Special Guest Blogger: Karen Carpenter

I have a reputation of being a very religious person and at five o'clock every morning I would get up and take an ice cold bath to wash away the cobwebs of indolence from my mind, to grow my moral character and enhance my spiritual awareness of the Christian soul but most importantly the bathroom was free for the daily ritual of making a call on the big white telephone.
I always wanted to be a drummer but when i joined the school choir they handed me a glockenspiel and i was like What The Fu.. so they let me have a go at the drum set and that's where it all began, me and Richard set off on a whirlwind of sex and drugs and rock n roll, well no sex, laxatives and romantic ballads anyway.
All those years of not taking drugs and not having sex with Carpenter groupies, i still remember the first time I didn't lose my virginity and how it was not smoking a cigarette afterwards and thinking yeah, nobody has not made love to like that before.
I spent my whole music career forever not leaping into bed and since then I've not had sex with literally thousands of men but there's nothing like your first time of not having sex.
In the mid-1970s Richard developed an addiction to Methaqualone, or mandies, but i had my own problems of a weight of 91 pounds or 6st 7lb.
I was misusing laxatives and was admitted to Hospital and forced fed intravenously which turned out to be what killed me, not the anorexia.
The procedure was too successful and i quickly gained weight in such a short time that it put a strain on my heart, which was already weak from years of not eating a proper diet and i died aged 32.
If i had known i was going to die so young i would have been at it like a jackhammer and sniffing stuff up my nose like a demented hoover, but oh well.

Special Guest Blogger: Captain Cook

After two years of sailing i landed in Australia in a place i named Botany Bay where i stuck a flag in the soil and claimed it for Britain.
What the natives thought as they watched some strange white man babbling away in a foreign language is anyone guess but i can only imagine the excitement back home in Blighty of me claiming a land half a world and two years away and which most travellers would die of scurvy before getting to.
Of course we did find a use for it, we sent our criminals there and look what they did to the place, let the local nursery school name their towns and cities so you can visit Nobby, Bong Bong, Wagga Wagga, Cocklebiddy, Coo Wee Rup, Humpty Doo, Iron Knob, Koolyanobbing, Mount Buggery, Wooloolmooloo or Tittybong. 
It's amazing they did as well as they did considering the clientele and not to mention that every animal i saw in Australia was trying to kill us, jellyfish, octopus and sharks in the sea while on land you have to dodge deadly spiders, crocodiles, dingoes, ants and giant centipedes.
Amazingly i managed to escape there alive and was actually killed during an exploratory voyage in the Pacific while attempting to kidnap the Island of Hawaii's monarch, Kalani'opu'u, because he nicked one of our ships.
Unfortunately i got clobbered over the head with a coconut and disemboweled, boiled to remove my flesh and my bones returned to my crew for a formal burial at sea which apparently is an honour but can't say it felt much like one at the time.
So enjoy your time in Australia, the land that invented a bent stick you can never throw away and try not to get eaten by a wild animal and wear your hat with corks with pride when you visit Cocklebiddy.

Special Guest Blogger: Gerald Ford

I was the only person to have served as both Vice President and president without anybody casting a single vote for me which turned out to be a good thing because we soon discovered that i wasn't very good at either.
My bad luck started with the collapse of South Vietnam nine months into my presidency and presiding over the worst economy since the Great
Depression.
One controversial act was granting a presidential pardon to President Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal which turned everyone
who didn't vote for me against me and Congress began to curb the powers of the President, which to be fair in my case, wasn't a bad thing.
One Senator said that i had played too much football without a helmet in my earlier days and another said i was so dumb that i couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time which was utter nonsense, i never chewed gum.
In my Governmental team i included George H. W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and they would spend hours trying to get me to read the intelligence reports but i didn't like what I was seeing, it didn't have pictures in it.
The three of them would often play practical jokes on me such as hiding my Arse and Elbow labels knowing that i would be useless without them.
When it came to the first time the American public had to vote for me, the writing wasn’t so much on the wall as scrawled across the stratosphere in skywriting as they decided they didn't want me anywhere near the White House and kicked me out after 895 days,  the shortest in U.S. history for any president who did not die in office. 
Annoyingly for them i hung around for years afterwards and when i died aged 93 and 145 days i was the longest-lived U.S. president and they even named a Library after me, i assume they have plenty of Where's Wally and colouring books inside it.

