Liberation Day: Weird, at best

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4336 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World with me, Andy Zoltzman, here in London.

The sun is shining, the birds are arguing about stuff, and the cricket season has, as we record, just begun.

It is, as I like to think of it,

liberation day.

A tentative phrase, sadly.

We have been released from the clasp of winter.

I'm joined to celebrate this momentous occasion.

Firstly, from Australia by Alice Fraser.

Hello, Alice.

Hello, Andy.

If you think the birds are arguing when spring comes, I have a small biology lesson for you.

When a man and woman argue with each other very much

also joining us as you may have just heard uh from uh from a slightly more northerly part of london it's uh tiff stevenson hi tiff hello hi yeah no birds outside my window because the cat's been patrolling hard right uh so it's it's it's spring awakening for him as well um he's just uh yeah he's it he's um doing that kind of machine gun noise that cats do when they see a bird.

Is it like an ack, ack?

It's a great sound.

It's a great sound.

Well, that's the evolution, isn't it?

That's the cat seeing what humans have done to intimidate each other with weaponry and adapted it to their own lives.

That's, you know, Darwin would be absolutely high-fiving himself in his grave.

We are recording on the 4th of April 2025.

Today is apparently National Tell a Lie Day.

So you are listening to the right show, Buglers.

It's also Walk to Work Day.

And I did walk the approximately 12 yards from the house to the shed today.

So I'm doing my bit to make the planet healthier and more active.

As always, a section of the Bugler is going straight in the bin.

This week, a kitchen gadgets section, the latest gadgets and gizmos to make cookery more fun and more efficient for you in your kitchen incue including the tomata kushner the most efficient gadgets yet developed for slaying a tomato at optimum ripeness to make sure that your salads are the tastiest they can be the cucumbrella which prevents your cucumbers from being rained on if you happen to leave them outside the pancake symmetricizer to make sure that your pancakes are perfectly identical on both sides of the pan And banana armour,

a new steel coating for your banana to make sure that it remains uninjured prior to being eaten.

Also, various gadgets to make your food taste better because it's relaxed and happy, including the clampoline to allow your shellfish to bounce up and down happily before they get popped in the pan.

The snackoozy, fairly self-explanatory, the prawna sauna, the spuds bar, and of course the hambulance to make sure that your ham,

whilst injured reaches your plate in optimum condition.

And also,

some news just reaching us from Scluton Malvain, the celebrity, celebrity chef, who's just opened a new healthcare-themed restaurant

specializing in seafood and environmentally friendly drinks called the Lobster Trician and Wine Ecologist, or Lobs and Winey, for short.

But the Mardikushina is the thing you bring in when your salad has become an olivegarky.

I'm a fan of the pornosauna myself.

The world needs more olive gark.

Just a nice, sweaty prawn.

It's what we're all after.

Is it middle-aged, this prawn?

Is it just recently?

Has it been listening to a lot of podcasts about biohacking and has bought a new sports car?

Top story this week: the world is free.

Once again, thanks to our overlord and leader, Donald Trump, democratically elected to be king of the world by 1% of the population of the planet, has liberated humanity with his Liberation Day tariffs.

One of the weirdest moments in international economic history, where Trump wielded a big placard of essentially made-up numbers to unveil his tariffs on every single place in the world, including some places that don't even have actual human beings on, which we'll get to

in a bit.

He branded it as a liberation day, when finally America unshackled itself from the onerous burden of any sense of responsibility to the world as its most powerful nation when it liberated its economy from...

well, economics, and when it liberated itself from itself by defenestrating itself through the open window of freedom to either fly or plummet delete according to whether you or not you believe in gravity now I both I know both of you are huge fans of

tariffs

they're terrific

Tiff what as the bugle's international trade correspondent um what did you make of it

Mercantilism let's bring it back baby like we're so basically the economy is on a Zempec because it is shrinking.

She is looking so snatched right now.

Trump showed up with his tariff boards,

kind of like the specials in the world's worst restaurant.

He sort of held it up to go through what would pair nicely with some huge tariffs in Europe.

And on the back, I think were a series of nuclear missile code launches.

Yeah, so that was good.

