Special Guest Blogger: Samuel Adams

Any American history book will tell you that the Boston Tea Party was the night when angry patriots gave birth to America by boarding a a bunch of British ships and throwing crates of limey tea into the harbor.
What the history books tend to overlook is that this event would probably have ended much differently if the angry patriots hadn't been raging drunk on the night in question.
I never really liked the English and hated the way they talked, I mean, do these guys realise how wussy they sound? They all think they sound so smart with their little funny accents and words like fortnight and penultimate..JUST SPEAK ENGLISH, YA LIMEY MORONS!!
The night began at a meeting led by me at the Old South Church, when a group of us gathered at the house of newspaper publisher and tea-hater Benjamin Edes to discuss what to do about the British ships, i stood up and said 'lets storm them and throw the tea into the sea' but there was a murmur and a distinct lack of interest so i sat down and had a few glasses of the red wine, rum and whisky punch or as i called it, Freedom Juice.
Hours and a few bowl's of punch later, we moved into the phase of the night when the Freedom juice was really flowing and drunk logic was starting to sound good so i stood up, wobbled a bit and announced that we should dress up as Indians, stumble down to Boston Harbor, and show the British how irrational they were being by wrecking their shit.
I also suggested we put on our wives dresses and go moon the neighbours but by then the patriots had all belched their agreement and we stumbled out the door and towards the Boston Harbour with our efforts only occasionally halted for bouts of puking.
We boarded the ships and spent hours tossing the tea crates into the harbor before falling back home giggling and dancing and then waking up six hours later a lot more sober and wondering what we did last night and why did our clothes smell faintly of tea?
The rest is history and we kicked the Brits asses all the way back to limeyland and America went on to become the land of the free, and the home of the brave and all it took was a bunch of drunks dressed like Indians having a massive piss-up.

Special Guest Blogger: Bob Ross

Hi, glad you could make it here today and i am very happy to see you.
I am known for three things, painting, big afro hair and aside from maybe Jesus, being pretty much the nicest person who ever lived with my smiling face and talk of happy little clouds and trees in a voice that never rose above that of a gentle lullaby but that wasn't always the case, i was a hard-assed drill sergeant in the Air Force for 20 years stationed in Alaska and would bellow at poor sods to clean the latrines, make their beds and shine their shoes.
When i eventually left i promised i would be the exact opposite of the awful person i was for those two decades and fortunately for me, i spent much of my non-screaming time taking art classes and painting the Alaskan wilderness around me of mountains, lakes, snow and log cabin scenes using a technique i saw on TV show called The Magic Of Oil Painting by Bill Alexander.
I began selling my paintings and found that i could make more money selling them than yelling at cadets for not having their boots properly spit-shined so quit and tracked down Alexander and asked him to teach me the technique he used, known as 'wet-on-wet' which was nothing new, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Paul Cézanne and Monet used the same technique to knock out paintings in double quick time.
As i was so good at it and could make a painting in under 30 minutes, i was approached by PBS to front a painting show called The Joy of Painting teaching Alexander's technique which i agreed to as it would help sell my painting and promote a line of my own art supplies, building what would become a $15 million business.
I painted over 30,000 paintings during my lifetime, many i donated to PBS for fund raising and would paint three versions of the one you saw on my TV show, the first one painted prior to taping and sat on an easel off-camera during filming as a reference to create the second copy which viewers actually watched me paint and after filming the episode, i would paint a more detailed version for my personal collection.  
People did wonder why i painted quite so many trees but i liked looking at trees and your options are to either paint one to look at or drag one through your home and put in in a corner leaving a wake of twigs and leaves that'll be showing up in the most random places for the next six months.
I often said that we don’t make mistakes, just happy little accidents and that was exactly what happened with my hair which was a perm job, the idea was that it would save me having to pay out for haircuts when i started out as a struggling painter but once the art took off and it got incorporated into the logo so i had to stay with it, never really liked it much though.
A heavy cigarette smoker, i suffered several health problems over the course of my life and developed cancer and lost my hair and wore a wig to keep up appearances until i died at the age of 52.
So my message is enjoy the happy trees, mighty mountains and fluffy clouds but most importantly, be sure to use odorless paint-thinner. God Bless.

