Special Guest Blogger: Heraclitus

Being a philosopher is tough, we spend our days staring into space just thinking about things, knowing full well that when someone asks what do you do for a living, any answer we give is going to elicit nothing but blank stares.
In Ancient Greece you either became a philosopher or a playwright and as you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a playwright, i went down the philosopher route but i was a grumpy bugger, i argued with everyone and everyone pretty much ended up hating me so i finished up wandering the mountains eating grass and herbs.    
In my old age I developed an illness called dropsy which is where your body swells up with excess water but i did invent an original cure, everybody knows that water evaporates when heated so I thought if I just stay somewhere hot then the excess water would evaporate away and what's a ready source of heat and in plentiful supply, cow dung so i jumped into a big pile of it and buried myself up to my neck.
Unfortunately i was a bit too rash and forgot to bring any water so I just got hotter and hotter and eventually died from heat exhaustion.
My death stank literally but my cure for dropsy may not be well known but Leonardo da Vinci's drawing called the "Vitruvian Man" is, the picture of a naked man which looks like he is making snow angels although Leonardo did me no favours in that picture and living in Greece i don't even have the excuse it was cold that day.

Special Guest Blogger: General Robert E Lee

To most Brits General Lee was the name of the car in The Dukes of Hazard but a Commander had to be spectacular to get his name slapped on the side of a moonshine running Dodge Charger a century later and i was spectacular, a badass to end all badasses.
It takes someone special to lead an entire region of their country that has decided to rebel when the President said they couldn't buy and sell black people anymore and the South's campaign wasn't a success for no reason, it wasn't a success for quite a few reasons.
One was the horrific dysentery and diarrhea we suffered, the whole concept of not drinking or bathing in your own toilet water was a medical innovation that would come along much too late to help and then there was some window shakingly stupid strategies that cost the lives of thousands of men, like when i ordered 12,000 soldiers across an open field and into the loving arms of the rifle firing Union soldiers, getting half of them killed on the spot and getting the shit kicked out of us by those dastardly slavery-haters.
Lucky i didn't have a commander as bad as me so i survived and died from a stroke many years later but my burial was a bit of a pigs ear, my coffin was washed away by floodwater and the one the funeral directors managed to get hold of was a bit short so they buried me without shoes or my hat, fortunately they never had to squeeze in my morals and dignity because they were dead and buried many years before that.

Special Guest Blogger: Tomás de Torquemada

History has not been kind to us Spanish inquisitors, now im not saying the Spanish Inquisition didn't burn the occasional witch alive or stretch the occasional heretic to death but we didn't just go around killing and torturing people willy-nilly, some of 125,000 people tried in our tribunals did not end up crispy fried.
The Spanish Inquisition is often cited by heathens and atheists as an example of religious intolerance and repression but it was a carefully thought out exercise so we would only burn people who we had evidence for such as the absence of chimney smoke on Saturdays meant that the family were secretly honoring the Sabbath and therefore guiltily Jewish, buying lots of vegetables or meat just before Passover or anonymous accusations by neighbors, the paperwork involved was horrendous.
We only investigated heretics and that included anyone involved in witchcraft and superstition, blasphemy, sodomy, freemasonry, reading prohibited books, bigamy or unnatural Marriage and if someone wasn't available to be burnt to death we would burn an effigy of them but that was usually because they selfishly died during torture.
We had a technique which simulates drowning, much like modern waterboarding but my personal favourite was the rack, mostly so i could do my joke about them being due a long stretch but mostly because i was a sadistic bastard but we did stop the practise of tying the rope around the victim's forehead as it was apt to pop the eyes from their sockets, health and safety issue to have eyeball rolling around for anyone to slip on. 
One guy, Antonio Zavallos, was such a zealot that on being sentenced to death following an inquisition that revealed he was Jewish, he demanded to be burnt alive to satisfy God but we refused and he was gutted, gutted literally in every sense and then then we chopped his head off.

Any Link Is Just A Coincidence

Something i have heard quite a few times is that Trump is a Nazi which is of course ridiculous, he is many nasty things but never a Nazi.
Okay, so he supported some folks who were white supremacist neo-Nazi types but most right wingers have a tendency towards fascism and that side of things, it doesn't make him a Nazi.
I will also concede that his former wife revealed during the divorce proceedings, the most thumbed book in the Trump library was the book of Hitler quotes and there was that infamous 'this guy Hitler had some good ideas' quote but that doesn't make him a wannabe fascist.
So they used an upside red triangle in an advert for those pretesting against them, just happens that the inverted red triangle was used as identity badges by the Nazi's to classify prisoners in the camps during the Second World War, just a coincidence obviously.
Now it's people are pointing at the item in Trump official shop called the 'America First Tee', a t-shirt featuring an eagle standing on a circle but the eagle is a very common bird for American symbolism and circles are everywhere so can't read anything into that so any likeness to the Iron Eagle, the official symbol of the Nazi party, is a pure fluke.
The biggest difference is that one was a racist psychopath who went on long winded, raving rants and spread hate while the other was the leader of Germany in WW2 and had weird facial hair. See, no similarity at all.

