Special Guest Blogger: Captain Robert Jenkins

Ears are very useful things. You can hear with them, hang spectacles from them and also stick jewellery in them but mine became one of the most famous ears in history because i used my ear to start a goddamn war.
The British and the Spanish were having a bit of a ding dong, they were swiping their gold from South America and we were stopping them when they sailed it across the Atlantic back to Spain.
In 1729 the Spanish were getting mightily ticked off with us doing that and demanded stop and search rights on all British vessels as they said we were nicking their gold from their vessels, which we were but we were not going to admit to it,  and that was like a fuse inching its way towards a powder keg and when the British brig Rebecca was boarded by the Spanish coastguard boat La Isabela we got into a fight and my ear was cut clean off by a Spanish commander who threw it at me and said that he would do the same to the King if he ever got his hands on him.
I was ordered to testify before Parliament and I took along the severed ear as part of the hearing and as the Spanish seadogs had hurled insults at Britain’s honour which was a clear provocation to war, and because they had lopped off my ear, the slur against the King could not go unanswered so Britain called it the Battle of Jenkins Ear and declared war on Spain and British warships attacked a Spanish port in Venezuela and to be extra sneaky, the British squadron entered the Venezuelan harbour while flying Spanish flags.
The Spanish commander of its fleet was a one eyed, one armed and one legged veteran which makes it even worse that they gave our lads a right kicking but my ear goes down as the most famous body part to start a war.

Special Guest Blogger: Diana Barrymore

With hindsight I had it all, the famous name, wealth and career should have not been just a silver spoon but the whole cutlery drawer but I didn't have the best example in my father, John Barrymore.
You think you got embarrassing parents? When I was 13 my dad took me and my 17 year old friend for an exciting day out but he spent the whole day flirting with her before copping off with, drinking too much and passing out in the car.
He was a jerk but he was a famous jerk and I received no shortage of media attention and  job offers and Hollywood came calling but my Mum was worried as she seemed to think there was some sort of curse on the family but i promised my Mum I would not let the industry turn me into a monster like my dad.
I did move in with him for a short time in Hollywood but when I arrived home one day and found him in a drunken stupor with a group of women, I said he was a disgusting and drunken old fool and left.
As it turned out they were the last words i spoke to him as a few weeks later he died of liver and kidney failure but by now I was 21 and my star was rising and opportunities and i did what any 21 year old with fame and money would do, i partied hard and dated every eligible (and ineligible) man in Hollywood which my then husband didn't take too well and he walked out.
Being an actress, i hatched the perfect plan to get him back and faked an overdose with sleeping pills but i must have been a better actress than i thought because he not only believed it but held me down while a doctor  pumped my stomach.
My fall from grace was about the same time as i got a reputation for being awkward and usually full of alcohol and after six films the roles dried up but i did marry a hot Tennis Player but things really hit bottom when after a night of drinking, we got pulled over by the cops and i took a swing at one which they didn’t take very well and spent the night behind bars and the next day on the front page of every newspaper.
Movies and Hollywood was out but i got offered a TV Talk Show, The Diana Barrymore Show, but on the day of filming I have one little drink to clam my nerves, then a dozen more and when i slurred and stumbled my way into the studio for filming, the fact that The Diana Barrymore Show became The Faye Emerson Show tells you what happened.
I was only 38 when i died from an accidental drug overdose and maybe mum was right and the family name is cursed but i hear that my niece, Drew, is now a Hollywood actress, wonder how that is working out for her?

21st Century Problems

When i began driving i had an Ordnance Survey A-Z map in my glove box but relied pretty much completely on road signs and pulling up next to passers by and asking where such and such was but since Sat Navs became a major thing around the late 90's my navigation to strange and new places have been fully turning when the little voice in front of me tells me to until it informs me I am at my destination.
As child my memories were of parents pulling into a Motorway lay-by and unfolding a map on the bonnet and a discussion taking place while us kids sat in the back of the car and dropped sticky sweet wrappers on the floor and as an adult i still did the sweet wrapper thing but the A-Z never saw the light of day until recently when I took a look at it and noticed it was published in 1984 meaning hardly any of it was relevant now anyway.
I know that with the increase of technology, us humans are losing our skills and I use Sat Navs to get to the place I want to get to and then the Maps on my phone to hone in on the actual site and I know that without either, a dead battery or a GPS malfunction, I would get  utterly and hopelessly lost immediately.
In 2020, neuroscientists based at McGill University in Montreal published research suggesting that found: 'People with greater lifetime GPS experience have worse spatial memory and a decline in the Hippocampus' which is quite important because that's the part of the brain that deals with navigation.
Another report i vaguely remember (the memory part of the brain is increasingly getting foggier also) found that among London taxi drivers, the need to memorise so many geographical details was found to cause it to increase it's size so stands to reason that to not use it decreases it.
I have mentioned before the decline in students spelling and grammar and I fully blame spellcheck and the grammar checker on word processing applications and that only becomes noticeable when neither are available.
I am sure if I sit down and think about it harder I could come up with many more 21st Century problems where technology has erased the human processes we took for granted but whatever bit of my brain which works that out is obviously on the blip as all i can think about now is where can I charge my phone up as it's on 24% and i'm going out soon.

Why The Left Rocks

The left and right disagree on most things but the one area where i confidently feel the left knocks the right into a cocked hat is musically.
The entire hippy philosophy of the 60s was a left wing movement, likewise the punk movement of the 70's and it's grown up sibling of the 90's Grunge.
On the left we are proud to be represented by the likes of Bob Dylan, U2, Carter USM, The Beatles, Nirvana, Guns N Roses, Tom Petty, REM, Green Day, Nirvana/Foo Fighters, The Clash and Morrissey amongst others.
Guns n Roses 'Civil War' is still the tip of my best personal antiwar chart (I also rate Slash as the best guitarist ever which always causes controversy) and Use Your Illusions has been in my cars sound system for way to long.
I assumed I just liked Punk because it was fast and energetic and sounded good with it's three minute riffs but I guess as almost all Punk had an ideological message behind it, it could have seeped into my young brain on some level but I have come across reports and surveys that show that people associating themselves with certain political identities were more likely to have a liking for a certain genre of music with only Country being liked by people with a right wing outlook but if you walk around in Snakeskin boots and wearing a Stetson hat and a massive belt buckle then you obviously don't care too much about what people think of your political, musical or fashion sense.
To be honest you can't swing a cat without hitting songs espousing left-wing ideals that oppose various current political regimes, reject war or call for equality to assorted oppressed groups but even with the thickest of rose-coloured glasses the right wing tune-smiths can't extract an acceptable amount of lyrics from their ideology or put together three minutes worth of song about right wing luminaries such as Margaret Thatcher, Donald Trump or Hitler, mainly because lyrics about smaller Government, free markets and less immigration is not a toe-tapper.
As for the right, all i could find for them was Rod Stewart, Phil Collins, Destiny's Child, Eric Clapton and the social commentary of rap music.
I am sure that there are some i have forgotten (Henri Rollins, Sex Pistols, System Of A Down) and some i have tried to forget (George Michael), but looking at the list, i would definitely say that as well as ideologically and morally, musically the left rocks!!

