Special Guest Blogger: Baden Powell

Some of the most important things that any young boy can learn is discipline, the knowledge of how to tie a reef knot and how to fold a Union Flag correctly.
When i left the British Army, i decided to dress young boys in a military style uniform and teach them survival techniques that i had learned in the army and thus the Scouting movement was born and kids could earn badges for passing certain tasks, badges that had a swastika symbol on them.
With hindsight, i could try and make the argument that i was not a Nazi sympathiser, rather that the symbol was from India and meant 'good luck' but that rather falls apart where you look in the pages of my own diary where i wrote in 1939 'Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc'.
Indeed, Mein Kampf is a ripping yarn but after i died the Scouts quickly dumped the use of the Swastika on their badges although they continued to use my oaths to 'love my God' and 'serve the Queen and country', or rather they did because that has gone the way of the Swastika and been kicked out.
Unfortunately, as hardly anyone is left who still believes in God and the Royals are not as popular as they once where, making an oath to a God that hardly anyone believes in anymore in modern times and a mega-rich lady who lives in a Palace doesn't rank very high on any ones list.
Still, my scouts are still going strong and who doesn't love a boy i uniform, i know i certainly did.

Special Guest Blogger: Joseph Smith Jr

If there one thing that my Book of Mormon didn't make clear when i translated it from ancient Egyptian texts was exactly where Kolob is.
Mormon scripture doesn't differentiate between stars and planets, so everything in space is called a star. This means that when us Mormons die, our souls either travel the vastness of space to land on a paradise they can call home for all eternity, or they fry forever on the surface of a sun.
My first taste of religion was in New York when i experienced a series of visions, including one which i saw 'two personages' (presumably God the Father and Jesus Christ) and another in 1823 in which an angel directed me to a buried book of golden plates inscribed with a Judeo-Christian history of an ancient American civilization.
This became the Book of Mormon, which i claimed was a translation of golden plates which had been compiled by the ancient prophet-historian Mormon.
I am considered a prophet of the Mormon Church as God gave me his commandments which were no booze, fags, coffee and tea but my personal favourite was the multiple wives thing but who am i to doubt Gods word, i had over 30 wives in my lifetime, and claimed a revelation from God instructing me to gain plural wives in order to gain a higher ranking in God's kingdom.
Practicing adult Mormons also had to wear religious underpants as a source of protection from the evils of the world.
I do sometimes feel a pang of jealousy for atheists, all that spare time from all the reading, arguing, and thinking they don't have to do would be nice.

Special Guest Blogger: Janis Joplin

My lifestyle of a hard-partying '60s rock star was short lived, mostly because i was short lived and my doctor told me that i wouldn't reach 24 if i continued my drink and drugs lifestyle, but i proved him wrong, dying from an accidental heroin overdose aged 27, part of that exclusive 27 club and i was joined by Jimi Hendrix just 16 days later.
As well as the speed and heroin, i did love Southern Comfort and would take a fifth of the whiskey onto stage with me during performances and when i died i left $2500 in my will for my friends to throw a party for me with Southern Comfort for everyone to get as drunk as humanly possible.
I did spend a night in jail after performing for a rowdy crowd and police officers climbed onto the stage and asked me to help them quiet the crowd.
I refused and instead screamed obscenities at the cops who decided they actually didn’t really like being sworn at and arrested me in my dressing room.
I was an angry young lady but musicians should be angry and spitting venom at injustices and if you dip out and return a decade later, they should still be just as angry and still looking for targets to aim their barbs at. Nobody wants that song that made you go 'Hell Yeah' to turn up telling you to buy a Mercedes-Benz or something.
If there is there's one thing us sweaty, hippies hate, it's consumerism and doing things for profit but i understand that choosing the right song for your commercial is a delicate process. You need to find a tune that gets the viewers' attention or sets the proper mood, conveys the intended message, and convinces everyone that they need to buy your product immediately or alternatively, you could just choose a song that mentions your product which is probably what happened with my song turning up on that car advert.
As the song was about how pointless and depressing rampant consumerism is, especially crappy expensive cars, the Mercedes-Benz executives just thought "Hey, she mentioned us! Let's use it!"
Maybe the message is to not look too deeply into the lyrics of the songs we are singing, to recognise that it is just a song with a bunch of words strung together but it was as if half a million hippies gathering for Woodstock and letting their private parts flap all over the marijuana covered mud was all for nothing.

