Special Guest Blogger: Jean de Dunois

When your nickname is the Bastard of Orléans you know that you truly are a bastard and the person i was a bastard to the most was Joan of Arc and we were on the same side.
How the hell a 17-year-old farm girl with no military experience whatsoever and who believed her orders came from the archangel Michael was able to be taken seriously by any military is bad enough, even a French one.
At first i was more than happy keeping Joan out of battle and, for the most part, ignoring her, which was exactly what i did saying that i was not being condescending but i was far too busy thinking about far more important things which as a girl, she wouldn’t understand so i left her out of my war counsels but she did complain to me about that i told her that i had more important things on my mind than what a schizophrenic teenager thought and that losing wars to the English was something better left to the men of the French military.
One worry i had was the strong Northerly wind that was preventing our ships from dropping off our food supplies so i gave a flippant, have a word with your man upstairs to sort the wind out if you want to help and i walked off trading high fives and bum slaps with my Generals.
All of a sudden, before i had got back to my tent, the wind just suddenly dropped and changed direction so it actually helped the ships come ashore and there was Joan standing with a 'what ya think of that then bastard' look on her face.
I had no choice but to believe that Joan had stopped the wind with the power of her prayers or something so thinking she must have the big guy on her side, i made her head of the army and together we led the French defenses at the siege of Orléans, and that girl with the divine inspirations sure could fight, sending the British skittering buttocks first out of Orléans, then out of Les Augustins, Patay and Troyes and our confidence grew as we believed that through Joan, God was supporting the French against the stupid English  and then she got captured, put on trial and turned into a crispy shade of burnt black and us French went back to getting out arses whupped by the English and losing the hundred year war.
I returned to my comfortable job in the Royal household but for one brief moment i thought not being a sexist bastard was going to work but it never so i was just went back to being a plain old bastard and i was happy with that.

Special Guest Blogger: Aaron Burr

During the American War of Independence i was part of the army marching to Quebec and we stopped at a woods and i wandered off on my own to drink some water from a nearby brook. By chance an enemy British officer arrived at the other side of the brook at that time and didn't immediately shoot me but instead the British guy offered me his cup and then we sat and chatted and i mention it because i always had a soft spot for the British, even when i went on to become the Vice President of the U.S. during which time i became most famous for shooting a dude in a duel.
That came about after a guy named Alexander Hamilton called me 'a dangerous man and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government' so i went to see him and have a word with him about it. Now Hamilton was a mouthy git who handed out duel challenges like candy but when he bad mouthed me i smack talked him back and as expected he handed out the usual duel ultimatum and to his shock i took him up on it and we faced off with pistols ready.
Hamilton fired first and being a jerk he missed but i didn't and my bullet found its mark right in his stomach and he died there on the spot.
My political career not unsurprisingly collapsed after that bit of homicide and i was sacked as VP although i was somehow found not guilty of murder at the trial but i wasn't ready to give up running a country so decided to try and create my own.
I traveled to Philadelphia and offered my services to the British and explained that i wanted to help them take over the Louisiana territory and Mexico but the Brits were not interested so i decided to press ahead regardless. I got myself a riverboat and set off down the Ohio River, at which point i  realised that i didn't have an army so, on the way to New Orleans, i recruiting any and every settler i encountered to my cause.
Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long for word of my revolution to reach the authorities who ordered me arrested but at my trial the great American justice system once again found me not guilty so i nipped off sharpish to Britain but still couldn't get their support and i kept nagging at them so much that they ended up booting me out so i returned to New York and married a wealthy widow but it lasted only four months then she divorced me and her divorce lawyer was Alexander Hamilton Jr., the son of the dead duelist and the divorce was officially completed on September 14 1836 which wasn't a great day for me as the decree nisi was the last thing i read as i died that same day.

Special Guest Blogger: Beatrix Potter

If the name Beatrix Potter doesn't quite ring a bell, the name Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkins and Jemimah Puddle-duck surely will as they were not just characters in my books, but were all also my pets for a time until i killed them for scientific purposes.
I was fascinated by the natural world as a child and would go around and collect anything that moved, slithered, or hopped for my personal menagerie, then i would take it home, skin it, and boil the flesh off so i could study the skeleton.
I began writing properly after my career in biology fell by the wayside after academia rejected my paper on the natural world due to old-timey sexism and women and science not being compatible which included hundreds of sketches of the innards of animals which i had dissected but my characters really lived, until i killed and boiled them but they all ended up starring in the books which made me, and them, famous.
I found my niche in children's literature but after six rejections for my Tales of Peter Rabbit story, i self published and printed 250 copies which became so popular that a publisher took notice and made me an offer to write more so i used my previous pets for inspiration.
Benjamin Bouncer was my first rabbit, he ended up being chloroformed and dissected and he was replaced by Peter Piper who went the same way while Squirrel Nutkins was a squirrel i asked a gamekeeper to shoot so i could boil and dissect it, a wood mouse i caught was Mrs Tittlemouse,  
and Jeremy Fisher was a frog i cut up to look at what was inside it's stomach which was flies mostly.
The books sold well, i ended up writing 36 of them but the real money was in the merchandise, i filed a patent for my characters so i could sell a line of stuffed animals and i made more cash off the merchandise than the books until i died of pneumonia.
I guess if my paper hadn't have been rejected i would never have become famous but writing for children was easy, all you need is a love of nature, a large collection of animals to draw on, a large enough pot and an oven that cooks at 180C and the knowledge that the way to a beloved pets heart is through it's chest with a scalpel.