Special Guest Blogger: Jan Pieterszoon Coen

The British had the East India Company but us Netherlanders had the rival Dutch East India Company  and some may say there have been relative goodies and baddies but to many when it came to the British and the Dutch, it was baddies versus baddies.
I ended the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands in Indonesia by eliminating most of the local population by slaughtering them or selling them as slaves.
We wanted exclusive rights to the precious nutmeg that came from the islands, but the natives wanted the freedom to not be killed and to sell on the open market since the English were offering more.
My plan was to subjugate Banda and populate it with other people and by subjugate i obviously meant eliminate and the other people were our own people, they call it genocide today but this was a time of Empire building and our motto was:  'Despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us’ or  sorry to slash, shoot, burn and hang you, mate, but it’s what God wants so stop whinging and keep still when i separate your head from your shoulders.
As well as denuding eastern peoples of their spices, the Dutch East India Company robbed them of rich artifacts and cultural treasures. We were also adept at engineering mass famines and I depopulated the Banda Islands to such a degree that of around fifteen thousand original residents, only a thousand remained by the end, with the rest dead, exiled or taken as slaves although quite a few unsportingly jumped to their deaths from the cliffs rather than fall into our hands.
Not surprisingly, our people were suddenly short of workers so we imported slaves from China and India to labour on the plantations alongside the few remaining Banda people who had been enslaved.
I eventually died of cholera, but i was revered as a hero of the Dutch with the usual statues, streets and even a town named after me therefore proving that the late 16th and early 17th Centuries were a very good time to be an utter douchebag.

The Reason Trump Is Keen To Let Russia Keep Ukrainian Land

Donald Trump has a weird bromance with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and two former KGB officers recently claimed Trump was recruited in Moscow in 1987 and given the codename 'Krasnov' which would explain why he has been soft on the aggressor in Ukraine and been tough on the victim and I always had a sneaking feeling it was due to his previous impeachment for: 'soliciting assistance from a foreign country'.
That foreign country was Ukraine and It all centred around a telephone call Trump had with the then new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, where he pressured the Ukrainian to investigate the Biden's family's business dealings and then removed the conversation from the computer system that is typically used for such records of calls with foreign leaders.
The President suspended military aid to Ukraine in order to incentivize the country’s officials to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, asking 'for a favour' and saying: 'We do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing', adding the US 'has been very, very good to Ukraine'.
Turned out that maybe a disliking for the man who was involved in his impeachment isn't just the reason for him so obviously siding with Russia as according to diplomats at the Saudi Arabia meeting a few weeks ago, Russia has proposed to the Trump administration a potential agreement under which the United States would gain some ownership of rare earth minerals and other valuable metals in parts of Ukraine presently controlled by the Russian military.
With Zelenskyy reusing to entertain a similar deal where Trump gets his hands on the rare Earth Minerals in Ukraine, Russia discussed with U.S. officials access to minerals in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia, both of which Russia declared it had annexed in 2022 and which Trump is urging Zelenskyy to give up in his warped peace deal.
Trump has suggested he is open to dealing with Russia, saying: 'We’re trying to do some economic development deals. They have a lot of things that we want. You know, they have massive rare earth. It’s ... very large. ...If we could do that, I think it would be a very good thing for world peace and lasting peace'. Trump added: 'If we could do some economic development in terms of Russia and getting things that we want, something like that would be possible'.
Putin said in an interview with Russian state television that he is open to offering the United States access to rare minerals in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine, as well as in Russia.
Explains why Agent Krasnov is so keen to see Ukraine give up the 20% of the land stolen from it by Russia, he profits from it.

Online Safety Bill

This could get interesting because Ofcom have announced measures to protect children online.
The UK Communications regulator has brought in more than 40 new rules for tech firms, called The Online Safety Act, which include apps and sites must filter out harmful content from children’s feeds and have effective age checks so they can identify those under 18, must quickly tackle harmful content such as such as violent, hateful or abusive material, make it easier for children to report content such as pornography, self-harm, suicide and eating disorders and have a named executive responsible for children’s safety.
From 25 July, sites and apps covered by the code need to implement those changes  or risk being found guilty of breaching the act which can be fines of up to £18m or 10% of global revenue or in the case of repeat offending, Ofcom can prevent the site or app from being available in the UK and senior managers at tech firms will also be criminally liable and could face up to two years in jail if they ignore enforcement notices from Ofcom.
The Molly Rose Foundation, established by the family of Molly Russell who was a British teenager who took her own life after viewing harmful online content, believes the measures do not go far enough and the Child Protection Charity, The NSPCC described the measures as a: 'major step forward'.
The Trump Government, currently in league with the Tech Companies, are expected to challenge Ofcom over the act’s impact on freedom of expression but the UK Government bacxk the Ofcom ruling and the science, innovation and technology secretary, Peter Kyle, said this morning that: 'Tech firms must adhere to British laws if they are to operate in the UK'.
Ofcom are not backward in banning media it deems outside of its law from operating in the UK, Fox News and Russia Today have both been removed from British Televsions as bias and unbalanced and GB News has been a regular recipient of fines for breaching it laws so maybe, finally, the US Tech Firms will be bought to heel and forced to take some responsibility which may well spark a few more Safety Acts to tame them in other countries.

