Special Guest Blogger: Mesopotamian God Pazuzu

You could probably name the Mesopotamian Gods on the finger of one hand but though my name may not be familiar, you do you know me, i'm considered a bit of a celebrity in the Deity world after starring in a blockbuster movie and as the 5th member of a pretty well known band.
My origins are a bit less auspicious, i was created as a counter to Lamashtu who was the most terrible of all the female demons. She preyed on women during childbirth, kidnapped their newborns while they were breastfeeding, and then slew the babies to eat their flesh.
As vile as eating children was, she also handed out the nightmares and caused pregnant women to miscarry, and brought disease and sickness.
My father, Hanpu the Pervert, (don't ask) created me to protect expectant mothers but rather than give me special powers or something cool, my gift was to be so hideously ugly that i would scare away her and any other demons that were hanging about.
I had a scaly body, birds talons for feet, wings and a scorpion's tail but it's the face which is where the money is, gazelle horns, human ears, a dogs muzzle and bulging eyes.
I was also responsible for the west wind so i was often kept busy so the soon to be mothers were told to hang an amulet with my face on it around their neck and when Lamashtu saw it, she knew this one was under my protection and leave her alone.
So successful was my fugly face that people began hanging the amulets in their homes to repel other demons and keep their homes safe so i was actually a decent type of God, sure i sometimes got carried away with the wind bit of my job and blew away villages but they were only there because i kept away
the real bad guys so cut me some slack for that.
I was pretty famous in my day but my big break was when i was asked to appear in the Exorcist, that woman with the swiveling head and shooting pea green vomit everywhere, that's me possessing her but being a God i didn't take any wages so everyone else got a much, much bigger cut of the film's profits, pretty much all of which must have been spent on therapy.
Then the Gorillaz decided what their band needed was for an ancient, really ugly wind demon to appear in their video's. Yep, that's me on Russel Hobbs drum kit so if you was imagining Stephen Tyler's face with Martin Feldman's eyes, you wouldn't be far off.

Special Guest Blogger: Prince William Of Gloucester

No i'm not that Prince William, as far as i know he is still amongst the living and going balder every day, no i was the other one, the one the Press gave the nickname the James Bond Prince because i was flying planes, dating models or trekking through the Sahara Desert up until it all went up in flames.
I was fourth in line to the British throne and had no real chance to ever become King so after finishing school i lived it up which the tabloid's loved hence the nickname but i did like a daredevil pastime such as riding around in hot air balloons, flying airplanes and dating beautiful women but i had to get a proper job so went to work at the Commonwealth Office in Tokyo, Japan.
In Tokyo, i was far away from the prying eyes of my royal relatives and obligations and met Hungarian Revlon model Zsuzsi Starkloff who was face meltingly beautiful and we moved in together but my family, Prince Philip inparticular, were not so in love with her as i was, they sent Princess Margaret to have a word and end what they considered to be a scandalous romance because i was technically in the line of succession, i needed the Queen’s approval to marry and she wasn't about to let me marry 'a commoner'.
I decided to ignore them and just get on with it but then my father fell ill and had to relinquish some of his royal duties so i was summoned back to stand in for him at events like gala's and charity balls which was very boring and my family were going on to me to find a suitable wife but i still wanted to marry Zsuzsi it would just take the Queen and her husband to both have strokes or something.
I still kept up my flying and turned up at the International Air Trophy event, piloting a Piper Cherokee and it all started very well then the plane banked suddenly to the left, a wing clipped a tree and hit the ground in a ball of angry flame.
I was so badly burned that they had to use my dental records to identify my body but cousin Charlie named his first-born son with the Lady Diana Spencer after me so see? I was the original Prince William only with more hair.

