Éric Zemmour: The French Donald Trump

The French elections are coming up and although the present President Emmanuel Macron has a 10 point lead, interesting to hear that they have their eye on the far right and Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour who is being called the French Donald Trump.
Obviously my mind went to a morbidly obese man with awful hair and fluorescent orange skin but when i saw him he looked boringly normal so i guess it must be that like the laughably idiotic Trump, he is a raging racist and it turns out he is as his speeches seem to focus on the three i's, immigration, identity and Islam and a bonus 'm' in banning the name Mohamed.
A former journalist, Zemmour identifies himself as a Bonapartist who base their belief system on the dinky French Emperor and considering that he was the 19th Century version of Hitler invading his way across Europe, that isn't a great starting point but maybe he isn't so bad once you actually look at his policies which include his defence of the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime and stopping the threat of a 'Great Replacement' which is the replacement of France’s white, Christian population with people who are not as white or as Christian as him and his followers.  
So far so whack-a-doodle Trump but it isn't just any old non-White Christians he is against, it's specifically Muslims, feminists, homosexuals, black people and Arabs and throw in that he has been accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour by several women, the Trump comparisons suddenly make sense.
The French election, like America's, gone on far too long and the first round is in December but we won't know who of the 40 starters, who will be left standing in April but unlike the Americans, the French are too clever to vote for a right wing racist with a thing for the Nazi's who has been accused of sexually assaulting women, if the election of Trump taught us anything, it's that never ends well.

Terrorism Still With Us

MP Sir David Amess had recently written about the risk of attacks on parliamentarians, saying that 'it could happen to any of us' and it was an unfortunate prophesy as he became the latest victim, stabbed to death while holding an MP's surgery in his constituency of Leigh-on-Sea.
In his book, he stated that 'The British tradition has always been that members of parliament regularly make themselves available for constituents to meet them face to face at their surgeries' and it was this that saw a 25 year old male armed with a knife waiting among a group of people to see him and launch the attack, stabbing him multiple times, shortly after the MP arrived.
Police have now declared it as a terrorist incident after the suspect, a Briton with Somali heritage, was arrested at the scene.
Quite rightly there are now calls for MPs to have security when they meet the general public but politicians of all parties have stated that the abuse, intimidation and risk for MPs and their staff has increased over the past few years and dealing with harassment is sadly now part and parcel of politics in 2021.
As the police are now saying it was an Islamist terror attack, i am sure we will find out in time if there is any significance that the attack happened in a Church, where Amess held his surgery's, or the MP was targeted due to some view he held but hot on the heels of the fatal attacks in Norway this week, terrorism is still with us.

Sex And Gender Confusion

I have always gone along with the idea that if a man wants to be a woman or a woman wants to be a man then that's fine but Professor Robert Winston made a valid point on TV last night that you may be able to change your gender, but you can never change your sex, that is biologically cast while in the womb and you are destined to forever have XY or a XX chromosomes.
The Labour party got its panties in a bunch the other week by saying that only women have a womb but that isn't true, there are plenty of women who for one reason or another have undergone a hysterectomy to have the womb surgically removed so that's false straight away.
At birth, the sex is determined by the midwife by whatever set of genitals is between the legs but you can have them removed, added or even be born with both or none so that isn't a great method to tell definitively male from female.
Another way to tell is to measure testosterone and estrogen but that is not always clear as in the case of the
South-African female runner Caster Semenya who had very high testosterone levels and had to take medication to lower her testosterone levels.
So biologically and genetically speaking, a person’s sex cannot change from birth, but their gender can so terms such as transgender are correct while terms such as sex change are not but as gender is the set of expectations, standards, and characteristics about how men and women are supposed to act in society, then the changing from one to the other is not a problem.
Their are problems, such as toilets or changing rooms but ultimately it is down to the person involved to identify with whatever gender they feel more comfortable with and i am as guilty as anyone for getting the ideas of a persons 'sex' and their 'gender' confused so the language needs to change but so does society to just accept it because the most important aspect is the person beneath the clothes, not the designated sex on the birth certificate.

