The Countdown Bugle

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4, 3, 2, 1 of The Bugle, the audio newspaper for a visual world that has been holding up a mirror to the world since 2007.

Sorry, not a mirror.

A potato.

It's been holding up a potato to the world and seeing whatever you want to see in the skin of a potato.

I'm Andy Zoltzman, it is the 15th of November 2024.

And I am joined, I'm delighted to say, by guests from all possible sides of the Atlantic, East and West.

I'm not counting north or south.

You can only have two sides of an ocean.

Joining me us from New York is Josh Gondelman.

Hello, hello, Josh.

Welcome.

Welcome to the bugle.

Thank you so much.

I'm so happy to be on the west side or something.

In America here, they're very biased, and they say I'm on the east coast, but here I'm on the west shore, I guess.

East Coast, West Shore.

We will talk about how you've been coping in the last 10 days

shortly.

Also, joining us, Tiffany Stevenson.

Hello, hello, Cliff.

How are you?

Hi, hi.

I'd like to say, and I don't know if you'll be able to see this if you watch it online, but I wrote my name in as, because this morning I hosted an awards ceremony, SQP Awards, just in case you're wondering, for veterinicals, because

it's, you know,

I'm a top awards host, and it was actually, they were so lovely.

And that was, so I've come in my very suited look, and I'm going to the opera later.

So I was like, that's a busy day.

I'm going to call myself Business Tiffany.

And then I misspelled it.

So it just says Buisness Tiffany.

Weasiness Tiffany.

Which sounds very New York.

Do we agree, Josh?

Oh, yeah.

Have to do some Buisness.

I'm closing deals over here.

Buisness.

Buisness time.

As I said, this is issue four, three, two, one.

I mean, it's the countdown bugle.

Those numbers have been at the end of so many classic countdowns, your hide and seek, your space rockets, your demolitions of power stations, you name it.

What a way to end a countdown.

Also...

As I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, it's an LL Cool J song from 1997 in which Mr.

Jay, whose mother was famously famously a very aggressive boxing coach, of course, advocates a soccer team lining up with four at the back, three deep-lying midfielders, and two attackers playing off a central target man up front.

He explores all the tactical pros and cons, L Cool J midfield solidity on the plus side, but perhaps at the cost of attacking fluidity, leaving the team overly dependent on the attacking three, fashioning something out of nothing, and the two fullbacks to provide attacking width.

It's to get all that into one single song, really, is one of his finest achievements.

Also, 4-3-2-1, one of of the all-time classic motorcycle pyramid formations, I'd say.

So, if you're starting out as

a 10-person motorcycle pyramid team, I don't think you can go far wrong with 4-3-2-1.

And Andy, I didn't know that LL Cool J, the J was short for Jordan Henderson.

It's very much

short.

Do you know what it stands for?

Genuinely, it's isn't it Ladies Love Cool James?

It is Ladies Love Cool James.

My brain is itchy because I know that song so so well and I'm like, it's not about a football formation.

I don't know.

I like tried to never be pedantic, but I'm like,

yes, so this is, well, the second bugle we've done

since the election.

The first bugle since I officially became champion of Taskmaster, having won

been seen off the competition in Series 18, and I'm going to cling to that title for, I'm going to say,

I want it to be 20 years.

I want to be number one.

I mean, it's quite hard to get on because they always use different people.

It's going to be really hard to retain it.

That's the thing with

Taskmaster.

But, you know, got to find a way.

Find a way.

I'm good with stats.

I can just hack into the system, I reckon.

First podcast since the first podcast, which was presumably just you and NATO screaming into a pillow for an hour?

It was, I don't know if it was screaming into a pillow or screaming into a void.

I mean, it's quite, you know, it felt like both, I think, at different

times.

I like to scream into a pillow, throw the pillow into the void.

That's kind of two voids, one stone.

Two voids.

Anyway, we are recording on the 15th of

November.

And to highlight, you know, this kind of growing sense that maybe humanity is not advancing, on this this day in 1965, Craig Breedlove set a land speed record and became the first person to drive a car at over 600 miles an hour, 600.601 miles an hour, specifically in the spirit of America.

And yet, when I drove my kids to school today, nowhere near that.

And, you know, yet we are, we are, what, what, almost 60 years, 59 years on from Breedlove hitting the 600 mile an hour barrier and always like crawling along at maybe like 10, 12 miles an hour max.

I mean, you know, what does that say about human progress?

I don't know.

Well, you're still eight miles under the speed limit, Andy, so it's 20 everywhere now.

It is, but that's

a very theoretical 20, given the traffic.

But think about the

traffic, the ticket you avoided by not driving 600 miles an hour through a school zone.