I mean, look, it's

we, I mean, this may be the first upside to Brexit we've

we've seen in that we're only going to get the 10%

uh tariff rather than the rest of Europe, which I think is 39%.

Um, Trump wants to uh wants to do trade with us, but he wants us to buy chlorinated chicken as part of the deal.

I don't know if you've heard about this, so we've got to get those Lido wings if we want tax relief.

And I don't know about you guys, but I don't want to eat a chicken that's wearing armbands with a Varuca plaster stuck to its butt.

So

I'm not keen.

I mean, it's sent the markets into frenzy.

You know, the FTSE's

down.

The Dow Jones is down, but that's just Welsh men generally.

They're quite depressed.

We are,

yeah, we are,

I think it's an attempt to bring back mercantilism, which is kind of what started the Revolutionary War, isn't it, in America?

So I just think we should bring back more stuff from the 17th century.

I think neck roughs, men in bloomers, lead-based makeup to hide syphilis.

Yes, please, bring it all back.

Well, so if you're if you're wondering what's going on and you think, oh, I don't know how to look things up on the internet anymore because everything's terrible, a tariff is short for a tax riff in that's basically freestyle jazz riffing on taxes by making foreign goods more expensive so that people who want to take advantage of globalization by buying cheap consumer goods from foreign countries instead have to buy expensive consumer goods from whatever industry you can cobble together from Spit and Lube.

Making everything more expensive for everyone is a tactic beloved of boomers because they remember a time when a television cost more than a month's rent, and a month's rent could be paid with a day's work, where now a television costs the same as a sandwich, and a month's rent is paid with a month's work in your full-time job, plus half of what you make on your side hustle Etsy store/slash OnlyFans crochet porn Bijoux business.

The reasoning behind these tariffs is this weird presumption that the United States does not merely sell its product to other countries and buy goods that it needs in turn, rather that it is being taken advantage of by all the free-loading countries that it subsidised, suckling at the teeth of America.

Or as Mr Trump said on Wednesday,

his country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered.

There's this outrage that some countries don't want to buy American products, chlorinated chicken.

For example, European countries that won't buy American beef, which is being presented as protectionist prejudice, but may have something to do with the fact that Americans use chemicals in their feed and processing that are illegal to call food in some countries.

Don't know what to say, America.

Your factory farm beef isn't beef.

I think in Montenegro, they're technically allowed to import it, but it has to be declared at customs as, quote, torture food for the night horrors.

They can taste the pain, end quote.

I was rather intrigued by those words:

that the US,

that the U.S.

has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.

Now, I can't recall if Trump himself has been convicted of all four of those crimes, but I think he's pretty close.

And I mean, it was a bit odd to hear the leader of the world's biggest, most exploitative economic powerhouse complaining about his nation being looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered.

Reminiscent when Sharky the Shark complained about how Sally the Seal hurt his teeth with one of her bony vertebrae, then gave him indigestion.

But it also does suggest that

the pro modern progress and the interconnected world has taken all the glory and glamour out of looting, pillaging, and plundering.

It used to involve an exciting journey, a thrill-seeking invasion, proper planning, risk, and effort.

It was exhausting.

Just ask the Vikings.

They were knackered all the time.

Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for, for example, American businesses to betray their own workforce by outsourcing to save money.

The game's gone.

When it comes to looting, pillaging and plundering,

we've all gone soft.

Or there's an uninhabited bit of Antarctica

that's had a tariff whacked on it.

And finally, penguins are paying their fair share.

I mean, they are raging about it.

I got a direct quote from Pingu.

He said,

and then we peed all over the snow.

Right.

Which is actually a more coherent economic policy than we've seen coming out of the White House before.

Another thing Trump said, he said, foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure entirely foreign scavengers, and if they have torn it, but they were really fed that American dream by American plutocrats and profiteering capitalists who wanted everything done cheaper, the kind of people who a cynic might say potentially end up as president of America, complaining essentially about themselves.

He also said, tariffs are going to make us rich as hell.

A couple of things.

A, hell's hell's not that rich.

The fuel bill is astronomical.

And it's so overcrowded nowadays.

