Special Guest Blogger: Black Bart

I do find myself wondering whatever happened to all the real men? The gunslingers and swordsmen who charged into adventure and then i remember that it turned out they usually ended up dead soon after charging into adventure and the life of a pirate was no different although i never set out to be a Pirate.
I had a respectable job transporting slaves from Africa to the Caribbean when the ship i was on was captured by pirates and when the pirates asked the crew if we wanted to join them, i looked at my measly salary and long hours and coupled with the threatening gang of pirates asking me while waving a cutlass in my face, i figured, why the hell not.
It turned out as i was Welsh and spoke Welsh, and the Pirate Captain was also a Welsh speaker, we got on really well and i became the pirate captain's trusted confidant and when the captain was killed, i was elected as the crew's new leader.
As i wasn't a Pirate at heart, i ran my Pirating business a little bit differently to the rest of the salty sea dogs and would sometimes give gifts to cooperative captains and crews of captured ships and i would do a thing were i would ask the captured crew whether or not they were well treated and if they said no, i would slice up the commanding officers much to the cheers of those they mistreated.
The life of a pirate was not all teddy bears and rainbows though, their was a lot of wallowing in filth and near-starvation as we were restricted to eating the kind of stuff that can sit in a barrel for months without rotting into slime such as dry biscuits which added crunchiness from the weevils which did nothing to keep away the scurvy which caused explosive diarrhea unless your pirate buddies rushed you to get medical care (which they didn't), and 90 men with dodgy bellies enclosed on a ship for months on end is a bit smelly.
My death came about after i chased what i thought was a merchant ship which turned out to be a Royal Navy ship armed to the gunnels with cannons and guns and one shot to the throat later, i was last seen wrapped in a sail by my crew who stopped crapping over the side long enough to throw my dead body overboard.

Do Something Now Boris

During this Coronavirus pandemic, you may have heard the odd mention from odd people that the virus currently running roughshod over our lungs is no more dangerous than flu.
The Office of National Statistics has now gone and peed all over those persons campfires by releasing figures for the first 8 months of this year which show that Coronavirus caused three times more deaths than pneumonia and flu combined with 48,168 deaths due to COVID-19, 13,619 due to pneumonia and 394 deaths due to influenza in England and Wales.
Out of all deaths during this period, COVID-19 accounted for 12.4%, whereas 0.1% were due to flu and 3.5% caused by pneumonia.
The data focuses on cases where people died due to Coronavirus, if they included the deaths where COVID-19 was an underlying cause or contributing factor, the figure rises to 52,327 deaths.
The words 'Herd Immunity' are rearing their ugly heads again recently especially as the calls are growing for a stronger lock-down because of the 17,540 new cases announced today with 77 more deaths amidst warnings that the NHS is 10 days away from being overwhelmed.
The Government are being urged by scientists and medical advisors that tougher local lock-down measures are needed now to bring the epidemic back under control because the current efforts to control the second wave are failing, Boris needs to get back infront of his Downing Street podium and announce a national lock-down soon because the longer he leaves it, the more the numbers go up, the worse it will be and more needless deaths on his hands.
It was how we paused it last time and no tinkering around the edges of the confusing and next to useless rules set out at present, shut it all down and save lives, saving the economy can wait.

Special Guest Blogger: Alfred Hitchcock

Straight off the bat i want to stomp on this reputation that i seem to have got for being a misogynist. To me, men and women are all the same, we're all equal and a woman can do anything that a man can do! They can have adam's apples if they want or shop uncontrollably and if a man bled for 7 days he would die and so what if they can't drive a car for more than thirty minutes without hitting something, it's okay, we are equal.
So with that in mind, my stormy relationships with the actresses in my movies was nothing to do with me being sexist, it was because they turned me down usually because five nominations for Academy Awards and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is not enough for some people.
Plenty of my movies had young, attractive blondes getting slashed, tortured or harassed, one of which was 'The Birds' with Tippi Hedren in the lead role who took my paying staff to follow her on her time off and sexually propositioning her completely the wrong way and demanded she be released from her contract with me so i would throw live birds at her during filming so all those scenes of her losing it in The Birds, she really is that scared and for good measure i made sure she never worked again by keeping her under contract for as long as her contract lasted with me by not casting her in any of my movies.
One of my most famous films was about a creepy motel owner stabbing his guests at the behest of his dead mother which upset Walt Disney so much that i was banned from filming anything within Disneyland but by then i had moved onto making the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents but as i could no longer insert myself into my own films, thereby turning all my movies into a rollicking game of Where's Alfred Hitchcock, i did a monologue at the start instead with a silhouette which did my double chin no favours but i hated to deny my public and to show all those leading ladies what they missed out on.
I became an American citizen before i died and i was last seen being tipped my ashes from an urn and scattering them across the Ocean which no doubt upset the women because it must have made a right mess and they couldn't get the vacuum out.

