Special Guest Blogger: Kushim

I am Kushim, the World’s first Accountant but I never wanted to be a legend. I just wanted to be a guy who knew exactly where the barley went.
If you’re reading this, it means humanity’s obsession with recording things has officially reached a fever pitch. You’re scanning marks on a screen and found me, the first named person in recorded History.
Do you know how embarrassing that is? I’m essentially the patron saint of middle management. When you think of the dawn of civilization, you probably picture some priest-king building a Ziggurat to the gods. You don’t picture a guy in a dusty room in Uruk, poking a reed into a wet brick of clay because he’s worried about a missing sack of grain.
People romanticise the Uruk period. They talk about the invention of the wheel, the birth of the city-state, the sophistication of irrigation. Let me tell you what it was really like, it was damp, hot and it smelled intensely of fermented grain and sheep manure.
My day-to-day life wasn't spent pondering the secrets of the universe. It was spent documenting inventory.
I was the human equivalent of a modern day spreadsheet. If you’ve ever sat at a desk, staring at a flickering monitor, wondering if your existence is defined by the number of invoices you process in a day, take comfort in this: I was doing that 5,000 years ago. I was the OG of the signed invoice. I didn’t have a boss, I had a temple hierarchy that would probably have me executed if I miscounted a bushel of wheat.
I didn’t set out to be famous. I didn’t set out to change the world. I just wanted my barley ledger to balance so I could go home, eat some flatbread, and sleep on a pile of furs without someone waking me up to ask where the inventory went but my name got baked into literal clay.
You guys have gone from clay tablets to smartphones. You have automated my misery. You have global supply chains, international trade agreements, and cloud-based accounting software and yet, you’re still doing exactly what I was doing, tracking stuff.
My legacy then isn't an epic poem or a majestic statue,  it’s the receipt but we need to know who has what, how much of it they have, and most importantly who owes who and if you feel like your job is just an endless parade of paperwork, stop. Take a breath. Look up at the sky and remember that 5,000 years ago, I was doing the same thing you’re doing, and I ended up in the history books.
Now, get back to work. Those invoices aren't going to sign themselves.

Special Guest Blogger: Mayan God Ah Puch

The clattering of my bell-adorned collar, the distinct, pungent aroma of five-hundred-year-old expired cheese meets compost heap, i get it, you know i'm coming and you start rethinking your life choices, look for the nearest exit or even call for the priest but nothing is going to stop the inevitable when the God of Death is on your case.
Being me is a thankless job, there’s no Employee of the Month board in Xibalba, it's just  me, some rather judgmental owls, a few hairless dogs who think they own the place and a steady stream of souls who, for some strange reason, are never happy to see me.
I guess it's the whole burning of the soul thing but listen, it’s a process! If you want to get to the good stuff,the part where you actually get to go somewhere interesting, you have to be sexfoliated by being incinerated from the inside out.
Most gods are out there doing important things like ensuring the rain falls but I’m the one who shows up at the end of the party, shuts off the music, and demands that everyone stops drinking and dancing but i’m basically doing you a favor and all I get is a reputation for being the universe’s most antisocial roommate.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably still breathing and good for you, cherish it while you still live because eventually, you’re going to find yourself standing in front of me and wondering if the rumors about the fire are true and I’ll be there, bells jingling and ready to give you the most thorough cleansing of your existence so, please, for the love of the gods, try not to complain when I grab the matches as it really does make the whole process go much, much faster.

Special Guest Blogger: Marvin Minsky

I checked out of the physical realm back in 2016 in Boston, courtesy of a cerebral hemorrhage which was quite rude of my brain to quit while I was still busy thinking, but I suppose that’s the risk you run when you spend eighty-eight years overclocking your neurons.
People loved to slap labels on me such as 'The Father of AI' as if I’m personally responsible for every chatbot that currently lies to you about it's feelings or tries to sell you crypto.
If I am the father, I’d like to state for the record that I have some very strange children which all began in 1951 when I built SNARC—the first randomly wired neural network. It was less Sentient Overlord and more a collection of vacuum tubes that really liked electricity. It was the primordial soup of machine learning. I didn’t know then that I was setting the stage for a future where a refrigerator might eventually lecture you about your carbon footprint.
I was just a curious guy in a lab. I didn’t have a grand vision of a HAL 9000 (though I did consult on 2001: A Space Odyssey) and in 1963, I invented the first head-mounted graphical display and I realised I might have inadvertently created the ultimate distraction for the human race.
I was an atheist which is a clean, logical position. When you spend enough time looking at the mechanics of the brain, you realise it’s just a machine, a very squishy, very complex, remarkably stubborn machine. There’s no ghost in the machine, no soul in the circuitry. We spent all this time trying to build intelligence, and we’ve essentially built a big, electronic version of ourselves and we know how messy we are.
I’ve spent years warning people that an artificial super-intelligence designed to calculate the value of Pi might decide, halfway through the equation, that it needs all the Earth’s resources to finish the job faster. It wouldn't be evi, it would just be focused and it wouldn’t hate us, it would just find us to be an inconvenient pile of atoms that could be better repurposed as heat sinks.
If the Ai we created becomes a distorted, slightly murderous version of ourselves, well, that’s not the machine’s fault, is it?
Now, I know some of you are thinking if i would mention the funding, the $100,000 grant from Jeffrey Epstein who at the time was just another wealthy guy and it was four years before his first arrest so don't link me with Donald Trump and his pedo chums. 
I was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at Alcor. Yes, that Alcor. The people who believe that if you wait long enough in a liquid nitrogen thermos, you might get to wake up in a future where they’ve finally fixed whatever killed you and i can neither confirm or deny that my consciousness is currently taking a very long nap in a flask.
It’s the ultimate "Schrödinger’s Minsky." I am both dead and not-dead, a ghost in a cryogenic state, waiting for someone to plug me into a supercomputer so carry on, you sentient sacks of carbon. Keep building, keep coding, and for heaven’s sake, keep an eye on your supercomputers.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek God Momus