They're having to expand to accept a predicted record influx that will be coming over the next generation or two.

And the cost involved in that have really undermined the whole operation.

I heard Satan's doing an AGM about that.

He's doing an AGM about fossil fuels.

He really wants to turn it around.

And history also suggests that the only way tariffs can make you rich as hell is spiritually, not financially.

Because when the entire economy tanks, everyone loses everything, people have to learn to appreciate the non-material things in life, which isn't always Trumpian America's M.O.

So

in terms of how the tariffs were calculated, I'm going to give you a multiple choice quiz here, buglers.

How did Donald Trump and his regime calculate the different tariffs for each country?

Was it A, with an in-depth analysis of the infinite complexities of international trade designed to create a sustainably equitable system to the benefit of both the the USA and the international trading community as a whole?

Was it B, with some sub-primary school level mathematics based on unlicensed economics, outright lies in a spiritually rancid philosophy of nationalist isolationism?

Was it C, by firing a baby hippopotamus out of a cannon into a cliff, analysing the splatter patterns and using AI to translate that into numbers?

Or was it D, by pairing up randomly selected nations with randomly selected cricket statistics?

For example, Cambodia, the nation, paired up with the cricket stat wickets taken by the the great England bowler SF Barnes in the 1913-14 series in South Africa, the all-time record by one bowler in a test series, hence Cambodia gets 49%.

Sri Lanka and David Gower's test batting average, 44%.

Norfolk Island, test hundred scored by Australian Vatican legend Don Bradman, 29.

29%.

Nicaragua, most wickets taken by a bowler in a single first-class match.

Jim Lakers, 19 at Old Trafford in 1956, hence they get 19%.

So those are the four options.

I don't know the answer other than that it definitely wasn't option A.

Whether it's B, C, D, or some combination of those, we'll have to let history be the judge.

I very much enjoyed sub-primary school there, Andy.

It's a nice way to just recall America's last minor economic snafu.

I thought it was just an abbreviation.

Leida, you could find the silver lining in all of this, Andy, by like relating it to cricket stats.

Well, I can always see that.

And you're just trying to find a sliver of joy in the darkest.

It's the last thing to go.

It's like a boxer's punch.

Well, as far as sort of the literature by experts on international trade goes, there's very little of what you'd call, you know, respectable expert opinion that supports the structuring of these tariffs.

The administration seems to acknowledge, at least, that it's going to be bad in the short to medium long term.

There's going to be pain.

I see people saying cheap goods were never part of the American dream, which is a big call because it really depends on whether you define happiness as access to an air fryer, which I'm pretty sure I know at least eight suburban boomers who absolutely do.

I mean, we can pretend that erratic trade policy is the perfect environment for long-term investment.

Come build a factory here, unless, of course, we randomly change our mind next week or drop the tariffs or replace them with an interpretive dance-based trade policy.

They seem to be justifying the pain by saying, first of all, this is about national security.

Nothing threatens democracy like cheap solar panels.

They say it's about reciprocity,

the economic version of

stop hitting yourself, but I'm the one who's hitting you, and also I'm hitting myself.

And also, actually, it's good for your soul to be poor, just ask a Victorian vicar who happens to be the fourth son of a lord.

So,

and of course, and and of course, and of course,

you know, these tariffs will in classic American fashion be counterbalanced by subsidies to preferred industries, by which they mean farming corn specifically, because that's part of their part of their self-image.

It's sort of identity,

identity-affirming surgery is to give subsidies to the corn industry.

For a gang of people who obsessively talk about freedom and free markets, they sure do a lot of putting the invisible and unlubricated hand of the market right up the butthole of justice, Andy, is all I'm saying.

That's what Adam Smith would have wanted.

Yeah, I'm wondering what Maynard Keynes thinks about all of this.

It's

there's been market panic, hasn't there?

And I keep reading that there's a bear market, which I can only hope is actually just lots of gay men in leather just wandering around complimenting each other.

You know, I could have gone for bear from the animal kingdom, but I just like the gay bears more.

They just

have beards.

They have beards.

They like to party.

I'm just, I'm into it.

Are we sure?