Special Guest Blogger: Genghis Khan

Geneticists discovered that 16 million men in central Asia had nearly identical Y-chromosomes, meaning they had the same male ancestor about 800 years ago. And who was running all over central Asia killing off other men and having all the sex at about that time?
That would be me but I always like to relax after a hard day at work. And I liked to relax hard by laying waste to every village in my path and killing the men, grabbing the women and generally doing everything that comes filed under the rape and pillage heading and then get really, really drunk. So drunk that i couldn't always tell my sister from my wife which can make the breakfast table the next morning a bit uncomfortable but it was fun, not as much fun as killing Persians though.
In the early 1200s, i started conquering places and it turned out that i was really good at it and soon the Mongol empire stretched from Korea to Eastern Europe and the secret was even though we conquered entire civilizations with brute force and i would introduce myself by impaled people by way of saying hiya, i realized that to stay the ruler of a mighty empire, you have to keep the people happy and marching into a country and killing some and forcing those left to convert to some weird new religion isn't the best way to maintain power when your subjects outnumber you by the millions so i said they could keep the weirdo cult they believed in, they just had to surrender, pay me some tax and you and you won't have to watch your town burn to the ground, your fields salted and then be brutally murdered.
We did have a rule that no noble blood could be spilt on the ground, but we also really liked killing so to get around this, we came up with some loopholes such as bending backs until they snapped, pouring molten silver into their orifices and roll the victim up in a rug and trampling then him with a horse. Clean and no bloody stains on our tunics to clean up afterwards!
Altogether we killed over 40 million people (90,000 in India from which we made a pyramid of their skulls and very pretty it was to) but it was the Persians who copped it mostly and all because as a sign of good will when we decapitated our way through Asia like a mustachioed lawn mower and turned up on their doorstep, i sent a group of messengers to ask them if they wanted to open up a trade route with us and they replied by killing all but one Mongol merchant who they allowed to live so he could come back and say that the Persians had gratefully declined my offer.
After giving it some thought i decided that a reasonable, measured response was to kill as many of them as possible, so we reduced many Persians to mounds of skeletons, 90% of the population of Persia, that it didn’t return to pre-Mongol numbers until the 1900s, nearly 700 years later.
I died falling off my horse like a numpty but my burial plot remains a mystery as i had those i trusted divert a river over my final resting place, ensuring no one would disturb my eternal slumber so i am literally sleeping with the fishes.

Special Guest Blogger: Voltaire

Nothing makes us feel smart like repeating something an actual smart person once said, why would you bother coming up with your own witty retort, when you have an off-the peg one which you read once, something someone said way back in the day.
I, Voltaire, was one of the 18th century's most celebrated intellectuals, providing irreverent and comedic commentary on the philosophy and politics of the day but most people will be familiar with the quote: 'I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'
Is a neat thing to say and would be neater if i had actually said it but it was by someone many, many years later who said it was something which sounded like a thing i would say, but i never, but despite that it's an accurate description of my whole philosophy anyway, i was big on the freedom of speech but mainly because it meant i could say what i wanted about people and then justify it under the absolute freedom from censorship which was essential for the intellectual growth of society by being a dick about it but i was full of hypocrisies.
Rousseau and i had our differences and i made an exception for the freedom of speech for Rousseau's books and decided censorship might be justifiable after all by lobbying the government to have his book burned and Rousseau punished to the full extent of the law for having written it.
Fueled by the 60 cups of coffee i drank each day, i also called out the religious fruitcakes for their beliefs, saying that 'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him' but it was that along with promoting such ideas as reason, liberty, progress, tolerance, protest and separation of church and state that saw me face an ultimatum of either being sent to prison or be exiled to England presumably because the officials figured that sending a Frenchman to live in England would be a far worse punishment than any prison sentence they could offer.
I packed up my boxes of coffee, my fortune i won from the Paris lottery (idiots made the cost of all the tickets less than the winnings so i bought every ticket possible) and landed in London which i said was far better than France and my French countrymen burnt my books in disgust.
I passed away at the ripe old age of 83 while visiting France and i was on my death bed when i managed to come up with one more witty quip.
The Catholic priests were hoping to hear me give my confession and be reconciled with the Church before my death but when they asked me to asked to renounce the Devil, i said 'Now is not the time to make enemies' and then promptly died.