Special Guest Blogger: Victor Grayson

Whoever said politics is rock 'n' roll for ugly people had obviously never seen Ozzy Osbourne but i was proper political rock 'n' roll, the Elvis of my day and with my strong views on Socialism and the unfairness of the system, i won a seat in the British parliament aged just 25 and my star shone brightly but many people warned me not to let it go to my head but it never, it went to my liver instead as i soon developed a drinking problem and ended up losing my seat at the next election. 
As a left winger, and with the Communist Russian Revolution in the offing, the Prime Minister David Lloyd George, had me spied on but i had some dirt on the Prime Minister and his secretary after finding out that they were selling knighthoods and lordships to all sorts of dodgy characters and at a public meeting i hinted that i would soon be naming 'the monocled dandy with offices in Whitehall'.
Rather than just name names i tried to build some tension to have a sense of drama before the big unviel and even after being beaten up in The Strand in an attempt to frighten me, i continued threatening to name the men behind the corruption, Lloyd George and his personal fixer and creepy weirdo whose name begins with M and ends with aundy Gregory.
What happened next is hazy but i was asked to go to a house, a house owned by M Gregory as it turned out, and then when i entered the next time i was seen outside was two months later in an unsealed coffin on a riverbank.
I can't say it was Gregory that killed me to shut me up but when he found himself in need of money, a wealthy friend mysteriously dropped dead, leaving a new will scrawled on a menu giving everything to good ol' Maundy so yeah, it probably was.

Special Guest Blogger: Jean-Jacques Rousseau

An 18th-century philosopher who helped form the modern political, sociological, and educational thought which is a surprise considering that i barely made it day to day alive considering how much i had wrong with me.
My friends called it hypochondria but i checked with a medical encyclopedia and feeling a bit dizzy one day, i found a few medical books and began to read about Typhoid Fever. Before i had even finished the list of symptoms i realised that i had got it.
I sat for a while, frozen with horror and then, in the listlessness of despair, i turned the page and read about St Vitus Dance, again read the symptoms and discovered that i had that also and must have had it for months without knowing it.
Wondering what else I was suffering from, i found the index and starting alphabetically, read up on Ague, and learned that I was sickening for it, and was in the early stages of Bright’s disease although i was relieved to find i only had it in a mild form.
Cholera I had and also Diphtheria while Epidermolysis Bullosa? I seemed to have been born with.  I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, learning i had everything from Acute Valley Fever to Zymosis and as there were no more diseases after Zymosis, i concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
Somehow i managed to write some of the stuff you learnt in college and then forget all about but i was considered one of the most influential philosophers of all time.
My seminal work, The Social Contract, inspired the Declaration of Independence and strongly shaped the Constitution although the bits about guns was all theirs, i never wrote that.
My most important was the 1762 book Emile, or On Education, a treatise on the education of children where i refused to accept the strict, authoritarian education style of the day and maintained that children should be free to discover the world on their own, play, and explore, with an ever approachable father always present to answer their questions about the nature of the world.
My philosophical nemesis Voltaire called me a hypocrite as i dumped all of my five children outside the door of an orphanage but i shut him up because i never dumped them at the door, i took them inside, which shows what a liar he was.