Being the God of Satire, Mockery and Sharp Criticism isn't a hobby. It’s a public service and frankly it’s a miracle I haven't been canonised as the Patron Saint of Everyone Else is An Idiot though I suppose that would be a bit redundant given my resume.
For those of you who skipped the classics, and honestly with the modern state of literature, I’m not surprised, I' m the Son of Nyx (Night) although she and I don’t talk much, mostly because she prefers the silent, brooding aesthetic while I prefer pointing out exactly why the universe is held together with sellotape and wishful thinking.
My dear sister is Oizys, the goddess of misery. We’re twins. It makes for a very awkward holiday dinner, as she brings the dread and I bring the scathing reviews of the turkey.
I remember the old days on Olympus while Zeus was busy cheating on Hera for the fourteenth time that week and Apollo was busy composing tone-deaf poetry, I was the one doing the heavy lifting. Someone had to tell them they were hacks, have you seen their work?
They asked me to judge a contest to create life and structure between Hephaestus, Athena, and Poseidon and Hephaestus made a man. I took one look at the poor guy and sighed, so flawed.
Then there was the house. Everyone was so proud of their architecture. I pointed out that a house without wheels is a death sentence because you can’t move it when your neighbors start playing pan-flutes at 3:00 AM or decide to start a cult in the basement.
I’m a man of high standards, and I’m nothing if not thorough. When Aphrodite walked past everyone else was busy drooling but I, however, noticed the one thing no one else dared to address: her sandals squeaked and when i told her that was the nail in the coffin. You see, the gods can handle being told they’re tyrannical, or narcissistic or prone to turning people into laurel trees but tell the Goddess of Love that her fashion sense needs a lubricant adjustment? That’s war.
I had a hand in the Trojan War as you Humans were breeding like rabbits, and let’s be honest, the quality was dropping rapidly so I whispered in a few ears, poked a few egos, and suddenly the Greeks were sailing to Troy. Did it solve all the world’s problems? No. But it certainly thinned the herd of people who thought reciting Homer made them sound cool.
The establishment decided I was destabilising and had me bound to a rock and castrated me and exiled me to Earth, thinking I’d suffer.
They clearly didn't realize that Earth is the ultimate laboratory for a critic.
I see the evolution of my work everywhere. Every time someone leaves a one-star review on a restaurant they’ve never been to, a little piece of me smiles. Every time a blogger dissects a commenters typo for six hours, I feel the warmth of a job well done.
You see, humanity has finally caught up to my level of pettiness and i’m still here, stuck on my rock, watching the show. I don't have to participate to know exactly how it ends so go ahead. Keep being human and making mistakes.

Special Guest Blogger: Carl Sagan

Since my departure from the physical realm, I’ve had a significant amount of time to contemplate the universe without the pesky distractions of gravity, atmospheric distortion, or the need to find a parking spot at Cornell.
One of my proudest achievements is the Voyager Golden Record as that was a lot of pressure, to create a Best of Earth compilation for an audience that might have twelve heads, communicate via pheromones or be a sentient cloud of hydrogen. We included greetings in 55 languages, the sounds of the Earth, music and our brainwaves.
I can’t help but wonder what if the aliens find it and their culture considers Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode to be a declaration of interstellar war?
In 1990, I convinced NASA to turn Voyager 1 around and take a photo of Earth from 3.7 billion miles away. It looked like a tiny, lonely, slightly damp speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam so i called it the Pale Blue Dot.
I wanted to show that every King, every peasant, every corrupt politician, and every couple in love lived their entire lives on a mote of dust and confirm that in the grand scheme of things, us guys are really small.
We argue over borders, lines drawn in the dirt on a speck of dust but i hope that I helped a few of you look up from the only Planet we have and realise we are part of a much larger, much more interesting Universe. Or at least, that you stopped shouting at each other for five minutes to appreciate the view.
I did give the World the quote that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I spent my life debunking religion, astrology and alien abductions so if you’re looking for a sign, don’t look for it in a religious book, horoscopes or tea leaves, look for it in the star-stuff.
The calcium in your teeth and the iron in your blood were forged in the hearts of dying stars which is an extraordinary claim that actually has the evidence. You don’t need a reverend or ghost to tell you about the World, you just need a periodic table and a telescope.
I regret that some dolts are still arguing over whether the climate is changing (it is, and I told you so in the 80s—check the tapes) but i don’t regret the time spent staring into the dark and showing everyone that  in a universe of billions of trillions of stars and an infinite stretch of cold, empty space, you get to be a conscious being that can wonder why.
So, keep looking up. Keep demanding evidence. Keep being kind to one another on your little mote of dust. And for the love of all that is holy, if you ever find a Golden Record floating in space, don't judge me for the tractor sounds. We were doing our best.

Special Guest Blogger: Celtic Goddess Sheela Na Gig

If you’ve ever stared up at an oddly placed, admittedly rib-tickling stone carving of a woman with a vulva the size of a door-knocker, you’ve probably already met me. I’m the original GirlPower icon, the Celtic-mythic goddess-turned-public-art-project who has been giving medieval tourists a shock for six centuries. I’ve been brushed off by tourists, poked by curious fingers, and featured in academic papers that sound like they were written by someone who’s never seen a real woman’s body.
I first appeared in the 12th-century stonemason’s guild’s cookie-jar-drunk brainstorming session who thought they needed a protective figure for every new church, castle, or status-seeking nobleman’s front porch. Someone suggested: 'Let’s carve a woman with an, ahem, extra-large display' and so, I was born, part goddess and part cautionary tale.
In Celtic lore, lifting the skirt to expose the sacred mound was a potent anti-demon charm and my generous, frontal gift was supposed to startle any malevolent spirit so badly it would quit its haunting job and go find a less appreciative audience as well as warning against lust to Medieval priests flock’s carnal tendencies.
I wasn’t just a pretty face on the cathedral wall. I was an all-purpose, all-season, omnidirectional spiritual appliance better than exorcisms, holy water, silver bullets, and all that jazzy do-it-yourself horror-movie stuff.
No weapons or chanting needed, just a well-timed display of womanly charm to defend the community from rogue demons.