Special Guest Blogger: Neil Armstrong

On 20 July 1969, an estimated 650 million people watched the live global broadcast of me stepping out of the Apollo 11 capsule onto the Moon and saying that it was a small step for man, i actually said for a man but the 'a' bit gets forgotten much like Michael Collins who tends to be the forgotten astronaut of us famous trio, a bit like that one out of Destiny’s Child who isn't Beyonce or Kelly Rowland.
It was going to be Buzz who stepped out first but the people at NASA thought that big-headed Buzz's ego would explode so they made up an excuse that i would have to be first because the exit door was on my side and opened inward so it would be impossible for Aldrin to get out first.
After two and a half hours of bouncing around like kids at a birthday party on the moon surface, we returned to a hero's welcome and three weeks in quarantine to make sure we didn’t pick up any alien diseases, i celebrated my 39th Birthday in quarantine but then we were out to a world tour that consisted of 25 countries in 38 days, and we met with important figures like the Queen of England, the Pope, and the Emperor of Japan and 17 other countries that honored me with several awards and medals.
Buzz loved the limelight but i retired from NASA and went to teach engineering at the University of Cincinnati and moved back to Ohio and purchased a 200-acre dairy farm.
Such was my aversion to the limelight, that on my death there were talks of holdImg a state funeral for me but my family said i would hate that and i was cremated and my ashes spread in the Pacific.
Some rumours i must nail is that the moon wasn't hollow or made of cheese, i never converted to Islam and the space-pen story is bull. The reason NASA didn't like using pencils in space was because pencils in space are dangerous. If the tip breaks off in a zero-gravity environment, surrounded by sensitive instruments that are the only thing protecting you from a horrible vacuum of space death, those little pencil bits suddenly become a big problem.
Shamefully they didn't go on to do anything useful with the one small step that i took like building a city on the moon or using it as a launchpad to Mars but at some point Aliens will come visiting us and they will probably pass by the moon and there they will see the now the six former large stars and stripes we planted not billowing in the lunar breeze and which are by now large white flags which will either reassure intergalactic travelers that us humans are a lovely bunch of pacifists but if they are coming armed with intergalactic lasers to take over our planet and enslave us all then it isn't really the signal we want to send out before they arrive.

You can Trust Him, He's Trump's Doctor

Such are things related to Donald Trump that even his doctors can't be trusted to to give out correct information, the Doctor treating the President admitting that he refused to admit the president had been given oxygen at the White House on Friday as he was 'trying to reflect the upbeat attitude of the team but in doing so, [it] came off like we were trying to hide something, which wasn't necessarily true' although it was necessarily true as they were trying to hide that Trump had been given oxygen.
The Saturday press conference also revealed that he was improving and already talking about returning to the White House until minutes later his chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that his vital signs had been 'very concerning'.
As the bleach injection remedy seems to have been passed over, several Health Experts are querying, if he is improving as stated, why is Trump now also receiving dexamethasone which the World Health Organisation guidelines make very clear is to be used 'only in patients with severe and critical COVID19' and underli9nes that by stating that it 'is not to be used in patients with non-severe COVID19'.
No wonder there is a great deal of skepticism about his condition but Trump himself has said in a tweet that he is 'starting to feel good' and is 'looking forward to finishing up the campaign the way it was started' which as i recall was him standing on a stage and shouting into the face of a 78 year old man and making fun of him for wearing a mask.
The administration has gone down the route of authoritarian regimes with the video released of him beavering away in the ward signing bits of paper which would have looked even better if the paper he was signing wasn't blank but they probably didn't expect anyone to zoom in and see what he was actually signing.
Then there is the 72 hours into the diagnosis, oops i meant 48 hours mistake by the Doctor so all in all, anything said should be taken with quite a few pinches of salt if not the whole damn barrel.
It is exactly the same as what happened in the UK with Boris Johnson where we were told he had a mild version of the disease and was working away in hospital when actually he was on ICU ward attached to a ventilator fighting for his life.
It is hard to have sympathy with a man who has downplayed the pandemic while it ravaged his country, mocked people who wore masks and has overseen the highest Coronavirus death toll in any country and judging by the reaction from most people, he isn't getting any but we have to remember that the President Trump is in several high risk categories as he is 74 so elderly, a BMI over 30 so he is obese, his £750 tax bill shows he is a low income earner and he is a person of colour, bright orange.