Carter USM - 'Falling On A Bruise

Rather remiss of me that after 4428 posts i have never mentioned the song from which i used as the title of this blog which was taken from the 1991 Carter USM song 'Falling on A Bruise'.
It's a British saying which means despite falling flat on our faces, we keep doing the same stupid thing over and again over again and continually falling on the same bruise that we got last time we did the crazy thing.
When i began this blog in 2007 it was the time just after the debacles of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, Iraq was a murderous hotbed of terrorists thanks to the actions of the West meanwhile in Afghanistan we were fighting against the very people that we had hailed as heroes and thrown support, money and arms at previously.
That we then did the exact same thing in Libya, arming and backing the very people that we had been fighting against in Iraq shows our own damned stupidity and then because it all worked out so well previously, we then did the same in Syria with Islamic State/Al Queada who took the arms we offered and re-invaded Iraq with them.
That's a damn big bruise we kept falling on right there but as well as wars it's the environment. I never joined up with the environmental cause until the late 80s and before then there was plenty of people jumping up and down and shouting about what we were doing to our planet and the consequences if we continued and now it is all coming true and there are still idiots who refuse to believe it and shamefully the biggest idiots are the leaders of the nations who do the most polluting.
Our financial system falls down on a regular basis and when it goes it drags down everyone from the poorest up creating chaos and wrecking lives but nobody is rushing to change it, we just keep patching it up, sending it back out again and hold our breath waiting for the next time it all comes crashing down around our ears.
Nothing is new in this world but we refuse to learn from our mistakes and we keep doing the crazy things again and again in the hope that it will be different this time but it never is, all we get is a fresh new bruise when we fall on it again.
That's why i chose this name, it sums up perfectly just how stupid we can be and have been and will always continue to be as Carter said: 'Some you win and some you lose / I've spent my hole lifetime falling on a bruise / And if I had the chance to do it all again / I'd change everything'.

Special Guest Blogger: King Richard III

I was quite shocked to see that the history Books had me down as a cripple with a hump and a withered arm who killed my nephews after keeping them in the Tower of London.
It was all Tudor propaganda written by William Shakespeare and Thomas Moore so it's time to tell the truth about sweet little me.
When my brother Edward died, his kids were too young to rule so i kindly took the throne on their behalf, i never poisoned my wife or bumped off her daddy, the Tudors painted me as the bad guy, said i drowned my brother in a large vat of wine and imprisoned my young nephews and i never once uttered anything about my kingdom for a horse and my back was perfectly straight, no hump.
I did place my two young nephews in the Tower of London though but that was punishment for getting their sticky fingers all over my crown.
I introduced the bail system although to be honest that was mostly to give myself a get out of jail free card as things were getting out of hand with Henry Tudor, the most boring Henry who even Shakespeare couldn't find anything noteworthy to write about.
It was nice that my skeleton has been found under a Leicester Pub Car Park although the reconstruction they made of my face didn't look anything like me but i won't be the last bloke to have his face reconstructed after leaving a pub car park in Leicester.
What isn't so nice is that my name has become synonymous with Cockney rhyming slang but beggars can't be choosers so thank you for your services Brad Pitt and Douglas Hurd, but 'I'm just going for a Richard the Third" will now be making a long overdue comeback.

Special Guest Blogger: John Wilkes Booth

Before i became known as the worlds most well known assassin, i was a famous actor in my own right starring in several plays but i gave it all up to protest against President Lincoln's abolition of slavery in the United States.
The assassination was part of a wider plot with Vice President Johnson supposed to also become dead but i did my part of the plot and fled on horseback to southern Maryland and, 12 days later, at a farm in rural northern Virginia, was tracked down hiding out in a barn.
In order to smoke me out the authorities set the barn ablaze and as i stumbled out, they shot me in the neck paralysing me and i died a few hours later.
So i am in the history books as being responsible for perhaps the most infamous crime in American history, shooting a popular American President so the question should be why hasn't the current unpopular one been shot yet?
Four years the lardass has been sitting there annoying people so i think there must be a conspiracy not to shoot him especially as he lives and works, well plays golf anyway, in America where you can buy a gun in a supermarket and 40,000 people are gunned down every year so why is he not one of them?
He is surrounded by CIA agents and they all have guns so why hasn't one of those shot the little squirt yet?
Assassins are just not what they were back in my day.

Special Guest Blogger: Jimi Hendrix

In the film 'Full Metal Jacket', there is a character called 'Hand Job' who is killed while waiting for his papers to come through for a medical discharge due to 'jerking off ten times a day' and when he was sent to see the Navy head shrinker, 'he starts jerking off in the waiting room. Instant Section Eight. He was just waiting for his papers to clear division'.
What you probably didn't know was that the character was based on a real life person, me.
Desperate to get out of my military service as i was only in there as part of a deal to avoid jail time for stealing cars, i became the worst soldier imaginable and my discharge papers listed behaviour problems, requiring excessive supervision, had little regard for regulations and was apprehended masturbating in the platoon area while on duty.
Once out, i never knew there was so many fans of feedback noise and 10 minute guitar solo's, and to them i was the greatest guitarist ever.
In 1969 i asked Paul McCartney to join together to form a super group, i also asked Ringo, but only because the band needed someone to carry all the equipment.
I got the blame for introducing the nations youth to drugs and some people suggested that i was off my trolley but of course we all know who's really to blame, the little men who live in my radiator and only come out at tea time.
They say i was so good i could play in my sleep, shame i wasn't so good at throwing up in my sleep while stoned, that would have been much more useful as i went to that giant speaker in the sky as a member of one of the most exclusive clubs, aged just 27.