Special Guest Blogger: Angel Gadreel

 
Being an Angel isn't all about sitting on clouds and playing harps. One day the big guy came over to me and said: 'I have just made the first man and woman and I want you to Guard them in my Garden. Don't let anyone in' he said and i stood there all keen and sharp at the Northern Gate and practised the 'your names not down, your not coming in' speech and all went well until Lucifer turned up.
The sneaky bugger conjured up stars and threw them around in front of me as and they darted about like demented fireflies, one of his  minions  grabbed me from behind while he sneaked into the Garden of Eden and...well you know the rest, the fall on mankind and all that and my punishment was to be not only lose my job to that suck-up Uriel but be shunned by my other Angel colleagues.
Being an Angelic failure is not much fun so i begged the big man for another job to prove i was not a complete dullard and he took me on as a Watcher, tasked with observing and guiding mankind with my station being the pathway of communion between humanity and the European-based Gods, such as the Greek and Germanic gods.
That's how I met the very hot Greek Titan Leto and to cut a long story short, we eloped together but the problem with having an omnipresent boss who sees everything is exactly that he sees everything and i was busted as was my fellow watchers who had been down Earth bonking humans and making human-angel hybrids.
This time i was banished from Heaven and thrown into Sheol,  think of a Hell holding pen, for eternity as well as being written out of the BIble until a few of my old Watcher pals freed me and now here we sit not obeying the man upstairs or the guy downstairs and just bumbling along keeping to ourselves and not annoying nobody.
So i'm sorry for the whole fall of mankind thing but i'm sure things will turn out okay for you all, just ignore any talking snakes.

One Pope Out, Another One In

Following Pope Francis's death, the papal conclave will elect a new pope and the favourites are the Italians Pietro Parolin and Matteo Zuppi but the race to the Vatican to become Gods mouthpiece also includes a Portuguese, an Hungarian and a Spaniard.  
Although we flipped the Catholic Church the finger almost 500 years ago, respectfully the Church of England waffled something about God and Churches but i lost interest to be honest, Catholic people are normally dependable in that their views are set out for them and they just follow them slavishly so a priest tells them they hate gays, abortion is wrong, women should not become Priests and unless you devote yourself to God, you have a snowball in Hell's chance of getting through the Pearly gates.
Then, along came Pope Francis and he sends their head spinning by not hating gays, saying the Church needs more women involved, divorce is okay, abortion is a decision for the mother not the Church and Atheists can get into Heaven as God would forgive their unbelief.
Once upon a time you knew where Catholics stood on their beliefs, circa 1450, but Francis did seem to at least try and drag them into the modern age but then he had to really because religion is increasingly obsolete and irrelevant today and the religious money spinner was going the way of the Dodo.
When he was alive I really didn't take much notice of him but my Papal highlight was when Donald Trump and his strange family met Pope Francis.
The Pope made no secret that he really disliked Trump and never tried to hide it by keeping his sulky glum face on during his entire visit and even in the official photo. Nice one Pope.

Special Guest Blogger: Josephine Garis Cochran

Take a look around you. Every object that you see (not the stuff that just grew from nature obviously) had to be invented by someone. Things that you have been using every day since you were little didn't exist until someone had an idea and made it into something.
Most of these inventors' names have not stayed in the public's consciousness, though. For every Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell, there are countless inventors whom no one has heard of, such as me.
I invented the Dishwasher but it wasn't to make doing the dishes easier, its main purpose was to reduce the number of breakages caused by my clumsy servants.
As the daughter of a civil engineer and  the great- granddaughter of John Fitch, the inventor of the steamboat, my main problem in life was worrying about the maids chipping my precious china which had been in the family since the seventeenth century.
This enraged me so much that one night after i spotted yet more chips in the plates one evening I dismissed all the servants and did the damned dishes myself.
In my defence, this did come with the realisation of just what an awful job washing up was so I looked around for a machine which could do it for me, didn't find one so decided to invent one myself.
When my husband William died and left me heavily in debt, I got serious and with the help of an engineer friend, designed the machine in our woodshed and despite being crude and cumbersome it was effective and we were able to able to wash and dry 200 dishes in two minutes.
I showed it off at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and won first prize for the best mechanical construction for durability and adaptation' and sold them at $250 each to hotels and restaurants.
So the first practical dishwasher was actually invented to wash dishes more often than a women who couldn't be arsed to.

Boycott USA Working

When it comes to Donald Trump, the UK seems to be playing a game of say the right things to placate the big orange baby while trying to snuggle back up to the EU but i know politicians are saying one thing, but consumers are not quite so diplomatic and have been boycotting all things American.
'Boycott USA' messages and searches have been trending on social media and search engines, with users sharing advice on brands and products to avoid and while the people of Ireland and Scotland have been vandalising his golf courses, his close ally Elon Musk has seen protests at Tesla showrooms across Europe with Tesla cars vandalised and even set on fire in some cases while sales have slumped.
Denmark’s biggest retailer, Salling Group, has given the price label of all European products a black star, so consumers know which are US goods to avoid and in Canada shoppers are turning US products upside down so it’s easier for fellow shoppers to spot and avoid them.
The Worldwide boycott of all things American does seem to be hitting the share price of some its biggest hitter, the Trading Economics shows the prices on April 2nd when Trump announced the Tariffs and the cost as of yesterday and oh dear, its not good reading if you are a shareholder in the following companies:

Alphabet - (Google/Youtube/Blogger) Was 164.69  and now 153.00
Amazon - Was 196.02 and now 173.13
Apple -  Was 22..67 and now 197.25
Burger King - Was 96.08 and now 87.56
Meta - Was 588.58 and now 502.50
Microsoft - Was 389 and now 368.16
Mcdonald's - Was 315 and now 311.00
Tesla - Was 280.92 and now 240.89
Nike - Was 65.26 and now 55.80
Harley Davidson - Was 25.37 and now 22.10

Just for completeness and because Americans seem obsessed by it, the U.S. egg prices went from $5.51 for a dozen on 2nd April to a new record-high of $6.23 yesterday.
Can see why Trump is now backtracking on the Tariffs and why all the tech industry, which was so visible at the inauguration, are now keeping their heads down but don't worry billionaires because only another 45 months of his presidency left to go.  

400/28..Carry The 1 Every Leap Year...

