Special Guest Blogger: Tanaka Shinbei

When your nickname is Heaven’s Punisher you know people think of you as some sort of badass but i was destined for a life of farming until i was introduced to martial arts and especially Jigen-ryu which shows you how to kill your opponent with one blow of your sword and if you take two or three slashes at them, it makes you some kind of pussy.
I was a natural and got real good real fast so nobody ever actually needed to called me a pussy, instead i got enrolled into the assassination group of the royalists and after performing my first assassination for them, i became a Samurai, and many other people quickly became corpses with the most confirmed kills of the Royalist assassins.
I took out politicians and pretty much anyone who got in my way but my most famous assassination was that of Ii Naosuke, the person who signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between Japan and the United States when the Yankees turned up with their navy on our shoreline and said 'howdy, it would just be super swell if you guys ended your 250-year-long isolationist policy and opened up your ports to us or else'.
I wanted to reply to their order for Japan to trade with them with an 'or else what?' by introducing them to my sword and driving them right out of Japanese waters with their tails between their legs, or at least those of them who had somehow retained the use of their legs, but Naosuke turned pussy so i got all murdery on him and turned him into bite size sushi chunks.
Eventually, all the assassinations led to the creation of the Shinsengumi, an elite military police force tasked with capturing us and restore law and order which they did and i was arrested on put on trial and exhibit number one was my sword.
I asked if i could see it and the idiots actually handed it to me so naturally i took the noble action of cutting my own throat and died but for all my killing, i was doing what i thought was best for my country, just that while many roads are paved with good intentions, i left ours paved with gruesome bits of body parts.

Special Guest Blogger: Alessandro Volta

There isn't many jobs when you can break wind with abandon but when you are working with methane you can let rip like a goodun' and nobody bats an eyelid and as i spent most of my days with the foul smelling stuff, i was passing wind like a brass section of the orchestra but it was all in a good cause because i invented batteries.
Back in the 18th century some people still suspected that the strange ghostly lights above swamps were caused by fairies but as a scientist i wasn't having any of that supernatural mumbo jumbo and visited Lake Maggiore, where i noticed bubbles after i stirred the mud beneath it. I collected some of the gas responsible for the bubbling to study in my laboratory found it was methane and as schoolboys with lighters everywhere knows, it was highly combustible.
I came up with a piece of apparatus that allowed an explosion to be sparked in a closed environment, this went on to become the predecessor of the internal combustion engine but i used it to gauge the force of gaseous explosions.
I concluded that the gas was rising up from dead fish and plants languishing in the bog which combusted in mid-air and that the ghost lights were the result of lightning mixing with the gas and was not fairies just hanging around European swamps.
As i was busy messing around with farty smelling gas my colleague, Luigi Galvani, was messing around with dissected frog legs and discovered something he named, 'animal electricity' when two different metals were connected to a frog's leg and they would twitch when he touched a steel scalpel against a specimen hanging from a brass hook and concluded that electricity was naturally present in the tissues of frogs and other animals.
I wasn't convinced so did my own experiments using different types of metal and found that the legs were not twitching because they had electricity in them but because the electric current was being transferred through it by the two different metals and discovering zinc and copper were the most effective metals, created the voltic pile, or electric battery,
I wrote it up and published a work describing a new type the electrostatic generator i had built which generated and stored an electric charge and one of my biggets admirers was Napoleon who invited me to Paris to demonstrate the pile to prominent French scientists. Duly impressed, Napoleon bestowed many honors on me including a gold medal, a pension and appointments as a cavalier, senator and count.
The unit of measurement regarding the strength of an electric current became known as it's Voltage in my honour and after becoming the chair of the University of Pavia, at the age of 74 i decided it was time to hang up my capacitors and voltaic piles and retired to a country house to spend time with my wife.
She looked after me after a stroke until i died four years later but i lived my life like one of my batteries, i was quite positive but i also had my negative side. Ba-dum-tss.