Special Guest Blogger: Adam Smith

While Karl Marx is thought of as the father of Communism, his counterpart would be me and my 'Wealth of Nations' book that decreed that the motivating force of economic growth assigning each worker a specific task to maximize efficiency even if doing the same thing over and over on a production line gets snooze-a-rama but the motivating force is selfishness.
My analogy was that: 'It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest' which means that the Butcher is not selling you meat because he enjoys or wants to sell you meat, he is only doing it to make money and this desire to make money benefited everyone as he spent this money hiring people and buying other things from people selling items and the money went around and everyone got a slice.
While Marx's slogan was that Communism would produce enough goods and services so that everyone's needs can be satisfied, mine was that being selfish and greedy is the key to satisfying everyone but i did underestimate the pathetic self-regulating powers of mankind when it came to selfishness.
My assumption that as the butchers, brewers and bakers fortunes rested with the fortunes of others, it would act as a brake on just how selfish we would be was wildly wrong.
I also mentioned 'the invisible hand', an idea that even if corporations act like greedy dickholes, the market will always deal with them by itself without the Government butting in to regulate corporations, or tax the rich, or bother with commie bullcrap like welfare, so just sit back, and let the invisible hand sort it all out therefore proving Capitalism is just the best, you guys.
I wasn't big on taxing the rich, when you’re successful, nobody wants to be bothered especially not by the poor who never really understood that in my system we need poor people. The rich are the yin, they are the yang and it’s okay to be poor and instead of complaining about being poor, enjoy it!  Watch TV!  Don’t vote!  Eat stuff you find at the side of the road for free. Who cares?
Without doubt my Capitalism filling the bank accounts of the top end while it empties those at the bottom trumps Marx's Communism with its sharing things out fairly for everyone and as the people at the top of Government are very rich people, it's all fine and Capitalism works for everyone as long as you don't get sick, grow old, be poor or underprivileged, lose your job or expect to eat decent food.

Special Guest Blogger: Tupac Shakur

A lot of people say gangster rap is misogynistic posturing by fake-ass idiots who spend more time in drama school then they ever did pimping or hustling dope. Well I assure you, i was the real thing. So what if i did spend time in drama school, enrolling in Harlem’s 127th Street Repertory Ensemble at 12 and performing in several Shakespeare plays while attending the Baltimore School for the Arts and taking poetry classes but that all just made me the awesome ghetto poet i became.
My lyrics were about my coming from the streets, y'know, gettin' hammered, singing about setting things on fire, shooting up funerals, striking poses, smoking a lid and all that but in my music i drew upon difficulties i had seen with his own eyes such poverty, drug addiction, violence, and gang culture and prison and all that was just in my own family.
I did do time for sexual assault and i beat on innocent people just for kicks, but i rhymed like an angel and i walked the walk and told a cautionary tale about the tough life on the streets, ya' hear me, playa'?
I come from a long line of radicals, both of my parents were active members of the Black Panther party during the 1960s and 1970s, my mother charged with more than 150 counts of conspiracy against the United States government, my step-father was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list and my godfather was a high-ranking member of the Black Panthers who spent 27 years in prison for murder.
So i was streets man, i was gangsta, a warrior poet and i was taking rap in a whole new direction but a week in September in 1996 was when it all changed, i released a diss track 'Hit ‘Em Up' in which i rapped trash talk about Bad Boy Records, Puff Daddy, and Notorious B.I.G., claiming to have slept with his wife.
Then i got into a brawl with members of the Crips while at a Mike Tyson fight and after driving away i stopped at a traffic light when another car pulled up carrying a busta' who shot me in the chest so you can forget all those sightings of me after faking my own death , i had enough bullet holes in me to prove i was stone cold dead.
Whether it was the Crips from earlier that night or Biggie, nobody knows but it was me in the crematorium and my ashes in that lid that my crew smoked later to honour my memory. Peace and chicken grease, i'm out.

Trump A Victim Of His Own Inadequate Actions

Karma and schadenfreude are just two words i have heard often today on the news that Donald Trump and his wife have tested positive for Coronavirus.
There was also talks of chickens coming home to roost and what goes around comes around and jokes about White House doctors running around with bottles and syringes full of bleach but we have to bear in mind that this is a person who could potentially be very, very ill or worse.
I agree with all the comments that Trump is an abhorrent and awful person but on a purely human level, i have seen people with Coronavirus in hospital on respirators hooked to machines and it isn't pleasant and i wouldn't want to see anyone going through that, even repugnant imbeciles like Trump.  
It is ironic though that the three leaders who did the most to dismiss the disease, Boris Johnson, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro and now Donald Trump have all gone down with the disease that has killed over a million people worldwide with 410,000 of those 1 million coming in their three countries alone.
Apart from the newsroom meetings this morning on how to mention his weight (do we call him obese, clinically obese, morbidly obese or just overweight) there has been some conspiracy theories springing up as usual.
Some include that he isn't really ill and this is just a way to silence him to stop him further wrecking his chances after the debacle in the first debate and there is the one where he has seen the polling numbers and knowing he is in for a massive fall, will use this to withdraw and stand down before the election rather than lose it heavily and i have also heard it pondered that it is to try and gain a few sympathy votes or even that it is a ruse to get the election postponed.
All very doubtful, his ego wouldn't allow him to pretend to go down from the very thing that he has spent the last six months trying to dismiss as not that important so i hope him and his wife gets better soon but he shouldn't be expecting too much sympathy from many people, especially those families of the 204,000 American's who have been victims of Trumps own woefully inadequate and harmful actions on the disease, inadequate actions which he himself and his wife are now a victim of.