Special Guest Blogger: Clara Bow

Boop Boop Be Doop, that me, Betty Boop is me in cartoon form although you wouldn't have known that because i was a silent movie star but my star fell quicker than a fat kid at a skating rink.
I was never one of those actresses who would light up the room, i was more likely to light up a fag but i was the first 'It Girl' which was the name of my blockbuster movie at the time, 'It', and earned me the nickname.
I was a flapper actress in the roaring 20s wearing short skirts, short hair, and generally having good, reckless fun all the time, living life to the limit, and becoming a tabloid staple during the heady years of my fame. I had no problem carousing late into the night and then rolling onto the film set in the early hours of the morning, taking whatever lover i pleased along the way. Some of my most famous flings included the heartthrob actors Gary Cooper and I partied and canoodling with actors such as John Wayne and Bela Lugosi.
Then it all came crashing down when Hollywood shifted from silent films to talkies and audiences were shocked at what they heard because i had a very strong Brooklyn accent.
Talkies were now the thing in Hollywood and the stress of talkies pushed me over the limit. My nerves were shot and then one of my best friends turned on me after i found out she had been conning me out of money and took her to court.
Somehow i ended up with all the backlash, especially when she revealed all of my worst secrets in front of the judge and jury, relating a series of stories about my fast and loose ways, tales of my fondness for public sex, threesomes with prostitutes and, oh yeah, fornicating with dogs.
True or not, it didn’t matter. The tabloids started running vicious stories about me and the damage to my career was catastrophic. The public and my studio no longer considered me an independent, sexually liberated woman, they saw me as a dog lover in the worst possible way.
When the i died from a heart attack at the age of 65, i was a has-been by choice, locking myself up in my bungalow for decades, and i passed almost entirely alone. Yet that wasn’t the only tragedy.
As the the bulk of all silent films were stored on ludicrously flammable nitrate stock, and Hollywood didn't even think of them as something worth preserving until 1935 and around 70 percent of Hollywood's silent films are plain gone. Fuhgedaboutit? They certainly did.

Special Guest Blogger: Maria Eleonora of Brandenburg

I had it all, the title, wealth, the beautiful face and suitors from all over Europe who tried to win my hand in marriage including King Charles I of England but i fell in love with King Gustav of Sweden. He gave me his heart and i mean that literally, when he died i refused to bury his body for more than a year and as a compromise they removed his heart and i hung it above my bed in a gold casket. I was romantic like that.
We had all the court buffoons and jesters as well as the hilarious 17th-century craze for keeping dwarfs as court curios but the one thing i couldn't have was a son to become a male heir and it drove me crazy and Sweden was really, really boring.
If i had given Charles of England a bit more encouragement i could have been Queen of England with its rolling hills and green and pleasant land but i went for Gustav and Sweden and the freezing temperatures, snow and forests and the roads which were always muddy and the tiny wooden houses so one time, my lady in waiting and i escaped by sneaking out of a kitchen window, hopping onto a boat and then a carriage, and boarding a ship to Denmark and freedom.
Unfortunately, after all the running away drama, Denmark was even more boring than Sweden, it must be a Nordic thing, so i came back.
I did bare the King a girl named Christina and it said that i immediately rejected her because i wanted a boy, and i can see how that rumour got started because the child was very accident prone, she somehow tumbled down a full flight of stairs, was dropped a few times on the hard, stone floor and a large wooden beam fell into her cradle but she grew up to be Queen of Sweden and then reaslised that was like being Queen of Squaresville so abdicated and went off to live in Rome, so that turned out okay.

Saying Hello To Stupid

It seems that straight after the vaccination for Coronavirus has been found, the next most pressing thing to inoculate against is stupid because i swear people are getting stupider by the day, or possibly it was just the ones i met this weekend who tried to tell me that the Coronavirus doesn't exist and it is all a Government plot.
Bristol Council had better make with industrial amounts of sanitiser in Castle Park because this Bank Holiday saw a crowd of around 100 people telling everyone who would listen that they know it's a hoax, one i spoke to at a safe distance was a car mechanic who grudgingly agreed that he had no medical qualifications to speak of but he knew it was a hoax because he had researched it on the internet.
Call me picky but i don't consider him far enough up the World Health Organisation chain of command to take his word over the 99.99% of medical staff who believe that there is a virus ravishing the Planet at the moment and taking lives and who have to deal with it and whose patients are made up of people who refuse to take it seriously.
It is reminiscent of the Climate Change deniers who refused to believe the climate was changing until the hurricanes got stronger, the rivers started overflowing and the summers got fatally hotter and even now there are some who still refuse to believe it, literally while the flood water laps around their ankles.
Today's protest in my Town Centre was thankfully very small with six people with a loud speaker handing out leaflets and i am happy to say they got a bit of an earful from the passers-by for the hour that I was there, but i did get to speak to the leader who ran through why it is a hoax (Government control over us all) and how people like Bill Gates stand to make billions from it by selling us a vaccine to a virus that doesn't exist.
This time when i asked what medical background he had he was ready, and said that he had an extensive background in all things medical although he strangely refused to name where he trained or what qualifications he held, prefering to stick with his 'people need to open their eyes' and calling me a 'sheep who is being hoodwinked by the Governments'.
'All the Governments in the World' i replied, 'except one which means that on my side of the fence i have almost every medically trained person on the planet and every World Leader except one who is on your side, so you have Donald Trump and he suggested drinking bleach, how you feel about that'? 
By the way he huffed and walked off saying 'i don't get it' i would guess he didn't feel that chipper about it but he was right, i didn't get it but if he keeps going about things like he is, he will get it and unfortunatley pass it on to people who had the required amount of brain cells to not be in a town centre shouting that a killer virus doesn't exist.

