Right Wing Broadcasters Lose Out In OfCom Battle

When GBNews launched in 2021 and TalkTV in 2022 launched their services, both aimed their direction of travel towards the right wing of the nation in what they considered to be a British version of Fox News but what they both seemed to overlook was that while Fox News can pretty much make up whatever they want without consequence in the States, in Britain Broadcast News is regulated by OfCom who take a dim view of biased broadcasting and came down heavily on both.
GBNews was such a regular recipient of OfCom fines for being unfair and unbalanced, that they told the staff that they would need to start paying their own fines as the station could not afford it as they had problems enough attracting advertisers and they were losing enough money hand over fist as it was.   
Both services lost staff and toned down the right-wing rhetoric but with GBNews posting losses of £30m and TalkTv £34m and without advertisers willing to pay to be associated with either TV Company that have so few viewers and pushing such publicly toxic views, something had to give and that seems to be both are discussing a merger.
TalkTV is owned by Rupert Murdoch and despite having the weight of global media empire News UK behind it, there are some shows which literally have nobody watching while GBNews have a smilialrly poor footprint but some bigger name presenters so it would seem a sensible solution, especially now that Piers Morgan has thrown his toys out of the pram yet again and left, taking his talk show to YouTube.  
Rumours are if the merger doesn't happen Murdoch will pull the plug on TalkTV and he does have a history of yanking loss making ventures while GBNews owners are 'concerned' that they have failed to attract an audience and the constant visits from OfCom who will be the biggest loser if they go under, their finances must have improved immensely since both station began broadcasting.
Personally, i have never been a supporter of the phrase: 'I may not like what you say but i will defend to the death your right to say it', to my mind i would prefer you didn't say it in the first place and kept your ignorant face shut but this is Britain, not America which has a higher threshold of ignorant, racist
nonsense spouted by TV Presenters and you either ensure you give a balanced view or else OfCom staff have an amazing Christmas Party.

Today Is...International Day of Women and Girls in Science

A panel of experts were asked to vote for the ten women in British history who have had the most influence on science and here are there conclusions.
Caroline Herschel was William Herschel's sister and assistant and discovered eight comets, fourteen nebulae and compiled a catalogue for star clusters and nebulae patches.
Mary Somerville carried out experiments on magnetism and wrote a best selling popularised rendition of Laplace's Mecanique Céleste and Newton's Principia.
Mary Anning was an early British fossil collector and paleontologist and made severaal important finds including the skeleton of the first Ichthyosaur and the first two Plesiosaur skeletons ever found.  
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first Englishwoman to qualify as a doctor when females were unable to gain such a post and in 1866 established a dispensary for women and in 1876 an act was passed permitting women to enter the medical professions.
Kathleen Lonsdale was an early pioneer of X-ray crystallography and the first woman to hold the post of president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. She spent a month in jail for refusing to register for war duties and then refusing to pay a fine of two pounds.
Dorothy Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize for Science in 1964 for her work on penicillin and vitamin B12.
Rosalind Elsie Franklin contributed to the understanding of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 Anne McLaren made fundamental advances in genetics which paved the way for the development of in vitro fertilisation which led to the birth of the first test-tube baby.

Today Is...Lunar New Year

As it's the second new moon after the winter solstice, Xinnián hao or if your Mandarin is a bit rusty, Happy New Year and welcome to the Year of the Dragon according to the Chinese zodiac.
As the animals rotate every 12 years, you are also a Dragon if you were born in 1916, 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000 or 2012 and your lucky numbers are 1, 6, 7 and any numbers containing them both (16, 61 etc) and your lucky days are the 1st and 16th of the month and lucky colours are gold, silver or greyish white.
People born in a year of the Dragon can be regarded as aggressive, angry and not open to criticism and are most compatible with Rats (born 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008) Monkeys (born in 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004) and Roosters (born 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005) but avoid Dogs (born 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006).
According to Chinese astrology, the year of one's birth sign is the most unlucky year in the 12-year cycle but it can be offset by wearing outer clothing, bags, shoes, underwear, and even socks in red or purple which brings luck.
Dragons are thought to be best suited to be leaders of the world with their character traits of courage, intelligence and ambition and fellow Dragons include Charles Darwin, Bruce Lee, John Lennon, Vladimir Putin, Martin Luther King Jr., Che Guevera, Andy Warhol and Rihanna.
Some things that you should not do today on Chinese New Years Day is eat porridge (brings poverty), no sewing or knitting (depletes wealth) don't wash clothes (washed away good luck), no crying (brings bad luck), don't use scissors or knives (cuts wealth), don't borrow or lend money (leads to debt), don't wear plain black or white clothes (unlucky), eat pears (leaving soon) or give anybody four of anything (brings death) and don't visit a hospital (brings illness).
So, Xinnián Kuàilè or Happy New Year and spare a thought for knife salesmen as well as launderette staff.

