The Most American Thing in History...

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and a belated welcome to issue 4318 of the world's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world with me, Andy Zoltzmann, currently in Islamabad, capital city of Pakistan.

And if you don't believe me, listen to this.

The distinctive sound of a hotel room in Islamabad, Pakistan.

There, I think I've proved that

good and proper.

I've been sent to Pakistan on a fact-finding mission by the BBC, and I found a fact that cricket is awesome.

One more of the three test matches to go.

And then I'm back in the UK to find out another fact.

How many of you buglers are coming to see my tour show beginning on the 1st of November?

Dates at Andy'solts and Code.uk.

I've got the plug-in right at the the start.

I thought I would do that.

Today, we set what I believe will be a podcaster-y first.

There may have been previous podcasts featuring three people in, irrespectively, Islamabad, Tokyo, and Glasgow.

But I very much doubt there will ever have been a podcast featuring three people in those places who are specifically me, Alice Fraser, and Josie Long.

So this is truly a moment.

of history.

Hello to both of you.

It's a world first.

Yeah.

I mean, this is...

Can you feel the history in the air, Josie?

I can feel it.

I'm enjoying making it, and I hope that this is the only way the three of us ever come together again.

The best place to meet, I find.

I've had most of my social interactions on recording devices for about 17 years now.

Almost exactly 17 years, in fact.

So I think we had our 17th birthday last week, the bugle.

Alice,

you are in Japan.

How's that going for you and Japan?

I mean, it's going really well for both of us.

Not so well for our bugle recording, which was actually scheduled yesterday, which I missed, and then rescheduled for today,

thereby having to cancel my daughter's third birthday dinner.

So I'm both a bad co-worker and a bad parent.

We are recording on the 22nd of October, 2024.

We were due to record on the 21st of October until aforementioned complications delayed the recording.

Had we been recording on the 21st of October, it would have been the 145th anniversary of Thomas Edison applying for a patent for his design for an incandescent light bulb.

This was arguably one of the most important moments in human history.

It sparked a huge increase in the rate of human brilliant ideas, facilitating, as it did, the light bulb moment, prior to which the quickest a human could have an idea was the time it took to safely light a fairly large candle, which could be several seconds, slowing down the train of thought, or of course before the early 19th century the donkey cart of thought.

Since Edison quite literally, literally lit up the

alleys of the world with his light bulb, we've raced ahead with brilliant idea after brilliant idea, whereas before it took us basically about 4,000 years to move from learning how to point with the stick to developing the cravat.

So well done Edison for accelerating human progress.

I think today is actually the anniversary of him going back to the patent office and saying, have you done it yet?

And then saying, no, you only dropped it in yesterday.

It's not bad.

It's still a big anniversary.

Yeah, huge.

I've already said, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I've shamed my family.

I've shamed my nation.

Your nation is very good at shaming itself, Alice.

Doesn't need any extra help.

We taught you well.

On the 24th of October,

in 1648, the Peace of Westphalia was signed, marking the end of both the 30 Years' War and the 80 Years' War.

People really knew how to multitask in those days, to be fair.

I mean, that's real commitment to have two wars overlapping by 30 years.

Also, if you've got an 80 Years' War going on, do you really want to schedule your 30 Years' War up against the last 30 years of the 80 Years' War?

Well, yeah, I mean, viewership numbers can only stretch so far.

People obviously loved a war in the the early 17th century.

But anyway, luckily, since the peace of Westphalia, there's never been another war.

So we've learnt our lessons.

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

This week, we have a special retro travel section as people are getting more and more into eco-friendly, nostalgia-fueled holiday making.

We tell you how to recruit a full crew to row your ancient Greek tri-reim around the world without breaking the bank.

We give you donkey comfort tips for the 21st century backside, how to avoid posterial pain when into the third month of your transcontinental shuffle, and how to keep busy and entertained whilst living in a cave.

What to do once the possibilities of bison drawing have been fully explored.

Also in the bin, we have a celebrity injuries section.

More and more celebrity influencers are showing off their injuries to their followers on pseudo-social media.

We tell you the latest fashionable new injuries you might like to copy from celebrities.

The broken forearm sustained karate chopping and electricity pylon.

Show you're prepared to get injured whilst making a pointless point about something to do with climate.