I guess that is, you know, I mean, every cloud, every cloud.

But just think, you know, if we were going 600 miles an hour in 1965, having been going, I don't know, what, maximum 10 miles an hour until the late 19th century,

unless you had a particularly exciting horse.

Or we're falling out of a very tall building.

We should be, you know, we should be, I don't know, 30,000 miles an hour by now, but we've gone backwards.

Thinking about 20s plenty, and it sounds like something a creepy old man would say.

Justify.

I'll tell you what,

I'm still feeling bad I didn't say two voids, one scream.

Um,

uh, on the 16th of November, 1871, the National Rifle Association of America received his charter from New York State.

That's going, uh, that's going well.

That is, you know, that's that's really panning out well for America, 153 years on.

And exactly 60 years ago ago tomorrow, the Arecibo message was sent.

It was an interstellar radio message containing information about humanity and Earth.

It was sent towards the global cluster Messier 13

on the 16th of November 1974.

And I just think, well, now 50, 50 years on, we need to recall that message and update them with all the shit that's happened since because they might be, you know, slightly, I don't know, under the impression that, you know, as a species, as a planet, we were making progress at the time, 1974.

I don't know.

Probably felt like a bit of a time of optimism relative to now, but we really need to update them on that before they turn up here and are very disappointed by what they find.

I think because they did such a stellar job updating the song We Didn't Start the Fire originally by Billy Joel, we should have Fallout Boy record the new RNC button message.

Top story this week, Donald Trump has still won the 2024 presidential election.

He's not disputed the result.

He's cooperating in a peaceful transfer of power.

He's not encouraging violent insurrection against his own country in the last few weeks of a presidency.

So I guess that is progress, Josh.

He's learned from his mistakes and he's respecting democracy more than he did four years ago.

I think that's a beautiful way to put it.

And I will say he's only called for a coup while he was still president.

He's never tried to get in.

He's just tried to stay in.

So we'll see how it goes four years from now.

But yeah, so far he hasn't, he hasn't

called for the public to carry out an insurrection against his own government yet.

In the words of Bart Simpson, don't have a coup.

It is really bad.

We're in the aftermath of the election, and by that I mean they're planning to abolish the Department of Education so we might literally be living after math exists in the United States.

Post-math climate.

Yeah, we're in the post-math, you're right, Tiff of Trump's election.

I mean, would that mean that all schools, they've just like backed, just get rid of education completely and take us back to, you know, sort of glorious Halcyon days, you know, when, yeah, so we in Britain, we know, of course, that, you know, children make an extremely enthusiastic workforce.

That's what we built our empire on, essentially.

So, um, I mean, maybe this is, this is the future for America.

Just get rid of the Department of Education, close all the schools and

get the kids, get the kids working.

I mean, we're going to be deregulating.

Well, there will probably be schools, but maybe we'll turn them into factories and kids will be allowed to smoke cigarettes with him.

I think that's the direction we're heading.

It feels really earn your education.

It feels really bad.

And I didn't expect the bad news to have started already, right?

Like the bad news, first bad news, he's going to be president again.

I don't like that.

But then I thought we'd have like a couple months off before new bad news.

And he's already started naming

cabinet member appointees, right?

He started staffing his government.

And so there's just bad news all the time.

And he's not even president yet, which is like if you walked into a restaurant and then someone else ordered for you, and then before the appetizers arrived, you started puking.

Like, how could it happen so quickly?

Well, after the 2016 election, he hadn't named a single cabinet official, right?

Like, for a week.

Like,

now.

Well, he, I think in 2016, he was kind of like, fucking what?

Who's president?

And now he's like, ah, president, as I should always have been and shall always be.

The cabinet pick so far, it's like a real who's who of guys who could credibly say, I'll see you in hell.

And just sound like they're actually making plans to meet up later, like kind of a cheerful, like, this is where we're going to be.

That's where the after party is.

And in particular, I mean, obviously, Elon Musk has got a lot of the headlines, could be one of the heads of the new Department of Government Efficiency,

which I think is actually going to be officially renamed as just Slash and Burn

Sacksville, USA.

Sorry, can we call the naming cabinet officials its proper title, which is the 2024 Ho Draft.

If we're doing rap songs, we have to update it from Warren G's 94 Ho Draft.

It's been 30 years.

It's time.

Ladies and gentlemen, pimps, players, and hustlers, welcome to the 2024 Ho Draft.

I feel like that is kind of Trump's, that's his Mi You.

Yeah, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-heading the Department of Government Efficiency.

And I think that's actually that one I get because Elon Musk is an efficient guy.