Note The Unexplained Bit Of UFO

I have been asked many times whether i believe in aliens and the simple answer is that the answer is not quite so simple.
If the question is do i believe that life has evolved on other planets then yes i do because the Universe is too vast and there are too many galaxies, stars and planets for life only to have began on just one.
If the question is do i believe that aliens are visiting Earth then the answer is no for the same reason as the previous question, the vastness of the Universe and the fact that Earth is one planet amongst tens of billions of solar systems in our galaxy alone, a galaxy which is in turn amongst hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe.
A US government report released 25th June which investigated decades of unexplained aerial sightings in US airspace, found that there were no evidence of alien activity but there are 120 unidentified flying objects (UFOs) that they are unable to explain short of they are not US military and could possibly be the experimental technology of a rival power, such as China or Russia or but it does not rule out extraterrestrial activity as a possible explanation.
The report details US Navy pilots who said they had seen inexplicable aircraft that flew faster than anything ever developed on earth and were more maneuverable that anything seen before and the obvious conclusion many will jump to is that if it isn't man-made, then it must be alien made but what the report actually states is that they are UFO's with extra emphasis, italics and underlining of the Unidentified part of those three words.
The nearest star system to ours is Alpha Centauri 4.3 light-years away or 25 trillion miles.
The New Horizons spacecraft, travelling at 36,373 mph, took just shy of a decade to reach Pluto so if New Horizons was aimed toward the Alpha Centauri system it would take this spacecraft about 78,000 years to get there.
The sheer distance and time to travel from one star system to another could explain why nobody has turned up from other planets, could be they are on their way but as they only left on the trip to Earth 39,000 years ago so they are only halfway here.
Without doubt, out there somewhere there is a very high probability that someone or something is gazing towards our arm of the Milky Way Galaxy in the Virgo Supercluster, tens of billions of light years away and wondering if any of those billions of solar systems in the billions of galaxies over there has life on a ball of rock going around just one of those stars and wondering if there is, have they visited them.
No and it is just as unlikely that we ever have the required technology to make the trip or they will turn up in spaceships here to say hi to us.

NHS Digital

David Cameron's Government had the idea of scraping everyone in England’s entire GP records
including everything from mental and sexual health, abuse, criminal records, ethnicity, gender, drug and alcohol history and putting them on one central database, where they would be semi anonymized and then made available for research purposes to third parties, including private corporations.
It failed because privacy campaigners, worried doctors and some MPs found it both ethically and technically dodgy as hell and the Government backed down and never mentioned it again, or at least not for eight years because it’s doing the same thing under the cover of a global pandemic without any consultation or endorsement by the British Medical Association nor the Royal College of GPs and a deadline of 23 June for patients to opt out although most don’t even know about it.
The data NHS Digital will store is pseudonymised, and it says it’ll only be shared with commercial third parties for “research and planning purposes”although that comes with the caveat that it can be unpseudonymised 'in certain circumstances, and where there is a valid legal reason'.
Should you feel that a UK Government which has been scandalously incompetent and is facing a lifetime of inquiries into corruption is not the best people to be trusting your medical data with and would like to opt out, here’s where to go.
If you think there is nothing to worry your pretty little head about, you can do nothing and be the recipient of some brilliant emails and letters from medical companies keen to hock you relief from whatever you told your doctor in strict confidentiality ails you.

