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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to Bugle issue 4330 sub-episode A for a week off to allow the world some time to calm down and come to its senses starting now.

Also, we're taking a week off because all of our AI projections and and technology suggested that if we did record a bugle this week, it would just be 40 minutes of whimpering, screaming, and occasional barking like a dog.

Such is the world.

Instead, we have a Bugle sub-episode with various choice morsels from the Bugleverse.

Before we get into it, a quick plug for our Bugle voluntary subscription scheme.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com to find out more.

We only exist because you, Buglers, make it happen.

Please do continue support doing what we do and helping keep our show free, flourishing, and independent as we head towards towards the Bugle's 18th birthday.

Later on you'll be hearing a bit from Alice Fraser's excellent new podcast Realms Unknown in which Alice takes the Bugle universe into the worlds of sci-fi and fantasy.

You can also buy her book A Passion for Passion.

The link is in the show notes which I'm very reliably informed you can quite easily find.

We will also be dipping into a moment from the Bugle past and what a moment that is.

But firstly let's start from something more recent, some boat news.

Yes, the UK may be a nation of seafarers but we're not faring particularly well right now as this story highlights

woke submarine news now and um

for everyone who's really worrying about the number of uh military submarines that had uh succumbed to the uh the the woke lobby uh

well i mean some some harrowing news um the uh britain has renamed uh a royal submarine, the best kind of submarine, although I don't know how, in terms of the hydrodynamics, whether the Crown makes it go slower or quicker.

It's been renamed from HMS Agincorps to HMS Achilles.

The name change was announced this week after concerns have been reported that the original name,

the HMS Agincourt, might

offend the French, who are

technically, if not in the world of British media, are allies.

Now, there's a number of things about this nation.

Obviously, any story now, you can pretty much put the word woke in any headline.

I mean, you could have a group stage match in the World Croquet Championships, and somehow the woke would be responsible for something that went wrong in it.

But what does this say about us as a nation that we'd called the submarine Agincourt in the first place?

The Battle of Agincourt happened in 1415, more than 600 years ago.

And I don't think I'm being even slightly revisionist here when i claim that that battle was fought on land it was not fought under the sea or even under the land it was fought on the land so as a as a submarine that's oh for two that is oh for two in terms of

nomenclaturial relevance it's a good 25 miles from the sea that is a long periscope look it was a bit muddy But to me, naming a submarine Agincorp is a bit like naming a space rocket Mickey the Mineshaft.

It's just not.

And so then, but then what does it also say?

That we then

decided that's a bit provocative.

And instead we name it after Achilles, a made-up dude from Greece.

Obviously, our patron saint, St.

George, is a basically made-up dude, or at least a dude most famous for doing made-up things from Turkey.

So I don't know if that's some kind of unusually diplomatic effort to

create some rapprochement between two nations that haven't always got on.

Anyway, Achilles was a brilliant but sulky young Trojan war superstar who hit the headlines in Homer's Smash it war blockbuster the Iliad um I mean admittedly if we wanted someone from that vintage we're talking what thousand twelve hundred BC not too many British heroes you could call it HMS grunting man carving a flint arrowhead and wondering what all the fuss about midsummer is but that's not as catchy um but it's uh there's something about this story and also it then emerged that prince um

former prince now king charles uh was in favor of the name change thank you for using his full title adding thank you for using his full title Former Prince, current king.

Yes, the artist formerly known as Prince.

I know you're a massive fan.

So just a little bit more on Azincourt.

Agincourt was part of the Hundred Years' War, which lasted from 1337 to 1453.

Vatnish, that's a lot of added time.

That's

a guess.

There must have been a lot of injuries.

Proper contacts bought medieval warfare.

But still, that's got to be dispiriting.

In 1437, you're fighting the Hundred years' war.

You look across to the touchscreen, you think it's almost full time.

And the fourth official pops up with his board showing 16 years of extra time.

16 years of added time.

I assume he held up in years rather than minutes.

8,415,360 minutes.

I mean,

that's a killer, isn't it?

We've got literally in many cases.

It is amazing that we've that we went with Agincourt just because it does sort of suggest

this is not true, it does sort of suggest that we've lacked military victories since 1415 to celebrate.

I mean, I don't know whether they considered calling it the HMS Amritsar massacre.

I don't know whether they considered it calling it the HMS brutal suppression of the Mau Mau uprising.

I don't know whether they considered calling it the HMS.

Yeah, we might have brought some smallpox to Australia.

I don't know whether they considered any of those.