Special Guest Blogger: Allen Collins

There were quite a few of us in Lynyrd Skynyrd and i was the lanky one dressed all in white, bushy long hair flowing in the wind, shredding my guitar during Freebird.
Musicians die young all the time and i died aged just 37 but people would drop dead like flies around me before that so Lucy is taking a chance asking me to come here because it seems that most people i was associated with died, Final Destination style.
We were all good ol' southern boys but God must have been on a break that famous day of our plane crash which killed three of my band members and seriously injuring me, severely damaging my right arm. We also landed in a swamp filled with alligators and several survivors who went for help got shot at by a farmer but God looked down at me that day and smiled, deciding he hadn't stopped screwing with me just yet.  
After my recovery i got together a new band with a few of the Lynyrd boys and just as we were preparing our debut tour, my wife died as a result of a hemorrhage but God looked down at me and smiled, deciding he wanted to screw with me some more yet.
Another band, this time the Allen Collins Band with the rest of the Skynyrd survivors and with Van Zant’s younger brother Johnny on vocals but as the group was preparing for a Skynyrd reunion tour i crashed my car and killed my new girlfriend and left myself paralysed from the waist down with limited use of my arms and hands and unable to play again.
God finally stopped screwing with me and instead gave me pneumonia and i finally died in 1990 but my song Free Bird and the kick-ass guitar solo at the end has kept my memory alive but the guitar solo was only originally added to give Van Zant a chance to rest during our shows.
Lynyrd Skynyrd are still going and touring and making albums proving not even a plane crash that killed half the band could stop us.

Blame The Government, Not The BBC

You can hear the howls already as the BBC announce that most of the 1.5 million viewers aged over 75 will now have to start paying the £157.50 annual fee for their TV license from 1 August although any over 75's on Pension Credits will continue to receive it free.
I do have sympathy for the BBC as it was the Government in 2000 who decided to give the over 75's a free license, and then once they got the £745m bill, passed the funding responsibility on to the BBC.
The broadcaster is already facing a challenging financial environment and has launched a programme of voluntary redundancies as it attempts to make £125m in savings this year and has announced job cuts in TV news and local radio but the Government still have the brass neck to say the BBC's decision is a 'body blow to millions of British pensioners'.
The Government do seem to be gaining a reputation for pushing the blame for things that are unpopular onto others but the responsibility lies with the government transferring free licenses to the corporation and the government cannot absolve itself of responsibility of this unpopular move.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Back

Hard to believe that the last episode of Buffy aired in 2003, a show that tops my list of all time favourite programmes.
It doesn't feel that long ago but watching the nightly week-day re-runs on E4, it is amusing to see how young the actors and actresses who lived above the Hell Mouth in Sunnydale look although it does give a sad tinge of 'where did those years go?'
We were wondering just what the cast have been doing since the last show aired and some seemed to have faired better than others.
 
Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Geller)
Gellar moved into movies, most well know being 'I Know What You Did Last Summer', 'Scream 2' 'Scooby-Doo' and 'The Grudge' and married fellow Scooby actor Freddie Prinze Jnr. 

Willow (Alyson Hannigan)
Alyson shifted her Willow character across to Angel and then starred in the American Pie movies and has been a permanent fixture in the TV sitcom 'How I Met Your Mother'. She married Alexis Denisorf who played Wesley.

Xander (Nicholas Brendon)
Brendon stayed in TV and appeared in TV series, Criminal Minds, and now writes Buffy comic books.

Angel (David Boreanaz)
The very easy on the eye Boreanaz starred in his TV series spin-off Angel until 2004 and now stars as FBI Special Agent, Seeley Booth, on the television crime drama series Bones.

Cordelia Chase (Charisma Carpenter)
Carpenter moved from Buffy to Angel and then onto another supernatural TV show Charmed. After appearing in several TV shows, she played the role of Lacy in The Expendables movie.

Spike (James Marsters)
Despite his immaculate English accent, Marsters is American and also made the move across to Angel and appeared in Smallville, the Dr Who spin-off Torchwood and the short lived revival of Hawaii Five O but has now carved out a career narrating audiobooks.

Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (Alesix Denisof)
Denisof was another who joined the cast of Angel and then moved into theatre and made a fleeting appearance in 'How I met Your Mother' alongside his wife Alyson Hannigan and appeared in movies 'The Avengers' and 'Much Ado About Nothing'.

Dawn Summer (Michelle Trachtenberg)
Trachtenberg starred in Six Feet Under and in the movies 'Harriet the Spy', 'Inspector Gadget' and 'Black Christmas'.

Oz (Seth Green)
Green went on to create 'Robot Chicken', appear in movies 'The Italian Job', 'Party Monster' and 'Austin Powers' series but is most well known for his voice role as Chris Griffin on Family Guy.

Anya (Emma Caulfield)
Since dying at the end of Buffy, she has appeared in movies 'Darkness Falls' and TiMER.

Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland)
On leaving the Buffy series, Sutherland attended a photography course and subsequently set up a photography studio.