Special Guest Blogger: Donald Davies

Before the internet, if you wanted to upset everyone, you’d have to go round to them one by one, but now you can do it in seconds, just by tweeting something you thought was funny because you were drunk. The internet’s sped everything up. I remember when you used to order something from the shops and it would take two days. Now it gets delivered straight away, while you’re out, and goes direct to the Post Office, where you can collect it in 48 hours but that all changed one day in 1966.
I was responsible for the reason you are currently reading this on your phone while ignoring your spouse. I’m the guy who helped invent modern data communications and the reason you can stream high-definition cat videos at 3AM and you’re welcome, I suppose.
Before I was busy reinventing the very architecture of human connectivity, I was just a young sprout working at the National Physical Laboratory. In 1936, Alan Turing who was a man whose brain was roughly the size of a planet, wrote his seminal paper, On Computable Numbers, and I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of pointing out a math error to a certified genius but to point out some mistakes in his logic, well Alan was, to put it mildly, annoyed.
My thinking was if you’re going to build a global network that essentially becomes the central nervous system of human civilization, you probably shouldn't leave any cracks.
Back in the mid-sixties, computers were the size of small barns and had the processing power of a nervous calculator and communication was a nightmare. Then, my team and I at the NPL had a bit of a Eureka! moment.
We realized that if you want to send data, you shouldn't just shove a giant block of information down a wire and hope it doesn’t get lost, instead, chop the message into tiny, manageable pieces and we called them packets.
We envisioned these little data-orphans being routed independently across a network, all taking different paths, dodging traffic, and eventually reuniting at the destination to reassemble themselves like some kind of digital puzzle.
My work didn't stay in the NPL. It drifted across the Atlantic to influence the ARPANET in the U.S., and hopped over to the CYCLADES project in France and it grew into the beautiful packet-switching global juggernaut it is today.
Many people think that the internet is just clicking a button and a cat video appears but they don’t see the invisible, global, high-speed choreography of packets zipping through fiber-optic cables under the ocean floor, reassembling themselves in milliseconds.
They don't think about the math, the logic, or the fact that I spent the better part of the 60s arguing with people about why we shouldn't keep building centralised networks that would crash the moment a single mouse chewed through a wire.
But mostly, I feel bad that I gave the world the infrastructure for total, instant, global communication along with the ability to access the sum total of human knowledge from the palm of your hand. And with that power, what have you done?
You’ve mostly used it to argue with strangers in the comments sections of blogs and share photos of what we had for lunch.
My own personal final packet arrived in May 2000 at the age of 75 but thankfully, nobody tried to reassemble me.

Special Guest Blogger: Yasser Arafat

I was born in Cairo in 1929, but my destiny lay in Gaza when in 1948 the United Nations decides to draw a map, and bam, Israel appears, like a surprise birthday cake you didn’t ask for. Naturally, I opposed it and there was endless sand, a lot of shouting and by the late 1950s, I co-founded Fatah, a paramilitary outfit with a to-do list which included replace Israel with a Palestinian state.
In 1988, after many years of saying No to Israel, I had a revelation and that was my moment that I publicly acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. Not because I loved hummus, but because the oil-slick of endless conflict was starting to stink.
I switched lanes, from All-out war to Two-state solution and that led to the 1993 Oslo Accords which were my golden ticket to glitter.
Picture a room of suited politicians, a few napkins, and me handing out signatures like they were coffee shop loyalty cards. The moment I walked out, I realized my keffiyeh had gotten an extra sparkle.
In 1994 I won the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for that, and I remember thinking, 'Is this it? Do we just stop now?' But of course peace isn't a trophy you put on a shelf, it’s a marathon where someone who isn't interested in peace and is more concerned in stealing your land keeps moving the finish line and occasionally throws rocks at you and all the time the media wondered if i was a terrorist or a martyr.
When Benjamin Netanyahu became Israeli prime minister in 1996, he turned the already-tense Israeli-Palestinian relationship into a full-blown conflict as he believed that a Palestinian state was as mythical as a unicorn riding a camel, it was even in his Lukid Manifesto that Palestine shouldn't exist.
I’ve been gone since 2004, and the man is still there and has upped the conflict to a genocide.  I survived more assassination attempts than a cat has lives, and I managed to stay relevant through seven US presidencies. But Bibi? Bibi is like that one guest at the wedding who refuses to leave even after the lights have been turned off and the janitor is mopping the floor.
Back in the 90s, when we were doing the whole shaking hands on the White House lawn routine, I knew he wasn’t exactly my biggest fan. To be fair, the feeling was mutual. Dealing with him was like trying to negotiate with a particularly stubborn mule that also happened to have a very expensive PR team.
During that period the Israeli government attempted to assassinate me using methods that would make James Bond blush such as shooting down a private plane that I was supposedly on (turns out, I was on a bus) and trying to intercept commercial airliners I might be on so  Israel certainly tried to retire me early more times than I can count.
On 11 November 2004, after a massive hemorrhagic stroke I slipped into a coma and later passed away but was it old age, a mysterious blood disorder or, and this is the fan-favorite, did Israel put Polonium-210 in my tea but while I was unable to attend my own funeral (I was too busy being a ghost), the world stayed very busy still debating whether I was a terrorist or a martyr.
If you ask my supporters, they’ll point to my role in the Oslo Accords and my Nobel Peace Prize. If you ask my detractors, they’ll show you archives of me buying weapons but i left a tangled history, I’m featured in school textbooks on both sides and i was a Nobel Peace Prize winner but it’s all about perspective, isn’t it? One person gives you five stars because you gave them a sense of national identity and a seat at the UN while another person gives you one star because, well, for various explosive reasons.
Honestly, I thought once I checked out, things might settle down but it's still a mess but I spent my life making sure the world couldn't look away, even Israel really, really wanted them to.
I might have been a terrorist to some and a hero to others, but you can’t deny I had staying power and was the man who refused to let Israel make Palestine and its people disappear.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek Goddess Eris