Special Guest Blogger: Jewish God Lilith

You probably know the story of Adam of Eve but how about Adam and Lilith? Didn't think so, they keep that particular story quiet so hardly anyone knows that Eve was actually the second attempt at a woman, i was the first but the religious crowd had a zero tolerance policy when it came to their women acting like they were all unique and independent so wimpy Adam wet his big boy pants and complained to the big guy that i wasn't obedient enough for his liking so they binned me and bought in a more subservient one instead.
Obviously i wasn't going to take that nonsense so i decided to ruin their little game of happily ever after by getting them to make a mess of things in the Garden of Eden so i turned myself into a snake and sidled up to Eve one day and told her that those apples look mightily tasty and the simpleton went and ate one.
After that they got booted out of the paradise garden so with my work done and not caring that much for all that gardening by myself, that and the fact God had sent a bunch of angels, Sanvi, Sanssanvi and Semangalef, to drag me back to God knows where, i slipped off to buddy up with a bunch of demons and when they caught up with me, my new demonic pals and i told them to sling their hook or i was going to find employment as a vampire who spealised in sucking the blood of babies.
We did reach a compromise of they would leave me alone in exchange for an agreement that if the parents name-checked either of the three angels, those babies would be spared so if you have worries about a new baby, all you have to do is scribble the Angel names on a scrap of paper and tape it to the baby’s head.
So my final words are to you ladies, don't measure your self worth in relation to a man, do physical labour, cut your hair short, grew out your body hair, drink pints of cider and get a tattoo, don't get sucked into their hopeless patriarchy.

Beginning Of The End For Boris

Nobody is really expecting to see Boris Johnson lose the confidence vote in Parliament today, sitting Prime Ministers just don't lose these things but we are expecting a big wedge of his own MP's to say that they don't support Boris and that is where the danger comes from for him because although he will remain as party leader and Prime Minister and be immune from another challenge for a year, he will know that many of his MP's are against him.
Theresa May survived a confidence vote in 2018 with two-thirds of Conservative MP's supporting her but the other third so tied up her Premiership that she had to step down just five months later which shows that an arithmetic win is not the same as a political one.
When the result is announced around 9pm, we will all know how many of his own party want the prime minister out but as well as Johnson waiting nervously, so will most of his cabinet who know they will not be included in any new cabinet, tainted by their association with the law breaking Prime Minister .
The best case scenario for me would be for Johnson to just about drag his carcass over the winning line and stay in office up until the next election where, as plenty of Conservatives are saying, they would lose.
If the Tories had any decency about them they would remove him, his blatant lies, partying and awful policies should be enough but the thought of them losing the next election, and their own jobs, may spook enough to look elsewhere in their party.

Special Guest Blogger: Zhang Heng

After 200,000 years of living in caves and bopping each other over the head with clubs, us homo-sapiens finally got our act together and began using our large brains to make specialist tools, develop cities, agriculture and trade.
Considering the dinosaurs were around for over a hundred million years and never invented anything at all and never evolved beyond walking around and eating each other, us humans have not done bad and i was lucky enough to be born in a time in China when inventing things and catching smallpox were the only pastimes.
I improved on Pi, tinkered with the Chinese calendar to make it more in sync with the seasons, invented the ode-meter and an Earthquake Siesometer before turning my attention to astronomy and documenting 2,500 stars in an extensive star catalog and explained that the Earth, Planets and Sun were all spherical and tried to explain eclipses to people who considered it so far out of the box that i would have to invent binoculars for them to actually see the box.
I began with how the Moon merely reflects the light of the Sun and sometimes the Earth gets between the two, eclipsing the light of the moon so a lunar eclipse and sometimes the moon gets in the way, or eclipses the light of the Earth and Sun and that's a solar eclipse.
After a while of repeating light here, big thing in way, no light there to the local yokels, this got the attention of the Emperor An who summoned me to his court and i assumed it was to relieve me of my head but he made me the Chief Astronomer and paid me a handsome salary of 600 bushels of grain.
Despite all my other inventions, my most satisfying was the earthquake weather-vane. China was prone to Earthquakes which we knew was down to the giant frog which was holding up the Earth twitching which shook the earth and when the frog's twitch manifested itself hundred of miles away, we wouldn't find out for days and by the time help arrived there, everyone was dead so i produced something which could indicate where an earthquake had happened.
It was a vase with an inverted pendulum that tipped in the direction of a detected earthquake, which triggered the mouth of one of eight dragons holding a ball to drop it, showing the direction of the tremors and luckily we didn't have to wait too long until a ball of the North Western facing dragon dropped, indicating an earthquake in that region.    
As there was no tremor felt in our location, my political enemies who thought me way too much of a smart-arse anyway, were briefly able to relish the failure of my device until a messenger arrived shortly afterwards to report that an earthquake had occurred about 310 miles away in the northwest region of Longxi, the same direction that my device had indicated.
I was later sent to serve as administrator of the city of Hejian, and briefly returned to the Emperor's court before my death months later but my earthquake invention was the first step in making frog related quakes more manageable and was light years ahead of those dozy Japanese who thought they were caused by a giant catfish living beneath the Earth's surface thrashing about, i know, a fish!! Those crazy Japs, so scientifically backwards.

