Special Guest Blogger: Buffalo Bill Cody

The cowboy is probably the most iconic character in the history of the U.S. Everyone immediately recognises them by their cowboy hats and fancy belt buckles, riding their horses while shooting at each other or, as was more often the case, at Native Americans.
My shows sold the myth of the Wild West to Americans but in reality my shows were about as representative of the real West as Star Trek is about Space travel but it was those shows that created the template for the Western look, including, among other things, the 10-gallon hat which i invented for my performances.
A silly hat, a massive belt buckle and ending each sentence with 'partner' doesn't make you a real cowboy but the look i created survived thanks to people who brought it with them from the East and whose only interaction with the Wild West was my shows they'd seen where where you'd shoot first and then shoot any questions that came later.
The nickname 'Buffalo' came from my time before i began trying to make the wild west romantic, i was charged with providing buffalo meat for the workers employed by Kansas Pacific Railroad and those boys could eat, i shot 4,282 buffalo in a space of 18 months and then i changed jobs and rode for the Pony Express and then i worked as a scout for the US Army under the command of General Custer back in the time when a white man could become a hero for killing Native Americans.
When that ended i began acting in a Wild West Show and then went off to make up my own and took it on tour around the USA and even Europe with many famous figures of the Wild West including Gabriel Dumont, Annie Oakley, Lillian Smith, legendary Sioux leader Sitting Bull, and even well-known frontierswoman Calamity Jane and in a early success for equality, i insisted on equal pay for the men and women who performed in my shows.
We were so successful that when the World's Fair came to Chicago in 1893 and the organisers said they didn't need no stinkin' gun fight show, i went to Chicago anyway and put my show right beside the fair, and it was enormously popular, stealing attention and visitors. Suck on that then.
Despite the fact that i had no real connection to the area, when i died the city of Buffalo, New York used my nickname for their NFL team, the Buffalo Bills, in honour of my contribution to the near extinction of the species, i think the helmets they wore might be a bit tight.

A Joe Biden Foreign Policy

Watching television without my glasses last night i thought how amazing our scientists are to be able to dress up a gorilla in a suit and get them to dance to YMCA but once i put my glasses on i saw it was Donald Trump on another of his national 'lets give all my supporters Coronavirus' campaigns.
There is lots of things we can say about Donald Trump but he is one of only a handful of American Presidents who has not taken his nation to war during his time in the White House.
Now with America waking up to just how much of a disaster he has been, the smart money seems to be on Joe Biden sending Trump and his equally ridiculous family out of the White House but nobody seems to know much about what a Biden Presidency will mean for the rest of the World.
What he does inside America borders we don't care about although it would be a fair assumption that it will be better than what has been going on there for the last four years but what about his foreign policy?
The Joe Biden website states he would make the use of force a last resort and not the first which is a good start and will end the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East including withdrawing American support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
He also says he will make up with NATO, re-sign the Iran nuclear deal, negotiate new arms control arrangements with Russia and rejoin the Paris Climate Accord on day one.
I could see no mention of ending one of the greatest long running sores which is Palestine but he does say he will sustain an ironclad commitment to Israel’s security which means the genocide of the Palestinians will continue with American approval which is the only minus point i can see in his foreign policy but it seems that all wannabe Presidents have to agree to funding the Israeli atrocities to keep the whack-a-doodle faithful onside.
All in all, a Biden Presidency will go some way to redo much of what Trump has undone but the largest surprise is that their are a large enough number of voters without the required amount of working braincells in America to even make it a contest.

