1. Charles I – who was beheaded on 30 January 1649. The execution was at Whitehall in London. At the very least, the current British royal family need to be completely stripped of their titles and wealth – although there are those who think it would also be a good idea to behead, hang, or shoot them! 2. Cleopatra VII Philopator is by tradition said to have committed suicide on 12 August 30 BC by inducing a snake to give her a poisonous bite. She was following in the footsteps of her bigamous husband Mark Anthony, who topped himself after losing the Battle of Actium on 2 September 31 BC.

I arrived at the Heathrow Virgin Atlantic bag drop late. I was told I’d missed my plane and to go to desk 13 to discuss whether I could be transferred to another flight. The next person I talked to said that since my bag to be checked was well below 10kg, I could take it as hand luggage on my original flight, but that I’d have to run to the gate. I got through security in good time and made it to the plane by sprinting all the way. I was pleased to be the last passenger on-board and having avoided hanging around – all that queuing is such a drag!

“How To Make Money Fast” is just one of thousands of spam comments my filter prevented from being posted on this blog. If the spammer in question actually knew a good way of making money fast, it’s unlikely they’d be telling other people about it. My filter is also repeatedly blocking spam comments from someone offering to write cheap blog posts for me and my readers. This seems to rather miss the fact that I prefer to put my own spin on shit – not to mention that with all the spam that comes my way, I’ve more than enough material from which I can write blogs fast, so I don’t need to pay someone else to do it for me.

The Corporation of London and their representatives in the Church of England look all set to evict the Occupy London encampment sometime this week. For anyone approaching the Occupy London protest from the east along St Paul’s Churchyard, the sight of the tents with a branch of camping equipment shop Blacks also in clear view is probably enough to raise a chuckle. The manager of Blacks couldn’t have arranged a better advert for the store’s winter sale. Less hilarious is the effect of The Church of England on the protest. When I was down there on Saturday, some religious nutcase was banging on and on about how she’d become a more effective activist after finding Jesus five years earlier.

In 2001 when Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art was on at the Hayward Gallery, a female visitor to the show walked into a room in which Tadasu Takamine’s Inertia was being shown only to discover a man jerking off to the projection. The woman left and complained to the gallery, but by the time security got there the man had disappeared. The work was recently re-shown at the Icon Gallery in Birmingham, I don’t know if anyone was caught wanking off to the piece there, but the description of it on the Icon website illustrates you’d have to be seriously sad to do so: “Inertia (1998) involves the uneasy combination of a young woman and a bullet train.