I don't know whether they considered any of those as potential alternative names.

but if they've gone with achilles it is pretty funny to name uh a military vessel after someone who is largely synonymous with having one very obvious vulnerability

it does suggest that there is

that there is a hole at the back of the submarine that's letting water in that that's all i'm saying by picking achilles i know that's doing down the rest of the lad's career i know that's i know that's choosing to focus on the one blight on his career.

But I will say, just conversationally, as someone who, unlike Andy, did not study classics, I would say, I hear Achilles.

I'm thinking the heel.

I'm afraid that's just where my mind is going.

Fair enough.

And, you know, they have made most of the submarine waterproof, but not all of it.

Just got one very obvious and visible vulnerability.

It's made of bread.

Oh, we forgot to put one of the windows in.

Oh,

God.

Oh, bugs.

So,

yeah, so, like I say, it was changed because Agincourt was, like, say, famously, a victory for Team GB over then arch rivals La France,

and it was considered provocative.

I mean, I don't know how provocative.

It's a submarine, it's underwater.

You can't see its name most of the time unless it's going wrong.

But if we really wanted to provoke the French, we could have called it, you know, HMS three-week cycling races are fucking stupid.

Or HMS, how about about you let the goose choose for itself how much food it wants for lunch or even hms horizontal stripe shirts are not cool anymore that's listen i'm not sure that battles from 600 years ago really rile people anymore

yeah i'm not sure yeah i'm not sure that that's the like that's the number one thing that is upsetting french people at the moment i would have thought if you want to really upset them we should have called it the hms lemigne yamal after the uh spanish teenager that scored a wonder goal uh that was part of spain's defeat of france to the recent european championships

I'll dubbed in favour of that.

Oh, Andy, there's been some breaking news.

As we've been talking about this, they've decided that Achilles was too embarrassing at home and the submarine has been renamed.

And I think there was some intervention from King Charles on this, the HMS Prince Andrew.

So that is,

we finally settled on a figure from British history that is in no way divisive or controversial.

I do like the idea of naming it after a professional footballer because, you know, that's good for a submarine, isn't it?

Because professional footballers go down very easily, and that's really what you want your submarine to do.

Well, as well as the full bugles, there is another feed from the bugle called Top Stories, where we play back classic top stories from past issues of this august audio newspaper.

For example, this top story from Austria entitled Fart the Police.

Top story this week.

Well, as if the world didn't need more hostility between the police and the public.

Austria has been rocked to its foundations after a man in Vienna was fined 500 euros for flatulentializing loudly in front of police officers.

Helen, you are.

Not just loudly, Andy, provocatively.

Yes, well, Helen, you are, of course, our landlocked continental European countries and flatulence legislation correspondent.

Bring us up to dates with

what went on.

Well,

this man, this farter, was sitting on a bench.

He was having some kind of,

as described by police, prolonged, unruly, and disrespectful interaction with them.

And then he got up and did a big fart.

And they said, it's, of course, they said on Twitter, of course, no one is reported for accidentally letting one go.

So as with so much of the law, intent is key.

There must be a mens rea as well as an actus reus.

It's a provable intent is relevant here.

Now, let he who has not used a parp as an assault weapon throw the first wind, say I.

Good to bring a bit of lawyer's expertise to this, Alice.

Thank you.

Last year, a man in Scotland farted intentionally whilst being bodily searched by police and got 75 hours of community service.

Right.

Well, yeah, 500 euro fine for the perpetrator here

for

the olfactory infraction.

He was fined under the audible gaseous discourtesy subsection of Austria's Offending Public Decency Act.

He was said to have, as you say, quote, let go a massive intestinal wind, apparently with full intent.

This is a provocative propale promulgation following an encounter with the police who insist that the accused performed an unwarrantedly confrontational ex flagrutum.

I mean the ma the maximum sentence in Austria for nasally discomfiting a police officer is 35 years in jail and a lifelong artichoke consumption banning order.

But the police let him off with a 500 Euro fine because we're backlogging the Austrian court system caused by a combination of lockdown Brexit and vegan schnitzels.

I wonder if in America they would have tried to shoot the fart.

One can only assume that they probably would have done.

He's got to use the facilities.

The police in Austria noted that the man may appeal against the penalty if he feels that it was unjustified, though it may be difficult for him to find a lawyer who will open the pleadings in the traditional manner of offences of this kind, which is, mom!

Yeah, I mean, but it's good actually, don't you think to, you know, with so many laws and social customs that have gone out the window during lockdown, see, Austria trying to keep some semblance

of social order.

It does seem that as a nation, Austria these days is a little more sensitive to the need to stamp down on the early sides of social and political rebellion for whatever reason.

And

no, no judgment on the man from us here in Britain, where just four years ago, 17.4 million of us voted for better out than in, regardless of the impact on others.