Like his company makes electric cars that seem to burst into flames as quickly and flamboyantly as if they were full of gasoline.

So you've got to hand it to him there.

He's an efficient man.

Yeah, he's technically eradicated the need for a driver by having the car crash itself.

He's very efficient.

That's that's they're probably the two pick.

I think probably um

Musk and maybe it was the defence minister or the defence defence secretary Pete Secretary.

Yeah, were the two picks that I actually went, oh, those are kind of playing to the smart ones playing to his base, I guess, because then they've never worked in government before.

So I think for people who voted for Trump, they were like, they don't seem like part of the establishment, part of the elite.

They've come in

with absolutely no relevant experience, which is which is really key in uh in modern politics i mean pete hegseth um

uh who is a fox news co-host because nothing prepares you for the life and death decisions you need to make as defense secretary quite like um gobbing off into an echo chamber with no repercussions i mean there is no better work experience for running a department within a trillion dollar budget and three million uh staff than dispensing superficial gyberry from a brightly lit studio.

I can't think of a more appropriate appointment.

Can you?

This is what I'm kind kind of optimistic about, right?

Because Trump named Pete Hegseth nominated him for Secretary of Defense.

And he has previously said in his capacity as Fox News analyst, he used to, you know, previously served in the army, but in his capacity as Fox News

bloviator, he's previously said he doesn't think women have any place in combat.

And I'm going to be optimistic and say that makes him 50% of the way to being a total pacifist.

We just need to convince him that men also don't have a place in combat.

And maybe we'll get this peaceful regime that people keep hallucinating is going to happen.

His glass is half anti-war.

He's also a defender of Guantanamo, isn't he?

And as we know from Dick Cheney, the U.S.

does not torture, therefore, anything the U.S.

does cannot be deemed as torture, including whatever that rap was that Kid Rock performed at the Republican rally.

He also said,

and

I'm going to give him a little bit of of credit here and assume that he was joking, but he said, germs are not a real thing.

I can't see them.

Therefore, they're not real.

And this was when he admitted on

a TV show that

he clearly hadn't washed his hands in 10 years.

And

so he said, and let's just say, I mean, he's a Princeton and Harvard educated combat veteran.

Let's hope that he was.

was joking because if he thinks that things you can't see are not real from a military strategy point of view, that's concerning for me.

I mean, that is basically failing to embrace almost every development in military technology of at least the last 500 years plus, possibly of thousands, just assuming if you can't see it, that it's yeah, get ready.

I think that leaves America vulnerable.

Is he religious?

Get ready for news for him about God.

Get ready for some headlines about hundreds of soldiers losing their lives in the ill-fated peekaboo offensive.

There's also Doug Collins in the mix, which is veteran affairs, which I mistook as veterinary affairs.

And I thought, let's be honest, if any government needs a Department of Veterinary Affairs with all the dead animals strewn across this campaign, I think a dead dog, a cat, some chickens, a bear.

A whale.

Bring in.

RFK Jr.

feels pretty qualified.

Dead animals seem to turn up wherever he is.

Robert F.

Kennedy, and the F does stand for that, is renowned for being skeptical of not just vaccines, but essentially skeptical of medical science and all facts.

The executive director of the American Public Health Association, George Benjamin,

said that, you know, to point out that Kennedy has no health background.

I mean, And again, I don't think that's a problem.

It's one of those things you've either got or you haven't.

You cannot learn medical science.

It's either in you

or it's not in you.

It's like RIS.

And George Benjamin added, he's not competent by training, management skills, temperament, or trust to have this job.

But apart from those minor quibbles, then it just comes down to the pure traditional prejudice that someone with no grounding in healthcare is assumed to know less about healthcare than someone who is trained and experienced in it.

And it's that kind of hide-bound, traditionalist, expertise-worshiping thinking that has held America back for too long.

Classic deep sit mentality.

I did go the other way on this because I don't know if you know this,

but

RFK Jr., actually, his name, those initials actually stand for Are you kidding me, Jr.

He would be he's been adapting.

Kennedy has been adapting Trump's MAGA slogan, right?

Make America great again.

He's been saying Maha, make America healthy again.

But a more apt acronym would be Mama Mia for make America measles and influenza again.

I know he wants to remove fluoride from the water, and I think that's just so the Americans, so you, people like you, Josh, can get a chance at British teeth for a change because I know you're obsessed with our teeth, so I think that's what that's about.

I like, I like some of the intentions that he's announced, like, you know, lowering the cost of medicine for Americans and reducing the power of big pharma.

You know, these are ideas that I think are possibly worth discussing.

But there was also looking into the FDA and additives in food, which is important.

But I think that Fox News ripped the Obama administration apart when they tried to do that a decade ago.

