware of the concerns over Israeli participation in the contest but are unlikely to withdraw while other nations such as Iceland and Belgium are considering whether to enter a song this year.
The vote to ban Israel was suspended following the ceasefire declaration but many nations were still angry that a nation with so much blood on its hands was being allowed to compete so they demanded a vote and the Eurovision Committee did a sleight of hand where they tagged the 'No Israel' vote to a clause for updating the voting system to make it fairer.
Israel's President Isaac Herzog obviously praised the decision, calling it: 'An appreciated gesture of solidarity, brotherhood, and co-operation, symbolising a victory over those who seek to silence Israel and spread hatred' which is another way of saying thank you for not punishing us for the genocidal mass murder and war crimes but there you go, at least he didn't say it was about Antisemitism which is the usual first straw grabbed at by anyone trying to defend the indefensible going on over there.   
I really hope the pressure grows on the British Committee to withdraw and we join Ireland and Spain in the dugout but it is throwing the Contest into turmoil and if a few more were to withdraw, it would have serious ramifications for the format of two semi finals and a grand final as well as financial but as Russia has been asked not to bother due to the invasion of Ukraine, it is hard to see how a nation like Israel and their abhorrent human rights record can be allowed to enter.

Bye Ellen

I read a story about Ellen DeGeneres which made me smile which is something because she never usually makes me smile, she is very much the female version of the similarly unfunny Jerry Seinfeld in that respect but 18 months after moving to the UK to escape Trump's America stating that 'Everything here is just better', she seems to have changed her mind.
It’s easy to be upbeat during a British summer, it really is a green and pleasant land when the Sun is out but now that the winter gloom has set in and the Sun only makes a brief appearance for a few hours and even then it has to battle rain clouds, the plastic Brits are plotting a return to Trumpland.
Apparently, DeGeneres and her wife can’t stand the thought of another British winter and are plotting a quick return to California which isn't a great advert for Britain when you flee fascism and a sex offending President with a criminal record only to run straight back to it because you’re a bit chilly over here.
She could have just put on another jumper but instead is waving goodbye to us Brits and nipping off back sharpish to Trumpistan where i am sure we will be given a warm welcome and and even warmer tootsies and where her humour is better appreciated than it is here.

Past To Future Lucy

Hi future Lucy, this is past Lucy. I'm actually you from 14 days ago so i hope you had a good holiday, didn't get too sunburnt or fall overboard or anything and don't worry, i am not here to show you previous things so you can change your ways or anything, i'm here to tell you what i fully expected you missed over the past 14 days.

Rachel Reeves would have delivered her budget and been keeping her head down ever since as someones taxes would have gone up so by April next year you and most other people will be paying more to the Treasury than you do at the moment.

The Israeli genocide would have gone on with many more Palestinians killed by the Israeli military despite there being a supposed ceasefire.

Russia will still be firing missiles and drones into Ukraine and Putin will still be promising to stop once he is rewarded for starting the war by being handed a decent portion of Ukraine.

As we are just entering the Christmas period, some group of workers will be threatening to strike over the Festive period.

It is a very good bet that Donald Trump said something stupid or offensive or more probably both.

Despite telling everyone you would be uncontactable and leaving your out of office on your emails, you WILL come back to find missed calls and texts on your work phone which has been left sitting in a kitchen drawer at home.

As the Christmas work rota would have been worked out while you was away, you may very well be having Christmas Diner at your desk again this year.

Arsenal would have beaten Tottenham, drawn with Bayern Munich and lost to Chelsea.

Welcome back.

Most Streamed Christmas Songs UK

Christmas songs are an essential component of the festive season, bounding into your home like a distant relatives each Christmas but with the advent of streaming,  many Christmas songs are far more accessible and looking at the UK’s most-streamed Christmas songs last year, it's the classics we reach for.
The Top 5 is the holy quintet of classics: Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You (1994) followed by Wham’s Last Christmas (1984) and Fairytale Of New York by The Pogues ft. Kirsty MacColl (1987),  Shakin’ Stevens’ Merry Christmas Everyone in fourth (1985), and Brenda Lee's Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree (1958).
The Charts define a 'Modern' Christmas song as anything released since 2010 and the highest-placed modern Christmas song goes to Michael Buble's 'It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas' from 2011 but is a song originally recorded in 1951 so the first original 'Modern' Christmas song is at number 8 where we hear  Ariana Grande's 2014 song 'Santa Tell Me'.
I'm all for the Classics but there has been some great Christmas songs since 2010 which will become classics in a few decades time when the term Modern is shifted forward a few years  
Kelly Clarkson’s Underneath The Tree (2010), Leona Lewis’ One More Sleep (2013),  Snowman (2021) and Santa's Coming For Us (2017) by Sia,  Merry Christmas by Ed Sheeran and Elton John (2021),  I’ll Be Home by Meghan Trainor (2014) Cozy Little christmas Katy Perry (2018), You're Christmas To Me Sam Ryder (2023) and It Can't Be Christmas by Tom Grennan (2024).
Interestingly, of the top 40 streamed Christmas Songs in the UK, only one has a religious element to it and that's Boney M with 'Marys Boy Child' at 37 with the rest mostly about Santa, Christmas Trees and Snowmen with even more songs about the weather than about the baby Jesus which shows that us Brits agree that Christmas is much better when we keep religion well out of it.