Commendable But Almost Impossible

Rishi Sunak is having a bit of a week. It started off with everyone booing him when him and Piers Morgan made a £1000 bet live on TV about how many immigrants will be sent to Rwanda and then there was his little aside about transgender people when the mother of murdered transgender, Brianna Ghey, was watching from the House of Commons public gallery and it ended with him turning up to a Dentist to announce his NHS Dental Treatment plan only to be told that that particular dentist he chose didn't do NHS Treatment.
One lady summed it up nicely when asked what she thought of Rishi Sunak, blew her big chance to appear on that evenings News by calling him a 'Total Bellend' which to be fair he is, but unusable at 6pm when small children could be watching.
What trouble with the bruhaha over his Transgender jibe was that it swallowed up the reason why Brianna's mother was in the Commons in the first place, to say that under 16's should legally be banned from accessing social media apps on mobile phones.
If a phone has an internet connection then it can still access the social media websites, kids are much more tech savvy then we give them credit for and they know about VPN's and things which would allow them to circumnavigate any restrictions so that wouldn't work.
I asked one of the IT guy's at work and he shrugged and was more interested in why i had my wet gloves draped over my laptop. Duh, because they're wet obviously.
I asked another one who said that it would be almost impossible to stop youngsters accessing the sites and the age verification currently used is next to useless as as you just need to tick a box to say you are over 16 or enter a date of birth which makes you over 16 so he thinks the only way is to pass the buck to the social media sites to face fines or legal action if they allow under 16's to access their sites or use some sort of Ai so an account is suspended automatically if someone is being a dick on them.
Unfortunately, Mrs Ghey's idea is commendable and understandable considering what happened to her daughter but it seems almost impossible to impose.
Now i have to find the IT guy again because my laptop seems to be playing up, it's as if water may have has got into it or something.

Today Is...National Toothache Day

Whenever we see ancient skulls, you can't help but notice that most still have a good portion of their teeth and you think hang on, did they have dentists back in Ancient times and the answer is not really, but they did have some brilliantly mad ways of stopping toothache which you could try.  
In 19th Century Ireland, they would either spit in a frog’s mouth or if the pain was so bad, they would pop a frog in their mouth to draw out it's healing powers to cure your toothache but if that didn’t work, you could try put a potatoes in your pocket which they thought helped for some reason.
Smearing honey on your aching tooth was a popular form of toothache relief in the middle ages and Ancient Babylonians thought it meant you was possessed and the only cure was sleeping next to a human skull and kissing and licking it seven times in the night to get rid of the evil spirit.
The ancient Romans believed that gargling urine as mouthwash would help keep teeth white and free from decay, although it doesn't say if it should be your own, while the the ancient Egyptians believed in making a paste from crushed up mice to cure toothaches and it was also handily great for earache also although the crushed up spiders was strictly for the teeth and did nothing for any aching ears.
Ancient Greeks gargled with Donkey’s Milk (who even knew there was such a thing as Donkey’s milk?) but the default treatment for a toothache was to just pull the sucker out, but dental implants in bygone days were either bamboo pegs (China), piece of copper (Egypt) or just take the teeth from dead animals and use them.
Trimming you fingernails on Friday would keep that pesky toothache away as would placing a hard-boiled egg anywhere in a teething baby’s room, placing a slice of onion to the ear on the side of the aching tooth or slice a rabbits head open and rubbing the brain juice on the gums.
Thankfully dentistry has made huge advances so the next time a person has both hands and several dental instruments shoved in your mouth while telling you not to move just think, it could be worse. It could be Ancient Rome and the Dentist has just urinated in your mouth.

Today Is...Mary Queen of Scots Executed

The only surviving legitimate child of James V of Scotland, Mary was six days old when her father died and she inherited the throne and at aged 6 she was betrothed to Francis, the Dauphin of France, and was sent to be brought up in France and married Francis aged 16 and ruled as Queen Consort of France until his death in 1560 and Mary returned to Scotland and questions about whether her subjects had a duty to obey her, her being a Catholic and all.
Things got sticky so she abdicated and fled to England in a fishing boat seeking the protection of her cousin, Elizabeth I of England who greeted her by slamming her into various castles dungeons and after 18 years and some forged documents began circulating that decided she was guilty of plotting to assassinate her and take her throne, she demanded she be beheaded for treason.
The executioner asked for forgiveness, Mary replied that she hoped he would put an end to all her troubles and he did but not straight away because the first blow missed her neck and struck the back of her head, the second blow only cut halfway through her neck so it took a third blow of the axe before he could hold her head up and declare her officially dead.
All her belongings were burnt, along with anything which had her blood splattered on it from the execution and in one final Royal up yours, her dying wish that she be buried in France was refused by Elizabeth and she was buried in a Protestant Cathedral in Peterborough.