It

just makes us feel better about ourselves, and we can't be worrying about who else gets inconvenienced by it or whether it signifies an underlying digestive or dietary issue that we don't want to face up to.

Can I end this contrived analogy here, please?

Yes, Brexit is the fart that began

as an attempt to relieve pressure and ended up in an accidental pants shitting.

Yeah, except they shat in all of our pants.

Virus news now, and everyone's least favourite microscopic terrorist, the coronavirus, continues to upheave and inhavocate the world.

Jochocratic governments continue to fumble around in a self-imposed fug of stubborn arrogance.

Science continues to try to convince people that it isn't making everything up as it goes along, in everything it does, as well as the virus.

I've been reading the Telegraph, and I'm starting to doubt that gravity is real anymore.

Life is shifting and changing by the week, and nowhere have the effects been felt more profoundly, no area of human activity has been so deeply impacted upon than in the filming of sex scenes for TV shows.

Helen, you are the Bugle's artistically, probably just about justified nudity filming logistics correspondent.

Please

fill us in, or more appropriately, make it look convincingly like you're filling us in.

Well, the Bold and the Beautiful soap opera is resuming filming, having been off since March, and they have a number of steamy scenes.

Obviously, they want to keep things socially distant but still sexy, so they are going one better than just people wrapping their arms around themselves and moving their hands up and down, like in the playground.

They tried cutting these scenes, they're like, it's not the same.

It's not the same.

So instead, first of all, for kissing, each of the actors will just be filmed separately.

I don't know if they're allowed to kiss something like a melon or their own hand.

And then they will be edited together.

And then when they're doing sex scenes,

their spouses, if they are negative for COVID, may be allowed to play whoever they're sexing on.

But otherwise, they will be using blow-up dolls and

dummies.

And usually, the dummies are used for stunts, like when people fall out of a window or have to play a corpse.

But not this time, they're getting lucky.

I mean, of course, with the amount of Botox and plastic surgery going round on the set of the bold and the beautiful, for those of you who don't know the bold and beautiful, it's like the fast and the furious, but without cars.

It's going to be difficult for viewers to tell the difference between the blow-up dolls and the actors themselves.

There are rumours in the sex doll community that if the sex dolls do a good enough job, they may be cast in speaking roles.

Right.

That's, I mean,

I've never seen the bold and the beautiful, but there's an etymological interest.

I know, Helen, you love, you love your words sort of to a professional level.

The bold and the beautiful is the phrase most diametrically opposed in the English language to the phrase Boris Johnson's cabinet.

So there's a bit of an item of linguistic interest for you.

I mean,

is this not an over-complicated solution to the problem?

I mean, what's wrong with a good visual metaphor these days?

A train going into a tunnel, a nodding donkey oil well, a tree bursting into blossom, or an industrial chimney being chained up, blindfolded, whipped, and forced to say yes, Mistress Margaret, like in that old biopic of David Cameron.

I once saw a very sexual montage on a BBC documentary about bread of people provocatively kneading dough

so they could do that.

Nobody needs dough, Helen.

You can only ever want dough.

Oh my god.

Very philosophical.

We haven't all suffered enough, Alice.

Do subscribe to Top Stories if you want to catch up on all the news from the last 17 and a half years.

Realms Unknown is the new podcast from the Bugle Stable, hosted by the wonderful Alice Fraser, celebrating the best of sci-fi and fantasy.

If you haven't heard it yet, here is a little snippet from episode one, where Alice is joined by Tom Neenan to discuss all things romantic and a new genre, apparently called lit RPG.

That brings us to a section I like to call Crossing the Streams, which is where fiction crosses over into real life.

And here it is the fact that BookTok, the book reading community on TikTok that has been profoundly influential in the last couple of years in driving book sales, particularly in the romantic genre, is tearing itself apart from the inside with

trying to decide whether art should be political or or not.

Apparently, some people say it's fiction.

It's about elves.

It's not political at all.

And other people have strong favorites in the political arena, particularly obviously in America.

Do you think your dragon banging books should be free of politics?

Or do you think that you should be in the middle of like an epic kind of linga scene on the deck of a starship?

and have somebody contemplating what political norms should be in place.

This goes back to my, you know, sadly, my bugbear, which is if you're writing, are you writing fiction, you are creating art.

The act of creating art is a political act, and everything that you write is in itself political.

And thinking that it's apolitical is an act of politics as well.

So I think that sadly, it just depends basically how much you turn up the dial, right?

But if you,

there are certain things that you realize, yeah, are political.