Special Guest Blogger: Elmer McCurdy

I started off as a really bad outlaw and ended up in a movie and an episode of the Bionic Man so my life is separated into what the medical profession call 'being alive' and 'being dead' so first the bit before i found TV stardom and that would be when i decided that after i left the army robbing banks and trains would be a good career move so i took the military training in explosives and went looking for an outlaw gang because every good crew needs the guy who’s good at blowing stuff up.
My problem was that i sucked at the whole robbing, shooting, wearing a bandana thing as the gang found out when on my first job i was charged with opening a safe and blew the entire thing sky high, destroying everything in it.
Because outlaws are basically a fair bunch, they gave me another go at a bank heist but this time i bought too few explosives and hardly made a dent in the door.
The third time, and with promises that i had the whole blowing safes open thing sorted, i joined them robbing a train but the local sheriff blew a big hole in me before i even got to the safe and for most people that would have been the end of the ride but for me it was only just the beginning.
My body was embalmed and held at the local undertaker but nobody turned up to claim my body and pay for my coffin so the undertaker did what anybody would do in those circumstances and started putting my body on display outside of his place with a sign around my neck to put a coin in my mouth.
Months passed until some men turned up and offered to take my body which the undertaker was cool with which is how i ended up being carted to a Carnival, tagged the 'Embalmed Bandit' and we toured around the USA until my body was moved on to yet another owner, this time a man who operated a traveling 'Museum of Crime' with a bunch of wax figures of famous criminals he would rent out to venues and as props, one time i appeared in the film Narcotic!, that's me sat in a seat in the theatre scene.
From there i was sold to the Hollywood Wax Museum and was transported there strapped to the roof of a car like a weird looking Christmas tree and when i arrived i was missing both ears, several toes and fingers which had blown off. My new owner wasn't loving the new look so sold me on to an amusement park where i was strapped to the ceiling of a haunted house.
The TV show, The Six Million Dollar Man, came to park to shoot an episode but while filming my arm fell off and the producers realised that the body they were filming was an actual dead man so they reported it and i was freed from my duties and laid to rest in an actual cemetery.
So i may not have been the best or most memorable cowboy but while they were forced to play sad songs on the harmonica out on the open range before riding off into the sunset, i got to star in films and on TV alongside some great actors as well as Lee Mayors who for that episode at least wasn't the stiffest most lifeless thing on the screen for once.

Special Guest Blogger: Thomas-Alexandre Dumas

My father was part of the French aristocracy and came to Saint-Domingue, a French-Caribbean colony, and took a shine to one of his female black slaves, and she gave birth to me and three daughters and we all lived together until news reached him that his parents back in France had died and he was eligible to inherit their title.
The very next day he made a list which went: 'Things to do: Stop milk, pay papers, sell female family members to slave traders' which is exactly what he did and he raised enough money to take him and me back to France.
Being a black man in 18th-century France wasn't easy but being part of the aristocracy meant i went to a decent school and studied philosophy, fencing and equestrianism and it all looked good until my dad wanted to marry a domestic servant and i refused to sign as a witness so he cut off my allowance.
With no money i had to join the army and the nobility would generally go in as Officers but as a black man i had to start at the bottom rank and found myself posted to a small, backwater town but that was where i met and married my wife.

 She announced her pregnancy just as the French Revolution kicked off and i got called to defend the capital and got caught up in the Champs de Mars Massacre where 50 peasants were shot and killed and as the black man i was the only one stood before the notorious Committee of Public Safety who bought my claim that i acted to prevent even more bloodshed of the Officers and was cleared but still sent away to join France's Black Legion, a group of freed slaves. 