Take Care As Covid Rates Increasing Again

For many people, Covid was so last year but the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has warned that the pandemic isn't done and dusted just yet and the amount of infections in the UK is climbing again and even more worrying is that the increase is being driven by the 4th and 5th versions of the virus which have evolved to include a high rate of 'immune escape', meaning even the vaccinated immune system can no longer recognise or fight the virus.
Medical experts are keen to point out that these Omicron variations are not more severe but of course, it would be better to avoid getting Covid-19 at all, it is still potentially a killer and there are the negative health outcomes the disease is linked to such as long Covid.
It is highly unlikely that the UK Government would enter a lock-down scenario again and even if they did any health messages by the Government would be largely ignored, Boris and his lock-down partying means that that particular ship has well and truly sailed.
Seems then that we are going to have to live with it so the new solutions are the same as the old solutions with vaccines, masks in indoor settings, better ventilation and getting rid of the god-awful Tories.

Special Guest Blogger: Yoruba God Olorun

Where with most Gods you just have the one, with me you get your money's worth because i'm three gods OLORUN the Lord of Heaven, OLODUMARE, the Ultimate Creator and OLOFI the Messenger which you must admit is Excellent value.
In OLODUMARE mode i saw that the universe consisted only of sky and a formless expanse of marshy water so i had some wonderfully ambitious blueprints for planet Earth which included some solid land, fields and forests, hills and valleys, and various living things to populate it and i prudently decided to delegate the job to my son Obatala and told him to get on with it as it just wouldn’t do for the Master of All things to get his majestic hands dirty.
Now Obatala did like a drink or two which is not a good thing when you have a holy mission to perform and on his way he gatecrashed a God-party and spent the rest of the evening roaring drunk but my other son, Oduduwa, spotted an opportunity and stole the holy building materials and did a little planet-constructing himself and to be fair, he did such a good job of it i promoted him to God of the newly renovated Earth.
As for the drunken muppet Obatala, he was punished with the tedious punishment of making men and women and he built some little clay figures which i breathed eternal life into and made them into humans but they kept multiplying and growing bigger and bigger after which they shrank into feeble old people. Because there were so many of them creeping around, they begged for me to free them from such a long life so i introduced the idea of death so the old, wrinkly ones died.
The water goddess Olokun wasn't best pleased that i had taken over the planet so she kept trying to flood the land to regain the area she had lost and we held a winner takes all weaving contest which obviously i won because you are not all living on houseboats.  
All in all the Earth isn't exactly what i had planned but it will do and it's a damned sight better than it would have been if a drunk Obatala had done it with his fumbling alcoholic fingers although i do sometimes look at some creatures like the penguin, duck billed platypus and hammer head shark and wonder if Oduduwa wasn't partial to a drop himself.

Some Victims Deserve More Sympathy Than Others It Seems

The general reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been brilliant, one of the World's most powerful militaries invading its much smaller and weaker neighbour in order to subjugate and take over it's land and although the military might of the Russian's will probably win out in the bitter end, the willingness of the Ukrainian's to fight back against the invader has been much admired which throws up the question, why is that willingness to applaud the brave Ukrainians not replicated when other nations are invaded?
The most obvious place is Palestine who have been fighting back against the invading Israeli's who have been killing them and stealing their land for almost 70 years, they are castigated for daring to fight back when the Israeli military swoops in to pull down their houses, break all sorts of International and Human Right's to kill, evict and steal their land.
The likes of Syria and Iran are vilified for supplying the Palestinians with the rockets to fight back against their murderous oppressors who launch the weapons supplied to them and paid for by the West, mostly America who financially back the Israeli forces.  
It as the West who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq but there was no rush to support the unfortunate victims of America and British weapons and the refugees fleeing the war-zone we created were not welcomed with offers to house them or heart tugging reports of scenes of devastation, if anything they were told in no uncertain terms that we didn't want them here.
So why was Benjamin Netanyahu and now Naftali Bennett not being compared to Hitler and why have no Israeli athletes been kicked out of International sports Tournaments or the entire nation under sanctions like Russia? After-all, they have done and continue to do exactly what Russia have done and have been doing it for decades? The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs put the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces at 6,050 with 138,114 injuries since 2009 and 49,532 Palestinian structures destroyed since 2019.
It is uncomfortable to answer why this is acceptable and endorsed by the West while the fate of Palestinians, Iraqi's, Syrian's and Afghans is largely overlooked, and that was answered by Western journalists at the very start of the conflict, before they were slapped down and told to begin choosing their words more carefully.
From CBS, 'Ukraine is a relatively civilized, relatively European city where you wouldn’t expect that it’s going to happen' and from the former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine: 'It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed every day' and in France, BFM TV stated: 'We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives'.
Writing in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan explained: 'They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking' and that is it in a nutshell, they look like us and the implication is crystal clear, when the war victims seen are white 'civilised' Europeans we feel sympathy, when they are African blacks or Muslim browns then, well, they are not 'like us' are they and deemed not quite so worthy of our sympathy aka good old fashioned racism.