Faith (Eliza Dushku)
Dushku was another who joined the cast of Angel and then into her own supernatural series, Tru Calling. Her movies include 'True Lies', 'Wrong Turn' and 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back'.

Drusilla (Juliet Landau)
Landau also joined Angel and has since appeared in several Tim Burton projects

Every now and then someone suggests a reunion and possibly a new Buffy film but as much as a Buffy fan as i was, and still am, i want to remember the wise-cracking teenagers of the late nineties and early noughties as they were, a TV show that was as near to perfect as it gets.

Waiting To See What The Tories Catch Is

The Conservative Party under Theresa May was unable to give the nurses a pay rise after 8 years of no pay rise that as they didn't have a magic money tree but the same Conservatives under Boris Johnson seem to have found one because they are handing out money like there's no tomorrow. 
Since the pandemic began, Boris Johnson's government has spent £159bn in direct measures including the job retention scheme and tax cuts, as well as a further £123bn on deferred tax rises and yesterday they added another £30bn to that with an extension of the job retention, this time a £1,000 handout to companies that put furloughed staff back on the payroll until January.
I would not berate the Government for the job retention scheme, if anything it is about the only thing they got right during the whole pandemic crisis but there is something in the back of my mind which says that this 'giving away money' is so unTory like that there has to be a sting somewhere and i can see it being how the massive bill is going to be settled.
The only way is to bring more money in or pay less money out and after a decade of austerity, it is hard to see what there is left to cut, that half of the equation has been squeezed as tight as possible so it will have to be tax rises.
The tax system in the UK is complicated with the three tax rate bands and tax reliefs and expenses so it won't be as simple as just adding a few pence to everyone's income tax as that hits the lowest earners harder but the Conservatives are not known as the nasty party for nothing.
Handing out freebies is just not the Conservatives we know, and Boris Johnson is as trustworthy as asking George Best to mind your drink while you nipped to the loo so we will have to wait and see just what the catch is, because guaranteed there will be one

Special Guest Blogger: David Ben-Gurion

Shalom, as the founder of the State of Israel, i do get asked many questions about Judaism and after the usual ones about foreskins, the next thing i get asked most is about Hanukkah and whether it's Christmas because Hanukkah is the only Jewish holiday anyone knows about.
Oh vey, some of you may have noticed the Hanukkah displays on a few shelves between the candy canes, stockings and dancing reigndeer in December but it is all about how almost two hundred years before Jesus was even a sparkle in his father's eye, the Syrians outlawed Judaism and us Jews went to war against the entire Syrian Army and won so we made a holiday out of it and it isn't easy to write catchy jingle about it.
So no it isn't Christmas, every idiot that goes about with 'Happy Hanukkah on his lips should be roasted on his own menorah and buried with a chunk of Challah in his throat to almost quote that famous non-Jew Charles Dickens.
We do eat chocolate money though which isn't a great idea for overcoming sterotypes and we have a Hanukkah bush which is a bit like your Christmas tree, my Auntie Hannukkah was always proud of her bush, a man would trim it for her twice a year.    
As for Isreal, it very nearly ended up in Argentina as it was our first choice but we also considered Kenya but on a visit to see where we could pitch up we were attacked by the wildlife so decided on Palestine, a land without people or rather a land with people who we could ignore when they kicked off so whatever, none of them are Jews. Moving on.
I did make a speech to placate the Middle East nations, saying: 'we must do more than make peace with them, we must achieve collaboration and alliance on equal terms' but apart from a few quarrels with our new neighbours, Israel has grown and has gone from strength to strength in my vision of living with our neighbours as equals and as Jews are always fighting with each other, mission accomplished.

Special Guest Blogger: Johnny Cash

The late 1970s is often seen as a time of punk with the rebels like the Sex Pistols and the Clash but none of them were a patch on me, i spent the '60s going in and out of jail, sometimes as a performer and sometimes as a felon sleeping off my misdemeanors in a cell.
I was a true American outlaw, angrily rejecting authority while loving my country, except for the parts when i was actively burning it all to the ground.
I was driving my truck through a Forest one day when my truck overheated and set the whole thing ablaze and i did what what any responsible motorist would do and abandoned it and went fishing.
508 acres of land burnt down that day, you could say i left a burning ring of fire and refused to go down down down as the flames went higher and that pisses all over wrecking a hotel room or lobbing a TV out the window.
My drinks and drug habit was expensive but there comes a point where you're making more money than your drug habit can spend and i used it to buy an exotic bird sanctuary but got into an argument with my Ostrich and attacked it with a tree branch but i swung and missed, of course i did, i was high and pissed remember, and the ostrich responded by ripping open my stomach with it's talons.
By the mid 60's i made the album Bitter Tears, a protest album about the plight of Native Americans saying i was proud of my Cherokee Blood although technically, most of my blood was amphetamine and the actual amount of Native American blood in me was precisely zero but the higher i got the more Indian blood I thought I had in me and i was so blitzed off my tits i could have been Hiawatha.
The KKK also tried to kidnap me but i'm almost out of space here so let's leave it there and anyway, i smell burning.