Special Guest Blogger: Nikola Tesla

I came to America with four pennies, a few poems and a blueprint for a flying machine but in my life i invented the electrical generator, FM radio, remote control, robots, spark plugs, fluorescent lights and the coil which is used in TV and radio transmissions.
I did show a strong commitment to the whole 'mad scientist' thing, i was celibate, afraid of round things and hated human hair, jewellery and anything that wasn't divisible by three. If they isn't nutty enough for you i built a death ray, a portable earthquake generator and  constructed a bath designed to cleanse the human body of germs using nothing but electricity, oh and tower which generated a 130-foot long bolt of lightning which remains the world record for man-made lightning.
As well as dodging hairy humans and cylindrical things, i would only stay in hotel rooms with number you could divide by three and once paid for a stay with the gift of my death ray which the owners eagerly accepted although years after my death they opened it to find a bunch of wires but that's one those the hidden benefits of being a crazy genius, say you've created a death ray and people tend to believe you.
My rival was Thomas Edison who i worked for but after he refused to give me my bonus so i told him to do one and went off on my own and it is my face all the nerdy teenagers are wearing today, not that goons.
While Edison was inventing boring stuff like light bulbs, i invented all the cool stuff and was played by David Bowie in a movie, Benedict Cumberbatch played Edison in his movie so i think i won that one.
After i died, the FBI took away all of my personal stuff from fear of someone else building the machines and actually using them to split the world in half, spoilsports.

Special Guest Blogger: Isaac Newton

It is strange to think that one of the most famous events in human history could have turned out very differently if i had decided to sit on a chair on the patio instead of under an apple tree but when that piece of fruit bounced off my noggin, it set in train a chain of events that would revolutionise our thinking. 
It didn't revolutionise anything in the Church though who held fast to the notion that when it came to the secrets of the Universe, everything in it had its natural God-given place.
I set out calculations to prove Gravity, reliably predicting when comets would appear by working out the exact speed and acceleration of an object in space and just for kicks, using the Book of Ezekiel, worked out the date of the second coming which i predicted would be in 1948 but also worked out that because the number of people who believed in Jesus was diminishing, he'd have to come back before the year 3150 as by then there would only be one person left who still believed in him at all.
A lot of people were not knocked over by my theory of gravity, invisible forces pulling the planets was apparently more nutty than a man in the clouds nobody had ever seen making the Universe in 6 days but to stray from that theory was apparently messing with God's will as it was God who was mysteriously moving things around.
My greatest feat was scoring an enormous victory over the Church but my regret was not going up to the Pope and shouting in his face 'My proof is accurate predictions of comets, orbits and planets whereas yours is the odd appearance of Jesus on a piece of toast', sucker.

Special Guest Blogger: Queen Elizabeth I

As the daughter of Henry VIII i was never going to be a wallflower and i was lucky enough to have ruled during the time of Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake and William Shakespeare and when the Spanish got all uppity, well, you may have heard of the Spanish Armada or as we called it afterwards, floating firewood.
I also had a few sibling problems with my sister, Mary, who planned to murder me and take the throne for herself but i ensured that she didn't have the last laugh by making sure she didn't have an head, odd bodkins the executioners axe soon settled that dispute.
I was famously called the virgin queen but as a lady i could never kiss and tell despite the courts of Europe being abuzz with gossip about my relationship with Robert Dudley, just as i was too much of lady to possibly comment on how exactly his wife, Amy Robsart, ended up with her neck broken at the bottom of a staircase.
I did die unmarried and there are relatively few portraits of me and the ones that there are, all look kinda similar and perfectly captured my regal beauty such as my petite nose and not my actual hideously crooked hooter, perfect white teeth and not the real rotten tombstones in my mouth and my porcelain smooth white face and no sign of my actual pockmarked skin.
The truth is that when i ordered portraits i ordered the artists to do an exact copy of the only portrait i ever liked and as i was a bit head choppy in my time, that's exactly what i got.
Say what you like about us Tudors but nobody can ever say we were boring, psychopaths and nutters yes, but never boring.