Are we sure when that meme went around about like, would you rather be in the forest with a man or a bear?

Yeah.

Well, that's it.

If you mean a bear, if that's the bear you mean, I'm here for it because I know we're going to listen to Kylie.

We're going to have a great time.

The bear still wins.

no matter what, the bear wins.

The IMF has said that the tariffs are, quote, a significant risk to the global economy.

Trump was reportedly significantly disappointed by that.

And he'd hoped that they'd be acknowledged as a sledgehammer of mayhem to the global economy rather than significant risk, which isn't quite as rock and roll or dramatic.

What was interesting in that, in that board, you know, the board of numbers, you had one column with tariffs charged to the usa

and then uh next to it was the tariffs the usa would be charging uh it in response which is essentially 50 of that figure but but the column with tariffs charged to the usa uh would have been factual had it uh had any facts in it uh but but they were missing because they were not the tariffs basically what they were looking at was the the trade deficits between america and other countries.

And now, there is a, I think, and look, I'm not an economist, economist, even though I have written a book about economics a long, long time ago,

albeit there was a book of complete bullshit.

But I don't think trade deficit and tariffs are the same thing.

It's like the difference between trousers and a bicycle.

Yes, both work better if you use your legs, but that doesn't mean they are the same thing.

And in terms of Trump's vengeance on the rest of the world, which is essentially what

this is, these tariffs, is Trump's personal vengeance against the rest of the world as he continues to extend his record for the world's single longest running continuous tantrum.

It's like releasing a shark into someone's swimming pool because that person didn't eat the fish finger sandwich that you gave them.

Both have some relation to things that live in the sea.

Other than that,

no real link.

But such is the world that we live in, this turbulent ocean of malinformation.

Well, I'll tell you who's delighted about it, Andy, is China is delighted about it, apparently.

They are seeing a reboot of the cultural revolution.

They're excited to see the chaos that ensues.

They are reaching out their soft power,

the open hand of greasy, exploitative friendship into the gaps left by America's withdrawal in international political diplomacy.

They are

setting off fireworks, which they invented, writing on money, they invented, and eating celebratory noodles that they also invented.

The best

feeling good about it.

Yeah, the little red book coming back.

Maybe the little red book is making a comeback.

I have a little red book, but it is just dates when I'm getting my period.

That's mine.

It's important.

Did I tell you about the time when I was in China and I bought lots of, you know, you have to bring something home?

And I bought, this is a true story, right?

I bought my husband a bright red Chairman Mao t-shirt.

He put it in the wash.

It destroyed all the other clothes, which I thought was beautifully ironic.

A satirical t-shirt.

Awesome.

The I mean, the reactions from around the world, Alice, your own Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, said

these tariffs have no basis in logic.

They go against the basis of our two nations' partnership.

This is not the act of a friend.

That's quite an Australian response to it.

I mean, that's basically saying, mate, you're not being a mate.

There's not mateship as enshrined in our constitution.

I mean, our constitution just reads, come on, mate.

Oh, mate.

Might.

From which all legal principles in Australian legislation are derived.

Yeah, but would a reasonable mate on the bus to clap him make this?

Yeah, I like it.

You can say it so many ways and it can mean so many things.

Mate.

Yeah, sometimes it doesn't mean mate at all.

Sometimes it means we're about to have a fight.

Madagascar was also oddly hard hit by these tariffs.

Clearly it's a serious rival to the USA.

Maybe that taps into the hatred of penguins again.

I don't know.

It's a biodiversity hotspot, which is now viewed as very woke.

And it's the fourth biggest island in the world.

after Greenland,

which is top.

So it's possible that this is just part of a strategy to scare large islands with the threat of American power so that Greenland will eventually just give in and swim its way to Washington begging for forgiveness.

We just don't know.

I guess one of the problems is

what Trump has made difficult is any sense of long-term planning because you just never know what is going to emerge next.

Now, ideally in politics, you want a combination of temporal horizons alongside the immediate and short-term practicalities and necessities to keep things functioning and help those in pressing need.

You might want your politicians to have plans for five or ten or twenty, fifty or even a hundred years time, depending on what the issue is dealing with.