They were like, let us decide our own salt, like Republicans.

It was just too salty for you.

It's all too salty.

There are other

appointments.

Tulsi Gabbard, the...

Putin and Bashir al-Assad fan lined up as director of national intelligence.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

I mean, I do think that basically basically there just should be, you know, a button that all news broadcasts can just press that just says, what could possibly go wrong with that after any announcement of a Trump appointment?

Also, John Wilkes Booth has been appointed head of presidential security

and Kermit the Frog, Secretary of State for French Cookery.

So

exciting momentum and Matt Gates as Attorney General.

This is good.

This is another good one.

You know what?

I've been too, I've been on short selling my optimism on this i've been underselling it because i love this this is an efficiency measure this is cost counting because as an attorney gates will be able to represent himself in court when the next round of sex crimes charges are brought against him by him as attorney general so this is really we're closing the loop on this i love that move

uh he uh resigned from the house of representatives in a clever move because he was being investigated by the house ethics committee um into its allegations of sexual misconduct illicit drug use and misuse of campaign funds.

But the ethics committee can only investigate members of the House of Representatives.

So, by making him no longer a member, he becomes entirely innocent, which is the kind of lateral thinking that you need from your top lawyers.

This is incredible because Trump's, the Supreme Court has ruled that Trump, as president, is immune from prosecution.

And now Matt Gates, getting out of the House, is immune to prosecution.

So, basically, Republican politicians are immune from prosecution, is what it seems like.

That's going to be Trump's first act, isn't it?

He's going to do what I do all the way through Christmas dinner and pardon myself.

He'll be pardoning himself.

I beg your pardon.

Excuse me, George, for being so rude.

It was not me.

It was my racketeering, influencing, payment of hush money, and stealing of classified documents food.

I also want to give...

a shout out to Mike Huckabee.

He's an evangelical Christian.

Mike Huckabee has been nominated as the ambassador to Israel because Donald Trump said, I see your genocide and I raise you the apocalypse.

Oh, Tom Homan.

I mean, it's the whole draft and we didn't mention

the former director of ICE.

So he's in on, he's the border czar, is he?

Yeah.

Scary.

And then, Andy, I get a few more.

You had a list of some of the kind of smaller departments.

Elmer's Glue is set to privatize the Department of Horse Welfare and Well-being.

Knives have been left in charge of the Department of Fingertips, and Piss has been made Secretary of Toilet Seats.

Just on note on Matt Gates, the New York Times wrote this about him.

Gates is not, by any normal standards, even a tiny bit qualified to be attorney general.

Is that I'm confused?

Is he the one that looks like grown-up Eddie Munster?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, he is okay.

Big forehead, big, high forehead, cathedral forehead, lots of filler,

spooky jaw.

Haunted.

Haunted jaw.

Appeared to have a haunted jaw, sir.

So the New York Times continued.

He practiced law only for about two years before then running for office, in which he handled small-time civil matters.

including suing an old woman for money she owed to Gates's father's care company.

So

that's all the experience you need for being attorney general.

He was described by a conservative writer, so from the same end of the political spectrum, Ben Dominic, as, and I quote, this is a series of quotes.

Let me be clear, Matt Gates is a sex-trafficking, drug-addicted piece of shit.

The man has less principles.

Should be fewer, but we'll let him off.

Than your average fentanyl-addicted hobo.

He is a walking genital, warts included as a bonus.

The man is absolutely vile.

There are pools of vomit with more to offer the earth than this STD-riddle testament to the failure of fallen masculinity.

And he's a sex-trafficking, drug-cattle, lying-philandering piece of shit.

That's from his own side is saying that.

That sounds like it's quoted directly from the thick of it, right?

This is how they all talked about Trump, too.

It's important to remember, until they had their enemies to lovers rom-com arc.

And now they're all like, oh, yeah, he's a walking genital.

And I don't think we should shame people for having warcs on their genitals anymore.

That's just more genital to love.

Trump has today launched a lot of lawsuits against media companies and publishers who've not been very nice to him over the years.

The type of media companies and the news websites that have criticized him for things like the things he's said and done, which I think is harsh

and clearly qualifies them as enemies within or whatever you want to call them if you want to sound like you're workshopping quite a sinister scene in a wartime drama.

And

Jack Smith, the special counsel who's been leading the federal criminal cases against Trump, he is

expected to leave the Justice Department before Trump comes into office,

basically I guess to avoid being sacked

as soon as he does.

So he'll leave without either of the criminal prosecutions going to trial over alleged improper hoarding of classified documents and the attempt to interfere in the 2020 election outcome.