Losing Our Ping Pong Balls

Anthropologist's at Dartmouth College have made a discovery after been digging around inside the skull's of humans who have died over the last thousands of years and found that we may be the most advanced civilisation ever exist on Earth, but we are doing it all with smaller brains.
They found that around 100 generations ago, our ancestors had larger brains and you may look around at some of the knuckle draggers walking around today and say 'no shit Sherlock' although another report from Norwegian researchers found that IQ scores have been steadily falling since the 70's.
Obviously brain size does not mean a higher IQ, on average the male brain is 10% larger than the female brain and look at the bang up job they have done but back to the Anthropologists who decided to use the medium of ping pong balls to explain the volume of grey matter we have lost since our great, great, great, great...x100 strolled around with their massive brains.
Apparently the amount is four ping pong balls worth and as i am not up to date with the exact International Table Tennis Federation's rules on ball size, i googled it to find that one ball is 40mm so the volume lost is 160mm which is quite a bit from a 1500mm brain today.
So what happened around 3,000 years ago to mean that we needed an extra 9% of our brains volume?
It could be our diets changed or the increased interaction with other humans as civilisations began to come together but basically the men with the trowels and dirty knees didn't know but they are certain that brain size does not matter and i would agree, the Sperm Whale has the biggest brain of any animal species, 800,000mm or 20,000 ping pong balls, and they haven't invented anything.

Fly Me To The Moon (One Day Maybe)

I had always assumed that by now we would have at least a moon base but it seems we have just given up since 1972 and apart from a few landers, the Moon has been free of humans bouncing all over it although there have been tenuous mentions of one of the big three, USA, China and Russia doing something but none have any firm plans which is disappointing.
The Chinese and Russians have announced a joint plan to build a base by 2035 and the Chang'e 7 lunar mission is planned to launch around 2024 and will survey the moon for a prime piece of Lunar real estate to build it but my hopes were on NASA who said a while back that their Artemis program planned to return humans to the Moon by 2025.
That has now been put back to at least 2028 due to a cock-up with the launch tower needed to launch the crewed missions to the lunar surface as the company already paid $16.8 million to build it at the Kennedy Space Center have announced the $16.8 doesn't quite cover it after-all and will need NASA to throw a few more tens of millions their way in order to complete it.
I don't know why America, Russia, China and the European Space Agency don't pool their resources and do it as a joint effort for mankind rather than try and do it alone, national machismo i guess, but it leaves me banging my head on my desk in frustration that we could do so much more in everything, not just space flight, if we put aside our differences and just did things together.

Go Away Foreigners...Then Come Back Please

The 52% of Brexit voters have always argued that they knew exactly what they were voting for in 2016 so they must be delighted at the massive queues at NHS hospitals due to staff shortages.
The majority of 1.35 million NHS staff in England are British but around 15% or 190,000 were not and quite rightly, they decided that living and working in a country which has said they should leave wasn't the best use of their skills and packed up and went elsewhere leaving all those Brexiters to wave them off and then admire that the Staff may be exhausted, but it fills their heart with pride that they are British people exhausted.
The Government, realising that forcing out non-Brits who did the jobs such as delivering petrol and picking our fruit and vegetables led to petrol not being delivered and food rotting in the fields decided that maybe we do need some foreign workers here afterall and have been quietly attempting to bring them back, quietly because they don't want to upset the people who voted for them to Get Brexit Done.
So after the NHS announcing they had a staff shortage of 110,192 staff following an exodus of foreign staff after Brexit which is leading to longer delays to a backlog which already sits at 6.1m, the Government have a plan to try and fill these positions, poaching trained staff from abroad.
How the other nations we are poaching them from feel about it is probably easy to guess, they pay for the training and then they bugger off abroad with their certificate and use the skills they have learnt on the people of other nations which is why the World Health Organization code of practice states that 'member states should discourage active recruitment of health professionals from developing countries' although that page must be missing from the Governments copy.  
Brexit seems to have become right, you all got to get out followed by sorry, but can most of you come back but keep it quiet because you know, the racists and little Englander's are our core vote, appreciate it.
Next week, how reducing the Civil Service by 90,000 personnel won't end in delays in getting your passport, tax refund or driving licence issued.