But I've done some calculations and now the average period of functioning stability enabling governments to plan in advance is 12 minutes.

So that's a big change in global politics.

The world is now living you know, hour to hour, social media post to social media post, mood swing to mood swing, as Trumpel Stiltskin applies the mandate given to him by 1% of the world's population to inflict chaos on the other 99%.

And by 1%, I am referring to those 77 million people who voted for Trump, just under 1% of the global population, not the 1% as in the super wealthy, although that does.

I'm referring to them both.

I'm definitely referring to them both.

I've cancelled my US tour.

I was going to be in New York in the first week of May and I spoke to a Visa lawyer and she said they are having a look at people's social media to see if they've ever made any jokes about Donald Trump or Elon Musk.

And

I made a cartoon pulling my collar gesture and said, I think there's a few.

Well, isn't freedom of speech great?

It's only the First Amendment, Andy.

It's not the real important one, the second one.

Tiff, you had some other Liberation Day news for us.

They've uh Musk has spent 21 million to lose in Wisconsin, um, and Trumper now has a 43% approval rating, apparently.

So, this is all kind of tied into his Liberation Day plan.

Is it working out for him?

I guess the most important thing about this story, though, is in the Times newspaper article that I was reading, I got a targeted ad in the middle of this asking me to, this is true, take a test to see if I was a witch by blood.

So I'm concerned.

I'm concerned that part of Liberation Day is a new run of witch trials.

You know, instead of seeing if I can swim or float, they want to know if I'm barefoot and pregnant because that's kind of where they want it.

And I just think it's a different criteria for witchcraft now.

I think one of the main tests is if you can apply liquid eyeliner equally on both eyes, you're definitely a witch.

If you can sneeze without a bit bit of wee coming out, you're a witch.

Right.

I mean, legally, there's it's always been a bit of a, I know, Alice,

you for a while were a lawyer in America, so you know that legally there's always been a bit of a grey area in American law between the terms witch and woman.

And

it's still slightly unclear how you demarcate between the two, evidently.

Well, I am.

I'm definitely not a witch by blood.

I am a witch by marriage.

It is great that there's now a blood test for it because, I mean, that's

so much less intrusive than putting someone's hand in a fire or dunking into the bottom of a pond.

I think that's progress.

People speaking for an extremely long time news now, and there's a podcast that is now into its what, 620 something, almost 630 episodes.

I don't know how many hours of content we've put out.

We're not in a position to criticize people for talking too long.

So we will instead praise them.

Corey Brooker has broken the record for the longest Senate speech in American political history with a 25-hour four-minute roast of

Donald Trump.

Booker, the Democratic Party senator for New Jersey, smashed the record for the longest continuous chunter held since 1957 by Strom Thurmond with a 24-18-minute filibuster against the Civil Rights Act, still regarded to this day as one of America's leading displays of endurance racism.

So it's nice to have turfed that particular marathon gob shittogram out of the uh out of the record record books.

A 25-hour rebuke to Trump's actions thus far as president in his second home.

And well done to Booker for squeezing it down to such a short speech.

He must have had to cut quite a lot out.

Inevitably, there was a degree of superficiality, but there simply wasn't time to go into all the malfeasances of Trump Mark II.

So, fair play to Brooker for cramming a decent selection in only a day and a bit.

I think people are quite harsh on Strom Thurmond because it's very difficult not to try and build a racial hierarchy in your mind if your parents are stupid enough that they can't spell Storm properly.

But

people are immensely impressed by Corey Booker's achievement, the 25-hour speech, just being able to, he was preparing for days.

Apparently, he fasted and stopped drinking water in order that he wouldn't have to take toilet breaks.

Um, and uh, a truly you know, this incredible achievement.

Apparently, he got through it by just imagining he was on a Joe Rogan podcast where they talk continuously

day and night.

Just get some adult diapers on and go for it.

I'm not breaking this streak.

Um, it's it wasn't technically a filibuster, which is, you know, because there was no bill.

So it's a shame, though, because I like a good filibuster and clichure mainly because it sounds like a french feminist cop drama that i would definitely watch

filibuster and clichure on the streets of paris again

i would have said it sounded like some sort of gender affirming surgery but there you go

I've really got some visuals going on now, Alice.