And I guess this is an important lesson to American children, Josh, that

no one in America is above the law apart from the people who can basically switch the law off when it suits them.

And I don't know if you can, can you be above something

if you just cancel it completely?

I don't know.

We've invented the concept of beneath the law.

And

I think that we don't give Trump enough credit for doing so much crime that he's just essentially tunneled through the earth's core and come out the other side clean.

He's Shawshanked himself in reverse.

Stayed up.

The injustice department.

Am I right, guys?

Am I right?

Smith would obviously have been fired by Trump.

He pulled like a preemptive, you can't fire me, I quit.

So his hands are tied, which actually could be probably a literal thing that Donald Trump does to him, hogtie him, and throw him out on the street now that the Supreme Court has made crime legal.

If enough Americans have decided they like your stance on tariffs because they don't understand what tariffs are

uh

the whole issue of presidential immunity um

which um trump the uh convicted felon serial bankrupt pro-celebrity misogynist and smug facial look monthly's undisputed man of the millennium basically just waggling presidential immunity right in the judicial system's quivering face is this another example of the founding daddies or fathers, depending on how familiar you are with them, when they hacked out their constitution back in those stroppy days in the late 18th century, they just failed to adequately take into account the possibility that America would one day be so democratically diseased that it would elect a president who needed immunity from prosecution 258366.

I mean, yes, they all knew like 15 guys and they were all like, ah, we trust James.

They couldn't imagine a country so big that Donald Trump would exist and that they wouldn't be friends with him.

So, there we go.

Well, that's what, 10 days.

So, on the plus side, every minute that passes is a minute closer to Trump no longer being president.

On the minus side, there's still a lot of minutes to go.

I mean, it's dropped below the 2.2 million minutes mark now, but that's still quite a lot.

On also on the minus side, I'll probably kick the Constitution in the Naggers until it lets him have a third term.

So, we might be looking nearer

for four million minutes.

Or the world could end.

Well, there we go.

Every Every cloud has a slightly darker cloud.

Yeah, no one's ever really tried to see the silver lining on a mushroom cloud before, but I think this is it.

Probably, ironically, the type of cloud that is most likely to have some silver lines.

Because yes, we get heavy metals inside there.

I'm just imagining Charlie Brown

plodding along with a mushroom cloud above his head saying, Good grief.

That should be the slogan for this time period.

Yes, good grief.

Good grief.

I'm picturing

Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

trying to heal himself of disease by giving his internal organs a silver lining, a lining of colloidial silver.

On the subject of the end of the world, environment news now and, well, COP29, the latest annual conference to discuss key environmental policies that will then be discussed at another conference in 12 months' time.

Before, if all goes well being discussed uh in 24 months time at a conference uh has begun in baku in in and

in oil oil rich why are those words there azerbaijan with the world's thermometers in record-breaking form again this year really on a roll this millennium uh the thermometers uh the race to find long-term solutions to climate change is hotting up um which isn't helping and the need to find ways of seeming to do things that will help whilst not actually doing very much at all that will have a genuine impact that need is greater than ever before, hence COP being hosted in Azerbaijan.

A controversial host as its economy is so dependent on making sure those fossils do not die in vain and has announced plans to expand gas production by 30% over the next 10 years, which isn't quite the same as leading the way on environmentally beneficial solutions to global energy demands.

But, you know, that's just nitpicking.

The president of Azerbaijan, Ilhan Aliyev,

did not give the conference the greener-than-green image it might have been looking for by at the start of the conference describing oil and gas as a gift of God.

Now,

God moves in mysterious ways.

We know that.

That's one of his

trademarks.

That's what makes him so hard to pin down for interviews.

Always wriggling off the hook, just when you think you've got him.

But that would seem to be an odd gift, would it not?

Given that he'd already gifted us solar power, wind power, and tidal power,

to then gift us something that takes millions of years to form and then needs really weird equipment to dig it out from under the ground.

That seems an unnecessary question, does it not?

Also implies that he is grateful to the Lord for killing all those dinosaurs.

I like how he said it basically, the president said it.

He criticized Western fake news and said, nations should not be blamed for having big naturals.

Sorry, big natural resources, but same, same.

It's

then with the planning to expand gas production by up to a third over the next decade.

And I'm like, just hang around me after Christmas dinner.

I can help you out with that.

I would be a great natural resource.

The chief executive of

Azbajan's COP2019 was also filmed Promoting Fossil Fuel Deals, which again chimes with the goal of reducing carbon dependence for the world in the same way that Metabolic by Slipknot, the American heavy metal band, chimes with a lullaby for a sleepy baby, or in the same way that an unanesthetized chainsaw appendectomy chimes with a session of snooker.

