Special Guest Blogger: Huddie 'Lead Belly' Ledbetter

Generally most celebrities go criminally insane with fame and fortune but sometimes celebrities start out as hardened criminals, and then spin their crimes into stardom which is the way i went about it.
The first time i was imprisoned it was for carrying a pistol and i sentenced to 30 days on the Harrison County chain gang but i waited until the guard wasn't looking and simply ran away and found work in nearby Bowie County under the assumed name of Walter Boyd.
That went well for about a year until i killed one of my relatives in a fight over a woman and got sentenced to seven to 35 years but it was during this second spell surrounded by people who could easily fold me in half, that i earned my Lead Belly nickname due to the scars on my belly from when i was wounded in the stomach with buckshot and i began writing music on my guitar.
The Governor let me put on shows for the guards and other prisoners which went down really well. Another inmate stabbed me in the neck after one show but hey, there will always be critics but it was the song i wrote for the Governor himself that impressed him and it was a pretty good song and it worked and he released me, explaining that on my current trajectory my future looked as stony as a biblical execution but i had the talent to turn my life around and earn a decent living as a proper musician.
I was a hit and the press called me the singing convict who was so good that i sung my way out of prison and i traveled around the South with my 12 string guitar and even cut some albums with some traditional songs and original songs including Black Betty, Cotton Fields, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? and Ain’t It A Shame.
Things looked good until i got into a knife fight with group of white dudes and wound up back in the slammer for six to 10 years for attempted murder.
I figured that if something ain't broke, don't fix it, so i wrote another song for the Governor asking for my release and he goddamn did, who would have thought that my music could override the legal system so on my release i picked up my career and played in nightclubs and was part of the New York folk music scene and had my own radio show and went to Califonia to record for Capitol Records and i even achieved success in Europe.
I was in France when i fell ill and got diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease and i died a few months later but i did provide hits for Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nirvana, The Animals, Aerosmith, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Meat Loaf, Bryan Ferry and Ram Jam but my advice for anyone, based on my life experiences are if someone comes at you and you feel yourself getting angry, take a deep breath and count out loud to 10. Then throw a punch at 8 as they won't be expecting that.

Special Guest Blogger: Saint Catherine of Siena

People today may wonder with no TV or internet, what people did for fun back in 14th Century, well my twin sister and i was children number 23 and 24 for my parents so that's that question answered.  
Parents had to have many children because the at that time the Black Death had strolled up and kicked Europe right in the teeth with its pestilence boot, my twin barely made it a week and by the time i reached my teenage years, there was only 12 of us 24 children left to share birthday cake with.    
From a very young age, i had visions of Jesus, which eventually developed into what i called a mystical marriage but each wedding needs a wedding ring and mine was an invisible ring of Jesus's foreskin.
In adulthood, i worked my foreskin-clad fingers to the bone bettering the lives of the sick and the poor but if you think wearing a foreskin wedding ring is as gross as it gets, you had better stop reading now because it gets much, much worse.
I was big on fasting and i did it so much that my body began rejecting food and by the time i was 25 i could no longer bear food all and eating anything caused me intense stomach pain and vomiting blood.
Doctors came to see me but this was the period of doctors trying to cure everything with leeches. A leech on my stomach for stomach ache, a leech on my forehead for headache, a leech on my bottom for constipation which wasn't that great if you forgot about it and sat down and squashed it.
I did keep down the pus i drank which was oozing from the body of a dying woman i was nursing but pus isn't a balanced diet and by the age of 33 i was dead but my story doesn't end there.
They buried me and then decided it would be better to honor me by moving my mortal remains to a more fitting burial site but when they dug me up my head popped clean off along with other parts of my body.
The Church decided that it would be a waste of good rotting body parts so repaid my devoutness and selflessness by naming me the patron saint of illness and mounted my head and a thumb in a cuckoo clock and sent three fingers and a foot to Venice, a hand and a shoulder blade to Rome and one of my ribs to Florence.
I tend to think the world is a bit of a miserable place, so anyone who can add a bit of cheer is doing a good job, which is what i hope I'm doing on the chime of the hour, every hour, 24 times a day.