Thank you.

Yeah, he said these are not normal times in America and they should not be treated as such.

And I can't allow this body to continue without doing something.

The threats to America's democracy are grave and urgent.

And I guess, yeah, in terms of what I've done for 25 hours straight to benefit the people,

I once binge-watched all seven seasons of the West Wing.

So I have this very dangerous, mid-wittery understanding of American politics from that, including, you know, the filibuster and clature.

Corey Booker did not take a toilet brown.

It's really hard to think about this story and this act of defiance without thinking of the phrase, absolutely busting for a Waz.

I mean, you just cannot read the story without that phrase going through your head.

I don't know

what next for the human body in terms of feats of speaking endurance, a week-long speech, maybe a 25-hour four-minute pun run.

I'm prepared to give that a go.

Maybe a 25-hour speech, but only using 25 different words.

See what we can do with that.

Or only 25 letters, 25 out of the 26 letters of the alphabet, which would be quite an interesting challenge.

Or maybe trying to speak your way around the world.

So

the record for quickest circumnavigation of the world on scheduled airline flights is around 62 hours.

So maybe...

Maybe that could be Booker's next challenge, is to try to speak continuously whilst traveling around the world on scheduled airline flights.

25 hours of saying mate with different intonations.

Mate.

name is

that must have been done, Alice.

Has that not been done?

I mean, I'm pretty sure that's what happens in small towns in the outback.

I think that's the entire dialect of mate-based chat.

I guess the good thing about this, I mean, it's obviously not going to have a huge practical impact on American politics, but it was a symbolic gesture.

And at the moment, with the American democratic system of accountability, checks and balances having been reduced to a strangely hued man

signing bits of paper with an oddly thick pen and declaring, I'm doing it, I'm doing it.

Resistances against the

Trumpian maelstrom of Ship Stormry have been minimal and futile so far.

The world, for the most part, has metaphorically speaking decided that it will try to stop the dragon from eating the children from the village by feeding the dragon with children from the village until it's too fat to move.

It's unclear yet how effective this will be long term.

Opposition from within the US political establishment has amounted thus far to occasional yelps of the word yikes and private prayers to as yet unmoved deities for a transfer to one of the alternative universes where things aren't going so weirdly.

So at least this was a symbolic gesture of defiance that is

as well as being a frankly ludicrous thing to do, to speak for 25 hours without a piss break.

But that is what Donald Trump has reduced this world to.

Yeah, it is extraordinary how quickly people will lie back and think of England

the person doing the brewing has all the nuclear weapons in the world.

Women in war news now, and Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary of the United States,

has

declared that fitness requirements for combat jobs in the American military will be made sex neutral,

which could significantly reduce the number of women who qualify to serve in the American armed forces.

I know both of you have had recently had

your applications to join the American military rejected for

various different reasons.

So what have you made of Hegsith's

intervention here?

Devastated, Andy.

I am devastated.

I have this accursed sword and the fierce desire to carry it into battle to defend a nation, not my own.

This sword, it was my father's and his father's before him, and before him, his uncle, and before that, his best friend at the pub.

And before that, it was born from the lake, held in a slender arm, clad in white samite.

And before that, it belonged to a guy called Greg.

And I

would have quite liked to wield it at some point.

I think this is a genuinely very valid thing to do.

Women do not belong in combat.

Of course, combat mostly now being sitting in a small porta-potty, sending drones towards your enemies, pressing a button with your strong masculine fingers, or again, pulling a trigger on a heavily automated weapon with your huge, manly arms.

I find it difficult to get outraged about this on a feminist level because I sort of don't think anyone should be doing shooting people as a job, generally, as someone who was brought up Buddhist.

I don't think men should be shooting people either.

Can't we just, have we not, in human history, evolved to a point where we can solve all of our arguments through armed wrestling or punitive tariffs?

I don't know why we still have

combat forces.

Surely it could all be sorted out with a quick wrestle in the mud and a game of chess.

I don't understand why we still just put holes in each other.

and wait for all of the blood to come out as a way of resolving our issues.