It jarred, I think, is what I'm trying to say.

The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described continued expansion of fossil fuel use as absurd.

And I mean, I do worry about Guterres.

Basically, he has to deal with

the environment.

He has to deal with the Middle East.

He has to deal with Ukraine.

He has to deal with the continued failures of humanity, of politics, of global cooperation.

And his face has now become not so much a human face and more a piece of installation art entitled The Inevitable Futility of Existence.

And I just, I just want to see, I don't know if there's anything that could make him smile now after he's done that job for so long.

That's my biggest worry in the world, is Antonio Guterres' face.

He said you can't double down, right?

We shouldn't double down on fossil fuels, but that's easier said than done, right?

We've developed this dependence, it's hard to break ourselves of it.

There's so much profit to be had still, and it's just that old saying goes, right?

Once you go frack, you never go back.

And he's really clinging, the president of Azerbaijan is really clinging to fossil fuels.

But I...

On a personal level, I can't blame him, right?

Because you used to look ridiculous not having fossil fuels.

They used to be so in.

He's like a nearly 40-year-old stand-up comedian living in Brooklyn who won't stop wearing skinny jeans despite them having been out of fashion for years and being environmentally catastrophic, to keep purchasing them the way they do.

And that's sorry, somebody snuck into my notebook and wrote that.

That is, it's wrong.

That's actually cool.

You can wear whatever jeans you want.

I'm still cool.

I've always been.

I like, I like Once You Go Frack, You Never Go Back.

Shale for Sale is also

a nice one.

Andy could probably do an entire pun run based on fossil fuels.

Yeah,

I reckon I probably could, but I've been clean for quite a while now.

I was at a friend's birthday party.

This is aside last weekend, and someone had given him his dad a sticker that said no puns to remind him not to make puns at his son's surprise 40th birthday party.

That should have said, I'm no pun at parties.

This is slippery slope.

Well, what's the point of COP29 if the three sort of biggest polluters in terms of countries aren't present at this

uh I guess that the the key is that uh Tiff that you've got to keep having these conferences every single year um because if you if you miss a year um the world will end um so that's you know the the best thing you can do for the environment is uh is is to keep having those those conferences also if you skip a year they won't budget it for the next year and then you just lose it lose the funding for your lobster tail and fly-by-private jet event.

It is kind of a real reusable tote bag situation, right?

Where you do one of these conferences and you go, all right, pretty good.

And then by the time we've done so many of them, you're like, these things are really starting to pile up.

And

don't seem to be making the difference we've intended.

Yeah, 29 is just feels like an awful lot of conferences now.

So given that we're still.

If the conference was a girl, Leonardo DiCaprio would have already stopped dating that

calendar news now.

And well, there's been a few articles, Tiff, this week, about the

Pirelli calendar.

Getting back to, well, I mean,

basics, I'm not sure,

it's gone a bit sort of old school in terms of

the level of and style of

nudity involved.

Yes, I mean that the Pirelli calendar for me, I mean, I always found it very, very confusing.

As a teenage fan of tyres, it was one of the most baffling publications

I've ever come across and haunted me through my impressionable.

Oh, look at the tread on that one.

Yes, bring us up to date with

the latest excitement.

Well, I could, for anyone listening that doesn't know about the Pirelli calendar, I've got someone to decipher it for you.

So I've got Scottish

boyfriend explains a hang.

Well, now Scottish husband.

So Scottish husband explains a hang.

Here's the hang about Pirelli calendar.

It's a calendar aye, but no like the one you buy your grand for Christmas with wee kittens in baskets that you got for a pound at the indoor market.

No, this is a calendar for folk who didn't actually need to ken what day it is because they've got nay days till payday countdowns today.

Instead, they get to look at beautiful people standing on cliffs or floating in an infinity pool somewhere sunny while the rest of us are stuck freezing in line at Aldi trying to remember if we've hit the lucky meter emergency credit.

But here's the kicker, right?

The calendar isn't even for us, right?

You can't he just walk into WH Smith and pick one up.

Nah, it's made exclusively for Pirelli's rich pals, big CEOs, maybe a couple of oil barons, folk who probably have a private private island for each day of the week.

And while the world gets colder, the rich get warmer.

They get to jet models and photographers to exotic places, probably spending the GDP of a small country just to capture the essence of art.

And didn't he even start me on the hypocrisy?

Page 3 gets banned in 2015, rightly so, because we decided we didn't need to see semi-naked folks staring out from the breakfast table.

But the Pirelli calendar, it's high art.

I write.

Same hang, different tax bracket.

So here we are, dream of a better life through pictures we're not even allowed to see.

Thanks, Pirelli, but I'll stick to my freebie from the Chinese takeaway.