Phrase That Could Only Come From America

There are some phrases you hear and you think they could only have come from that country and i heard a quote today from an American doctor that was couldn't have been more American if it came with apple pie, was chewing gum and was wearing a baseball jersey.
The doctor was discussing how the Coronavirus hospitlisations are sky rocketing over there and how full the hospitals were and how the ambulance service across the nation were stretched when he launched this classic Americanism: 'The emergency rooms are so backed up that even gunshot victims were having a hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated'.
With echoes of when Donald Trump suggested drinking bleach may be an effective treatment against the disease (just in case you are wondering, no it isn't) he then went on to explain how the situation got worse after the influential podcaster Joe Rogan announced he had tested positive for Covid and was taking Ivermectin which is an anti-parasitic drug for cattle.
As well as Coronavirus and gunshot wound patients joining the queue outside American hospitals, now there are people who are poisoning themselves by drinking Ivermectin forcing the US Food and Drug Administration and American Medical Association to issue a warning that 'Taking this drug is
dangerous and can cause serious harm including nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, seizures, delirium and death'
The final word from the doctor was that: 'People are actually putting themselves in worse conditions than if they’d caught Covid' but he didn't add stop drinking poison but at the very least stop shooting at each other until the crisis eases up.

Government Spending Ideological Choices

I am as guilty as anyone for often saying that the NHS is free because it isn't, we pay 20%, 40% or 45% income tax for it but often forgotten is the 12% National Insurance Contributions which everyone who earns above £6,240 a year pays.
Out of your pay packet each month then comes 32% but the whispers are that the Government are about to announce a hike in National Insurance contributions to pay for 'Social Care'.
When the Government made the pledge in their manifesto not to raise tax, everyone took that to mean Income tax but they have the dubious wiggle room of they are not raising taxes, they are raising National Insurance which to everyone is the same thing but obviously not to a Prime Minister who is not on speaking terms with the truth at the best of times.
The result will be more of our money heading into the Government coffers anyway regardless of what name it is taken under but the Government assume that as it is 'for the NHS', people won't complain too much and obviously more money for the NHS is a great cause, but i do have a problem with being taxed for a particular cause.
Once this has been bought in 'for the NHS', what about all the other essential services that have had their budgets slashed such as housing, education and police, they could all quite rightly make an excellent case for a 1% rise in contributions also.
Each year the Government get an amount to spend on what they see fit and any cuts and shortages of funding for our services are purely an ideological choice of the Government, they decide how much the NHS, police and other departments receive from the tax intake, the way it is divided out is down to the ruling Government and the Conservative Government have made the choice to reduce the amount the NHS, police or schools receive and that will continue regardless.
My personal bugbear is the £44.6 billion they spend on defence which doesn't include the £133 billion spent on maintaining our Nuclear Weapons and to to quote Dwight D. Eisenhower 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed'.
If the Government decide they can't afford to spend billions on rockets, nuclear submarines and tanks and also spend the money building schools, equipping hospitals, hiring police officers or building houses then they should be deciding which is more important. Spoiler alert: It should never be the war equipment.

A Last Blast Of Summer

Climate Change means that Mother Nature takes what is already in the offing and ramps it up so you get stronger hurricanes, heavier rain and hotter summers although the last one doesn't seem to apply in Great Britain because apart from a few days in June, our Summer was not a scorcher.
Not that i am complaining that i wasn't waking up with my pillow stuck to my face or getting third degree burns from the car seats, i am quite happy with a summer where i am not getting sunburn within 30 seconds of stepping outside the front door although i did get the annual insect bites so still spent weeks smelling of Calamine Lotion.
So off we head now into the -ber months with a stop off at Halloween and Bonfire Night before we dive headlong into Christmas but don't go putting away those shorts and strappy summer tops just yet because the MET Office has announced that Summer isn't done with us entirely as next week is going to see a 'sharp hot spell' and are advising us to 'wear a hat and some sun cream' with temperatures hitting 30C in the South of England which is where i am currently sat in my cardigan.
The next week is obviously going to be the last chance to blast out Mungo Jerry, sit outside batting away stingy things and deciding whether to wear socks with the sandals as the season of white legs and men in shorts that are far too tight comes slamming to an end for the Northern Hemisphere and it's looking up the date the Christmas Channels start on TV (I looked already and they are Great! Movies Christmas on 24 September, Hallmark Christmas October 22 and Christmas24, October 24).