Special Guest Blogger: Ray Charles

Record companies would have us believe that the money made by CD pirates goes to fund the drug industry but the money music stars make from legal sales end up in exactly the same place and drugs was one of my many addictions, along with booze and women.
Glaucoma took my eyesight in childhood but i learnt to play the piano and thought i could make a career in music but it was when my mum died when i was 15 that i decided that i should go for it because life is short and it could end anytime.
I dicked around some of the Southern states before deciding the North was where it was and headed to New York and that was when i met up with the booze, the women and the drugs.
A blind piano player was quite a thing and i got a recording contract and despite a couple of arrests for drug possession, i had a hit with 'Georgia On My Mind' which gave me some money which gave me access to even more drugs, booze and women.  
A third arrest for heroin possession bought my career to a stop and i agreed to go to rehab to avoid jail time and eventually kicked my heroin habit at a clinic but replaced it with even more booze and women.
I tell you i was racking up quite a trail of pregnant women, 12 that i knew of but lost count somewhere along the way, on father's day, i was scared to go to my mailbox but the booze and women continued but my career slowed down in the 70s when the record companies moved towards the Rock and Metal genres and people like me got left behind but not so much my complete inability to keep it in my pants and i didn't let it sour me on the joys of hooking up with the ladies again. And again, and again.
I did kick my heroin addiction, only to immediately replace it with a different one (besides women and baby-making). I started drinking massive quantities of liquor for breakfast, with a side of marijuana for dinner every day and people think that there’s no good way to die have obviously never heard the phrase ‘Heart Attack during a Drug-fuelled sex marathon’ but unfortunately for me i was eventually diagnosed with alcoholic liver disease and my liver self-destructed taking the rest of me with it.

Special Guest Blogger: Moondyne Joe

Considering what the Aussies started with through sheer hard work, sweat, toil and tears they built a great country and then ruined it by letting a bunch of nursery school kids name the towns and cities so they ended up with Nobby, Bong Bong, Wagga Wagga, Cocklebiddy, Coo Wee Rup, Humpty Doo, Iron Knob, Koolyanobbing, Mount Buggery, Wooloolmooloo and Tittybong.     
I was born in Cornwall in the UK but i got arrested for stealing food from a neighbours house and was expecting a few months in the pokey but at my trial i thought it would be a laugh to make fun of the judge and to be fair he was smiling when he sentenced me to be deported to the prison colony in Australia because that's what the Brits did back then.  
Once there i was issued a ticket of leave which entitled me to all the wonderful freedoms Australia had to offer including getting horribly mauled by almost every fish, insect and mammal living there and i was a good little deported convict for a few years until i got caught stealing a horse and subsequently locked up in a ramshackle hut and i just walked out and re-stole the very same horse plus the magistrate's saddle.
I was recaptured two days later and sentenced to three years in a place with better security and on my release i killed an ox and got another sentence and escaped three times until the Governor constructed an escape proof cell and only let me out an hour a day to break rocks.
The guards were tasked with removing the broken rocks at the end of each day, but as the guards got lazier, my rock pile got bigger and got so big that it neatly disguised the big-ass hole i knocked through the prison wall and used to let myself out.
Two years later i got nabbed robbing a winery and the judge at the trial said i was beyond a criminal and must be insane so they locked me up in a lunatic asylum which i obviously escaped from four times before i died of dementia but i led an eventful life and got to travel so remember that life is for living and then you die and they throw dirt in your face and then the worms eat you and as long as it happens in that order then be grateful because you haven't done bad.