I rose through the ranks to Brigadier General but while i was away my wife gave birth to our child, a boy called Alexandre Dumas, who would grow to become a writer and include me in many of his books.
I was sent to command the Army of the Alps and under my command we captured the mountain range from the Austrians and i came to the notice of Napoleon Bonaparte who had a very complex relationship with me, he either hated or loved me depending on the day.
He tried to demote me for resisting his order to ransack any city we entered then got his praise for taking the city of Mantua then demoted me again when i complained about a General then promoted again after almost single-handedly defending a bridge in an Italian village after the rest of the men retreated.
He took me to Egypt with him but when men began dying of the heat, thirst and inadequate supplies and i complained to Napoleon, he promptly sent me back to France, or he would have done if the British hadn't sank all our ships in Cairo Harbour so i hired a ship to take me home to my family but the ship was a dog and sinking and we had to land our ship in Naples which was friendly to France or rather it was when we left but in the meantime the Government had been overthrown and the new guys were warring against us.
I spent the next two years locked up somewhere in Naples, Napoleon heard but preferred to carry on not sticking it to Josephine than try and get me released and the guards treated me so badly that when i was released i was partially paralyzed, almost blind and deaf in one ear but i went home thinking at least i had my army back-dated wages and pension to live on.
I wrote multiple times to Napoleon, asking for both explaining that my son couldn't get an education without it but nobody ever replied and i died of stomach cancer a year later but if I had ever got my hands on him i would have tied him to a cannon and made him into Napoleon Blown-apart.

How Dare The EU Do What We Agreed to

As we found with Donald Trump and his loony supporters, it is hard to satirise people who are so awful in real life that it is impossible to write anything worse than what they actually say or do which brings us to Boris Johnson and his satire writers worst dream of a Government.
Hot on the heels of Iain Duncan Smith article asking what has gone wrong with Britain because workers are refusing to return to the office while in the 1940s they kept coming to the office even when Hitler’s bombs were raining down (to which many people pointed out that the Home WIFI capabilities in the Blitz were not really up to home working so they had no choice but to go to the office), we have Lord Frost.
It should be pointed out that this is the same Lord Frost who negotiated the Northern Ireland Brexit Protocol, the one him and Boris Johnson called a 'great deal that was oven ready' which was agreed by both sides and is designed to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland.
The very same Northern Ireland protocol he said was 'an excellent deal' with the EU that he had been 'proud to secure' but now he wants to rip up and start again because the EU was breaking the spirit of the thing by going to the trouble of actually implementing it, accusing the EU of acting in bad faith by applying the treaty in the form in which it had been agreed.
Irish deputy PM Leo Varadkar has warned other nations considering doing deals with the UK that they should be wary because it might not keep its word, to which the only reply is to look at our inept Government and say 'duh...you reckon'?

Special Guest Blogger: Noah

A long, long time ago when God first made the Earth, we haven't got time to get into the dates and things but let's go with the Bible and say 5,000 years ago, God looked at his humans being evil and threw a massive hissy fit and said to himself they are so wicked so went straight to the genocide and said i know, i'll have to wipe them off the face of the earth with a flood along with every living thing because he was angry with the animals too for some reason.
There was one man who was still very good, that would be me, and despite being 600 years old at the time, God told me the plan to just start again with me and the wife and i should round up two of every animal, build an ark to keep them alive and i did what God said but let me tell you, it was a proper nightmare.
There are 5,000 million species of animals, that's 10 million animals on an Ark 300 cubits long (437ft), 50 cubits wide (72ft) and 30 cubits high (43ft) and it rained for 40 days and nights the flood water rose higher and higher until it covered the tops of the highest mountains and so every living thing was drowned except us and the animals in the ark.
The sea creatures were fine, they were better off in fact, but i had the problem of feeding and cleaning up after the 10 million animals and as God was busy massacring everyone, it only left us to do the feeding, water and to shovel the poop over the side of the ark.
For a hundred and fifty days the earth was covered with water and we bobbed around until i opened a window of the Ark and looked out and noticed that the water seemed to be going down so i sent a raven out but it soon came flying back as it couldn't find anywhere to settle so i waited another week avoiding being mauled by the vicious animals or trampled by the heavy ones and sent out a dove who came back with a green olive branch and God told me to land and let all the animals out.
Now with God being a bit of a moody sod, i asked if i could keep the Ark moored somewhere safely in case he got all murdery again but he said no need, he would never again send a flood to destroy the earth and here's a pretty rainbow to prove it.
So when you've done wrong and you are feeling very sad about it, think of the rainbow and the peace which God wants to put into your heart and don't ask any akward questions about how did 10 million animals fit on a Ark with 95,832 square feet of floor space or why almost every other and earlier religion also had a deity causing a killer flood to almost wipe out mankind for being evil, just shut up, look at the rainbow and say thank you for the loving mass murder of your ancestors because God is love remember. Yep, it was a good thing, for me it was anyway, i lived to be 950.