Room For Improvement

After surviving the attempt by his own MPs to throw him out on his ear, Boris Johnson has been repeatedly talking up his successes since he took over from Theresa May in 2019 which seem pretty thin on the ground but when you actually look at what he promised and what he has delivered, they are even thinner.
The 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 more GPs is actually 24,295 more nurses and 1,147 more GP's and the promise to build 40 new hospitals stands at 1 but any usual definition of 'new hospital' but the Government have changed the definition to include any new clinical buildings or a new wing of an existing hospital or a major refurbishment.
The 20,000 more police is so far an extra 13,576 police officers recruited but those of us with long memories that they are replacing the 21,000 who they deemed 'surplus to requirements' previously.
300,000 new homes a year was 242,000 in 2019-20 and 216,000 in 2020-21 so not so hot there as the
former Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick told MPs: 'The government will miss their pledge by a country mile'.
His big pull for 52% of the nation was the promise to 'Get Brexit done' but as the Northern Ireland border rumbles on, the lack of trade deals leaving a 15% deficit in imports and exports and the severe worker shortages, it is hard to say that Brexit is done and dusted.
No rise in rates of income tax, National Insurance or VAT turned into a 1.25% rise in National Insurance and the largest rise in the tax burden since the 1940s.
As for Keep the triple lock for the state pension, that quickly became suspend the triple lock and just as quick to go was was the pledge to keep spending 0.7% spent on International Aid which went down to 0.5%
It wasn't a pledge but one of Boris's ofte repeated lines this week has been that under his leadership, the UK has the fastest growing economy in the G7 but according to the OECD, of the G20 nations, only Russia keeping us from being 20th in the economy growing league.
All in all, not great and although Boris has been proven to be untruthful, let's be charitable and mark his card as plenty of room for improvement.

Special Guest Blogger: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey

You may think i was pretty bitter over what King Henry VIII did to me but nothing could be further from the truth.
So what if i was the second most powerful and one of the wealthiest men in England, he was the King even if he never really had the temperament for it and changed the nation's religion just so he could get his leg over, that's his business, not mine.
Twenty years of service i gave him, as Chaplain, then as Cardinal and Chief Advisor getting him whatever he wanted and helping him to run England successfully and prosecute anyone who annoyed him such as his ex-mistress, Anne Stafford, but it another Anne who turned the King's bright ginger head and bought about my downfall.
Anne Boleyn had been involved romantically with one of my pages, Henry Lord Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, but i knew the fat monarch was interested in her so i put a stop to the romance by dispatching Percy far away which annoyed Anne enormously so she vowed to see me destroyed but i knew that as long as i was in the King’s favour i was untouchable, even though she tried many times to bring me down.
I also knew despite him being a complete jerk, he had an eye for the ladies and he may have been a man with the stomach for a fight but he showed a woeful lack of self-control in the face of a pretty face and a heaving cleavage so i would have to be smart when Anne Bow-legs-lyn began flirting and making demands of him.
First she said that my home in Hampston Court was far too good for a mere Cardinal and he agreed but left me living there for the moment and then he asked me to arrange a marriage between his daughter Mary and the most powerful man in Europe, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, but that proved tricky to arrange as he was 21 and she was only 6 so he married another princess which the red haired git blamed me for.
My final error was my failure to gain the porky Henry an annulment from the Pope from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boelyn and Henry cast me out of Hampston Court, giving it to Anne Boleyn, charged me with high treason and ordered a trial.
Obviously the head choppy nutjob was going to have me executed but i beat him to it, dying of natural causes in my cell first so up yours fatty, too slow.