St. Andrews Day

Do you know what’s quite interesting about Scotland, kilts, bagpipes, haggis, porridge, whisky and tartan?
None of them is Scottish. Scotland is named after the Scoti, a Celtic tribe from Ireland, who arrived in what the Romans called Caledonia in the fifth or sixth century AD. By the eleventh century they dominated the whole of mainland Scotland.
‘Scots Gaelic’ is actually a dialect of Irish and Kilts were invented by the Irish but the word ‘kilt’ is Danish (kilte op).
The bagpipes are ancient and were probably invented in Central Asia. They are mentioned in the Old Testament (Daniel 3: 5, 10, 15) and in Greek poetry of the fourth century BC. The Romans probably brought them to Britain but the earliest Pictish carvings date from the eighth century AD.
Haggis was an ancient Greek sausage (Aristophanes mentions one exploding in The Clouds in 423 BC) and Oat porridge has been found in the stomachs of 5,000-year-old Neolithic bog bodies in central Europe and Scandinavia.
Whisky was invented in ancient China. It arrived in Ireland before Scotland, first distilled by monks. The word derives from the Irish uisge beatha, from the Latin aqua vitae or ‘water of life’.
The elaborate system of clan tartans is a complete myth stemming from the early nineteenth century. All Highland dress, including what tartan or plaid there was, was banned after the 1745 rebellion. The English garrison regiments started designing their own tartans as an affectation, and to mark the state visit of King George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Queen Victoria encouraged the trend, and it soon became a Victorian craze.

Having said that, the Scots have not been idle.  
Inventions and discoveries include adhesive stamps, the Bank of England, bicycle pedals, Bovril, the breech-loading rifle, the cell nucleus, chloroform, the cloud chamber, colour photography, cornflour, the cure for malaria, the decimal point, electro-magnetism, the Encyclopædia Britannica, finger-printing, the fountain pen, hypnosis, hypodermic syringes, insulin, the kaleidoscope, the Kelvin scale, the lawnmower, lime cordial, logarithms, lorries, marmalade, motor insurance, the MRI scanner, the paddle steamer, paraffin, piano pedals, pneumatic tyres, the postmark, radar, the raincoat, the reflecting telescope, savings banks, the screw propeller, the speedometer, the steam hammer, tarmac, the teleprinter, tubular steel, the typhoid vaccine, the ultrasound scanner, the United States Navy, Universal Standard Time, vacuum flasks, wave-powered electricity generators and wire rope.
Thanks Scotland.

Great Until The Last Bit

Due to their being an estimated septillion stars in the observable universe and the total number significantly higher as it is just the number in the bit of universe we can see, the chances that the Earth is the only planet with life on it is madness and it is assumed alien civilisations do exist but we just haven't found them and by the same token, it is doubtful they have found us so they are not coming all this way to not say hello and just make patterns in wheat fields or stick a probe up the odd drunken rednecks backside.
What i assume also is that they are more advanced than us, we only came up with successfully leaving our Planet's gravity 70 years ago so they could have a massive start on us if we were busy hanging around in trees 6 million years ago and trying to not get getting eaten by a massive Dire Wolf when they managed it but a team of scientists from the UK, US, Sweden and India say they can prove that we are clever enough to track them down.
The international team of researchers have devised a way to search for extraterrestrial megastructures, known as Dyson spheres and say they have  identified seven of these huge things lurking in the Cosmos.
A Dyson sphere is a swarm of objects that orbits around a star to harness it's energy and the team say they have detected the technosignatures from these potential Dyson spheres.
Analysing data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Gaia map of stars, as well as the 2MASS infrared astronomical survey and NASA’s WISE infrared astronomy space telescope to carry out their work, they investigated around 5 million sources to build a catalogue of potential Dyson spheres and after sifting the possible wheat from the chaff: 'Have identified candidates that display anomalous infrared excesses that cannot be attributed to any known natural source of such radiation such as nebulae and background galaxies' the researchers say.
From five million down to seven and the researchers feel confident that these seven are legitimate but then, right at the end they add:  'We acknowledge that there could be other reasons why the group is emitting excess infrared and additional analyses are definitely necessary to unveil the true nature of these sources' which kinda punctures the rest of it.
Bloody spoilsport scientists with their caution and insistence on rigorous testing and peer-reviewing as they continually build up their knowledge of things over centuries and centuries.