Sums, Math's, Arithmetic Or Numeracy?

I was never very good at math's a school, i zoned out of so many lessons about triangles and fractions that half the time i was looking out the window and the other three quarters i was scribbling things about George Michael on the front of my math's book but the Government are considering making changes to make the subject less challenging by changing the name to numeracy.
According to someone in Government responsible for these things, the name mathematics is 'too academic and scary' and what teachers with patches on the elbows of their jackets should be teaching is 'real world math's' which apparently is math's we use in our everyday lives and never to my knowledge have i been stood in a shop, bank or anywhere desperately trying to remember what pi or calculus is so i have always assumed that all those lessons i missed, didn't really matter.
My view is as long as you have a working knowledge of the times tables, can divide, subtract and add, are able to find a percentage of something you will always get by and as most things have a calculator included, don't fret.
Of course if your career depends on math's then do fret, nobody wants a building or vehicle designed by somebody who said: 'Whatever, that's close enough' but otherwise, you can always get by with a basic knowledge of Sums, Math's, Arithmetic, Numeracy or whatever they call it, i would say getting a proper grip on English is more important, the amount of people who get there, their and they're wrong is embarrassing.

Special Guest Blogger: Blaise Pascal

We’re not the fastest, strongest or hardiest of species, how we weren't all eaten as soon as we dropped out of the trees by things with bigger teeth or claws is anyone's guess but we are the best at dreaming up ways to make life more livable.
In a blink of the eye in planetary timescales, we’ve gone from chasing things with pointy sticks to landing humans on the moon and every invention started out with someone saying 'It sure would be neat if that thing existed' and then going and inventing it and my invention didn't keep us safer, more comfortable or any healthier but it made cheating at math's a breeze.
While the Pilgrims were landing at Plymouth Rock and Europe was dealing with various plagues, i ignored the struggles of everyday life to use projective geometry to figure out how air pressure and vacuums work and it was while hearing my accountant father complain about how working out the pages and pages of figures gave him a banging headache that i thought i would help by putting my big brain to help him with a mathematics machine.
Using a box with dials that could be twisted, i came up with a machine that he could use to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and display the result.
I built 50 of them for him to hand out to his accountant friends and i called it the Pascaline but it never really took off and instead went off to ponder on what became known as Pascal's wager which states that a rational person should live as though God exists because if he does then they stand to receive infinite gains in Heaven against if he doesn't.
On less theological matters, one my last designs was creating a route for a carriage with many seats for Paris that would move passengers around a fixed route for a fixed price but my bus idea was 200 years too early as was a cure for my tuberculosis and i finally got an answer to my wager aged only 39 but no spoilers here, you will have to wait and see for yourself.
My legacy then would be the number 18 to Sudbury & Harrow Road and the schoolkids sat on it writing 58008 and 55378008 into their Pascaline's and turning it upside down.