It seems deeply uncivilized and I find it difficult to get upset that women are not being included in this

murder hobby that we seem to have as nation states.

Tiff?

I think, I mean, look, I think the complete opposite.

I think the military should just hire a bunch of women over 40 for surprise attacks because invisibility is not to be ignored.

You want your army to run

efficiently.

Like we can infiltrate the highest levels.

You know, actually, most blue chip companies have boards that are 50% female.

You just never see it in the photos because we fade out of them, like Marty McFly.

So it's perfect.

We can sneak up on every terrorist cell.

We can watch men showering, see how they like it.

We're masters of WhatsApp, and we all know the Pentagon love using that for missile launches and stuff.

So

we'd be very handy.

I think also pop the minion names in the war planning app.

Exactly.

Exactly.

We're great internet sleuths.

You know, we watch every, you know, so intelligence-based stuff.

We watch every true crime documentary because we need to know how they'll try and kill us.

So if you want an army that's good at defence, hire women over 40.

We'll be there ready with our house keys poking through our fingers and a rape alarm ready to blare through the nearest speaker.

So I think he's wrong.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I guess the questions are, you know, can women do what is necessary in war in the way that men can?

Can women really meet the standards that men have set in the U.S.

military?

Will they, for example, have the mental strength to carry out extrajudicial slayings in contravention of international law?

I just don't know that they will.

Will they be as good as men at subjecting enemy captives to torture, humiliation, and abuse?

The evidence remains sadly unclear.

Will they have the cojones to open fire on unarmed civilians like a real man would?

Who can tell?

And can a woman really contravene international law and break the Geneva Convention in the proper way whilst grabbing their balls and saying, How about it?

That's, you know, those are things that America has yet to answer.

Bugle feature section now, archaeology.

And, well, people have been digging up old stuff yet again, including

one of the most prodigiously talented archaeologists to have emerged on the archaeology circuit in many years.

A three-year-old archaeologist putting Doogie Hauser MD to shame by doing some high-quality archaeology in Israel.

Ziv Nitsan at the age of three discovered a 3,800-year-old amulet,

which I mean,

generally, you know, archaeology is

an art, a craft that rewards experience.

So to be...

finding that kind of stuff at the age of three makes you wonder what she'll be doing when she's, you know, 35, 40.

She'll be discovering entire civilizations buried somewhere under Antarctica with the cities that used to have two billion people.

And it's so exciting for archaeology to have this three-year-old genius on the scene.

Oh, the only thing worse than peaking in high school is peaking in preschool, Andy.

This is the worst news I have heard all year, this adorable news of the three-year-old making a world-shattering archaeological archaeological discovery.

This means that I no longer have 100% internal conviction that I do not want my three-year-old daughter to bring back the handful of rocks she's decided are important from the park.

I have spent a solid two years convincing her that we only borrow shells from the beach on our street.

And if we want to take another one, we have to return the ones we took yesterday.

Now you're telling me that I'm going to have to have in my mind a fraction of doubt when I tell her that a rock is just a rock and there are many rocks like it.

You cannot have a fraction of doubt in your mind when you're you're talking to a toddler, Andy.

It's like a blood for a shark.

They can smell a single drop of it in 50,000 gallons of water and they will come for you.

There is no backing down.

I am going to have to forget this story out of sleep deprivation in order to protect my mind.

We've all been there.

We've all stumbled across a Canaanite scarab that dates back to the Middle Bronze Age.

It's quite nice, though, isn't it?

For it when you say archaeology news, for it to be an actual object rather than an opinion that belongs in the Smithstone.

Donald Trump has just put,

I think, 85% tariffs on ancient Egypt.

I mean it's very exciting casting news for the new Indiana Jones.

I would watch the shit out of that movie.

Man, oh

yeah.

I mean, if you're

if you're discovering these just by picking up a pebble and you've got a 3,800-year-old

priceless piece of archaeological relic.

I think she'll have discovered the lost city of Atlantis by the age of eight.

And if not, I'll be very disappointed in her.

I don't know if she's listening to this or not.

I bet the otters are furious as well because they love a pebble and a stone.