Evolutionary Waste

Modern day Humans are the product of thousands of years of evolution so it's no surprise that sometimes we come with a few spare parts which are left overs from our earlier incarnations so what remnants of ancient ancestors have we still got that we don't need and what where they for anyway?  
The Appendix is a small pouch attached to the large intestine which in our early incantation helped digest tough plant matter and acted as a reservoir for beneficial gut bacteria but now the only thing is does is sometimes explode and get hastily removed.
The Coccyx is also sometimes called the Tailbone which is exactly what it is, the remnant of vertebrae that once formed a tail in our mammalian ancestors to hep balance while swinging about tree branched but since we learnt to walk upright, it's just something whose only use is to be difficult to spell and make Microsoft Word underline it when you write about how we don't need it but are stuck with it.
Wisdom Teeth were useful to our larger jawed forefathers as they were ideal for grinding down a tough raw diet of plants and meat but as we now cook and soften our food, our jaws have shrunk but the Wisdom teeth didn't get the memo and still turn up and sometimes have to be surgically removal.
We have have lost most of our body hair but the Arrector Pili Muscles are still inside the hair follicles and where they were once great for contracting and making us appear larger to whatever wanted to eat us for lunch, now when they contract they just give us goosebumps when we are frightened or cold which is a pretty naff thing to have as we already know and dont need our non-existent hair to tell us.  
The Auricular Muscles allowed our earliest ancestors to move their ears to better pinpoint sounds like a dog or cat but since evolution gave us the ability to turn our heads, they just sit there giving some people the ability to wiggle their ears which is a pretty cool party trick to be fair.
In the forearm is the Palmaris Longus Muscle which helped ancestral primates to climb trees and grip branches but since a massive meteor wiped out the dinosaurs and we could come down from the trees without getting trodden on by a Woolly Mammoth, no use but still it remains as a handy source for tendon grafts in surgery apparently.
Back in the day when we were somewhere between being ex-fish and wannabe apes, we had a third eyelid called the Plica Semilunaris which slid across the eye for protection and moisture and though many animals such as birds and reptiles still have them, we have regular eyelids and tears so don't need it so it has shrivelled to that small fold of tissue in the inner corner of the eye.

You're Ai, And You Know You Are

Is nothing safe from the cold, dead hands of artificial intelligence? Certainly not if you’re in the business of trying to win football matches because it's the the game’s newest double act.
It has crept in like Gabriel Magalhães at the back post at a corner kick and is being used in tracking player movement to offering tactical tweaks and has been as common at training grounds as bibs and traffic cones and is now being used by clubs to predict fatigue and even scout kids while they are still trying to grapple with which of Henry VIII's wives lost their heads.
VAR, of course, burst onto the scene and with semi-automated off-sides, it is conspiring to make us celebrate twice, once when he ball hits the back of the net and again once it has been checked for 5 mins to determine the strikers big toe wasn't in an offside position when he prodded it in.
Obviously many workers are concerned that Ai will be taking their jobs and many Employers are pondering on whether to allow the machines who don't need paying, holidays or coffee breaks to take the strain but what about football?
The Seattle Reign head coach, Laura Harvey, admitted that she had used ChatGPT to help determine her team’s tactics, asking it what formation would win them the most games in the National Women's Soccer League  and it spurted out every team in the league and what formation they should play.
They are currently 5th in the 14 team league and last season they finished 13th and having won 10 games so far against their 5 wins last season, it seems Ai may be asked for tactics and suggestions by managers all over so AI isn't going to be put on the Subs bench anytime soon as it turns into a real life version of Football Manager. 

Why Are We Left Or Right?

Interesting question, why do people become leftwing or rightwing?
Personally, i'm not sure i was even aware of a left or right wing ideology when i become 'a lefty', i had my views and later found out that they chimed with the Left but then my parents were both Lefties so it could have been i was raised to have those views from a young age, i also grew up in the era of Margaret Thatcher and her cruel right wing ideology so that probably had an effect also.
Maybe it is nothing to do with nurture and is down to nature as perhaps some people are just drawn to a certain side of an ideology but i lean more towards it being a result of parenting, society and our own experiences or even out of antagonism towards ideological parents and their upbringing.    
I asked someone at the Political Psychology Section at the British Psychological Society and they seemed to think that it is a bit of Nature and Nurture, Nature designates our temperament and our emotional experiences and Nurture which shapes our sensitivities and emotional responses. The strongest emotion, they said, is empathy and how much we empathise with others and the more empathy we hold, the more a person will lean to the left and less empathy often result in leaning more to the right.
They did say that political ideology is not fixed though and as we live our life social tribes,  exposure to other ideas, friends, family, media, teaching, what we read and learn all go into our ideology all mixed with a healthy dash of a private inner sense of what is right and wrong.
Very interesting, i love a bit of Psychology and I am sure they know what they are talking about but i always refer back to a 2013 study published in Psychological Science that found  people with right-wing views are less intelligent than those of us with left wing views.
The British Cohort Study found that right-wingers tend to be less intelligent, have lower reasoning ability and more racist and homophobic views than left-wingers and people with low childhood intelligence tend to grow up to hold right-wing views.
Nice to have it clarified by science and remember if you are unfortunate enough to come across a Right Winger, remember talk slow to them...they are not too bright (or they had right wing parents and therefore little empathy).