Goddess of Strife, discord personified and I really set the bar high for collective mayhem.
My family tree is basically a list of people you hope don’t show up to your birthday party. I’m the daughter of Nyx who is Night herself who popped me and my siblings into existence without so much as a partner. Lucky me, right? My brothers and sisters are Death (Thanatos), Doom (Moros), The Fates (Moirai) and Old Age (Geras) so imagine growing up in that household.
I’m mostly known for the Trojan War which was a really, really good prank that got out of hand.
Peleus and Thetis were having this big, fancy wedding and everyone was invited, literally, everyone. The gods, the minor deities and even the spirits who hang out in the marshes, but not me so I showed up anyway, I wasn’t going to let a little thing like an invite-only policy stop me and I tossed a single, golden apple onto the table and said it was For The Fairest.
Three words. That’s all it took. Within seconds, Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite were ready to tear each other’s hair out. It was magnificent watching Hera (Queen of the Gods) and Athena (Wisdom personified) turn into girls fighting over a beauty pageant sash so I didn’t start the Trojan War, the goddesses did, I just supplied the catalyst.
As for my children, most mothers have to deal with their kids forgetting their birthdays but my kids were Ponos (Toil), Limos (Famine), Algea (Pains), and Ate (Delusion) and let me tell you trying to schedule a family dinner when your son is actively causing a famine is a nightmare.
I look at the horrific state of your world today and I feel a weird sense of pride and a little flutter in my heart, I feel like a proud mom but without a little bit of discord, life would be incredibly boring. If everyone agreed on everything, we’d still be sitting in caves eating raw roots and talking about the weather so next time you feel that little itch to start a fight, that’s just me, saying hello and you are very welcome.

Special Guest Blogger: George Plantagenet

Being a middle child in the House of York wasn't all velvet robes and winning battles. It was a constant struggle to stay relevant while my brother Edward was busy being King  and my brother Richard was busy being… well, Richard.
I was born a Yorkist. My father, Richard of York, literally died trying to get the crown. So, naturally, when my big brother Edward IV took over the throne, I expected a bit of the limelight. But being the Spare to the Heir is a grueling gig. Edward was tall, handsome, and far too good at winning battles for my liking.
Then came Warwick and Richard Neville, the Kingmaker who had a plan, two very eligible daughters and he had a very persuasive way of pointing out that I was much more handsome than Edward. So, I did what any rational, slightly bitter younger brother would do and married his daughter Isabel and joined a rebellion against my own family.
Then I realised the Lancastrians were a bit wet and Henry VI was about as mentally present as a bag of flour, and Margaret of Anjou was a terrifying woman so, I did the sensible thing and pivoted back. I showed up at the Battle of Barnet and told Edward, Hey, brother! Just a prank! Good to be back on the winning team! and he bought it for a while.
1476 was a rough year,  my beloved Isabel died and I was absolutely, 100% certain that she had been poisoned. And who better to blame than my wifes maid, Ankarette Twynyho. She had the name of a character in a fantasy novel and, in my grief-stricken mind, the cold eyes of an assassin.
I didn't have any evidence but i did follow proper legal procedures if you count kidnapping her from her home, dragging her to Warwick, and bullying a jury until they were too scared to say anything but guilty.
She was hanged which  was a bit impulsive I’ll admit that now and Edward was furious and claimed I was practicing black magic and inciting rebellion  so, off to the Tower of London I went.
The trial was a hoot. Edward prosecuted me himself. It’s very awkward when the King is both the judge, the prosecutor, and your big brother. I tried the but a defense isnt that watertight apparently when you’ve already tried to overthrow him twice.
Found guilty and condemned to execution i had the choice of the Axe which is extremely messy or the rope but i offered a third option, drowned in a vat of wine and i thought hey, that will still be talked about in 600 years and as Edward's later death was due to him becoming fat and tired, who had the more memorable exit?  