Ever since we began counting days we seem to have failed to get a full grasp on the calendar, adding the odd days here and even losing eleven of them at one point so what we have now is a year of 52 weeks split into months of 4 weeks 3 days, or 4 weeks 2 days one or 4 weeks exactly or 4 weeks and 1 day every four years which seems overly complicated especially if you don't know the '31 Days have September' poem.
How we divide up days, months, and years has been tinkered with over the years and many people have come up with ideas of how to simplify the passing of time such as he 1963 idea where the year is divided into five 73-day seasons which was silly and obviously quite rightly ignored.
In the late-1990s Swatch introduced Internet Time , a digital metric-based on time zones where instead of hours and minutes, days were divided into beats with each lasting 1 minute and 26.4 seconds but again, it went away with other 90s ideas such as Tamagotchi's and  Britney Spears singing career.
The Mayan Long Count Calendar was suggested but it ended on December 21, 2012 with doomsday predictions and the end of life on Earth (spoiler: It never happened) and in the 1950's a bunch of Americans tried to apologise for the Nuclear Bomb and the future career of Seinfeld but creating The World Calendar with the year split into 4 quarters, each with 91 days and the League of Nations took a proper hard look at it but the Religious leaders poo-pooed it as it would disrupt weekly worship.
Stalin had a go with his The Soviet Revolutionary Calendar which had a five day week and no weekends but after some (very brave) workers complained he changed it to a six day week before quietly reinstating the 7-day week and to prove that Revolutions are a ghreat time to make calendar changes, the French dreamt up the Republican Calendar which had 12 months of three 10-day weeks and decimal time so 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute but the French ignored it and Napoleon binned the idea all together.
One idea, The International Fixed Calendar, does have some merit, it simply makes a year 13 months of exactly 4 weeks or 28 days long but we would still have to have a leap year every 4 years because the Earth inconveniently doesn't go around the Sun in exactly 364 days so no different to what we are used to now which is we get a leap year if the year is divisible by 100...but not by 400 and not for the first three leap years every 400 years or if there is a Sunday on the 12th of the Month...or something like that. 

Hiya K2-18b-ers

 
Why a God would create a whole Universe for us Earthlings and then tuck the Planet away in the dull suburbs of the Galaxy perched on the edge of the Milky Ways spiral arm is confusing but the religio's believe it but then it wasn't that long ago that they were absolutely certain that the Earth was at the center of the Universe until Science slapped that particular nonsense out of their heads.
I have always believed that the Universe is just too large for their not to be life elsewhere on one of the 1 Septillion (that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) planets in the observable Universe so it was only a matter of time before they found us or as seems to have happened, we found them.
A giant planet, 2.6 times larger than Earth and 124 light years from Earth, K2-18b, has yielded the strongest evidence yet that extraterrestrial life may be thriving based on observations by the James Webb space telescope has revealed the chemical fingerprints of two compounds that, on Earth, are only known to be produced by life.
The Scientists at the University of Cambridge are keen to state that the detection of the chemicals, Dimethyl Sulfide (DMS) and Dimethyl Disulfide (DMDS) do not comprehensively prove alien biological activity, but it is 'very strong evidence' and called it: 'A potential tipping point to answering the question of whether we’re alone in the universe'.
K2-18 b sits in the Leo constellation and orbits in the habitable zone but at 124 light years or 744 trillion miles away, it is too far away to photograph and using the speed of the New Horizons spacecraft travelling at 36,373 mph as a baseline it would take 390,000 years to travel there to have a look ourselves so that is out of the question.
The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest concentrations of DMS, DMDS thousands of times stronger than the levels on Earth but there is a chance that there may be processes on the Planet that are producing these molecules but they don't know of any Earthly process that can explain this, without it being biological life.
'Life is one of the options, but it’s one among many' poo-pooed  Dr Nora Hänni, a chemist at the Physics Institute of the University of Berne and was joined by Dr Jo Barstow, a planetary scientist at the Open University, who said that the detection was significant, but the burden of proof of life elsewhere must be very, very high and I don’t think this crosses that threshold'.
The Planet is estimated to be 4 billion years old which is approximately the same age as the Earth which is 4.5 billions years old and life began here 3.7 billion years ago with intelligent life 200,000 years ago, so if the K2-18b-ers began on the same trajectory as us hundreds of millions of years before us while our ancient ancestors were first clambering out of the oceans or Tyrannosaurus Rex stopped fighting with a Triceratops to see what that loud noise from that massive fireball was, they would be so far advanced of what what we can offer that maybe we shouldn't try too hard to announce we are here.
K2-18 b may be filled with harmless bacteria, it might have the equivalent of cats and dogs but it may be little green man angrily waving around something which looks suspiciously like an anal probe at our telescopes looking at them but at 124 light years away, unless they have a Red Dwarf style Faster-Than-Light Drive, we can rest easy.

Such A Perfect Day

Someone, somewhere has had the best day of their life ever today but Scientists have discovered how to have a perfect day every day and it doesn't involve drinking Sangria in the Park unfortunately.
According to researchers at the University of British Columbia, the secret formula is six hours of sleep, six hours of work, six hours family time, two hours of exercise, two hours with friends, hour of eating and drinking and an hour of screen time (TV, computer, phone etc).
The formula was created by studying data from the American Time Use Survey and working out how the amount of time people devoted to various activities and how they rated their day but the
research team did sy that the times are only a guide and then went on a tangent about some activities are like chocolate chips and some like salt which lost me but to be fair when they recommended twice as long exercising than eating or drinking I made that pffft... noise and lost interest.

Celebrating What Exactly?

The UK Supreme Court have reached a judgement on what makes  a woman a woman and clarified that the definition of a persons sex was purely biological in character but should it really take the highest Court in the land to tell us what nature already decides?  
It was strange to see celebrations on the judgement and some people calling it a victory for truth and feminism when it is obviously a conflation of a persons sex and their gender.
The definition of a woman is ultimately a biological one and comes down to Chromosomes, XX you are female, XY and you are a male and it really shouldn't be this difficult with politicians tying themselves up in knots about wombs and ovaries and genitalia.
While you can never change your sex as that is biologically cast while in the womb and you are destined to forever have the pair of Chromosomes you were dealt, you can change your gender but that is a whole other discussion and this does nothing to quell that as we will still have the problems such as pronouns,  toilets or changing rooms but ultimately it is down to the person involved to identify with whatever gender they feel more comfortable with as the ruling from the World Health Organisation defines.
Last year the NHS announced that they will be using the medical definition of a persons sex and will be working towards same sex hospital wards based on the patients biological sex so as the Courts decision was based on biology, feels a case of we knew that already so I am a bit confused over what people were actually celebrating.