 

FOAB: An Apology

 
To all staff,

It is with a heavy heart that I take keyboard in hand to inform you of the resignation of both my parents, the General Father of FOAB, Mr P,  and also the blogs Mother, Mrs P, the Chief Executive Officer of FOAB.
Please rest assured that during this turbulent time for our blog, our commitment to blogging is undimmed.
As you will be aware, the FOAB output has been under intense scrutiny in recent days, following complaints about our Posts from President Donald J Trump.
We always welcome that scrutiny and the opportunity to correct errors which is why i commissioned an investigation of bias within FOAB and found the resulting Memo deeply disturbing as it was found a systemic bias for describing the US president as being as thick as a whole carpenters store of planks of wood as well as being a 'giant Orange toddler', 'Mango Moron' and an 'Apricot coloured Fascist'.
Worse than that, FOAB made repeated mentions of the lies the US President made about his extremely close friendship with the most prolific pedophile in the modern era without explanation that actually, Jeffrey Epstein was friends with him, not the other way around.
There have been suggestions that the collapse in the quality of FOAB has been the result of the owners failure to emphasise many of the benefits of his Fascist and racist policies however it was never my intention that collapses in standards would lead to inaccuracies about people I disgreed with.
Most importantly, nothing could have been further from my thoughts than the idea of offending any Fascist, racists, close friends of sex offenders or even any low IQ right wingers who i disagreed with.
FOAB policies have now changed, and henceforth all mentions of the American President will make it clear that his weird, birds nest hair is actually a good look, that his face is not the unnatural clownish colour of a ripe carrot and that any mention of his being a racist, Hitler loving sex offender with a criminal record is balanced by mentioning him ending so many wars that he even had to make some of the combatants up.  
As a peace offering, I have dispatched to the White House a pair of extra small child's gloves to keep his teeny tiny hands warm and a framed copy of the legal documents pertaining to his various legal cases.

I hope this will bring an end to the matter.

Yours,

Lucy P
Blog Owner

Missing The Snow

Typical. You wait all year for some snow and then the second you head off to warmer climes, it snows.
Every weatherman, weatherlady and weather app is predicting an icy blast is sweeping down the UK from the Arctic next week with temperatures plunging down as far as -8°C as our old friend the Jet Stream shifts downwards and leaving the UK on the colder side of it.    
In the South of the UK it is very rare that we get snow and cold weather warning issued by the the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) covers most of the top half but have warned that this could be slid down to cover further areas next week and some reports do have flurries spreading right down to the south coast of England although not in significant amounts.
The MET Office are advising people to keep an eye on the forecast in their area as it is possible warnings may be issued for snow and ice at times.
Try and stay warm people but also, make snowmen and throw snowballs and just enjoy it.

Is America Great Yet?

 I speak to American journalists a few times a week and i always start with 'Is America Great yet?' to which i get a varying degrees of answers but usually, nah, not yet but i did ask about the $2,000 which each American is going to get as a Tariff Bonus.
To me it sounds like making them pay higher prices for the essential (his claim that other nations would pay was always nonsense) and then giving them something to make up for him making them pay higher prices for the essential things but $2,000 would be gratefully received i guess a because as the Tangerine Tyrant said 'The tariffs are bringing in so much money, a dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone' so get the good China out and toast the Mango Moron.
A fly in the ointment could be that analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale University, reckons that Trump’s tariffs will see the American public pay an additional $200 billion to $300 billion a year and a $2,000 dividend, if it went to all Americans, including children would cost $600 billion which is why the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said that it might not mean that Americans would get a cheque from the government but instead would probably take the form of tax cuts for some.
So what did the Fushia Facist promise would be cheaper for Americans?
He promised that: 'I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One' and specifically mentioned groceries which official data shows rose by 2.7% since he made the promise with the sharpest increases on Coffee (18.9%), Ground beef (12.9%) and Bananas (6.9%) so not so great then.
The price of eggs have gone down though, a dozen large eggs was $4.93 then and are now $3.49 a dozen so omelettes all round but you may want to hold fire if you have an electric cooker because he may have said: 'Under my administration we will be slashing energy and electricity prices by half within 12 months' but unless my maths is very wrong, going from 15.94 cents per kWh in January to 17.62 cents per kWh today isn't halving them.
Cheaper cars and petrol under $2 a gallon was another thing he promised supporters to get prices down on however, the average price of a new car went up from $48,283 to just above $50,000 today and petrol remains stubbornly $1.079 above the $2 figure so you may want to walk to the shops to get those eggs.
So making America great again can be added to ending the Ukraine War on Day one and how he never signed a birthday card for Jeffrey Epstein to the list of things inane and things the Orange Ogre has farted out.