Special Guest Blogger: Aaliya

Since it seems like every movie and music star is just a drug and sex scandal waiting to happen, you could almost think that it's not possible to be a prominent musician without also having an utterly depraved life behind the scenes and looking back at the great musicians of history you couldn't help but wonder if that's right but not me, i was praised for my clean-cut image and moral values.
My musical mentor was R Kelly and it was him who named my album 'Age Ain't Nothing but a Number' a title that people who don't understand irony would call ironic because when we got married, he was 27 and i was 15 although my birth certificate said i was 18, or at least it did after we altered it with a biro.
The marriage was annulled a year later after my parents learned about it and forced me to cut off Kelly personally and professionally for the rest of time, they wanted to cut off something altogether different.
It was reported by some that i was the predatory one and not a teen who'd been groomed by an adult with control over every aspect of my life but this wouldn't be the only time my ex-husband would be accused of heinous sex crimes. It wouldn't even be the second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth come to think of it but i was always seeing women throw themselves at my husband.
We was at this party once and there was this old cow. I mean she was OLD! Must have been like 30. At least. At any rate, she was really annoying my husband and throwing herself at him. I mean.. GEEZ! I said by the time i’m thirty i’d be doing something REALLY important, or so i thought.
My life was not filled with enough sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll to kill a rock god but i died like a true rock star, in a plane crash.
We were coming back from Bahamas after filming my music video for 'Rock The Boat’, the plane was overloaded with all my equipment and the pilot had falsified his licence with the same biro that i had used on my birth certificate and he flew straight into a marsh at the end of the runway.
I squeezes quite a lot into my 22 years and i wasn't nasty or spitting venom but i really hope none of my songs turn up advertising Washing-Up Liquid and or telling you to buy a Vauxhall Vectra.

Special Guest Blogger: Bela Lugosi

My finest role was as Count Dracula, and everyone loves Vampires as evidenced by all the TV shows with vampires produced each and every day in the world today.
Whenever i was starting out and would receive a script to read through i would comment that it needed vampires. Sure enough they soon got fed up with it and stopped sending me things to read through but i stubbornly maintain that any story can be improved with the introduction of the blood drinking living dead. Just think how much better Pride and Prejudice would have been if Mr Darcy had taken to rampaging through the village of Longbourn in an orgy of blood lust instead of chasing the prudish Elizabeth about the place but then Jane Austen seemed to do quite well without my advice. Could have been better though.
My Vampire career began when i played Dracula in a stage play which was so frightenig that in one theatre in San Francisco there was actual real life nurses on hand with smelling salts, my acting was THAT good but it was also the Hungarian accent and the way i said 'I vant to suck your blood'.
After appearing as Dracula in the iconic 1931 film, i was briefly the most popular star in Hollywood and i got more female fan mail than even Clark Gable. I told you, chicks dig vampires.
Dracula was part of the core group of monsters Universal Studios kept on hand along with Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man and the Wolf Man although being the go-to guy for the ghoulish role, it typecast me but it got me the chicks, including Betty Boop, or rather the woman that Betty Boop is based on, Clara Bow.
When i died they even buried me in one of my Dracula capes but in true horror fashion, rather than die peacefully and leave a used-vampire-cape-sized hole in Hollywood, i still made movies like Plan 9 from Outer Space which came out three years after my death with cobbled together footage of me previously unreleased production as a final tribute to me, in true horror fashion, i refused to just stay dead.