Cosmos Loving My Hair Apparently

Every summer there seems to be a song that follows me around everywhere and this year it was Chic's 'Good Times' that i was hearing on a loop in Supermarkets, on the radio, on TV and just about anywhere that my ears went.
Not a bad song to have trailing me through what should be the hot months although this year the British Summer was a few warmish days in June and the rest of it slightly warmer than normal rain but whenever the same song keeps popping up in unexpected places i take it that the Universe is trying to tell me something but what is the message to me from the guitar of Niles Rogers?
The problem i have with the song is that the tune is the same as the one for 'Rapper's Delight' so when it kicks off with that distinctive bass my mind goes ' I said-a hip, hop, the hippie, the hippie, to the hip hip hop-a you don't stop the rock, it to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie, the beat' (yep, i googled that) rather than the Good Times lyrics which i am delving into to see what the Cosmos is desperate to alert me to.
Quite worrying that the chorus is 'Good times, these are the good times' because that means it's saying this is as good as this is going to get which looking at what is happening in the news is a bit rubbish but there is a bit about girls in pony tails and i have been growing my hair so have actually had it in a pony tail but then it goes onto roller skates which i haven't owned since about 1987 and when i did i spent more time on the floor than actually skating so i am ignoring the Universe wants me to buy some roller skates.
The words 'Good Times' appears 32 times in the song so applying Occams Razor to the problem, there is a good chance that the Cosmos is saying that the bad times are over and it is all rainbows and lollipops from here on in or it is really loving the pony tail.
Yep, i'm going to go with the Universe really likes my hair, thanks Galaxy.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek/Roman God Apollo

Anyone who is familiar with the Greek or Roman Gods knows that our family tree gets very complicated very quickly and when the Romans changed the names of the Greek Gods it got even more-so but luckily i was one of the few whose name stayed the same although my responsibility changed with the crossover.
In the original Greek Mythology i was the God of Light, and it was my job to pull the Sun across the sky in my golden chariot every day but when i wasn't creating the day (the original sun god was the titan Helios, but everyone forgot about him), i was also the God of poetry, truth, art, oracles, medicine, knowledge and plague but two of my best inventions were archery and music.
As the son of Zeus and the Titan Leto, my twin sister, Artemis, and i were Olympians and both expert archers and as immortals, we would zing each other with arrows when we annoyed each other and were both pretty quick tempered, after the god Hermes stole some of my cows, i was about to make a colander of his head when in desperation he created the lyre for me, the very first stringed instrument from which all other stringed musical instruments came from.
At the many drinking parties held on Olympus, i would perform some bodacious lyre solos but as always, there are others who think they can play better so i was forever being challenged to contests though, being a God, i could never stand to lose as King Midas found out when i gave him donkey ears for not choosing me as the winner of a contest against Pan (him of the stupid pipes fame) and also the satyr Marsyas who i flayed alive for being a bit too good and nobody likes a show-off.
Probably the Sun dragging thing was the most important of my jobs but although i have dropped out of favour i have had a big hand in the music business, you might recognise a few tunes i dashed out over the last few millennia but there are a few i regrettably have to put my hand up to also.
That 'Big Yellow Taxi' song is one, Jodi may have been a woman brainier than Kurt Cobain’s living room wall but she refused to remove the line 'they paved paradise to put up a parking lot’ despite me telling her that would actually alleviate the awful traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise where i lived and i didn't really think through The Weather Girls 'Its Raining Men' song where they sounded happy about the prospect of male forms thudding down onto the pavement filling the streets with twitching, shattered human corpses and soaking everyone with blood, brain matter and piss.
Something i absolutely will not take the blame for is boys bands, seriously, who buys that crap? Everyone knows pop music should be sung by hot little teenage girls in tight clothes foaming each other at a car wash in the video, tell me that's not entertainment at it's finest!
I may have fallen out of favour and been replaced by one God who does everything us Romans and Greeks Gods did but millennia after i blinked out it was my name on the side of the mission to the Moon, because you're goddamn right it was, it's the least you puny humans could do for me giving you the goddamned Sun everyday and persuading Oasis to call it a day. You are welcome.

Special Guest Blogger: Rudolf Diesel

I have been dead over 100 years but looking around today your world is bullcrap. Your governments don't work, there are rocks everywhere and almost nothing hovers, dammit things were supposed to be hovering by now but the worst thing of all is that Socialism is not the default Government everywhere.
I did my bit, i invented the Diesel engine with the idea that my invention would foster social equality and peace between all nations as i explained when i premiered it at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris with one of the main benefits of my engine being that it would enable small-time craftsmen and artisans to compete with the new industry behemoths that were beginning to eek them out of business.
The last thing that i had in mind was that my engine should power tanks and other war contraptions and pollute the atmosphere, i designed it to run on peanut oil and other biofuels but the Capitalists got hold of it and ruined it and the planet, nice one morons.
There was many pluses to Socialism, you get a cool song sung to the tune of a Christmas Carol and Socialism comes in any colour you want as long as it's red and Albert Einstein thought it was a good idea and if the brainiest man who has ever lived decides that Socialism is the way to go you know you have backed the right horse, or German physicist. What's not to like?
So if your child struggles to read even the most basic literature, have no concern for their fellow man, they don't like to share and appear to be intellectually backwards while refusing to recycle, question climate change or have a view that supports the fairness of the Capitalist system then don't bother trying to persuade them of the value of Socialism, they are already lost.
My death has been the subject of much conjecture and i am not sure myself what happened but the question of suicide has been raised but i was aboard a German Ship heading to a meeting with the Royal British Navy to discuss powering the British ships with my diesel engine after refusing to grant the German forces the rights to use my invention for their ships so what do you think?   
I am spinning in my grave whenever someones thinks that i would kill myself and spinning significantly more efficiently than Karl Benz and the rest of the internal combustion engine guys.