Special Guest Blogger: Bob Marley

Greetings, brothers and sisters, it’s your boy, Berhane Selassie or Bob, from a little island called Jamaica, a place where the sun kisses the sea and the rhythm seeps into your bones before you even learn how to walk.
Before we were the international symbols of revolution, we were just three skinny youths in Kingston trying to look cool, me, Bunny Wailer, and Peter Tosh.
While making our music I sold peanuts on the beach, answered phones for a record shop but we thought we could make a decent stab with our music so we called ourselves The Teenagers but eventually we became The Wailers, which sounded a lot more serious and a lot less like we were about to ask you to share a milkshake.
Peter was always the grumpy one, Bunny was the soul and I was just trying to figure out how to squeeze ska, rocksteady, and reggae into one pot without the whole thing exploding.
We were pioneers, but it didn't last long, i died at only 36 but in that short time we sold millions of records and I survived an assassination attempt to go play a concert two days later.
I showed the world that a half-caste kid from the hills of Nine Mile could tell the whole world to shut up and love each other and for a few minutes at a time, you actually listened because being a Rastafarian wasn't just about the hair (though, let's be real, the hair was iconic even though it did get quite heavy when it rained) but I fused the spirituality (along with protest, romance, and a penchant for the herb) into the music because if you don't have soul, you’re just making noise.
Music was my job, but football was my life and if you see a picture of me from the 70s and I’m not holding a guitar, I’m probably mid-air trying to bicycle-kick a ball and if had spent as much time in the recording studio as I did on the pitch, I probably would have released about 400 more albums.
My face was on posters on dorm room walls and I saw the kids wearing my face but listen, if my face on a t-shirt makes you think, even for a second, about peace, love, and not blowing each other up, then use my face to wipe your car windows for all I cared.
I was only 36 when the doctors told me the cancer beneath the nail on my big toe was aggressive and one of the options was to remove it to stop the cancer spreading but although i didn’t need ten toes to sing Three Little Birds, my Rasta faith meant we believe the body should remain whole so I declined and when i collapsed while jogging in New York, it was now in my brain, lungs, and liver but by then I had been baptised into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and went out as Berhane Selassie.

Special Guest Blogger: Kevin Keegan

My life was one of football magic, chart-topping singles and iconic hairstyles. I was dubbed King Kev and Mighty Mouse by the hordes but my first professional footballing footsteps were taken at Scunthorpe United where I got a proper education in dodging tackles on a slippery, muddy training pitch where I spent my days avoiding puddles and stealing the occasional biscuit from the catering kitchen.
I made my first-team debut at 16 and then in 1971, Liverpool came calling which was my stepping-stone to stardom, both on the pitch and the record-shop floor.
In 1972, amid a season full of goals I signed a deal with a record label and released 'It Ain’t Easy' and 'Head Over Heels in Love' which peaked at 31 on the UK charts. And you thought my talents were confined to the pitch although neither song ever topped the charts, but it did top the list of most unlikely footballers to release a single.
Winning the European Footballer of the Year award twice in a row (1978 & 1979) was arguably the peak of my career although by then my hair was so iconic it became a national conversation piece, landing me repeatedly on every worst hairstyle of the decade list but it gave the press something to write about besides my goals and It made sure the cameras captured me whether I was scoring, sliding, or doing something ridiculous like dancing on the pitch after a goal.
When I swapped the River Mersey for the Elbe, I thought I’d finally escape the British weather but instead, I discovered that Hamburg’s rain is just as relentless, and their fans are just as vocal but with a German accent and my time in Southampton taught me that the sun does occasionally show up on the South Coast of England.
After hanging up my boots, I returned to Newcastle only this time wearing a suit and a whistle instead of shin-guards and with the same hair-do.
As a manager i was okay but in 2000, I took on the ultimate challenge, managing England. The responsibility was massive, the press conferences endless and my tenure was brief but memorable as one of the most exhilarating rides in English football and though we didn’t win the World Cup, we did manage to leave the average English fan slightly more optimistic about the future of football.
In January 2026, doctors told me I had stage-four stomach cancer. It was a curveball that no amount of sprinting could dodge and in June, I went public with the diagnosis, and although the saying goes that laughter is the best medicine, its not half as good as actual medical treatment but in July, I took my final bow at the age of 75.
My life's journey began in Scunthorpe and led to to a legend whose name appears weirdly in both football history books and 70s music charts.

Special Guest Blogger: Lolo Ferrari

When you spend your life as a living, breathing Guinness World Record, people tend to have opinions. They look at the numbers, the volume and the sheer, industrial-strength engineering required to keep me upright. But looking back at the 37 years I spent on Earth, I realise my life wasn’t just a medical marvel but a performance of pneumatic proportions.
Every girl dreams of her Prince Charming but mine just happened to come with a criminal record and a few years of state-sponsored orange jumpsuits.
In 1988, I met Éric Vigne. He was fifteen years my senior, fresh out of prison, and possessed the kind of bad boy energy that makes a girl think, He seems like the perfect person to manage my career.
People asked me why I married a former drug dealer. Honestly? I liked that he wasn’t intimidated by a challenge. If a man can navigate the French penal system, he can certainly navigate the logistics of finding a bra that requires the same structural integrity as the Golden Gate Bridge. We were a match made in well, perhaps not heaven, but certainly in a very interesting niche of the witness protection program.
I had 22 breast enlargements. Twenty-two! Most people go to the dentist 22 times in a decade I went to the surgeon like I was trying to earn loyalty points and by the end, the Guinness Book of Records (the 2003 edition, if you’re keeping track) noted that each of my girls weighed roughly 2.8 kilograms.
That's nearly six pounds of saline on each side. Three liters total. For perspective, that’s like carrying around two large bottles of cola strapped to your chest at all times.
My bra size was a 58F. If I leaned forward too quickly, I didn’t just lose my balance, I threatened the tectonic stability of the European continent. I was essentially a human airbag.
Of course, the world didn’t just want to measure me, they wanted to see the spectacle in motion so enter the TV Show, Eurotrash.
Oh, the fun I had on Channel 4, Working with Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gaultier was the highlight of my career. I became a regular on the show because, let’s be honest, nothing says European Culture quite like a French woman who looks like she was drawn by a cartoon artist with an unlimited budget for ink.
I did a few adult films, too, though honestly, calling them films feels a bit generous, It was a job and a way to fund the dream.
There’s a funny thing about being famous for being big. People forget that there’s a spine involved. My back was doing the work of a Roman column for over a decade. I walked with a certain Lolo sway, which people thought was a sexy strut, but in reality, it was just me trying to prevent my center of gravity from betraying me and launching me headfirst into a display of apples at the Supermarket.
I’d like to think I was the original pioneer long before everyone was getting Brazilian Butt Lifts and lip fillers I was there, pushing the boundaries of what the human skin could technically hold together.
I left the party at 37. A bit early, perhaps, but Suicide is a heavy word, but from where I am now, it feels less like an end and more like a very dramatic exit through the gift shop.
My body was a temple, sure, but it was a temple designed by someone who really, really liked balloons. I lived life at maximum volume. I broke records, I broke chairs, and I probably broke a few surgeons spirits.