Special Guest Blogger: Dennis Wilson

For a band who made a career out of singing about how rad and cool Surfing was, out of the five of us i was the only one who knew the correct end of a surfboard and could actually surf and it was my idea that surfing should be our thing after going to the beach and seeing lots of the kids taking up surfing and i persuaded the band it was going to be huge so we should sing about it, and maybe call it surfin' to be be a bit more cool, and boy did we milk that with Surfin', Surfin' Safari, Surfin' USA, Catch A Wave, Surfer Girl, Noble Surfer, The Surfer Moon, Surfers Rule, South Bay Surfer and Surf's Up before branching out into songs about the beach, girls, fast cars and then a few more about surfin'.
The band was me, my two brothers, my cousin and a friend and i was the drummer but i wasn't great and a few times they had to get a proper drummer in to dub over my weak offerings.
We were the kings of riding the wild waves and impressing those California girls with our surf moves although we did get into hot water with Surfin' USA as we lifted the tune directly from a Chuck Berry song, denied it and he sued us but Chuck wasn't about to horribly murder us for it unlike the next guy whose song we nicked.
That began with a couple of female hitch-hikers i picked up and bought home who turned out to be members of the Manson Family who invited themselves over, including the head of the family Charles who i got on well with and he played me some of his songs which i liked, so much actually that i took one tune, called 'Cease to Exist' and decided to change the name to 'Never Learn to Love', rewrite a few lines and claim the full credit.
To show his appreciation, Manson threatened to murder me and showed me the bullet he was going to use to do it and that sort of thing puts a strain on a friendship and i skipped town until Manson and his goons were good and locked up for murdering someone else.
I drowned while drunk and high but the seeds for that were sown three years earlier when during a bitter divorce, i threw my ex-wifes belongings into the sea at the Marina Del Ray and i was at the same Marina three years later, felt bad about it and after an afternoon of knocking back tequila, decided to hire a boat and to see if i could dive in and salvage them.
Turns out drinking lots of alcohol and swimming goes together about as well as drinking lots of alcohol and swimming and i drowned but i was proud of what i achieved, it was my idea to give the World the Californian sound and despite the whole Charles Mason thing the guys said that of all of us i was always the real brick of the group, and that's not too bad, sturdy, reliable...my mistake, that first letter is a P. The b*stards.

Calling The Armenian Genocide What Was

The Oxford English Dictionary definition for Genocide is 'the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group' while Article Two of the UN Convention on Genocide of December 1948 describes genocide as 'carrying out acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group'.
With the definition pretty clear, it would be hard to say that the deliberate killing of 1.5 million nationals does not fit the description of genocide as above so it has always been a hard sell for the Turks to get uppity when is it said that what they did to the Armenians in 1915-16 was not genocide.
Turkey does not dispute that many Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks deported them en masse from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert where they either were killed or died from starvation or disease but they have responded angrily to the American President, Joe Biden, issuing a statement formally describing the massacre of Armenians as a genocide.
The Turkish foreign ministry has replied that Turkey 'reject and denounce in the strongest terms the statement made under the pressure of radical Armenian circles and anti-Turkey groups' which begs the question of if it wasn't genocide, what would their act of deliberate killing a large number of people from a particular nation?
The Thesaurus offers up holocaust, mass murder, massacre, slaughter, annihilation, decimation, ethnic cleansing, mass execution or race extermination which are just other ways of saying the same thing so if it looks like genocide, smells like genocide and fits the Dictionary description perfectly, they genocide it is and you don't have to be a radical Armenian or a member of an anti-Turkey group to see that.