Special Guest Blogger: Michelangelo

I was famous in my day for perfecting the human form, such as creating the masterpiece David out of a giant chunk of marble and the not-so-little painting called The Last Judgment, and one you might have seen where God’s outstretched finger is reaching for Adam's.
As a bambino, my father owned a marble quarry so I was always around stone but my father wanted me to work as a medic or Government official but i wanted to do something creative so I talked him into sending me to Florence to be with people like Leonardo da Vinci and Verrocchio on an apprenticeship.
I was thirteen then which is kinda late for an apprentice but not to blow my own trumpet, but i was absolutely brilliant from the start and as I was able to draw anatomical parts to perfection, I was quickly outperforming other famous painters of Florence and I was in demand from the Churches who needed the best artists as decorators although i did think of myself as more of a sculptor.
When Leonardo left Florence I was the rising star, the bees knees, the dogs bollocks and various other good parts of animals so when he returned to see me with many commissions he got a bit uppity and we even had a few words when we ran into each other on a bridge and Leonardo mocked me for my gruff manners and unrefined ways and I replied he should run away as he has a history of that as he never finished what he started.
I did have a bit of a reputation of being hot headed and hard to work with, i took on no pupils or collaborators and when i created The Pietà i wrote 'MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI FLORENTINE, MADE THIS' on Mary’s sash because I overheard someone say the work is done by Cristoforo Solari so that night I take a chisel and leave my mark.
David is probably the world’s most famous sculpture but all anyone asks me about is his winky being a bit on the small side. If you were naked and about to fight a giant called Goliath wouldn't the stress of that make you shrink up a bit?
After finishing David, I took on some huge projects but as it was only me I never got around to finishing most of them as many patrons become broke, or died, during the projects and when Pope Julius II asked me to carve 40 statues for his tomb I tried to open a new quarry at Pietrasanta but he then changed it to a bronze statue of him then he forget about that and said do something special at the Sistine Chapel so i spent four years on my back painting the ceiling an cleaning paint out of my beard.
I did do a lot of male nudes and wrote poems professing my desire for other men, heck, i even used male models to sculpt my female figures so make of that what you will but i never married and after leaving Florence I spent my remaining years in Rome, where i worked primarily as an architect and created the Capitoline Square and dome of St. Peter’s Basilica, though neither was finished at the time of my death which was very Leonardo of me.

Space Ass-tronauts

When I saw the picture of Katy Perry holding up the daisy in the Blue Origin penis shaped space ship I thought that picture is going to be iconic and it was a great picture but once they were back on Earth 11 minutes later it all went very wrong.
One said that she didn't really have words for the experience but when she did find some they were: 'I looked out the window and we got to see the moon'.
Other insights came from Perry, who served up the 'feminine divine' and being 'super-connected to love' and 'Making space for future woman' and 'Space is going to finally be glam' but the absolute butt clenching moment was when she said 'We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.'
Another one, i'm not sure which because by now I was chewing my cushion,  said that she wanted to test out her hair to make sure that it was OK so she skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure it would be good.
And they were not finished yet because there was SO much more of it. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule' and  'I think it’s so important for people to see us like that'.
The real scientist/astronaut's must have been mortified and felt so diminished by this but great picture though.

MASA...Making American's Stay Away

After a British woman was held at Immigration for 10 days, the British Government has updated guidance for travelling to the United States but it seems that we are all one step ahead of the Government because travel from the UK to the US has dropped by almost 15% from this time last year according to official figures from the US National Travel and Tourism Office who are concerned, saying it could have a chilling effect on Tourism.
Travel from Canada to the US has dropped by 36% and trips from the US to Europe have also, down almost 13% compared with the same period last year but that is being put down to the World becoming hostile to American tourists in the age of Trump.
Some say because Trump has trashed his own economy and tried to do the same to the rest of the World, American tourists are worried about how they will be received, the  website Business Insider interviewed Americans about their experiences abroad and they do say that since January, they have been treated in a less friendly way and not just in Europe but Canada, Asia and Australia.
I can offer some advice though for Americans coming to Europe and this come's from American's who are here already, tell people you are Canadian.
To our European ears Canadian and American accents are the same so say: 'American? Nah, Canadian Eh Buddy so can you point me to the nearest Timmies? 'and you can avoid any of those difficult questions about politics and mad guns laws.
You may want to leave the red MAGA cap at home also and you may want to avoid Denmark and Greenland altogether, you really don't want to be going to them places.

I Predict The Minority Report

The Minority Report is a novel by Philip K. Dick where three mutants are plugged into a machine and foresee all crime before it occurs so police can arrest suspects before they can commit any actual crimes.
The UK Government obviously thought that sounded like a good idea because apparently they are creating a 'murder prediction tool' to identify people most likely to become killers or commit serious violent offences.
The scheme being implemented by the Ministry of Justice comes with the catchy name of 'Sharing data to improve risk assessment' and the existence of the project was discovered by Freedom of Information requests from Statewatch who are a pressure group whose mission is to ensure democracy, civil liberties, personal and political rights, free movement, freedom of information, equality and diversity.
The government says the project is at this stage for research only and will: 'Provide evidence towards improving risk assessment of serious crime, and ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis' but campaigners claim the data used would build bias into the predictions.
The project, commissioned by Rishi Sunak, uses data from the Prison Service, Probation Service and data from Greater Manchester police and collects information on types of criminal convictions, the persons age and health markers such as mental health as well as names, gender and ethnicity.
That the Police will depend upon a Computer regarding a person based on events that have not yet happened is worrisome but then so is the current way of finding criminals which in the current institutionally racist force is simply are they not white? Then GUILTY!!!

Mentally Unstable Rourke Out

 
It wont come as a surprise that Mickey Rourke has been booted out of Big Brother, the man was an eviction wait to happen after his homophobic rant against JoJo Siwa, insulted Patsy Palmer's cooking in front of her, weight shaming Donna Preston and now acting in an unacceptable and threatening behaviour towards Chris Hughes.
During a Pirate task Hughes looked at him and Rourke walked over him, stood directly in front of him telling him not to eyeball him and calling him a C***.
From the off, the way he was leering at presenter AJ Adudu as she announced him to the crowd on opening night , it was obvious he wasn't fully in control of his mental faculties and how he made it through the ITV Psychological evaluation to ensure he was psychologically able to enter the house only they will know but it quickly became evident that he wasn't.
There are now calls for Tory MP Michael Fabricant to be bought back to replace Rourke which makes it hard to believe that in a popularity contest, the Tory MP is the one people like more?
Special mention must go to Chris Hughes for sticking up for JoJo against Rourke's homophobic bigotry because it takes a lot for someone tell another, older and more famous man that he’s out of line.
I am sure that ITV will say all the right things but tonight's episode will be a viewing bonanza for them, despite how uncomfortable it is to see someone with obvious mental problems be evicted from the house.