For instance, I was thinking this the other day about if you were

a fantasy writer of colour

and you wanted to, for instance, have a fantasy realm where unlike 99% of fantasy realms, everyone wasn't basically sort of Celtic, Caucasian kind of thing.

And you wanted, you know, people with darker skin or people who look more like you to occupy this world.

I'd say about, you know, 90% of readers of fantasy would consider just that act as political, as a political thing.

Whereas for you, that might just be like, no, I just want a fantasy realm where the main characters or, you know, the characters look more like I do.

So, so yeah, basically, I think every choice you make,

creating even a fantasy realm with zero connection, or at least what you think is zero connection to the real world, is a, is a political choice.

So, lean into it, guys.

It makes it better.

It makes it more fun if it is political.

And yeah, I'm sorry.

I don't think you can escape it either way.

So, you may as well just enjoy it.

Yeah, I mean, you can't pretend that, for example, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings weren't wildly political, like clarion calls to the heartland of

the definition of what Englishness could possibly be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Go with we're myth-making.

Myth-making is always political.

Exactly.

Let's not think too much about how basically, yeah, the good bit of Middle-earth looks like the Cotswolds and the bad bit is the hotter bit, where the people with yeah, where the darker-skinned creatures come from.

Let's, you know, let's, there are choices being made, and saying they're not political is you, you are showing, you're showing yourself, basically.

You're revealing yourself in that situation.

This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Devon's Discount Doomsday Device, the ultimate conversation starter.

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And I'm on tour in the UK.

I look up the dates on alicefraser.com.

If you want to come, it's A Passion for Passion, the show, which is based on A Passion for Passion, the book, which is also available online.

If you write my name and A Passion for Passion, it'll probably come up.

That's how the internet works.

I know that I'm a guest and thus I obviously am, but I am so excited for this.

I am,

the design, everything has got me very kind of, yeah, it's right up my street and I will be there.

I'm very excited for this tour and I can't wait to hear it.

It's going to be very good.

Oh, thank you so much.

I've had a few people say, I'm not really into romance novels.

Will I still enjoy the show?

And I say, yes, this show is for people who love romance and also for people who have no idea why people love romance.

That's everyone.

It's for everyone.

The show is for everyone.

It's not for everyone.

I'm not for everyone.

I'm an acquired taste.

But that, but it's a, yeah, it's a broad acquired taste, if that's a thing, if that isn't a contradiction in terms.

Free-flowing, top-of-your-head, improvised fantasy novels coming from a stream of consciousness near you.

Unplanned, unstructured, and literally just the first thing that comes out of my mouth.

An unplanned fantasy novel in which there's a wizard, I guess, and sure, he lives on a beach, and maybe there's also a big falcon.

If you want this kind of structured narrative in which things just basically happen one after the other and consequence doesn't lead to action, then I can recommend my free-flowing top of my head romance fiction fantasy novel coming out of my mouth wherever I can be found.

I mean, I've got to take issue with that.

Wizards can't live on a beach.

It doesn't work, does it?

A wizard on a beach isn't the sand, the sand interferes with the sort of dignity.

I think sand and dignity can't coexist, yeah, really.

It's why Australia is such an egalitarian nation because we all have to be on the beach

at some point.

It's why Jesus told you he was on the beach after he'd been on the beach, so you didn't see him on the beach.

He was like, Oh, by the way, that those footprints were mine, but you didn't see me because he knows deep down the dignity would have been gone.

I did, I just thought that was because the Bible couldn't afford to film on the beach, so they just did the theme.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you can see where they've cut corners with like a bit of like, oh, that happened off-screen kind of stuff.

It's smart.

It's smart.

I have a friend who writes on a very famous dragon show.

I won't name it because that would be breaching confidentiality, but think of the famous dragon show and it's that one.

And she said, like, a significant proportion of her job is just figuring out how to not have dragons because they cost like $100,000 a month.

So it's a lot of like,

my lord, there was a dragon yonder.

You just missed it.

Well, there you go.

I do hope you've enjoyed this sub-episode of The Bugle.

We will be back with a full bugle next week on the assumption that there's any news worth talking about.

So let's make that assumption.

If you want to come and see my live show, The Zoltgeist, the details of the remaining tour dates are on my website, andesoltsman.co.uk.

Also, details of how to order Alice Fraser's book, A Passion for Passion, and the live A Passion for Passion tour shows.

All those details are on the Bugle website, where, of course, you will be heading imminently to join our Bugle voluntary subscription scheme.

Or if you've already done that, you'll be heading there to just glory in the fact that you have helped keep our show going for 17 and a half years.

Thank you for listening, Bugles.

We'll be back next week.

Until then, a 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.