Special Guest Blogger: Ganna Walska

Russian-occupied Poland was a bleak place for women, and also men, and frankly most of the animals didn't have it great either but with nothing more than sheer force of will, mad scientists and some truly great divorce lawyers i made my way to international celebrity.
It all began with a chance meeting of Tsar Nicholas at the royal ball in St. Petersburg and he declared me the most beautiful woman at the ball and even commissioned a special portrait of me which bought me to the attention of certain young men and i met and married a wealthy baron but he wanted to live in cold, desolate Russia and i had much higher ambitions so i divorced him and moved with half of his fortune to New York and into the bedroom of an elderly, well off doctor who i married and then he helpfully died two years later leaving me heartbroken but the huge inheritance helped to soothe my broken heart along with Harold McCormick, who was the head of the world's biggest producer of farm equipment and who went to Switzerland to ask his wife for a divorce so he could marry me but by the time he got back with his divorce papers, i had got fed up waiting and married another millionaire.
That marriage soon ran into trouble and at the divorce proceedings my lawyers successfully argued that i had suffered numerous acts of cruelty like him giving me Cartier bracelets as they covered 'the natural beauty of my delicate wrists' and he 'forced me to accept a sable coat worth a million francs, so big and heavy that it made me look old and fat'.
Amazingly the court agreed that i had no choice but to divorce the cruel bastard and i had to accept a hefty out-of-court settlement, and then immediately married Harold McCormick after all.
Now Harold was all man, apart from his testicles because he had baboon glands inserted to increase his sex drive but his super-gonads did not interest me as much as his opera contacts because i fancied myself as a bit of a singer and he staged numerous elaborate productions starring me
with one performance ending with the audience booing and throwing rotten vegetables so i packed my bags and departed for Europe where i bought a theater on the Champs-Elysees and staged many lavish performances.
With my own theater and no further need for a man with monkey balls, i divorced him and married the inventor Harry Grindell Matthews who was putting the final touches to his death ray which turned out to be so weak that at the demonstration, three scientists stepped into the path of the beam to show that nothing would happen, which it never, so as appealing as an Opera singer with a death ray might have been, we divorced months after getting married and by now, with 5 divorce settlements in my bank account, i was stinking rich and next up was Theos Bernard, a Buddhist mystic 21 years younger than me but while his testicles were human, his brain was certainly baboon and we divorced, he used his divorce settlement to fund an expedition to Tibet, where he was immediately shot in the head and dumped in a river.
I never married again, mostly because i was so rich i had more to lose in divorce settlements so i bought a big house and spent millions building up my mansion's gardens so my journey through everything ended with nothing more than an interest in gardening and avoiding the monkey cages at the zoo's.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek/Roman God Zeus