Special Guest Blogger: Charlemange

To some, i was Charles the Bastard, to some Charles the Great while to others i was Charles the Cruel but to Pope Leo III i was the bloke with the foreskin. Not mine, i was Catholic and not Jewish and so i had mine safely tucked away in my tunic where it should be but Jesus's, his was in my bag and i handed it to the Pope as a thank you for making me the Emperor of the Romans.
There were plenty of foreskins around at the time, all claiming to have come from the Holy dong but i told Leo mine was the authentic one as it had been delivered to me by an angel and he went 'okay then' and put it in a display case in the Vatican.
The bastard bit was due to my parents not being married when i was born but as my dad was king, it was not such an issue but when my dad died it was a toss up between me and my brother which of us would succeed him and i was devastated when i found out he had died from a nosebleed especially as i was nowhere near him at the time and i could probably find a witnesses to prove that but it conveniently left me in sole possession of the Frankish kingdom and it changed my life forever.
The great was because i was one of the most influential leaders in western history. As Holy Roman Emperor, i united diverse peoples across
the European continent, instituted a culture of learning and scientific advancement which would rival the Renaissance, despite not being able to read or write myself, i introduced a more legible writing system using lower case letters and spaces between words and zealously enforced Christianity throughout Europe and as i had conquered most of Europe, that bit was easy.
The cruel is mostly from all the wars and the 5,000 Saxons i relieved of their heads for refusing to convert to Christianity.
If i had one vice it was my love of roast meat and my doctors would plead with me to restrict my intake but i said if it’s all the same to them, i’d rather carry on eating meat and just let bits of my body fall off at random and when i died at the ripe old age of 72, they buried me in a casket made of gold and silver and as far as i am aware, nobody removed my foreskin to hand out as a present.

Special Guest Blogger: Fred Astaire

There are some things that everyone agrees are awful, like paper cuts, or cancer, or paper cuts from the hospital bills you receive after getting cancer treatment but not everything in life is that certain and when i began my dancing career, it was my sister, Adele, who was the one set for big things and i was just copying her.
When she gave it all up to marry Lord Cavendish and move to a Ireland to live in a castle, i went solo and tried out for a few parts and i was told i couldn't sing, i couldn't act but i could dance a bit so the studios hit upon a strategy, get proper actors like Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers to do the proper talking and acting bits and get me to just dance everything.
I based my trademark onscreen look of top hat (to hide my bald spot), tails, and a white tie on Edward VIII of Britain and off i went to make films.
The early Hollywood dance films had a very different look than how dance is presented today, due to my dancing everything to make up for a lack of other required movie skills, dancing become part of the plot and the producers came up with a new way of filming dance sequences, which was to fit both dancers in the frame.
Ginger Rogers and i starred together in 10 films and became one of Hollywood’s most adored on-screen couples but funnily enough, i never wanted to work with her to start with but there was never any romance between us and i left our partnership to explore new film opportunities, forgetting that acting and i went together like whiskey and driving so actually retired at one point, then came back and danced some more and then after 30 musical films in 25 years, retired again saying i was fed up with dancing in movies.
So i began dancing on Television instead and even got a few straight acting jobs which didn't involve me doing soft shoe shuffle or a paso doble.
I died of pneumonia at the age of 88 and my body was buried at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California and one of my last requests was that there should never be a film made about my life, because if it was my best acting bits, it could be shown in the adverts between films with proper actors in.

Special Guest Blogger: Clyde Barrow

Bonnie and i were pretty notorious outlaws in our days and our lives may have been short, but we crammed a lot into them.
Bonnie was an honor studnet and wanted to be an actress but i persuaded her that she could either find fame and fortune with lots of sweat and hard work or she could just join me in sticking a gun in people's faces and then dying in a hail of bullets and she was up for that, so that's what we did.
Being only 5ft 4", many people understimated me but Mr 20-gauge shotgun soon focused minds but it wasn't easy being so short, i had to put up with the 'hey, what's the weather like down there' comments so i might have had an attitude but you would too if you couldn't reach the frigging cheesy-wotsits at the grocery store.
I got into crime early and was on the run from Prison for stealing a truckload of turkeys when we met but we clicked straight away and Bonnie was a natural with a gun, most girls are stupid when it comes to firearms but she knew that if a gun is loaded, you should always point it away from you.
At a bank clerk or a store owner which were our favourite targets but it meant we had to keep moving as the police were always just behind us and we were always just escaping their clutches.
We almost got caught a few times, one time we had to duck out a window of a motel and left behind all our stuff including my guitar so i telephoned my mum to ask her to ask the police if i could get it back. I’m sure you can guess that the answer was two words, the second one being 'off'.
Our end came after we stopped off at a friends farm to lie low after killing a store holder but that friends father turned to the police to set up an ambush and while we were driving along we saw the elderly friend's father apparently broken down at the side of the road. We stopped to help him and the hiding police put 150 bullets into the car with many going in, and then back out again, of Bonnie and me.
We always said that we wanted to be buried together, but we were buried separately because Bonnie’s mother didn’t approve of me and to be fair she had a point, if she had not met me she probably wouldn't have ended up with more holes than a colander salesman.