About Time IOC

In everyday life, a man can live as a woman and a woman as a man without to many issues and good luck to them, its none of our business, but when it comes to sporting competitions, that is something which i have always said is a step too far because it seems very unfair that women will be competing against with such a massive biological advantage, especially when athletics spends millions trying to catch drug cheats trying to gain the tiniest of advantages.   
Sport did seem to get itself tangled up in knots over it but maybe all it took was the spectacle of men punching women in the face in Paris in 2024 for the International Olympic Committee to decide it may not be fair after all.
In 2003 the IOC decided that that men who fully transitioned to live as women should be allowed to participate in women’s sport but then later in 2016, softened the rules to say that trans-identifying men could compete in female events as long as they took drugs to lower their testosterone.
Then athletics, swimming, rugby and cycling ruling bodies decided to protect their women’s category, they would based inclusion on biology and the IOC position changed to deciding that each sport could make its own rules and then came Paris 2024.
Then came the 2024 Paris boxing rounds and the inclusion of trans women Imane Khelif and Lin Yu Ting, both of whom were biologically men but took testosterone lowering drugs and both who won gold,
Possibly stung by the backlash of having to defend a man hitting a woman, the IOC commission a report by biologists and athletes and last week they announced that: 'The evidence shows that men retain sporting advantage even if they suppress their testosterone' and the IOC now have a decision they can use to decide who is able to compete.
It amazes me just how complicated this has got because to me, and i am aware that this puts me very much on the opposite side of some people who feel this is unfair to anyone who's gender is different to the one they were born with and as i keep pointing out, you can choose your gender but you can not choose your sex, and no operation or hormone drugs will change the biological facts that a person is XY or XX and that should always be the deciding factor and it shouldn't take a biological woman being punched in the face by a biological man to make other people see it too. 

The End Is Nigh For Keir

It’s as good as over for Keir Starmer. However long he limps on, even if he somehow stumbles to the finish line of the next election, his race is run which is amazing for a Prime Minister with a 174 seat majority and four years left in office, but the Fat Lady is practising her scales and gargling with the Aquafresh.
The maneuvers to replace him have began, despite the denials from those obviously jockeying for position behind him and it is shame because he seems a decent guy, just a decent guy who had a chance to make real change after the previous lot and completely wasted it.
My best guess would be that he will limp around to the May 2026 Local Elections where Labour will get a Royal tonking and he will be thanked for his services and ushered away while the Labour Party members put a cross next to who they want to replace him and give the Country it's 7th Prime Minister in just over a decade.
Count them, David Cameron quit after disastrously taking us out of the EU by accident, Theresa May gambled on an election to improve her Parliamentary majority and found herself with a smaller one, Boris Johnson treated Downing Street like a nightclub while ordering everyone else to stay at home, Liz Truss bankrupt the nation in just 44 days and was outlived by a lettuce,  Rishi Sunak was so weak within his party that he sought a dissolution of Parliament months before he had to and was duly toppled by Keir Starmer who could fall into a puddle and make the puddle even wetter.
The question should be then why are the crop of recent British Prime Ministers so terrible at their job?
Some will point to the UK never really recovering from the 2008 Financial crash and there is some truth in that and the things that followed, Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine War only made things worse but many of the events which saw the previous PM's removed were nothing to do with any of them things and were self inflicted mistakes so we can hardly blame them.
Others point to the constant scrutiny by 24 hour news and social media but you would assume that would make them less likely to do stupid things and probably accounts for Keir Starmer who seems much more attuned to the way the wind is blowing, and then doing the required contortions to try and bend as many ways as possible, attempting to try and please all the people all the time.       
Maybe, we as a population, are now just ungovernable with the way we have split into not just left and right but those sides have split into smaller factions which leaves the historical big boys such as Labour and Conservatives, out on a limb with traditional Labour voters breaking away to the Lib Dems, Greens and Your Party and the Tories being cut in half by Reform.
I would guess that the days of one party rule in the UK is over and from now on it will be coalition parties making up the Government but that brings it own problems as deals are hashed out and agreements made but the most galling thing is every MP will tell you they entered politics to make things better, but when they got the chance to actually do it, all of the last 7, to quote one of them, spaffed it up the wall.

Insanity That We Did Nothing

Former US vice-president Al Gore told UN delegates at the Cop30 meeting in Brazil that :'It is literally insane that we are allowing global heating to continue' and according to a report from the Climate Action Tracker, the World is on track for a catastrophic 2.6C temperature rise.
To put that into context, at the mid 19th Century, when the Industrial Revolution really took off, the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was 280ppm while today it stands at 425ppm which is the concentration last seen around 4.6 million years ago in the Pliocene Epoch.   
You may hear people (generally the ones with a vested interest to play it all down) say the the atmosphere is always changing and that is true, it does but by humans pumping our poison into the atmosphere it has taken 250 years to go from 280ppm to 425ppm which is many times faster than it increasing this much naturally, ice cores showing it taking tens of thousands of years to match the current human-caused rate.
The rapid pace of the modern increase means that the current human civilization is experiencing conditions never before seen in its existence,  and since the mid 19th Century, global temperatures have risen by 1.3C and Climate Change is taking a strong grip with fiercer storms, wildfires, droughts, floods and other calamities so it is a scary thought what a doubling of this will unleash on our future generations.
Al Gore then is right to say it is literally insane to allow it to happen but then it shouldn't come as a surprise because environmentalists and climate scientists have been telling us for decades and decades what will happen if we don't roll back the CO2, and yet the people who could do something did nothing and here we are and if you think this is bad, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Trump V The BBC