And So Ends The War On Terror

There are many words to describe what has happened in Afghanistan, fiasco, failure, disaster, defeat, screw-up, cock-up, pig's ear, balls-up but one which it definitely isn't is 'success' and as the last act was blowing up and killing a car full of civilians, that pretty much sums up the West's efforts over the past two decades.
A couple of trillion dollars later, America had decided they have had enough war over there and left Afghanistan in exactly the same state that they found it, only with fuller cemeteries from the 50,000 dead civilians courtesy of Uncle Sam, John Bull and the rest of the deluded Western Governments who arrogantly decided what the Afghan's needed was some good old Western style democracy and they would bring it at the end of a drone missile.  
What Biden stayed awake long enough to say was that the airlift of 120,000 people out of the mess they made was a success as much as you can call the desperate scramble to get the hell out of there under fire with your foe showing off the captured military equipment left behind is a success, i guess any straws will be grasped at if their is enough desperation.
The Afghan's have now been left not only in the less than safe hands of the Taliban, but an even more extreme religious terror group in ISIS but the US has said that it will support those still in Afghanistan with what it is calling an 'over the horizon' counter-terrorism effort, tackling any threats in Afghanistan from afar with drones and as the family in the car found out as well as countless Wedding Parties which suddenly turned into funerals, that's not a great option.
I'm sure that there will be films made in the future which will feature American's going to Afghanistan and killing their citizens but describing how killing them made the American soldiers feel sad.
So the Afghan war is over and just like with Iraq and Libya, we have run off after leaving behind the civilians to face terrorists in their shattered nation and the final act of the 'War on terror' has been brought to a screeching halt.
For those twenty years, millions of troops and bombs, trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, the trashing of humanitarian values, rendition, torture, entrapment, extra judicial killings and jihadist recruitment figures up, we don't have much to show for it.
Will the West learn from it's many, many mistakes over the last 20 years since George W Bush and Tony Blair launched their democracy crusade? I’m not holding my breath.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Symeon the Stylite

It takes some doing to be deemed too fanatic a Christian that your own religion shun you but that's exactly what happened to me and how i ended up perched high up on pillars for the last 37 years of my life.
As a child in Syria, i heard some quotes attributed to Jesus and i liked the sound of them so as soon as i turned 16 i arrived on the doorstep of a local monastery and demanded they admit me which they did but i had a real hate-on for the pussified way they lived their lives and i considered their fasting and praying a bit too extravagant so i took too fasting for days on end and standing as long as i possibly could until i passed out and as that made them look bad they told me to leave the monastery.
Out on my own i decided to shun the luxuries of the early 5th century life by shutting myself in a little ramshackle hut for three years but the hut proved too expansive and extravagant for me so i packed up my loincloth and moved to a crevice in a rock in the desert.
Soon pilgrims arrived to bring me goat’s milk and flat bread and seeking my counsel and to say prayers while emptying my waste bucket which cut heavily into my own praying time so i clambered up onto a stone pillar with a little platform on top and sat there instead.
Still they came and asked me questions so i kept clambering onto higher and higher pillars until i found one 50ft high with a 3m platform but the pilgrims still came, and this time with ladders.
The goats milk and bread was gratefully received but despite me saying just leave the milk and sod off, they wanted to know things and occasionally a woman would appear on the top rung and women...ergh..cooties, so i let it known no women are allowed near my rock erection.
To keep from falling, i tied a rope around my leg, which gradually sank into my flesh and the sore got worse but i refused to remove the rope and refused to come down for treatment when i got an ulcer which became infected and led to my death but i inspired many other worshipers to follow my example and, for a while, seeing Christians living a top a pillar was a common sight in Syria although some forgot to bring a bucket and you really wouldn't want to be standing under those pillars when nature called and a bare backside appeared over the edge of the platform, from 50ft up the solids land with a very wet splat.