Branch scrafing, how to do pull-ups in the woods to be at one with nature whilst also keeping a ripped physique and ensure you have the marks on your hands to show off to your friends and followers.

Plus, more complex injuries such as the leading muscular injury influencer YouTube Auchi Babauchi has recently suffered, including the quadratic tersey ep ablasion, the predominal causal glutex rebuffering, and of course his well-known upper groinal lumbar insprainment.

That section is in the bin.

Top story this week.

What's that sound you can hear, buglers?

That is the sound of America choking on its own political vomit, which, of course, has been made more likely by the fact that it's been feasting on its own political vomit for decades now and never chews things over properly.

Just a couple of weeks ago.

Ah, reflux, redux.

Just a couple of weeks to go now until America chooses between, on the one hand, full self-immolation, complete resignation as a vaguely serious intenimal nation, and making Margaret Atwood think I might have underwritten it, if anything.

And on the other hand, not doing those things.

It's an awkward time of the four-year political cycle, isn't it?

When

you basically just have to sit back and let America be America and prepare for whatever shitstorm emerges.

How have you been enjoying the election?

It's definitely gone from handmaid's tale to hand mother's tale to hand crone's tale, Andy.

It is full tale all the way.

um

and it's uh yeah it feels it's it's simultaneously exciting and boring it's it's it's it's it's terrifyingly in in a in a boring way upsettingly worrying in a way that has sort of lost all of its savour there's no there's no fun in the depression anymore andy it's just it's really wearing me down it's kind of shroding a shitstorm i guess um josie what have uh i know you've uh you are our american politics correspondent i feel like this election feels like a remake of twenty sixteen

where they were like, Well, we know that Donald Trump really got people's attention, so we'll bring him back, but we're not going to bring back Hillary we'll just do the same, but it'll be weirder and worse and hopefully people won't realize that the last one was so recent.

They'll just be like, Oh, this is the canon version of it.

And it just feels like I didn't imagine that Donald Trump could be weirder and worse and yet here we are, like my most thrilling time him just stopping an event he was doing to put on his iPod yeah I mean and we restarted the bugle the bugle relaunched just before Trump was elected in

2016 and I mean the fact that we're back I feel responsible well I do feel quite responsible actually because we'd been off air for about a year beforehand and

into that gap came Brexit and Trump.

So I feel that's a responsibility I have to bear with me every day.

I'll tell you something new that's happened, which is Kamala Harris dared to appear on Fox News.

It was really like new in a retro way, like the olden days, politicians unafraid to speak across political barriers.

I mean, not since Al Gore went and personally addressed the concerns of a factory farmer have we seen such political courage.

Like, you know, when anti-when Abraham Lincoln went to talk to the anti-Big Tall Hat Brigade

or when George Washington went to Dirtyton to allay their fears that his name would oblige him to wash their pleasingly dirty town.

It's just such a depressing indictment of the modern news landscape that politician goes on news is news.

Well, I guess that's because Fox News is not news.

So

I don't know where the self-eating snake that is modern news media are coming from.

It's not news, but nor is it Fox News.

It's not the news of foxes.

Fox News, if you've not heard of it, is so called because it feasts on absolute rubbish.

it makes a god-awful noise, it shits everywhere and leaves an atrocious stench wherever it goes.

I read a headline that said that it's grievance theatre.

It wasn't an interview, and when you try and watch it, it's so adversarial, it is pointless.

You know, like the things that the guy was coming out of, he was just like shouting about immigration and then shouting about

shouting transphobic talking to you.

Oh, sorry, that's just notes that I'd written on the Labour Party conference.

What I was disappointed was when I looked at what we were covering this week that there was no other way for me to be rude about Kier Starmer.

So I thought I'd better get in somehow.

I don't know how, but we're getting.

Well, you've done well.

Yeah.

You've bent that one in from outside the Fox.

It's Greedlin's Theatre.

Yeah.

Greenfield's Theatre is one of the venues on my forthcoming UK tour, in fact, so I could buy your tickets.

So essentially, it seemed to be Harris's attempt to reach out via Fox, which is essentially

Trump's personal publicity channel, to voters who might theoretically wake up from their spiritual coma in time to vote for her on the 5th of November.

A date when, of course, there is a bit of a tradition of people trying to destroy democracy.

So I think that date could play into

Trump's hands.

I mean, but it's hard for Harris, I think, to overcome Trump, particularly because Trump has a new backer this week.