The BBC is finding itself in the middle of the News cycle rather than merely reporting on it and all the usual suspects who would benefit from the BBC no longer being here are wetting their pants in all the excitement.  
The fact is the Panorama edit where they spliced together two comments to make it seem like one long comment was bad and the highest-level scalps have fallen and a producer and editor will be promptly joining them while the US president is threatening to sue it for $1bn.
So why, we must wonder, has the editing of a clip in a documentary that aired in another country, which no one noticed at the time and shortly before he won a Presidential election victory, vexed Trump quite so much?
Throw into the mix that targetting any media that challenges his nonsense utterings to try and silence them is his modus operandi, the BBC reaches more than 25% of Americans (85 million people) and 118 million web visits a month so that is a lot of voters who have access to whatever either the weak US media outlets or the right wings one, are not saying which he would rather they not hear at all.
The best part is the letter he sent to the BBC basing part of his claim on 'reputational damage', which we must ask how much of a reputation has a renown liar who has a recent criminal conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records in a case where he paid hush money to a porn star and a civil case where he was found to have sexually abused a woman and been ordered to pay her $83m while admitting he 'grabbed women by the pussy' so not a lot of reputation left i would assume.
His reputation as the most corrupt, dishonest, and dishonourable man to ever occupy the White House, yes that reputation i can believe.
That reputation while his press office spews out lies on an industrial scale on a daily basis. He has an intent to undermine news organisations in the US and he is trying to silence any criticism of him here now also.
If he wants a fight, by God, we should give him one and the next Panorama episode should concentrate on all his outrageous lies, extra marital sexual shenanigans and a deep dive into the Epstein Files, let's see if he is so keen to go to court to defend them shall we.

Budget Looming

It's the budget on the 26th November but thankfully i am not going to be here because from the 19th November until the 4th December I will be bobbing around in the East Atlantic Ocean on a huge cruise ship while the industrial strength cleaner is employed to clean the fan of whatever Rachel Reeves has hit it with.
I do have some sympathy with the Labour predicament because the previous Conservative administration left her an awful legacy of huge Government debt, a massive blackhole of £20bn-£40bn worth of 'promises' they made and stuck in an envelope for them to pick up and services so ideologically run down over 14 years that it would be almost impossible to just get it back to where it was with one budget and one 5 year administration.
At the last budget, the Chancellor delivered an estimated £40bn of tax rises and financial experts seem to think that this time she is likely to need to raise a further £26bn to get the UK's public finances in order, and that is the crunch, it is not to raise tax to drastically improve the public finances, but just to bring them up to a standard where we have enough public and Civil Servants to ensure the country runs correctly and to fund the NHS correctly.    
Obviously she and Labour are going to get the blame for whatever she does, the Conservatives are already harping that they were correct when they said during the election campaign that Labour would put taxes up and they are right, but right because they are going to have to in order to pick up the dreadful slack that the Tories left them.
Unfortunately, Labour didn't do themselves any favours by immediately cutting the winter fuel allowance which opened them up to accusation so going after the pensioners and they were quite rightly forced to backtrack on that idea as well as climbing down on reducing benefits to avoid a revolt from their own back-benchers.   
Following a pre-Budget press conference last week where the Chancellor never really told us anything but refused to rule out breaking their manifesto pledge to not increase Income Tax, National Insurance or VAT which would realy pout her under the4 cosh if she did so i would like to think was just kite flying to see what the reaction would be if she did do it,  the wise money seems tro be on things such as a Wealth Tax, Mansion Tax, Exit Tax and even the merging of National Insurance and Income Tax which someone with a better calculator than me would raise approximately £33bn so i'm guessing that is where she will be looking.
Anyway, i will not be here and will be avidly avoiding it and will have no phone access until i am back on the 4th December, hopefully with a sun tan, a Cruise belly and a photo reel on my phone to bore people with into the New Year. Enjoy.

So You Are Going To Trump's America...

Where America once said 'Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to break free', it has added...'oh and the passwords to all of your electronic devices so we can lock your sorry arses up' because stories abound about travellers to the USA having their devices searched.
Even white people turning up at Trump's American borders have been detained, one French Scientist was denied entry to the US recently after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration's research policy and was accused of writings: 'That reflect hatred toward Trump and can be described as terrorism' and he was promptly sent back to France on the next plane.
The US Customs and Border Protection, blubbed in a statement: 'As part of their critical national security mission, CBP officers routinely determine admissibility of foreign nationals using longstanding US immigration law. If an individual has material discovered on their electronic media that raises flags during an inspection, it can result in further analysis' so if you want to go to the USA, a Security expert has given me details on how to prepare your machines first.