Back in my day i was the top banana, numero uno and the Chief of Gods as well as being responsible for the sky, thunder, weather, law and justice and when i wasn't battling with the giant Titans and engaging in all manner of gut-busting glorious Godly pursuits, i ruled Olympus. It is the lofty cloud-land where us Greek Gods lived and looked down upon you feeble humans but i didn't make the best start, my father Cronus was terrified of my awesome power and concerned that one of his kids would grow up and overthrow him, he swallowed us but my mum wasn't having any of that and gave him a stone to swallow instead of me and she smuggled me out to the nymph Adamanthea who hid me by dangling me by a rope from a tree so that my dad couldn't see me so i grew up and learned to walk, talk, and rule the Universe and the story does have a happy ending as i went back and made him puke up my siblings and then me and my brothers Hades and Poseidon, chucked him into the Abyss of Tartarus with the rest of the Titan's who arses we kicked.
Being a hunky, irresistible God i did have an eye for the Goddesses, mortals, animals, actually anything that would keep still long enough but my wife and sister, Hera (again, Greece), was very understanding, a God needed to relax after a hard days successfully crushing revolts against me by my fellow gods.
To seduce Eurymedusa, i disguised myself as an ant, i really didn't think that one through, but from all my affairs i had hundreds of children but my main family included Artemis, Apollo, Hermes, Athena, Ares, and Aphrodite who all went on to be Gods themselves although we did all get new names when the Romans took over, i became Jupiter but i was still the top dog in charge of weather and thunderbolts although sometimes a well lobbed thunderbolt up the jacksy wasn't enough and i had to get proper Greek on their arses.
Humans did like to make sacrifices to me and usually it was a virgin or a goat and i would say what's the point in sending me a burnt virgin but they continued so i decided to wipe out mankind and flooded the world with the help of my brother Poseidon. None of that ark business with two of each animals, just flooded the damned place but that was the kind of guy i was, rewarding good conduct and punishing evil with floods and guess what else, yep, thunderbolts, i did love a good thunderbolt.
When the Roman's took over matters they kept me as top God but changed my name to Jupiter and named a Planet after me and considering that it is a massive ball of gas, that seems quite right but then so would you be after all that nectar and ambrosia.

Special Guest Blogger: St. Denis of Paris

Life as a missionary can be tough, especially if it's in third century Paris under Roman rule where the Christians had almost vanished thanks to the head choppy ways of Emperor Decius.
If your only knowledge of Christian saints is that holidays and cities are named after them, hang on to your hat because some of us guys went down in history because we had superpowers like functioning without heads.
I was sent by Pope Fabian along with six other missionaries to Gaul to convert the Pagan's and increase the Christian population again so we found a nice place on the River Seine and set about the business of converting.
I don't want to blow my own trumpet but i was good, a bit too good actually because i was made the Bishop of Paris but the Pagan priests became alarmed over their loss of followers to my side of the religious fence so they called in the Roman's to put a stop to our little game.
The Emperor sent threats and started dropping tactful hints in the form of a goddamn executioner standing outside my window swinging a huge sword but undeterred i continued to convert Parisians to Christianity which resulted in me being beheaded which to some could be considered a handicap but not me, i carried on undeterred. You could say i was a head of my time...ba dum tss.
I picked up my own severed head, dusted it down and washed it in a spring because all that blood was not a good look for a Priest and i walked for about six or so miles preaching all the way through the mouth of my severed head which i was carrying.
At this point i should point out that headless missionaries are not a familiar sight in Paris so credit must go to those who stayed to listen to my message of salvation and saw past the headless guy walking toward them with blood spurting from a ragged neck stump, carrying his own own head.
I carried on walking until i reached a spot that looked nice and promptly dropped dead thereby forever giving artists the problem of where to put my halo in paintings. Many discussions must have gone on whether it goes where the head used to be or where the head is now in my hands.
Fun fact: I am the patron saint of people suffering from headaches which is nice but as usually happens, i thought of something cool to say way too late and have always regretted not saying on my walk from my execution 'See guys, Christians are head and shoulders above all the rest of those other religions' but the moments passed now.