Wow.

See, it appears it's a class issue, Andy.

Right.

But

I was sort of wondering, like, what kind of things would be sexy to have in the Pirelli calendar?

Things that we would find truly sexy, you know, like for January, like a picture of a signed copy of the Paris Agreement.

That would be quite nice

or maybe

a classic hottie from history like florence nightingale uh in february you know she's one of your faves or this this is the most important one i think the inventor of the condom Charles Goodyear, he's sexy.

He invented the condom.

In fact, why is it a Pirelli calendar at all when another tire man helped make safe sex available for all?

That beats someone like lying over a rock like a mollusk.

Like, let's see Charlie with a raging boner and a prophylactic in his hand.

That's an even better double dip.

Tires and

condoms.

That's even better than the Michelin people doing tires and restaurants.

Oh, I forget.

They do get about, don't they?

It's weird.

What a weird combination of things.

It also makes you wonder what it is about tires that obviously makes these companies think there must be more to life than this and branch out.

Has the Michelin cut is a genuine question.

Was it originally a guide for restaurants you would stop at on the road?

That's a I don't know.

I don't know.

Like a like a list of little chefs.

It just started as a list of little chefs and Texaco garages

that you could stop off.

You could start off in and everyone would be like, well,

this is one star.

And they were like, no, you can't give one star.

A star is what we give to something that's really good.

So just list it.

And then it went up from there.

So basically, it just started as sausage and beans by the roadside and ended up with

a tiny little rabbit fetus that has been massaged over 14 months by

a Trappist monk before being served in a reduction in its own despair and costing £40,000 for the dish.

I mean, that's, I guess, the progress of

food.

Do you want the boring real answer?

Yeah, go on then.

So there weren't weren't enough cars on the road.

So the Mitchelling company were like, how do we get more people driving?

We put a load of restaurants that you need to drive to in a book.

So the stars aren't even for how good the food are.

Food is.

It's just for how far apart the restaurant is from where you are.

I could only assume.

I think the boring real answer could be a new podcast.

I think

the world needs more podcasts.

and this is once again as i as the whole episode has been brought to you by fossil fuels fossil fuels thank god those dinosaurs died

shale for sale

uh in other religion news the archbishop of canterbury uh the uh number one ranked anglican uh in the world has resigned uh following um an abuse scandal in the the church.

An independent review found that Justin Welby had failed to act on reports of abuse over several decades by a man who ran Christian camps.

The church covered up allegations, failed to investigate them despite having known about them from the early 80s and did not report them to the police.

In all, a massive, horrendous, cosmically hypocritical institutional failure to add to the catalogue of massive, horrendous, cosmically hypocritical institutional failures perpetrated by A, Christian institutions, and indeed no doubt institutions of other religions who with hindsight should maybe have cross-referred with the teachings of their

literal pin-up boy Messiah Jesus Christ if they were in doubt about stuff like this, because I think Jesus would came down pretty strongly against it.

And also B, by British institutions who've been having a bit of a bad run over the last few hundred years.

It's, I think, a unique resignation in the history of the Church of England at a time when its market share has been

dribbling away.

But the most interesting thing is who could be next?

And I've looked at the possible candidates.

And, you know, I think I've laid my cards on the table over the years on the bugle.

I'm not a practicing member of the Church of England.

I'm an even worse Christian than I am a Jew.

And that's.

You're not practicing because you've perfected Anglicanism.

But it's obviously a huge position in British public life.

And so it's important to see who could be next.

Some people have mentioned the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cotterell, but will he be prepared to move house at the age of 66?

That will be a big upheaval for at Yorkie York as he goes on social media.

He was rumoured to have been overheard saying, no sodding away, am I doing the M2 three times a fing week?

So that could be a deal snapper for the Archbishop of York.

Could it be a female Archbishop of Canterbury?

Some have suggested the Bishop of Gloucester, Rachel Trueeek.

She's said that she believes God is neither male nor female, which, if true, would be the only modern thing about God.

And that could be quite an exciting development, I think.

Also in the running, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mervis.

Experience of leading one of the big three Abrahamic franchises here in Britain.

But can he be tempted to transfer to traditional rivals, the Church of England, at the age of 68?

Could be his last chance for a big transfer and a new challenge, but...

he might be holding out for a crack at the papacy come on go yeah try his hand in europe uh is the transfer window still open, Andy?

I don't know when it closes for the season.

Yeah, well, it's just been reopened spontaneously.

The stained glass transfer window is indeed open.

Saint Augustine in the running, the original Archbishop of Canterbury, who, of course, famously died in 604 AD, but with generative AI now capable of effectively bringing back the dead, something, of course, that Christianity fans have a track record and for being quite in favour of.