And sometimes they pick one up and keep it and put it in their little otter pocket and keep it for life

if they really like one.

So, um, you know, that's an untapped resource for archaeological digs and exploration.

otters.

Get on it, people.

There we go.

You heard it here first, buglers.

Pickpocketing the little

shaking them down for artifacts.

In other archaeology news, if you think football has gone soft these days, well, further evidence for your gripes, because archaeologists digging up a football pitch in Austria have found more than than a hundred bodies dating from a game played almost 2,000 years ago.

The dead were all male, mostly aged in their 20s, and experts think they were from a Roman Empire 11 dispatched to play in a way tie against then Austrian champions Rapid Vienna sometime between 80 and 130 AD, or perhaps even it was against the German Giants Bay Munich in a pre-season tournament on neutral territory.

It's unclear exactly what happened.

They've discovered what it's 129 bodies precisely so far.

They think there might be as many as 150.

Experts have suggested that the the Romans began the match on this football pitch in an innovative 3-2-1-3-1 formation with an inverted sweeper, two central wide players, a three-quarter half fullback, a false nine or eight, and an old-fashioned target man.

Due to the high number of fatalities in early first millennium football, of course, unlimited substitutions were allowed.

That was in the days before FIFA banned weapons such as swords, spears, and flaming arrows.

And in those days, of course, not only could you...

go in two-footed to try and win the ball fair and square, but you could also hack at someone's torso with an axe without the referee telling you off.

So, yeah, but it's a very

exciting discovery from perhaps the earliest known football match.

Yeah,

early first millennium.

This is huge for the

history of football.

I mean, to clarify, this was a battle.

This is

a Roman battleground that happened to find itself under the pitch of a football team.

Oh, I didn't get beyond the headline, to be honest.

They suspect that the reason all these Roman soldiers died was because they were trying to fight using only their feet and heads occasionally.

Apparently, in this early form of football, instead of red cards as a form of discipline, they made the team draw straws and strangle the tenth guy who had the short straw.

Form of locker room bonding.

That'll draw a team together.

Sport is just a continuation of war by other means, right, Andy?

Yes.

Yes.

Which is what I say when I bring my flaming trebuchet to the local fiber side.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

We will have full updates on the total collapse of the global economy over the next

zero to 1,000 years here on the bugle.

Tiff, anything to plug?

Oh, yes, I have a show coming up at the Leeds Wardrobe.

I will be doing husband material.

I think that's the last performance of it in June.

So if you just check my Instagram and everything else, it will have details of all of that sort of stuff.

forthcoming and I'm doing the Rick Mail Comedy Festival, but I think that is sold out.

You cannot get tickets.

It's sold out within 24 hours, which is nice to be able to say that.

So, yeah.

But yes, and I'll be doing the Edinburgh fringe.

So look out for all of that.

Alice?

I will will not be coming to America for the launch of A Passion for Passion on the 5th of May.

I will be doing some sort of online launch event and please feel free to organise events of your own.

That's coming out on the 5th of May in America.

If you have a podcast about books or anything that I can come on, plug the show, that would be great.

Let me know.

I will also be doing a run of shows at the Soho Theatre for my show, A Passion for Passion, which is about a show about the book, A Passion for Passion, in early August.

And then I will be doing two weeks of the edinburgh fringe festival late august uh and then i'll be doing my swiss writers retreat in september so if you'd like to sign up for the writer's retreat and come and write with me in the real world you can do that via my link tree linktree slash alice fraser that's linktr.ee slash alicefraser Also, I have a podcast called Realms Unknown, which is a science fiction and fantasy podcast.

It's a sub-podcast of the bugle, a bugle, a bugle umbrella.

We need to figure figure out what we call this thing.

A bugle gang production.

It's where we talk about it.

It's very fun.

If you're a big nerd, and you are, please tune in to Helms Unknown.

I have not much to plug.

There's a few dates left on my tour, but I think they are also sold out.

I've sold out in just 25 years.

So it took a little bit longer than Tiff's 24 hours.

Thanks to everyone who's come along.

so far.

We will be back next week with NATO Green's take on life, the universe, and everything.

Until then, goodbye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.