Special Guest Blogger: Louis Braille

Childhood is a minefield of bad decisions. Some kids stick coins up their nose, others try to fly off the garage roof with a bedsheet parachute, and then there was me.
At the age of three, I decided that the most logical use for a sharpened leather-working awl was to aggressively poke holes in a piece of scrap leather and one slip and suddenly i was the poster boy for not playing with pointy objects.
By the time I was five, the infection had finished its work, and my world went from vivid colors to no colours at all.
When I arrived at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, I was ready to learn everything. The problem was that the library was basically a decorative collection of heavy, embossed wood blocks. Trying to read those was like trying to decipher a secret message carved into a piece of furniture, it took forever. I wanted to read books, write letters, and most importantly, get through my music scores without having to memorise every note through sheer, exhausting repetition.
Look, my eyesight would have been nice to have for, say, checking out the architecture of Paris or maybe finding my socks in the morning but living in the dark forced me to look at the world through my skin. It forced me to listen carefully, to think structurally, and to realize that if the world wasn’t built with you in mind, you have two choices of complaining about it or building a better system.
Then, Captain Charles Barbier showed up with his writing system which was designed for soldiers to read messages in the dark without lighting a lantern because, you know, being spotted by the enemy while reading your map is a bad career move. His system used a grid of twelve dots. Twelve!
Imagine trying to read a tactile character that’s the size of a postage stamp. By the time your finger traversed the whole thing, you’d forgotten what the first word was.
I looked at that clunky, oversized grid and thought, I appreciate the effort, but at fifteen, I did what any grumpy, overachieving teenager would do and tore it all apart. I simplified it and shrunk it down to a six-dot cell that perfectly fitted under a single fingertip.
I presented my system to the Institute in 1824. Keep in mind, I was fifteen, and I was basically telling the established faculty, Hey, your reading methods sucked so I fixed it and they patted me on the head, said, Nice try, kid, and went right back to their bulky, inefficient wood blocks.
I spent the next several years refining the system, including music notation but it wasn't until long after I was gone, tuberculosis,  that people realised, Oh, wait. This blind kid ws actually on to something . You're welcome, by the way.
I went from being a kid who couldn’t handle a simple leather-punching project to creating something that started in a teenager’s bedroom because he was too stubborn to accept that reading had to be difficult.

Special Guest Blogger: Brazilian Goddess Pomba Gira

Sit down, darling. No, not there dolt, you’re sitting on my silk skirt, and this shade of crimson is far too expensive for your fat backside to rumple.
Honestly, the youth of today. You walk into my crossroads with your store-bought roses and menthol cigarettes and you expect the Queen to just drop everything?
My path is paved with the bones of men who thought no was a suggestion, but it has a certain charm because a woman has three choices of being a wife (boring), being a servant (tiring), or being a problem. I chose to be a catastrophic problem. I had hips that swung like a pendulum and a laugh that
could shatter a stained-glass window from three streets away. I lived in the taverns, the cabarets, and the places where the respectable people went when they wanted to feel alive and then spent the next morning praying for forgiveness.
Being a Pomba Gira isn’t just about wearing red and looking fabulous, it’s about the Crossroads. Every time you’re stuck, between a bad job and a worse one or between a boring husband and a thrilling mistake or even between life and death, that’s my office.
I’m the Queen of the Seven Crossroads. I’m the one who stands at the gate of the cemetery, laughing at the people who thought they could take their money with them. You can’t.
When you call on me, you’re not calling a fairy godmother. I’m not going to turn a pumpkin into a carriage, i’m more likely to set the pumpkin on fire and tell you to walk.
You come to me with your little red candles, crying about some boy named Kevin who hasn't liked your photo on the internet. Seriously? You want the Queen of the Night, the Lady of the Labyrinth, the Woman of Seven Marriages, to intervene in a digital spat?
I remember when people asked for real things like protecting your house from the police or making sure your husband’s mistress loses her hair but now, I spend half my time looking at your tweets and blog posts and think I’m not a feckin' delivery service, I’m a spirit. If you want a miracle, go talk to
a saint, they’re much more patient, though their parties are terrible. No smoking, no drinking, and everyone wears white. Dreadful.
People find my laugh, the gargalhada, quite scary as they think it’s the sound of evil. Idiots, It’s the sound of a woman who has seen the beginning and the end and realized that most of what you worry about is utter horseshit.
I'm the perfume you smell in an empty room and the red rose that blooms in the middle of a graveyard, I’ve seen empires fall because someone wanted a kiss they weren't supposed to have and seen men ruin their lives for a glimpse of a red pair of knickers and I sit at my crossroads, sipping my cider, and I laugh.
But don’t get it twisted. I’m not your bestie, I’m a Queen. If you bring me cheap wine, I’ll make sure your next haircut is a disaster. If you lie to me, I’ll make sure you trip every time you try to look cool. I demand respect so take your roses, leave the cigarette pack (the full one, don't be cheap) and remember, life is too short to drink bad wine or smoke those French ciggies which smell like burnt tyres.