Shame On You If You Still Support Israel

Since the atrocity by Hamas against Israeli civilains in October 2023, I’ve been writing about Gaza and have been writing about one atrocity after another as Palestinian journalists have been burned alive, babies have frozen to death, medics have been executed and buried in mass graves and kids are being killed in their beds.
I don’t know what is really left to say at this point after 18 months of endless carnage but it should be clear to everyone that this is not a war or as Israeli call it, 'self-defence'.
What is happening in Gaza is, quite simply, genocide as a litany of experts have stated yet still nobody seems determined to end it.
Palestinians aren’t just being murdered by US-supplied bombs but since Israel cut off the meager amounts of supplies of aid they allowed in as well as cutting off water and electricity, this is now an attempt to starve the Palestinians until they 'voluntarily' agree to leave en masse to somewhere else and leave Palestine free for the Donald Trump visions of building hotels and casinos alongside Israeli settlements on the site of the mass murder.
Overnight the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City was hit by multiple missiles and Israel trotted out the same nonsense about Hamas using it as a Command and Control Centre as a justification although they never provide any evidence and the doctors and medics state it wasn't but as the only hospital that was still functioning in Gaza City, the war on Palestinians Healthcare has taken an even darker turn.
The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, was among those who condemned the strike, calling Israeli attacks on medical facilities 'deplorable' and comes hot on the heels of the massacre of fifteen emergency workers, butchered in cold blood by the Israeli Defense Forces.
Despite the initial strong denials, that only came to light and exposed the Israeli outright lies as it was filmed by a Red Crescent paramedic in the last minutes of his life and then the mass grave of the medics who were shot at close range and buried along with their vehicles to try and hide their war crimes.  
Since October 2023, the death toll of health workers in the Gaza Strip has reached the grim number of 1,060 and health facilities have been targeted and destroyed, and a report from Healthcare Workers Watch identified 384 cases of unlawful detention of Health workers.
In the opinion of the UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, 'This is part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realisation of the right to health in Gaza.'
After 18 months you probably already know where you stand on all this but if you are happy to stay silent, simply look away or actively back the murder, starvation and genocide of your fellow humans, if you still support Israel while knowing all of the above out of some bizarre religious reasons or ignorance then shame on you.  

Dire Science

 
The film Jurrasic Park did open a debate about whether we should bring extinct animals back to life and my take on it was the hell would we?  They went with Tyrannosaurus Rex's and Velociraptor's in the film with the results being as expected if you mix some of the most lethal killing machines ever to roam the Earth with soft, squidgy humans but luckily science isn't that stupid. Isn't it?
What they have done is take the DNA from the Dire Wolf's tooth that has been extinct for 10,000 years and combined it with grey wolf cells, edited the genes to make the animals larger and more muscular, inserted the resulting cells into domestic dog egg cells and implanted those into another dog’s womb. And lo, three Dire Wolf pups were born.
The Pups, when fully grown will weigh 68kg or 150lb and measure 6ft although they may struggle to find any Woolly Mammoths to snack on today which was one of the main food sources for their ancestors.
The company behind it, Why, Colossal Biosciences Inc, are calling it the World’s first 'de-extinction' but why they went with a more muscular killing machine that can down an elephant for dinner and not a Dodo or one of those smaller and more gentle meat eating ones is my first question.  
Some geneticists are claiming that these pups can’t be true dire wolves because they aren’t being raised in a dire wolf pack, and thus can’t fully learn true dire wolf behaviour which surprisingly wouldn't be that comforting if one was chasing after you.
What use a 6ft Wolf would be is another question as you couldn't keep it as a pet and we all know that if they were released into the wild some moronic hunter with small penis syndrome would want to shoot at it so can't really see the point apart from scientists showing off that they can do this if they wanted to.

Sweet Dreams Are (Not) Made Of This

Some people try to achieve immortality by doing brilliant things but i decided to achieve it by staying alive as long as possible and it seem,s like I am on the right track because I have suffered some insomnia most of my adult life.
Researchers at the University College London and University of Warwick have been studying mortality rates and cross referencing them with sleeping habits and found that that sleeping eight hours or more doubles the mortality risk from all causes.
The scientists concluded that sleeping for 10 hours or more per night leads to a 30% higher risk of dying compared to getting just seven hours. They also found that the participants were 56% and 49% more likely to die from a stroke and cardiovascular disease.
Their definition of  oversleeping is sleeping more than nine hours in a day with prolonged oversleeping increasing inflammation and hinders the immune system so how much sleep do they think we actually need?
The daily recommended amount of sleep that people should get depends on your age so children and teens need to sleep longer because sleep is when brain development and growth occur but for adults between 18 and 60 years old seven hours is the recommended amount and above 60 you should get eight hours.
Before I could woohoo and start planning my 100th Birthday Party, it does go on to say that less than 7 hours of sleep for an adult increase the likelihood of developing dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and even cancers of the breast, colon, ovaries and prostate as well as affect the ability to function while performing daily tasks like driving.
There is something surreal about the time spent awake when everything around you is sleeping but i generally use the time to catch up on work, read, write blog posts or just sit and watch the sun rise especially in Summer when the Sun comes up at around  4.30am  and i know it's just me and a handful of other people watching it before driving to work and leaving a trail of accidents on the road behind me obviously.