Special Guest Blogger: Benjamin Guggenheim

I started out working at my fathers copper smelting company and we were very wealthy which is how i ended up on the RMS Titanic on it's maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.  
I had a reputation of being the perfect gentleman and i was, i always picked up a few trinkets for my wife back home on my business trips and always treated my mistress to the best of things also and on that particular trip i bought her the finest things in the ports of Southampton, Cherbourg and Ireland and picked up a few trinkets for the wife back home.
My wife never joined me on the Titanic trip so it was just me and my valet and obviously as my wife was at home, i took my mistress Leontine who was a pretty famous French Opera Singer at the time and after Ireland it was full steam ahead for New York and tea and crumpets at Macy's only things took a bit of a turn.
Just after midnight on 14th April i was awoken by a steward screaming in the corridors of the first class suite that the ship had hit an iceberg.
My initial reaction was to say shut up you damn fool, the ships unsinkable, it said so right here in the brochure.
The shouting continued so we went to investigate and sure enough, the few life boats we had on-board were being filled with women and children and being lowered down to the sea so i made sure Leontine was on one and as the boat was being lowered i shouted out not to be concerned, the ship will be repaired and we will soon see each other again tomorrow.
The way the ship was listing it was obvious that it had more holes in it than a teenage Goth and as the last of the lifeboats sailed away, i turned to my valet and asked him if he fancied a drink.
We returning to our quarters and donned our finest evening suits, went to the bar and poured ourselves a brandy and took a cigar and went and sat on the deckchairs on the upper deck.
As the water slopped against our ankles, then our knees, then our chests we drank and smoked until the water put out the cigars and then our lights as the ship slipped to the bottom of the Atlantic.
In life i was very much at the top but in death i was at the bottom and as far as i know, apart from a few fish nibbles, i kind of stayed there.

No Win Game For Scotland

The Scotland football team doesn't usually generate much sympathy this side of the border in England but even we see that they are in an unwinnable match later tonight as they are playing Ukraine in a play-of for the right to play Wales and therefore in turn play us at the World Cup in Qatar.
Facing one of the home nations at the big festival of football in the desert makes the World Cup even more special so i am hoping that Scotland win and then whoever triumphs out of them or Wales, us English are guaranteed a British Isles match in November but it seems it is just Scots and the English (and probably Russians) hoping it is  Steve Clark's boys celebrating this evening because everyone and his dog wants Ukraine in the first competitive match they have been able to play since the declaration of war to qualify.
Scotland is the nation that has historically been bullied by a tyrannical neighbour but this time it is they who face the charge of  kicking a blind man’s stick away if they beat Ukraine who have had next to no preparation for the game and by all rights Ukraine should be in for a proper rogering and Clarke said that while he symapthises with the Ukrainian plight, 'We’re here to win a football game'.
Tonight's winner plays Wales in Cardiff on Sunday with the winner taking the last slot in the group with England, USA and Iran so it's 'ach aye the noo Scotland' and then 'Lan hogia cymra' so we can get some to some STUFF 'EM ENGLAND in November.

Special Guest Blogger: Hindu God Yama

People can be quite intimidated when they first meet me, i'm a Death God afterall but i sort of got the job by default, as the first human i was also the first to die so with no other candidates i just got handed the job.
Being the first dead person in the Underworld was very strange and very lonely at first but there was no shortage of mortals arriving to keep me company since and my job is to have a bit of a nosy at what you did in your life and then decide one of three fates for you based on Karma.
So what can you expect when you finally get here? Well my porter Vaidhyata will take you to my two attendants Kalapurusa and Chanda who will usher you to me for an audience and then my scribe Citragupta will read all your worldly deeds from the Agrasandhani where everything you have ever done, good and bad, are logged.
Then it's my job to weigh it all up from my throne of judgement, or Vicarabhu, allocate you a score and consider the three options that i have at my disposal.
Depending on how good or bad you have done when the score is totted up, too low and i escort you to the 21 levels of Naraka which is our version of hell where you are tortured for a bit and then once you are suitably rehabilitated, you come back to me.  
If your Karma score is not too shabby or you have been through Naraka, i offer a route back to the World in the form of a re-birth so you can have another go but be warned it may not necessarily be as a human, you could be a cow or a chicken or whatever i feel like that day.
The highest scorers get the best option which is to be given immortality by drinking Soma made from mushrooms and sent to live forevermore with the wise and saintly spirits of the departed ancestors of Hindu culture to enjoy eternal happiness and shine as stars in the celestial heavens.  
You are probably now worrying about all the things you have done and yep, they have all been written down but there is a loophole to spare you the justice of my court, you just need to make sure that you die in a holy place so as long as you can arrange to draw your final breath in a Temple then that time you stole all that stationery from work or scribbled your ex-boyfriends telephone number on the toilet door in the local pub need never be mentioned.