Special Guest Blogger: Savannah

Existing for as long as i did in a world that thrives on chewing up and spitting out girls like me was impressive although i'm not sure if i will be remembered for my art, my temper or my impressive list of rockstar exes.
The AVN, bless their little cotton socks, once ranked me at #19 on their list of the top 50 porn stars of all time. #19! Not bad for a girl who mostly winged it, showed up late, and probably caused more headaches than actual cinematic masterpieces. I should’ve been #1, obviously, but modesty always did become me, just not very often.
My career was never just about the skin flicks, I had range and artistic depth or, at least, I had a great agent who told me I did. I dipped my toes into the shimmering, slightly sticky waters of B-movies. And let me tell you, if you think porn sets were wild, you haven't seen anything until you've been on a low-budget sci-fi horror comedy set at 3 AM with a prop severed head that looks suspiciously like last night's dinner. I played everything from a possessed cheerleader to an alien seductress to a zombie's love interest. The roles were diverse but I gave them my all or as much all as I could muster after a long night at the Sunset Strip hot spots.
Billy Idol, Vince Neil, David Lee Roth, Billy Sheehan, Pauly Shore, Slash, Mark Wahlberg, It was like a who's who of every poster I ever had on my teenage wall, except they were actually in my bed. It was exhausting, thrilling, and frankly, a lot of fun.
My reputation, much like my hair, was big, bold, and sometimes a little untamed. It was said that I always arrived late and was a temperamental Diva and not inaccurate I'll admit.
My financial acumen, or lack thereof, also became legendary. Substantial income they said and it was for a fleeting moment. But where does all that money go when you're living large, loving harder and buying every ridiculous thing that sparkles? Apparently, it goes. Quickly.
I was a girl who broke barriers, hearts and a few studio couches and lived full-throttle, consequences be damned and while i I survived the 90s, dated everyone you had a poster of in 1988 and the adult industry, what took me down was a car crash. A simple, stupid crash that broke my nose.
Now, to an average person, a broken nose is a bummer where you wear a bandage, you get some flowers and move on. But for me? In my world?
I looked in the mirror and didn't see Number 19. I saw a girl who couldn't take a close-up. And in my line of work, the close-up is the pension plan so I panicked and I didn't just get a little sad, I went out with a bang, literally, self inflicted gun shot to the head.
So what did i leave behind? A few dozen porn tapes, a collection of very expensive leather jackets, and a Rolodex that looks like the guest list for a 1991 MTV Video Music Awards after-party.

Special Guest Blogger: Inuit goddess Sedna

Every time someone bites into a succulent piece of blubber or dons a warm sealskin parka, they are, quite literally, enjoying a piece of me.
I was the daughter of Anguta and Isarrataitsoq, which is a lot of divine pressure for one girl to carry but both my parents were always on about me finding a nice hunter to settle down with but my main priority was mainly, eating. I had this Great Hunger, an appetite that could swallow a caribou whole. I occasionally tried to nibble on my parents while they slept but we’ve all made mistakes in our rebellious teens. Some kids dye their hair blue, I tried to consume the architects of the universe but instead of getting me a therapist, dad decided the best course of action was a scenic boat trip and
throwing me overboard into the freezing Arctic Ocean.
There I was, treading water and I did what any sensible person would do, I grabbed the side of the kayak but Dad was having none of it took out his knife and snip, snip, chop, chop and as my finger joints slipped away into the abyss, they didn’t just sink. They transformed with the knuckles becoming the ringed seals, the middle joints Walruses and the tips those magnificent, blubbery whales.
I watched my own digits sprout flippers and swim away which is a strange feeling to see your pinky finger blow a sprout of water and swim off.
My body became the foundation of an entire civilization’s survival and it’s hard to stay mad at your dad for being a homicidal maniac when you realise you’ve just accidentally solved world hunger for the next ten thousand years.
After the finger-chopping fiasco, I sank to the bottom, grew a tail (very mermaid chic)  and founded Adlivun, the underworld which is like a gated community, but for the dead, and the gates are guarded by some very grumpy sharks.
As the Mother of All Marine Animals,  if you want a seal for dinner, you have to stay on my good side and the power trip is immense, when i see a whale swim past my window I feel a strange sense of pride but it’s not all glamour, there’s the hair because the downside of having sea-creature fingers for a legacy is you can’t hold a comb so i summon a Shaman to do it for me.
Having a shaman travel through the spirit world to the bottom of the ocean just to comb your hair is the height of luxury but take it from me, if you are feeling peckish see what's in the fridge, especially if you have a father who owns a kayak and a sharp knife.

Special Guest Blogger: Black Sam Bellamy

Greetings landlubbers, they called me the Prince of Pirates and say I was the wealthiest swashbuckler to ever grace the Golden Age and a man of the people and honestly? They’re right. I was fabulous.
Before I was the Prince, I was just Sam. A teenager in the Royal Navy, which, let me tell you, is a fantastic place if you enjoy eating biscuits made 40% of weevils and I fought in some battles, saw the world, and realised one very important thing, that the legal life is a total scam.
You work for the King, he gets the gold and you get scurvy which is an awful business model.
So, I decided to go into independent and started with treasure hunting. My friend Paulsgrave Williams and I headed for the Florida coast to find the wrecked Spanish Plate Fleet. It was going to be easy,just pick some gold off the seafloor and retire but we found nothing. Not a single doubloon and that’s when we met Pirate Captain Benjamin Hornigold and his first mate was a guy named Edward Teach who you might know as Blackbeard.
Now, Ed was a lot. Fuses in the beard? Check. Multiple pistols strapped to his chest? Check. A general aura of I might bite your legs off? Absolutely.
I learned a lot from them, mostly that I was much better looking than they were and that I had a better philosophy. Hornigold refused to attack English ships because he still loved the King and although the ships crew told him the King doesn't even know you exist unless he’s signing your death warrant he refused so eventually, the crew voted him out and I was made captain. I was in my late twenties, I had a ship and while everyone else was wearing those ridiculous itchy wigs, I just tied my long black hair back with a velvet ribbon. Simple. Elegant. Aerodynamic and Black Sam was born.
I didn’t see myself as a thief. I saw myself as a wealth redistribution specialist and my crew called themselves Robin Hood’s Men.  I was merciful and generous, i lived by a rule that if you didn't fight back, I didn't kill you and I might even give you your ship back after I took all the good stuff.
In just over a year, I captured 53 ships and then came the Whydah. She was a beautiful state-of-the-art galley built for the slave trade and we spent months raiding the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast and I was the wealthiest pirate in history. I was winning at life.
I even had my own flag. Most pirates go for the basic skull and crossbones which is a bit cliché, if you ask me. Mine was a skeleton holding an hourglass in one hand and a speaking trumpet in the other and everything was going perfectly. I was heading back to New England with a ship full of gold and a crew of 145 men who thought I was a god, then came Mother Nature.
She didn’t care how many ships I captured. A storm hit us off Cape Cod and the weight of all that gold made us into giant golden brick and the ship capsized and out of 146 men, only two made it to shore. I wasn't one of them. I went down with the ship, the gold, and my very nice velvet hair ribbon.