Penguins Celebrating

In his boneheaded attempt to make Americans Poor Again, Donald Trump went around slapping tariffs down until a grown up pointed out that it was a stupid idea and the markets crashed so he backed down and pretended that was his plan all along.
Obviously wasn't and there is a reason Donald Trump said he liked the uneducated but the Penguins of the Heard Island and McDonald Islands have a theory why he backed down and are claiming victory.
Last week when he had the brain fart that Americans would really like to pay more for almost everything, the Tangerine Tinged Tyrant imposed 10% tariffs on
an Australian territory with no human inhabitants, just Penguins and Seals.
The Seals kept a dignified silence but the Penguins didn't hold back and told Trump to keep his flippers off their things and organised a protest, even setting up a website @PenguinsAgainstTrump with the byline 'We love fish and hate fascists'.
The penguins become unlikely social media stars and since Trump went from saying that he definitely wouldn’t pause his tariff plans to then go and pause them a few days later,  the penguins have prevailed and have been celebrating winning the Trade War against the honey faced lunatic.
In a hastily arranged press conference, the top Penguin put down his fish to say: 'Did he really think he can take on penguins in a tariff war and win? He thought that he’s no match for Russia or China, so he’s picked on an islands of Penguins as he thought he could beat us but we beat him when he realised that we export the Ice that he has in his Diet Coke'.
Congratulations to the Penguins, we are proud of you.  

Thank You Moon

As the Asteroid 2024 YR4 is out of view until 2028, news of its trajectory to hit Earth in 2032 have been thin on the ground but at last estimate, there was a 43/1 chance that it would hit somewhere in the Earths Southern Hemisphere but NASA have crunched some more numbers and had a look and decided that in December 2032 the Moon could be between us and the 100m ball of destruction and take a smack on the lunar surface.
Based on observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and other ground-based telescopes, the team at NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies have updated the chance of impacting the Moon on Dec. 22, 2032 from 1.7% to 3.8%.
Obviously, as they point out on their website, that means that there is a 96.2% chance that the asteroid will miss the Moon and even if it did hit our celestial neighbour, the impact would have no effect on the Moon’s orbit which does the job of regulating our seasons and tides.
Seven years is a long time in killer Asteroid detection though and the 43/1 odds are expected to fluctuate and men in white coats at the European Space Agency are saying we shouldn't start to worry just yet and as more data comes in it could very well show the odds of hitting us or the Moon is zero but if given the choice and it is out of us or the Moon, I would prefer the Moon takes it full up the Aristotle Crater.

British Polite-isms

Us British are just too damn polite sometimes and Trinity College London have released new research exploring the role of polite-isms, or indirect expressions used to soften requests in British English.
They found that the average Brit used 14 of these polite-isms a day to avoid confrontation and to be nice and avoid any unnecessary tension although non-English speakers find our strange way of saying something while not actually saying it confusing, overly complicated and don't recognise when to use a polite-ism.
The top five polite-isms used are 'Could I just squeeze past you' rather than 'Could you please move out of my way', 'I’ll let you know' rather than 'No', 'I beg your pardon?' instead of 'I’m fuming', 'I’m a bit busy at the moment'  rather than 'Leave me alone” and 'No rush' when we actually mean 'Hurry Up'.   
Other favourite's are 'No Worry' (I am but will pretend i'm not) , 'With all due respect' (Your wrong) and 'As per my previous email/letter  (As i have already told you) and 'I’ll keep that in mind' (I will forget it 10 seconds after you have gone) and 'A gentle reminder' (You STILL haven't done this??)
It does seem to be a very British trait and I use the 'Gentle Reminder' and No Rush all the time although my version of that is 'When You Get a Minute could you...' which is a lot less confrontational but seems to get across the message that the minute you should get is NOW.
I can see how it would be confusing for non-English speakers but also it shows how us Brits can take them to be rude sometimes, nobody likes a direct No when you ask for a favour or if they would like to do something together, much more polite to at least pretend you would consider it.    
So with all due respect to non English speakers, I hear what you're saying about this being overly complicated and will bear your interesting idea of not using them in mind but if you find this confusing, wait until you hear about Rhyming Slang, that will blow your mind me old China.

Thinking About Tariffs

I am a bit confused over this tariffs thing so let me see if i have this straight.
If i sell something to America for £100 but they put 10% or 20% tariffs on it so it now costs the American consumers £110-£120, the consumers either pay more or stop buying my thing and start buying something cheaper.
To avoid the tariffs i could move my business to America and sell the things again for £100 there but then if i wanted to sell my things to the rest of the World, because of the retaliatory tariffs put on America by everyone else, the consumers there would have to pay £110 - £180.
So the choices then are to move my business to America and sell to Americans but struggle to sell to the rest of the World or stay where i am and sell to the rest of the World but struggle to sell to America.
Why would anyone do that and restrict their goods to one country and limit their options with the other 194 countries in the World?
It's not a great business plan but it must make sense to Donald Trump, a man who literally managed to bankrupt multiple casinos but maybe he is an economic genius after all and is the guy to reshape the American economy. On the other hand he may tank it completely so let’s find out!
Either way, only 45 months of his presidency left to go.

Come Fly With Me (In A Decade Or Two)

When the Hindenburg Airship Hindenburg fell to the ground in a ball of flame in 1937, the idea of Airships was put away but they may be back on the agenda again as a Company LTA Research attempt to revive the whole thing again.
Founded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the company have spent the past decade testing a prototype Airship and the 124.5 meters (408.4 feet) long has passed every test with flying colours.
Almost half the size of the Hindenburg, the Pathfinder 1 has just completed it's first flight which was the first time a rigid airship of this size had flown since the 1930's and is made from modern, lightweight materials and most importantly, is made from  flame-retardant synthetic material filled with the less flammable Helium rather than Hydrogen but the trade off is that Helium generates less lift and is in short supply which makes it expensive to fill the Airship with.
Nobody knows for sure what caused the Hindenburg to collapse in the fiery inferno it did and suggestions such as sabotage, a build of static, lightening and being covered in flammable paint have been put forward which is why the developers are saying they are being ultra cautious and have a safety first policy with no plans to rush to the next stage.
Obviously with one eye on the changing climate and the disasters that brings, Airships would be immense from an Environmental angle but that may be decades into the future but the first step has to be to convince people that it is safe so years of test flights before anyone even gets close to climbing into one.

Another To Add To The Israeli War Crimes List

 
The Israeli military says its forces opened fire on vehicles moving suspiciously towards soldiers without prior co-ordination and with their lights off and killed nine Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives.
The Red Crescent say what they shot at was Ambulances and they killed 15 people, all Paramedics and some at close range shot in the head in execution stye, and the bodies then thrown into a mass grave.
The Israel military dined shooting at Ambulances and launched an investigation into the claims which  found that the vehicles were coming at them with no lights on so that's why they were fired upon.
Video emerges of the incident and the Ambulances can be clearly seen to not only have headlights on but the external flashing red lights also, clearly marking it as an Emergency vehicle.
The IDF has admitted to mistakenly identifying a convoy of aid workers as a threat The IDF acknowledged that its statement claiming that the ambulances had their lights off was incorrect and they will re-investigate into the original investigation.
Volker Türk, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that: 'This episode raises further concerns over the commission of war crimes by the Israeli military'.
Just another to add to the growing list of the Israeli genocide going on under our noses, only this time their lies have been exposed, consider the many times a camera wasn't there to record them.