1 - Do not go to the USA, simply stay home and leave your phone the way it is, nice and easy and you won't risk ending up being bundled into the back of an ICE van.
2 - Decide before you go if you are going to refuse to hand over passwords to your devices (might look suspicious) or of you will let them look at your devices (which could be possibly worse).
3 - Whatever you decide encrypt your data then turn off face ID and fingerprint unlocking
4 - Delete all anti Trump social media and blog sites like this one
5 - Set up face social media accounts where you just share cat videos
6 - Get a burner phone instead

As a rule, if you are reading this or know me personally then you are probably pretty dubious in their eyes anyway, what with all us lefties being woke, vegan, Israel hating, tree hugging climate complainers so it's best to assume you will get taken aside and questioned anyway.
Obviously the drawback of just not taking your phone is that you can't then be added to any top-secret group chat about bombing middle eastern countries but if it keeps you out of an  El Salvadorian prison then that's a decent trade off.

Why Do We Love Christmas So Much?

The Christmas TV Adverts are starting to fill our screens and already i think i have found my favourite for the year and it comes from Supermarket Lidl who have come up with an absolute corker which pretty much sums up everything i love about Christmas.
We see a young girl who questions what makes Christmas special as she watches people sharing moments of kindness, rather than focusing on traditional Christmas indulgence or materialism and has an absolute killer of a pay off line.
She asks the question, 'Why do we love Christmas so much?' and wonders if it's because maybe everyone's a bit less grumpy and how it is not about 'me, me, me' but more about 'us' and when time isn't about money anymore, its just time and instead of thinking what we want, we wonder what someone else might like and decides that: 'I think we all love Christmas so much because we all want to make each other feel more loved'.
And then the line with which i wholeheartedly agree with....'I think everyday has a lot to learn from Christmas.'
Just brilliant and i hope whichever advertising bod came up with it has been given a few days off as reward to go Christmas shopping and a massive hamper, from Lidl of course. 

Welcome To Arsenal Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani is having a great November because not only has he just added 'Mayor of New York' to his CV, but his Football team also sit top of the Premier League.
Social Media posts from 2011 celebrating Robin Van Persie and having a moan about Granit Xhaka starting in the team have resurfaced with Mamdani spouting forth on all things Gunners so he isn't a Johnny come lately to the red side of North London and another Political Arsenal fan, Jeremy Corbyn, was pictured posing with a 'North London 4 Zohran' Arsenal football shirt.
Keir Starmer is also a fan of the mighty Gunners but before you start thinking supporting Arsenal is a left wing thing, Conservative Party members Priti Patel and James Cleverly are also declared supporters and they are as left wing as William Saliba.
Arsenal do have some very famous fans such as Mick Jagger, Lewis Hamilton, Rihanna, Jay-Z, and actors like Colin Firth, Idris Elba, and Danny DeVito as well as Roger Daltry, Kevin Costner, Robert Pattinson, David Schwimmer and it was rumoured that Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mother were both big fans.
On the 'You sure you wouldn't prefer Tottenham?' list is Piers Morgan and Osama Bin Laden who was a regular at Highbury before he took his talents for hiding in caves to Afghanistan but that is the best thing about the Arsenal, we accept anyone as the transfer of Willian and Francis Jeffers showed.
As for Mamdani's politics, i keep hearing he is a Socialist so we can fully expect him to be sat with Starmer at the Emirates and helpfully passing on tips on how Socialism should work, and maybe some to Gabriel Martinelli, our very own exceptional left winger.

Remember Remember....

Remember, remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot and in the UK we do remember because tonight is not a night to have a peaceful kip because it is going to be non stop fireworks whizzing around and old sofa's and cupboards set on fire in fields.  
The story of Guy Fawkes is a strange one, firstly he wasn't even called Guy but Guido and everybody hated the Catholics at that time because they seemed to think that they were always plotting something which in this case they were because Fawkes was caught red handed under the Houses of Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder ready to blow up King James I and it would have worked if one of his co-conspirators hadn't written to his Catholic MP to tell him to avoid the Commons that day and who told everyone and got Fawkes caught.  
Fawkes was arrested and sentenced to death but as he was being taken to the gallows, he made the worst escape attempt ever and fell off and broke his neck, killing himself in the process.
17th Century justice being what it was, the Government thought he isn't getting away with that and had his genitals removed and burnt before quartering him between four horses and gutted anyway.
Ever since then, November 5th was decreed the day where we celebrate the Kings safe escape from being launched through the roof of the Houses of Parliament but due to Health and Safety gone mad, we can no longer burn real Catholics and have to make do with burning effigies instead while going 'ooh', 'aah' and 'whee' at a few overpriced fireworks and watch a teddy bear in a Donald Trump mask make the ultimate sacrifice.