Clinton 2016 Trump Predictions

You didn't need to be a psychic to predict in 2016 that Donald Trump would be an awful President and he hasn't disapointed and it is widely expected that he will be sent skidding buttocks first out of the White House in November but we will never know if Hillary Clinton had won last time, how things would have played out but she did make some predictions of what was coming down the line from the first Orange President.  

She said Trump didn’t pay any income tax and she was only $750 out with reports showing he paid no tax at all in 11 out of the last 18 years.
She said the US’s reputation would plummet and a recent Pew Research Centre poll shows the reputation of the country dropped from 64% in 2016 to to 49% Worldwide now. Ouch, that gotta hurt.
She said Mexico won’t pay for Trump’s wall and so far the amount of Peso's sent to the US Treasury for the 260 miles of wall that has been built is nil. It has cost the American taxpayers £11bn though.
She said racial tensions will rise and no argument there but a survey by Pew Research Centre said 73% Black people, 69% Hispanics and 65% of Asian's agree.
She said LGBT rights would be stripped and opposition to the Equality Act, banning transgender service members from the military and making it harder for LGBT people seeking asylum in the US gives this one a tick.
She said he would hand tax cuts to billionaires and according to University of California at Berkeley, Donald Trump's $1.5tr tax cuts helped billionaires pay a lower rate than the working class for the first time in history.

What do you know, she was right afterall, who would have thought it??

It's Her Party And She'll Stay If She Wants To

Some World leaders consider Democracy to be so good that they are willing to send other peoples husbands, wives and children into war and bomb the population of far flung places to try and install it but as the current crop of Western Democratically elected leaders are showing, sometimes you get a couple of real duffers in charge.
That's the main problem with Democracy, the whole process is only 1 day every 4-5 years and the elected personnel can do what he or she wants without censor until the wheel slowly grinds back around again and we get the chance to vote him or her out.
What would improve Democracy is a way to remove the elected officials if they turn out to be a dud or found breaking the rules during a global pandemic which brings us neatly to SNP Margaret Ferrier who travelled on a train from London to Scotland whilst aware she was contagious with COVID-19 but is insisting that she will not resign.
She has held up her now sanitised hands to travelling to London from Glasgow after taking a Coronavirus test last month despite showing symptoms for Coronavirus and once she received confirmation of a positive result, took the train back to her Scottish constituency therefore breaking the Coronavirus rules of two countries, Scotland and England.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has told Margaret Ferrier that she should resign as an MP and has removed the whip which effectively throws her out of the SNP but with no attachment to a political party, it allows her to continue as an Independent MP until the next election and nothing anybody can do to stop her.
As Churchill nodded towards, Democracy is deeply imperfect but it is what we have and the reason why Margaret Ferrier will still be looking at her £6827 plus expenses MP's payslip this month and not her P45.

Special Guest Blogger: Lou Reed

I was hard to nail down, either musically, artistically or ideologically and my sexuality was always a bit ambiguous also but one thing i definitely was, was high.
I used to be concerned and nervous about the future, sometimes i'd get panic attacks before an important event and i found it hard to focus on anything but sometimes you need a little help navigating life's trouble spots and that's when I discovered Heroin and all my troubles were forgotten.
True Heroin also makes you forget your name, or where to properly go to the bathroom but it was the 60's, nobody went to the bathroom in the right place then anyway.
It's difficult to sum up my life, partly due to all the brain cells i damaged with drugs but my greatest achievement was being a founding member of the Velvet Underground, a band managed by Andy Warhol which is as mad as it sounds.
My drug use was never in question due to half of my songs being about heroin but my sexuality always was due to the other half of my songs being about transvestites.
I did start out planning to be a journalist, even attending University to study it but while there i met John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Angus MacLise and we got noticed by Warhol and invited to become the house band at the Factory and after adding singer Nico, off we went to become one of the coolest and most influential bands of our time.
I did go solo after a while and had a massive hit with 'Perfect Day' which was a strange choice for a BBC Children's Charity single because although it wasn't about transvestites, it was about doing a 24 hour long heroin bender.
Nobody really expects rock musicians to be nice people and after i died of liver disease it came out that i was a tad violent, misogynist and racist and the guy who was writing my biography asked one of my friends to describe me and he said that i was 'the worst person who ever lived' and a 'stupid, disgusting, awful human being' but i’ll tell ya, i lived that life of a rock n roll star and so sometimes i woke up in weird places, beat on my women and made fun of black performers but i always looked brilliantly moody while doing it and that's all that matters.