Keeping The Restrictions For Now

With the June 21 'Freedom Day' looming, the Government is coming under pressure from all sides to either open up the country or to leave the restrictions in place as infections number rise alarmingly.
On the one side is businesses, hospitality and travel companies who are looking at things through the eyes of their profits and the viability of their businesses and jobs after 15 months of restrictions.
In the other corner are the medical professionals who are looking at the rapidly increasing infection rate, 6,238 new confirmed coronavirus cases yesterday, and arguing that it would be madness to open the nation further just when a third wave is about to come crashing down on us fueled by the spread of the more transmissible Indian variant, also known as the Delta variant.
The Prime Minister is refusing to decide who to follow, saying that he is ruling nothing out but the whispers seem to be that 'Freedom Day' will be pushed back to 5 July to allow more vaccines to be jabbed into peoples arms so more of the country is protected when the restrictions are lifted.
The Medical profession are saying that we need as much as 80% of the 65 million Britain's to have been immunised with both doses to achieve herd immunity and as present, 60% have received at least one vaccine dose and 40% both doses so still some way to go although the NHS are ramping up an
already impressive campaign.
In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon has paused lockdown easing and in Wales Mark Drakeford has already said he is considering keeping social distancing rules for the rest of this year making it difficult for Boris Johnson to not follow suit.
For me it is a no brainer and the nations Health should come first, Covid 19 is not going away and we will have to earn to live with it at some point and get back to normal but not until we reach that 80% immunised rate so if that means pausing the reopening of the nation until July or August or even beyond, that's how it should be.
Economies bounce back, it may take a while but they do come back finally but if people catch Coronavirus because we reopened too soon as some people were more concerned with the threats to their financial situation, the only bouncing some people will be unnecessarily doing is when their coffin hits the ground and nobody cares about the profits of Ryan Air or Wetherspoons when they are 6ft in the ground.

Special Guest Blogger: Michael Crichton

Have you ever seen a real dinosaur? Of course you haven't, and you never will. Fact! That's because they never existed and science is a lie. I mean, have you actually ever seen a sperm? We've all tried and i was a Harvard trained physician and best-selling writer including a book called State of Fear where i set about dismantling the idea of climate change, claiming it is nonsense and is at best based on shoddy science, and at worst an elaborate scam concocted to line the pockets of Big Science.
There is a famous quote that states given enough time, a thousand monkeys typing at random would produce all of Shakespeare's plays. A hundred monkeys given a few weeks would turn out a sci-fi book by some of my lesser author rivals and one monkey, given 20 minutes and a bottle of extra strong Russian vodka would produce one of the Global Warming papers polluting the world of science.
State of Fear won an award from a petroleum association but that's nothing to do with it, people were being suckered into believing that the global climate was changing and as there was no voice calling out their blatant bullcrap, and as any opposition was weaker than the Russian parliament, i stepped in.
I toured Universities to poo-poo global warming and also advise students to ignore the opinion of the entirety of the medical community that secondhand smoke could hurt them and as a trained physician who chose to make things up for a living, i told them to believe me rather than all the collective physicians who actually physicianed for a living.
It was while i was at University that i wrote a novel under the pseudonym John Lange, Odds On, that was so well received they asked me to write a series of them but once i finished medical school i decided physicianing was not my thing so took up writing full time under my real name instead and my first book, The Andromeda Strain, was a smash hit and i directed a few films but it was the writing of the novel Jurassic Park which really made me.
That gave me the platform to spout off about other things but as i said, i'm very intelligent so i didn't expect the average person who read my books to understand so i tried to keep it simple.
I died of lymphoma but i would like to think that my books act as warnings against the use of science and technology and from where i am sitting the greatest threat is now computers, robotics and the nonsense people read on the internet. What the hell is the internet anyway? I mean, a lot of computers linked up so you can look at pictures of chicks in the buff. What's wrong with a good old fashioned telescope or a shoe mirror?
In truth, we have nothing to fear but fear itself so do yourself a favour and burn all books related to global warming, except for that one by me obviously.

Special Guest Blogger: Victoria Woodhull

One thing you would hope for in a leader is intelligence, you would think twice about handing the reins of your economy over to a person who had L and R printed on their shoes but American kids grow up hearing that anyone can become President and 21 people have done it before i had a go at it and they had all been male and it had been that way ever since a guy who owned 600 people helped start the country by writing 'all Men are created equal'.
During my career i started a newspaper which focused on a number of controversial topics, such as women's suffrage, free love, and Spiritualism and in my spare time i was a suffrage pioneer, became one of the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street and even ran my own successful brokerage all during a time period in which women weren't supposed to work and didn't even have the right to vote so with that in mind, i thought those men running the country are all awful, i can do a better job than them so with the many, many dollars made from my stockbrokers job, i threw my hat into the ring for the 1872 election for President of the United States as a third-party candidate for the Equal Rights Party and first ever bra wearing candidate against incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant.
My campaign ran on the idea that women didn't need a man to make our decisions for us and women should have the right to vote but my campaign didn't get off to the best start.
The idea to give women the vote was a non-starter and claiming to be a Spiritualist who would be guided in Office by ghost advisors from the World of Spirit including Demosthenes, Napoleon and Josephine wasn't a vote winner and my running mate, Frederick Douglas, was next to useless, at one of my stump speeches he actually urged people to vote for Grant!
The campaign never really got going at all, amazingly my views on equal rights for women earned more public ire and derision than believing that a French General's wife who had been dead for 60 years was deciding economic policy and on election day i never received one vote and despite being a candidate i couldn't even do it not that i could vote anyway as i was in prison on election day for my newspaper publishing an article revealing Congregationalist Clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher's, extramarital affairs which was deemed indecent and obscene.
Giving America the finger for not voting for me, i went to live England and gave up hopes of ever being able to pass laws over America but seeing what the the male moron's they have elected have done to America since, i wouldn't pass water over it now.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Erasmus