Boris's Dead Cat Bounces Back

Boris Johnson failed as Foreign Secretary, was a mediocre Major of London and has been pathetic as Prime Minister but because he has the reputation of being a bit of a clown with his tousled hair and bumbling manner, his many indiscretions are excused as 'That's just Boris being Boris' but finally the punchline may be about to be delivered to this political joke and amusingly it could well be delivered by the man he spent so much political capital trying to protect.
Seemingly made for the same Teflon that once covered Tony Blair, nothing seemed to stick to Boris, the many, many lies, the racism, the affairs, the awful Coronavirus response and the casual view of fatherhood just slid off the Prime Minister but possibly the man who always showed a woeful lack of self-control in the sight of a female body is going to be undone by the same lack of self-control in the face of his bank balance.
The story began with leaks regarding how the Government Ministers were not only feathering their own nest with public Coronavirus Relief money but feathering the nests of their friends and families also and then came the leak that Boris was 'fixing' the Tax System for a certain Tory donor and also requesting other Tory donors pay for the refurbishments to his Downing Street Home.
As the furor grew someone in Number 10 decided that the dead cat strategy would work and decided that the dead cat should be the inventor of the Barnard Castle eye-test himself Dominic Cummings who they perceived was so unpopular in the UK that nobody would believe any leaks that came from him but boy did they pick the wrong guy.
Not one to just take the heat quietly, Dom has not only hit back with a tirade of just how hopeless Boris is but has offered up proof of his incompetency and then gone further and is keen to spill the beans on other scandals that went on, and continue to go on, in Boris's Government such as planning to break the law and interfere with independent inquiries to protect the friend of his girlfriend, Carrie Symonds.
Last seen disappearing from Number 10 holding a cardboard box five months ago, Boris Johnson did not need to pick this fight with his former adviser especially as Cummings has now said he wants to appear again before MPs next month to tell all, an offer the non-Blue MP's in Parliament have accepted with relish.
The British public are surprisingly acceptant of much from the MP's but a sense of unfairness in slanting the playing field in favour of those already with more than most is a line that must not be crossed and as Boris has not only crossed it but leapt fully over it, he must be regretting his decision over who he tried to throw to the wolves to detract from the topic of Tory sleaze because the Pandora box Dominic Cummings has thrown open could prove to be hopefully, much more damaging.

You Spell Tomato, I Spell Tomatoe

It almost took off in America and the Australians almost have a basic grasp of it but the English language has always been a movable feast and has been evolving ever since the first person on our little island off the coast of mainland Europe looked at the letters of an alphabet and decided what order they would go in for the name of things over here.
It has been called the hardest language to learn for non-English speakers due to the nuances of the language which allows sentences like 'High Karen, eye wood like two start bye saying that eye am knot shore ewe red my male..' to be completely wrong but still completely readable as is Aonethr qiruk taht as lnog as the fsirt and lsat lterets are in pacle, the snetecne is still readable although your spell check may explode.
Outside of official documents or projects where perfect English is required, I have never been much of a spelling nazi, to me what someone is trying to say is always more important than how they say it which is a view that may be frowned upon by English Language Teachers but then English Language Teachers are a bit pompous about that sort of thing anyway.
The Education Secretary has been bemoaning the drop in English spelling standards and is blaming mobile phones and computers and i find myself in the strange position of agreeing with a Conservative Minister because during my 17 years in Education, i noticed that as bright as some of the students were, their spelling often sucked.
Quite why Americans, Gawd bless 'em, decided to mangle the English language and drop vowels (vowels for crying out loud) and stick the letter Z in words where the letter S was perfectly acceptable i can't explain but as for the the poor spelling i pin the blame squarely on spellcheck which either automatically corrects the wrong word or just underlines it with a red squiggle which a swift click rectifies for the sender.
Possibly we are seeing evolution of the English language in action, there are already a few words where alternative spelling are acceptable such as acknowledgment/acknowledgement, ambience/ambiance and counselor/counsellor and over the last few centuries the spelling of musick to become music, rime into rhyme and phantasy to fantasy shows how we spell is an ever evolving process.
In a perfect world British kids should just learn the correct spelling rather than adapt the language around there shaky grasp of spelling but as my friend explained that wearing hats probably sped up his baldness, all the time he wears a hat nobody will know he is bald, it's the same concept with spellcheck because as it is now omnipresent, nobody will know your spelling sucks! 