Special Guest Blogger: Babe Ruth

Baseball was never a difficult game, anyone can hit a home run and the British have the same game only they call it rounders and it's played by girl scouts. In baseball you stand around a field waiting for some action earning a fortune but i was known as a baseball legend, both on and off the field and it was fun as long as your idea of fun is having 50,000 low IQ morons in Washington, or Pittsburgh or Detroit or wherever, screaming and howling they want you dead just because you're playing for the Yankees.
I may be best known as a batter but i began as a pitcher, my break came when i was 14 and standing at the side of the Orioles field at St. Mary’s and making snidey jokes at the other kids’ pitching and the coach shouted over come and have a go if i thought i could better and yeah, turns out i definitely could and they signed me and as i was a kid, they nicknamed me 'babe' and the name stuck.
I made it to the major leagues, joining the Boston Red Sox as a pitcher but i fancied myself as a batter but the Sox guys were dicks, they tried to put me in my place by sawing all of my bats in half so when i joined the Sox, i was happy to see the back of them and i also left them with a curse, the infamous 'Curse of the Bambino'. Before trading me, Boston won five of 16 World Series and after, they wouldn’t win another for nearly a century.
Before me, the Yankees had won exactly zero American League championships. Once they had me? Seven pennants, baby—not to mention four World Series, not blowing my own trumpet but, y'know, just saying.
I'm best known for my tenure with the New York Yankees and those iconic Yank pinstripes which made me look slimmer because at the height of my stardom, i was known for outrageous carousing and partying but i still managed to rack up a staggering number of records many for batting but also for pitching but it all caught up with me and the Yankees traded me to the Boston Braves but i could barely between run the bases, it got so bad that my fellow pitchers refused to play if i was on the field.
I did have the advantage of not having to play against black people, the league i played in at the time excluded an entire segment of the population from competing but after baseball i embarked on a tour on the Vaudeville circuit and you would think people would said Wow, who could have known that the Great Bambino was as talented a showman as he was an athlete but no they didn't because i wasn't, my shows were basically me talking about baseball for an hour and then signing some autographs.
I died of cancer aged 53 but i didn't do too bad for a guy who was good at hitting a ball with a stick.

Still Not The Time For Universal Basic Income

When the unemployment queues grew substantially as employers laid off workers due to the Coronavirus pandemic, the UK Government stepped in to pay 80% of workers wages in companies across the nation, effectively nationalising massive swathes of the private sector by paying most of the wages of workers instead of their employers in order to prevent the economy from imploding.
Sensing the time is ripe, advocators of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) are now pushing for the Government to go the full hog and introduce it to the UK and the idea seems to be appealing to the left who see it as a way to cut poverty and inequality but this is one of those times where i just can't agree with them.
I understand the argument that it would eradicate poverty and free people to do what they want but struggle to get my head around how this could possibly work and how we can afford to give each citizen a monthly payment of £520 as is being suggested.
My query was answered by a man with some calculations on a back of a fag packet who explained that by folding in all the current elements of the welfare state and the tax relief system, each person in the UK could receive £520 per month and the UK economy would not be adversely affected.
As it would be impossible to live on £6240 per year, most people would still need to work although they could possibly reduce their hours which would create more employment opportunities which is fine if you can work, some people can't and as things stand they get extra financial support but £6240 UBI is all the welfare benefits they will get.
I like the idea in principle but in order to work and to not have to worry about making ends meet if you can't work, the figure for each person will need to be much higher and no Government Finances could sustain that so until the man with the fag packet comes back to me with a better solution to pay for it, i'm out.