A reboot for the conversion specialist and professional saint could be a good option for the beleaguered C of E.

And then you've got Taylor Swift.

I mean, if there's ever going to be a female Archbishop of Canterbury, it would surely have to be someone like Swift.

I mean, the Church of England loves songs.

Swift loves songs.

And of course, her famous We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together song was rightly interpreted as her laying down her opposition to the Anglican and Catholic churches, setting aside their 500-year-old differences and reuniting.

Social media.

She's going to win the Grammy for Best Schism this year.

Schism of the year, Taylor slipped.

She's come down very much on the side of Henry VIII on that one.

Then you've got Prince Andrew, formerly second in line to the throne, who's dropped down the rankings now, eighth in line, terribly out of form, Prince Andrew, desperately needing a new public role to repair his own reputational damage.

What a redemption arc that could be for Andrew.

And

so, I mean, he'd fit right in based on what Welby's had to resign for.

Gary Lineker is

been plummeting in

the odds with the bookmakers.

He stepped down as host of the BBC's flagship football highlight show match of the day this week.

Coincidence?

There's no such thing as coincidence, you f ⁇ ing buffoons.

It's going to be Lineker all day long.

And Elon Muzzle, who's a clone of Elon Musk, the 12th of the Elon Musk clones, of course, the 11th Elon Musk has, of course, been the most successful so far.

But another Elon Musk clone running one of the world's

leading religions, I think that could be good for the brand.

Well, that brings us to the end of

this week's bugle.

What is it now?

I'll try and work it out for the top of my head.

It's only about what, another 170 odd bugles until the end of Trump's next second term in office, 170 and maybe 200 max.

I don't know.

So it's not that many, not that many, but we will try and keep going.

Keep going.

And we might even launch a new series.

Maybe we'll, we'll.

When did we last have a new season?

We had the season that lasted three seconds.

What's it?

I think we're in season six now, aren't we?

We are in season six.

It's, I don't know, 50 odd episodes old.

And

the numbers don't make sense anymore.

So say what you like.

I mean, you need how many seasons is syndication?

Right.

That's right.

That's a good question.

Community, they famously wanted six seasons in a movie.

So after this season ends, the bugle of the movie is the next logical step.

Yeah.

Well, so anyway, we will

definitely keep going for at least 180 more episodes, buglers.

So strap in.

Josh,

thanks for joining us.

Well, I know it's a very difficult time for

you and

your entire nation.

Anything screaming about this to you or to whoever was listening.

So thank you for taking me out of circulation with the other people in my life for an hour.

Anything to plug?

Yeah, I do a newsletter called That's Marvelous every Monday, joshgondelman.substack.com.

It's free and it has all my tour dates.

I'm doing after right after Thanksgiving, I'm doing a little run of shows with Ted Leo and Amy Mann and Paul F.

Tompkins and Telly McKay, Nellie Mackay, around kind of the Northeast.

They're Ted and Amy's Christmas shows.

I have a stand-up special called People Pleaser That's Out, and then another one, hopefully, coming early, early next year, called that will be called Positive Reinforcement.

So, hopefully, stand by, follow, subscribe to the newsletter for all your Josh Gondelman needs.

Yes, I would say also, I have a mailing list on my website, which hasn't been updated since Brexit, but I will get around to it.

Um, I am trying to like get people on the mailing list because I, you know, it seems that social media platforms are like dying and reappearing, resurrecting and moving around.

So, um, so yeah, if you join my mailing list there, I'm doing a show on the 30th of no, the 29th of

the 30th of December.

It would be good if I knew in Edinburgh.

Anyway, I'm doing husband material.

It's right in the festive gooch between the walls of Christmas and the asshole of New Year.

So if you want to come out during that time period,

come

see me there.

And also, I have some tour dates next year.

I have a special coming out, mother which was my show about being a stepmom and reproductive rights and cats which

you know um but if you want to watch that and see why all of those things are great um you know you can that's coming out so uh just check my instagram and stuff like that for announcements and all of that business yes

My tour, the Zoltgeist, is underway.

Thanks to everyone who's come to see it so far.

And book tickets for the rest of the shows.

It runs sort of mostly weekends until sort of April next year we're adding a few extra dates as well so buy your tickets at andysultsman.co.uk

until next time at Buglers goodbye also if you want to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to help keep this show free flourishing and independent go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button and you will also get access to the global exclusive monthly ask Andy show we're recording the latest installment in just a couple of days time so thank you for all those who've already supported this podcast.

And if you want to join them, then you too can be one of the great heroes of the modern universe.

Until next week, 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.