We feel like we know the general history of Christianity, Christ was born, he spouted some stuff about free love and messed with the Roman's then bada-boom-bada-bing, his followers rule the world but back at the start things were not that straight forward for us Christians.
I was the Bishop of Formia in Italy at a time when the Roman Empire under Emporer Diocletian was doing its best to stamp us out before we got going and i was captured and imprisoned but an Angel came and freed me saying that i should leave Rome else i end up a God fearing Sheesh-Kebab so i fled to Turkey to continue my preaching and kept my head down for seven years.
I was quite happy converting Turks until another Angel came to see me and said that Diocletian was dead and i should return to Formia to pick up the conversion thing again so off i went but within days i was arrested a second time because the Angel forgot to tell me that the new Emperor, Maximian Hercules was even more of a Christian hater than his predecessor so the Emperor told me to give up the whole Christian thing or face being rolled down a hill in a barrel and i thought that doesn't sound too bad, might actually be quite fun so i took the barrel option which turned out to not be as much fun as i first thought.
They dropped me into a barrel of spikes and rolled it down a hill but the same Angel who came to me in Turkey appeared and healed my wounds so i popped my head up out the barrel and said, 'Sorry, still a Christian' so next they covered me in pitch and set it alight but the Angel kept the flames from burning me and the flames went out and i was getting a bit cocky, protected by Angels and that so i  went 'Hey, still a Christian here' so next they cut open my stomach and wound my intestines around a winch and hoisted them out of my body and i looked at the Angel to help but he just shrugged in a sort of 'on your on with this one' type way and floated off.
I am predictably the patron saint of stomach ailments but also sailors who pray to me to protect them at sea in thunderstorms and the electrical discharges at the mastheads of ships were seen as a sign of my protection and came to be called 'Saint Elmo's Fire' after me and i assume anyone who gets their guts wrapped around a winch is said to be doing an Erasmus.

Special Guest Blogger: William Dampier

The English language almost took off in America (they have a few problems with vowels) and the Australians almost have a basic grasp of it but seem to name things when they are drunk (billabong, dunny, chook) but while Shakespeare may take the plaudits for introducing many new words to the English language, i gave it over 1,000 and he wasn't raiding Spanish settlements and plundering other people's ships in South and Central America at the same time, but i was.
When it came to sacking, burning, robbing and ransoming Spanish towns, i was never really any good at all that stuff as i was busy drawing coastlines and the flora and fauna of the places we raided but while all pirates are depicted as toothless hobos who talk like idiots, my booty was the collection of over 1,000 words i introduced into the English language.
I sailed with several pirates and chopped and changed ships quite a lot because a gang of bloodthirsty salty sea dogs were not so keen to discuss the interesting plant life when there were treasure to plunder so i returned to England and joined the Royal Navy and was handed a commission to explore the Australian coastline which turned out to be quite eventful.
We never made it there as our ship sank but we did pick up a shipwrecked sailor living on a deserted island which Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoe upon and while tangling with a storm, one of the crew shot an albatross which became the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
I returned from that trip with a slave named Jeoly who i sold to a local inn, telling them he was a Prince but he died of smallpox within 3 months of landing in England but i had said no returns so i wrote a book instead and gave the language avocado, barbecue, breadfruit, cashew, chopsticks, posse, tortilla, banana, castaway, sea-breeze, subspecies, intelligence, free trade, maroon, soy sauce and kumquat.  
I was then handed a ship to go fight against the French and Spanish off the coast of Chile but was captured and thrown into prison as a pirate and released to go back to England if i promised not to attack another Spanish ship but i had my fingers crossed and ended up back in the South Pacific watching a Spanish galleon sink with its treasure stowed on our ship.
My share of the loot from that was £1351 14s 10d, which was enough to live out the remaining years of my life in luxury but i died before i received it.
I may not go into the annals of history as the greatest pirate but next time you are wondering what to call the curved yellow fruit thingy or using live fire and smoke to cook food and using grabby sticks to pick up green mushy thingies, not sounding like a complete moron is my legacy.