More Sheer Madness In Gun Loving America

The latest in an extremely long line of gun related WTF reaches our shores from America, this time how the parents of a 15 year old boy who shot and killed four of his classmates and injured six more has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
The boy had been bought the gun by his parents as a gift days before and that is the WTF bit, not the fact that anyone can buy a gun in America, hell the gun laws over there are so whack-a-doodle that you can go in a shop and buy them with your breakfast cereal in some stores, the fact that parents decided not to buy
their son a new PlayStation Game or a bike, but thought that what he would really like was a gun!
Luckily America is thousands of miles away geographically and just as far ideologically when it comes to gun safety and as the gun nuts seem to have the Politicians in their pockets through donations, that isn't about to change but there was an eye opening statement from an American Politician on the News this morning where he said that as much as they would like to really clamp down on the lackluster gun laws: 'No politician would ever be elected if they proposed banning guns'.
In my mind, i generally come down on the side of no as to whether the parents should be facing jail time for their children's behaviour but in this event i think hell yeah, they bought their 15 year old son a gun which he used to murder 4 innocent students with so damn straight they are responsible for what he did with a thing which is designed and built to propel bullets into people at high speed.

Today Is...Safer Internet Day

When it got caught red handed, the American Government said it wasn't spying on the US (and UK) citizens, it's carrying out counter terrorism efforts by collecting and storing virtually every Internet phone call, email, text message, Internet searches, social media communications and virtually all other electronic information. That's okay then.
They argue that the surveillance programs have helped in the fight against terrorism and pointed to a specific plot against New York's subways which ruffled a few feathers at Scotland Yard because they said that it was them who passed on the information to the American Authorities that prevented the subway attack and not Internet snooping.
Obviously there are some words and phrases that if typed into Google will bring you to the attention of the authorities such as Assassination, Dirty Bomb, Militia, Terrorism, Anthrax, Ammonium Nitrate or How To Assassinate a World Leader but there are a host of innocent words that could also see you bundled onto an aeroplane and landing in Cuba wearing a fetching orange jumpsuit.
Luckily the Department of Homeland Security has released a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats.
The more of the 'alert' words the shadowy types find in an email or electronic communication, the further up the list of potential evil-doers you rise but some of the words on the list are seemingly Innocent but hide evil intentions, such as Drill, Authorities, Stuck, Recruitment, Aid, Watch, Blizzard, Salmonella, Cancelled, Agriculture, Exercise, Subway, Recovery, Southwest, Landing, Cloud, Pork, Wave, Electric and Worm and the mention of North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, El Paso, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, China, Colombia, Mexico and San Diego which much play havoc with the San Diego Cloud Authorities email system.
I don't understand why the number 2600 attracts unwanted attention but if you are STUCK in the SUBWAY with a bad case of SALMONELLA from a PORK chop whilst on the way to a RECRUITMENT Day in the SOUTHWEST during a BLIZZARD, you may want to rethink sending that text or email.

Today Is...Library Day

Today marks National Libraries Day, one of the most important institutions that we have and according to the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) 240 million books were borrowed from the 3,450 libraries left in Britain.
The most borrowed authors of last year were James Patterson, Julia Donaldson and Daisy Meadows. Roald Dahl was the most borrowed 'classic author' with Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie making up the top three.
The title that was most checked out by the British public was the 'Personal' by thriller writer Lee Child, 'Never Go Back' also by Lee Child and the crime mystery 'Abattoir Blues' by Peter Robinson.
The most borrowed audio-book was Lesley Pearse's 'Without a Trace' read by Emma Powell.
I seemed to have spent a good portion of last year plowing through the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich, a great accidental discovery about a female bounty hunter who mixes it in a world of supernatural characters and as there are 22 novels, 2015 was certainly a Stephanie Plum year although i also managed to squeeze in a handful of Ben Elton books and re-read 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', a book so far removed from the 'Blade Runner' film it spawned that to say the usual 'loosely based on the novel' isn't loose enough.

Today Is...The Creation Of Synthetic Plastic

You are what you eat and what we are eating is plastic according to a trial at the Medical University of Vienna who found tiny shreds of it in the digestive systems of people from eight different countries including the UK.
Plastics pervade all aspects of society. We sleep on plastic-filled pillows, clean our teeth with plastic toothbrushes, type on plastic keyboards, drink and eat food from plastic containers so it’s impossible to go through a day without encountering plastic of some kind but as we are becoming increasingly aware, our widespread adoption of plastics has not been without consequences to our health and the environment.
Plastic pollutes our landscapes, oceans, air and bodies and it was Belgian Chemist, Leo Baekeland, we have to thank as he pioneered the first fully synthetic plastic today in 1907.
He beat his rival, James Swinburne, to the patent office by one day. His invention, which he called Bakelite, combined two chemicals, formaldehyde and phenol, under heat and pressure and it sparked a consumer boom in affordable products but the chemical properties also made it difficult to dispose of, with some types taking tens of thousands of years to degrade in landfill or worse, where it seeps into our food table.
Theories given for why plastic is being ingested by humans include from plastic eating fish, drinking out of plastic bottles, eating food that’s been wrapped in plastic and tiny plastic particles floating in the air which then land on our food.
The scientists couldn't tell if ingesting plastic is causing any internal damage to our bodies but there is evidence that plastic is absorbed through the stomach and accumulates in the internal organs of animals so probably yep is the answer to that question.
If the knowledge that our food is literally killing us isn't the wake up call that we need to cut out plastic and stop littering the planet with the stuff then we are even more dense then we already think we are.