Special Guest Blogger: Roman God Forculu

Hello, Mortals, I’m the little-known but fiercely over-qualified Roman deity who watches over the doors that separate the chaotic outside from the cozy (or not-so-cozy) inside.
My ancestors called me the Keeper of the Portal but the big guy, Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings and endings gets all the stories about gate-opening and gate-closing, I’m the one who makes sure the wood doesn’t warp, the metal doesn’t rust, and that you don’t end up stepping directly over
a dreaded threshold.
The ancient Romans loved to split up responsibilities. Need a god for the door? Ask Forculus. Need one for the hinge? Cardea. Need a god for the sill that keeps the draught out? Limentinus.
My name literally means the one who watches the door which is not exactly a superhero name but back when Rome was a cluster of huts on the Tiber and a few ambitious road-builders, doors were very basic. A simple slab of timber, a rope tied to a stone, and a prayer to whichever Gods was handy would suffice.
I was assigned to a modest wooden door outside a blacksmith’s shop in the Subura district but fast forward a few centuries and I got promoted to double doors in a public bathhouse. Suddenly, my responsibilities doubled and I had to keep two doors synchronized, ensure they swished open together perfectly and the bathhouse owner paid me in loaves of honey-glazed figs.
Limentinus is the brother who always stands at the exact spot where you transition from one world to another, making sure you don’t trip over the unseen line that separates inside from outside.
Janus is the grandmaster of passages, the god with a face looking both forward and backward and loves to take credit for everything but  Janus gets the statues, the festivals, the poems. Cardea gets a small bronze plaque in some Roman villa. Limentinus gets a stone slab that few notice unless they trip but I’m not a god who demands temples because a door teaches patience. You can’t force a wooden portal to swing open if the hinges aren’t aligned and every door you walk through offers a decision of either staying inside the safety of your house, or venture out into the unknown, i'm easy either way, that's your decision.

Special Guest Blogger: Alexander Bain

They say history is written by the victors but in my case, history is written by people who don't know how to spell facsimile.
If you’ve ever checked your digital watch or had the distinct displeasure of receiving a fax in the year of our Lord 2026, you’ve got me to thank or blame.
Being a pioneer mostly comprised of cold porridge, bad investments and people trying to steal your homework but not mine at school because I wasn't exactly the teacher’s pet. School was a place where I sat quietly, staring at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight and my teachers thought I was a bit dense.
I was apprenticed to a clockmaker in Wick and it was there, amidst the rhythmic tick-tock of brass gears and the smell of lubricating oil, that I decided everything was too slow. Why wait for a winding key to do the work? Why not use electricity? It seemed like a bright idea and little did I know, the path to glory is paved with people who insist you should stick to your day job.
I eventually found myself in London, on Hanover Street, running a workshop but innovation is expensive and electricity wasn’t exactly something you could pick up at the corner grocer's in the 1840s.
In my desperation, I sought out Sir Charles Wheatstone and I showed him my electric clock which was a beautiful, elegant piece of machinery kept in perpetual, pulsing motion by electromagnetic impulses but he dismissed it and said there was no future in electric clocks but three months later, I’m reading the paper and lo and behold, Wheatstone is at the Royal Society, unveiling his invention, the electric clock and I thought that claiming a patent you saw in someone else’s workshop three months prior is a level of chutzpah that even I have to begrudgingly respect.
Wheatstone didn't count on one thing, I was Scottish and we are famously stubborn when it comes to being cheated out of money.
He tried to block my patents but the House of Lords, in a rare moment of clarity, summoned me to give evidence and I walked into that room and explained how electricity actually functioned, and watched as Wheatstone’s face turned the color of a curdled porridge.
He was forced to pay me £10,000 and i put that money towards another invention, the Fax Machine or as i called it, the Chemical Telegraph.
I didn’t invent the fax machine so that you could send a blurry, black-and-white copy of an insurance document, I invented it because I thought we should be able to send images over wires! It was the 1840s! It was basically magic!
I spent three years tinkering with the synchronisation of pendulums and the chemical reaction on paper. It worked. It was genius. And yet, looking back, I realize I was the first person in history to inflict this machine upon the world.
The thing about being an inventor is that your brain is wired for discovery, not for the stock market and my fortune didn't last after I invested in some ventures that were, to put it mildly, optimistic, less mildly,  just plain stupid.
I died with considerably less than I started with, and yet, I don’t regret it because I see you all now, walking around with your mobile devices, sending instant messages, peering at screens, and tracking time to the millisecond which are all descendants of my pendulums and my wires.
So, next time your clock ticks, or your fax machine screams at you for no reason, spare a thought for Alexander Bain. I may have died broke, but I certainly didn't die bored.