New Atheism

Apparently there is a thing called 'New Atheism' which is a movement which not only dismisses religion, but mocks, criticises and challenges it.
Whether I am a New Atheist or just a run of the mill Atheist I don't really know because I will tolerate it but will challenge it if somebody tries to ram it down my neck or stops me in the street to hand me a leaflet or ask if I pray or if I have accepted Jesus as seems to happen from time to time as i make my way around the Town Centre.
I have yet to see an Atheist stop someone in the street to push their beliefs on them uninvited or knock on someones door to discuss Atheism so i can only assume that the religious have got their rosary beads in a knot because Atheists are not content to just ignore them anymore and are openly challenging them.
I assume this makes me a New Atheist then because i stick to my belief that you can do what you want but if you try to persuade me or stop me or try and force your belief on me i will mock, criticise and challenge you about it.
If you want to ask me why I don't believe in a God then you had better be prepared for me to answer with why do you believe in it?
If you want to point to everything around you as proof of a God made Universe then you had better be prepared for me to point out the mountains of evidence which proves it isn't.  
If you want to push the Bible on me as some sort of manual to live by you had better be prepared for me to point out the abhorrent bits which guides you to kill homosexuals, witches and plenty of other innocent folk.
I am happy to ignore Religious folk, as i have said many times it brings comfort to people and I understand that but if there is a New Atheism that challenges your notions then good, hopefully you will wake up to the fact that its all a load of nonsense if only you stopped to look at it rationally.

Poor Penguins

I will let other blogs with more understanding of what the Tariffs imposed by Donald Trump means although from what I am hearing it is stiffing Americans who will now have to pay more for things while the things they export will be boycotted by everyone else as is already happening but what they hey, that's for them to debate but i was amused to hear that the brains behind Liberation Day sought to impose tariffs on places which not only don't export anything to them but has no humans living there anyway.  
Not sure what the Penguins and Seals of the Australian Island Heard and McDonald Islands in the Antarctic thought of Trump imposing 10% tariffs on them but the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, called them 'a bit strange'.
The orange faced plank also said that Europe doesn't buy American Beef and Chicken which is true because us Europeans don't much like the taste of Chlorine in our Chicken or steroids in our beef so both practices are banned this side of the Ocean.
Interesting that Russia was exempt but Ukraine wasn't but every news outlet is mulling over that so i'm just going to leave them to it and just hope that the Seal and Penguins can find another outlet for their goods...whatever that is.

You Could Be Mine (For £96,546)

How much are you worth? Obviously priceless is the correct answer but in 2013 the Royal Society of Chemistry worked out how much it would cost to build a human from scratch using all the constituent elements and it came out to £96,546.79 for materials alone.
Apparently all the chemicals needed to make a human body could be bought in a hardware store but before you turn up in B&Q with a shopping list and a plan to build your own person, what would you actually need?   
Sugar and spice and everything nice for a girl and frogs and snails and puppy dog tails for a boy you might think if that rhyme is to be believed but the RSC calculations include fifty-nine elements with Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium and Phosphorus accounting for 99.1% of what makes us so that would be the best aisles to visit first but what goes into the other 0.9%?
In the shopping trolley would need to go a few atoms of Molybdenum, Vanadium, Manganese, Cesium, Zirconium, Arsenic, Uranium Tin and Copper and twenty atoms of cobalt and thirty of Chromium which means you now have the material for your self made human.   
After taking it home and spreading out the materials on your kitchen side, the problem you got now is how to actually make the human from all those bits because you won't just be chucking it all it a bowl and giving it a good mix and unfortunately you won't find the answer on the Internet and even if you have the telephone number of the cleverest Scientists on the Planet, they won't be much help because nobody yet knows how to make a single living cell from scratch, let alone the 50 trillion human cells needed for an average sized human.
Hopefully you have kept the receipt.

56 Today!

Today is the end of my 55th trip around the Sun and the start of my 56th and the latest meeting of the 01/04 Club which consists of Me, Chris, Phil, Susan, David and Beth meeting up in the same coffee house, sing Happy Birthday to each other over a couple of lattes and a bit of Birthday Cake, shoot the breeze and then go back to our lives and agree to meet up next year.
It's kind of macabre but as i have made it through 55 still alive, I have lived longer than people such as Henry VIII, Tammy Wynette, Francis Drake, Bill Haley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Del Shannon, Johnny Ramone and Steve Strange who all died in their 55th year so now my next goal is to navigate the next 12 months and be able to list Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, Beethoven, Sinead O' Connor, Linda McCartney and Rik Mayall who will forever be 56.
If you happen to be in the South Western side of the Country today and pass a cafe this afternoon and you hear the strains of 'Happy Birthday' and see a group of people slurping latte's and laughing raucously, pop over and say hi and if you are also celebrating a birthday today, pull up a chair.

Welcome Sir Killalot

Seems like hardly a day goes by without someone mentioning the words Artificial Intelligence and there was a scientist on the radio this morning claiming  that within our lifetimes we’ll be fitted with brain-enhancing microchips which will 'wake up' with us every morning which puts an image in my head of hearing and seeing the Microsoft Windows start-up screen in your head instead of the alarm clock.
The scientist was full of the benefits of Artificial Intelligence and was quite excited about the integration of machines and humans (Cyborgs?) and was quick to dismiss fears that robots will soon be out-thinking humans and experiencing emotions and in no way will our new metal chums be using us as squishy playthings as we will ultimately still be in control of them.
So for him no oppressing us with powerful laser eyes or giant metal claws and I think he may have a point because every computer I have ever owned has either crashed when I have tried to run more than two programs at the same time or stopped to tell me i need to download a driver, the one I downloaded three times already that morning.
Obviously the solution to make sure the Robots don't get too big for their boots and take over is to get the new robots to run on the Windows Operating Systems but then when you think of some of the people currently running the World, being lauded over by Sir Killalot and Wheelosaurus from Robot Wars and their army of USB 2.0 Stormtroopers may not be so bad after all.