Special Guest Blogger: Saint George

Hello, peeps! Issa George here and i is the Patron Saint of many countries, Canada, Greece, Portugal, Georgia but especially England which is a place i never been but they like me there so to them i not a bloody foreigner, we even speaka the Queen's Inglis, like what i does.
I was a Turkish but became a Roman soldier and a priest in the Diocletian Army but Diocletin hated Christians but he know my father very well and he say hey peeps, every Christian is gonna be arrested unless you offer sacrifice to the Roman gods which is absolute disgust as George is God's man, not blinkin' Zeus, so i say not on you nelly.
He say to my father you tell George to believe in Roman gods and i give him land, money and slaves but i still say no so he say gonna chop off your coconut George and i say you is giving me the right Humperdinck so it fine innit so i give all my money to the poor peeps and then the guys take me outside city walls and do that and my head come clean off innit.
I is probably one of the most famous Saints because of the dragon i killed so issabout time I set the records up straight and tell you peeps what was about.
I was riding my horse through Lcyrene when i hear story of a mass crocodile and it was scaring all the peeps who where unable to collect water and so the peeps would give it a sheep each day and while it was eating, the people would fill buckets but soon they run out of sheep and they say this gotta end in tears, marking my words so they say we know, a lady would taste as nice to crocodile as sheep so they gave it a lady instead.
The townspeople chose the victim to be crocodile food by drawing straws and this go on until one day the princesses straw was drawn and the Monarch begged for her to be spared but the people would not have it so she offered to the Crocodile but before she could be eaten, i comes along and stick sword in crocodile and the peeps say good rids and in honour of me being all brave, all convert to Christianity.
The Crocodile later became a dragon in the story but that is bloods stupid, there is no dragons and i would have said hey dragon, you can have her if big fire mouthed dragon was there and not crocodile.
So today in England people wave a big red cross flag and bang on what Saint George and England means which it turns out is very little but you wanna know somethin' wot is going right through my nostril about the English? They invent Cricket.
Issa stupid boring game and no matter who wins, both teams, and all the fans, are losers so come up England and invent a new game, you must have better ideas, you can't run out of ideas, that's like kebab shop running out of lamb innit.

Special Guest Blogger: Wernher von Braun

What i did wasn't brain surgery but it certainly was rocket science and all i wanted to do was develop the means send man to the moon which is what i explained to the Nazi's when they came knocking and they said jah, but as you are aiming rockets at the stars, could you maybe also aim a few towards London and as the Nazi's were not reknown for taking no for an answer, i ended up working as the Technical Director in Germany's rocket development program and developing the V2 rocket.
Due to an oversight in the Treaty of Versailles, rocketry wasn't in it's list of weapons forbidden to Germany so by the time we had the V2 to a usable standard, Germany became the first nation on Earth to fire anything through the stratosphere, reaching a height of 150,000 feet before it plummeted back to Earth on top of some terrified bystanders.
Germany was being surrounded by the Allies, the choice was to either surrender to the Soviets to the right or the Americans and Brits to the left i decided that the Americans would be better to entrust the devastating military power we had built to are they were guided by Christianity and humanity, they would use it for the application of space technology and not for killing people, like pacifists, hippies and spotty faced 16 year old boys, we were making the call of more lovemaking and less war.
The Americans recruited all 1,600 of us NAZI rocket scientists under a program called Operation Paperclip and i explained that all i wanted to do was develop the means send man to the moon which is what i explained to the American's when they came knocking and they said yes, but as you are aiming rockets at the stars, could you also maybe aim a few towards Pyongyang and i was put to work on their intermediate-range ballistic missile program just as the Korean War was starting up.
In the late 1950's, after the Soviets began sending things to the outer limits of the atmosphere including a dog wrapped in a metal chamber, the Americans decided that the Soviets may have beaten them to Space, but they would be the first to the Moon and i was assimilated into Americas brand spanking new space program and worked as the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon but i held back on my ideas for a Space Station above the Earth as the US military wanted to arm it with missiles So America and the Soviet Union fought it out to become the Space Race winners and both nations can count many firsts to argue their point to who actually won but it was my V-2 which became the granddaddy of every modern rocket design around the world but the first nation to actually launch a rocket into Space was Nazi Germany so every cosmonaut and astronaut that followed can say thanks to Hitler. Danke Adolf.