Dick, Bush And Colon

There wasn't much amusing about the Iraq War but the fact that it was bought to us courtesy of a Dick, a Bush and a Colon (Colin actually but for some reason Americans pronounce it like the part connected to the poop chute) was usually enough to bring a wry smile to the fact that all three lied their way to a massive war in the Middle East.
Colin Powell died a few years ago and while Donald Rumsfeld (who disappointingly didn't have a rude sounding name) has also turned up his toes and now the 84 year old Dicky Cheney has joined him because the last man you would want to go quail shooting with has confirmed the Billy Joel lyrics that only the good die young.
One of the main architects of the War on Iraq and Afghanistan, the last remaining of the quartet, George W Bush, said that: 'The death of Richard B. Cheney is a loss to the nation and a sorrow to his friends. Laura and I will remember Dick Cheney for the decent, honorable man that he was. History will remember him as among the finest' which makes me wonder if there was another Dick Cheney because the one i remember  wasn’t just a driving force in the wars as well as championing torture, but pushed both the Iraq WMD lie and the Saddam is mates with-Al-Qaeda falsehood which resulted in millions of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers dying.
So with Dick and Colon gone as well as the miserably unfunnily named Donald Rumsfeld, at least Bush had the decency to keep his war mongering head down and not go swanning around like Tony Blair who, to be fair, had to avoid a few shoes and eggs thrown at him when he was last seen in public but there you have it, another completely horror of a person thankfully off the face of the Planet but while we can only hope that the war criminals of today (Netanyahu, Putin, Al Assad etc) don’t get to live quite so comfortably as Cheney did, his friend who's face he mistook for a quail and blasted him with a shotgun, might be relieved.

Follow The Money

Just as Labour pushes on with it's policies of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the UK’s two main rightwing opposition parties are openly questioning was is long-settled climate science with Nigel Farages' Reform party saying they will cancel it if they are elected and the Conservative Party policy is now to suspend it until later.
As 71% of of the British Public support Net Zero and are concerned about the climate crisis, they do seem to be battling their own voters but with extreme weather really ramping up globally, how did we get here?
It was actually the Conservatives under David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson who did most to bring about Net Zero and Labour are just continuing the policies they put in place and as for Reform, deputy Richard Tice was absolutely taken to the cleaners by everyone when he said that there was no evidence that humans putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere changes the climate so he is obviously on top of things and really shouldn't be listened to.
So why are the two right wing parties swimming against the tide to try and dismiss something we can literally see happening with our own eyes?
It might be noting that both are doing very well financially out of playing down Climate Change with both Reform and the Conservatives backed by prominent donors and supporters with a climate-denying outlook.
Kemi Badenoch and her family recently spent a week as guests of the donor Neil Record, who chairs Net Zero Watch, an offshoot of the UK’s main climate sceptic thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and handed Badenoch £10,000 for her campaign to become Tory leader and the Conservative Party has received millions of pounds in donations from individuals and entities such as the GWPF linked to high-pollution industries such as fossil fuels, aviation, and construction.
One of the biggest donors to Reform is the shipping magnate Terence Mordaunt, a trustee of the GWPF and now head of First Corporate Shipping who has given hundreds of thousands of pounds to Reform but analysis of donors listed in the Parliament donor book show that 92% of Reform's funding came from individuals or companies with polluting interests or those who question climate change.    
Follow the money and it is obvious why both parties are bizarrely ranting against Climate Change policies but as the majority worry about Climate Change, both parties are on a collision course with not just the British public but the laws of physics because Mother Nature won't care as she bakes, floods and throws more and more extreme weather at us.
Still, the growing Conservative and Reform bank balances will soften the blow for them i'm sure.

Internet Connected What??

I gave our son my old coffee machine a while ago but it started to make strange noises whilst doing its coffee thing so we went to the coffee machine shop to inquire about buying a new one and they all looked a bit flimsier and had a lot more buttons and some included WiFi and Bluetooth.
I asked the nice shop salesman why it would need WiFi and Bluetooth and he said it was so it could be updated over the internet which seemed a bit mad so we went for one which didn't come with an app but i later heard of something which was even madder, so much i thought it was a spoof at first, an internet connected smart mattress.
There was a Cybersecurity expert and he was talking about security concerns about the firmware in the mattress which allowed backdoor access and full arbitrary code execution capabilities making the mattress a disastrously unsafe device to keep on a home network...or something like that because i was stuck on...there's an internet connected mattress??? WTF???
Nope it was not a wind up, there really are people who pay £2,000 for the mattress and a subscription of £17 per month for  'bed control and bed monitoring and sleep-enhancing features' which include heat control, automatic firmness adjustments and other settings to optimize your sleep surface through the use of sleep tracking sensors.
Brilliantly, during the major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage last week the people who actually shelled out for a internet connected mattress found that the lack of internet caused chaos in bedrooms across the UK because the mattress designers didn't think to include an off switch and were stuck at high temperatures and odd positions in the night because something they do if you don't pay the subscription fee, (or disconnect it from the internet) is turn to such an angle to be unusable.
So many questions but mostly, what genius pays £2000 for a mattress that monitors everything that you do in it and then holds you hostage and turns completely useless if you don't pay the subscription fee, or the internet blinks off?