And that is God, apparently.

Trump has claimed that God is specifically the hand of God.

is

leading him.

I mean,

that's one of his more outlandish claims, I think, for me, to claim that God...

I mean, this is the man who's clocked up over 30,000 lies in his first term in office at a rate of more than 2.5 bull sheets per working hour at the official internationally accepted term.

But I mean, God has yet to confirm or deny Trump's claim.

And it was a day or two ago that he made this.

I mean, it seems slightly unlikely, doesn't it?

But I mean, God is out of form, to be fair.

I feel like it's easy to make fun of Trump for this kind of unhinged behavior or his bizarre statements or his weird personal style.

But I feel like whenever I do, I'm falling into a trap that he's laid.

Like, because he's treating politics as WWE wrestling.

It does not matter to your fans if you're a heel or a face as long as you are continually entertaining, continually like getting the camera on you.

And to his fans, his job is to provoke whoever they think are their shared enemies, whatever it is, the woke or the elite or the united spirits of all ex-wives.

His policies are so secondary to that goal that they might as well be non-existent.

And you can tell that because they're basically non-existent where they're not actively inimical to the basic well-being of his fan base and i i think that's because for politically disenfranchised people like federal politics feels like it's far off in the distance and doesn't have any real and direct impact on their day-to-day benefit you know any benefits or negative impacts feel like they're sort of diffuse trickle-down fountain of feces

stuff that sort of is just part and parcel of living in America.

And you can tell that by the fact that both parties blame each other's previous policies for all bad social outcomes and take credit for everything good that happens by pointing to their own policies.

And no one can fact check it because it's all happening so far above day-to-day concerns, it might as well be bird gossip.

I enjoyed very much,

and I enjoyed, there's always, yeah, there's a sick sadness to any enjoyment that comes from anything coming out of this election.

But I did enjoy very much Donald Trump just stopping an event that was geared towards the public asking him questions so that he could just put on his playlist and saying, who wants to hear questions?

Just play my playlist.

I don't want to answer any questions.

And the vibes he was bringing were so my six-year-old on a weekday dinner that when the playlist came on, I was like, it's going to be Frozen 2, songs from Frozen 2, the empirically worst frozen film.

And then when they interviewed people afterwards, somebody said, I felt like I was just sitting in a room with him.

I was like, you were.

That's all that's all that was happening.

Like, you, that's what, that's what he did.

And I, um, yeah, I don't know, like you say, it is not necessarily good that politics has been reduced to spectacle.

It is not good at all that a fascist is like standing bopping to some music and people are ignoring the plans that he has.

However,

I would also like to posit that it is

funny.

I think that's fair.

And it's also arguably the least divisive, most responsible, and most philosophically coherent thing he's done for more than eight years.

Just

standing on a stage, just swaying from side to side.

I mean,

if he would commit to only doing that for the next four and a bit years, I wouldn't be so worried about him winning the election.

What happened, I think, was somebody keeled over in the audience, right?

And he was sort of halting proceedings in a sort of a benevolent way to let them them have time to clear out.

And then instead of sort of retreating backstage, which I imagine would have signified weakness or

doing this sitting quietly, which I imagine is incompatible with his psychology, he decided to play Ave Maria.

And they played Ave Maria.

And then he said they'd play the wrong Ave Maria and they needed to play the one

with words in it, specifically Pavarotti.

And then they played it again.

And then did they bring him a sandwich?

And he said, no, I don't want it in triangles.

I want it in squares.

And then threw it on the ground.

The Democrats have suggested that this latest display raises further questions about Trump's mental capacity for the job.

But raising those questions, that is a minimum of eight years too late.

And it's not going to make any difference.

Those millions and millions of supporters who seem set to vote for Trump have clearly decided they want a president whose mental capacity is not up to the job.

And

just every piece of evidence that backs that up, I think, will only help him on the 5th of November.

Well, I mean, the problem is, you know, obviously on the left, we're in a bit of a, we're in an echo chamber.

And so we're getting like these like picked selections of his worst moments,

randomly selected, cherry-picked moments that just happen to all be incredibly damning.

Problem for Carmela Harris has come up with a dispute over whether or not she ever worked in McDonald's, a claim which Trump and the Republicans are

trying to

disprove

and suggest that Harris is lying.

And

look, look,

there's no point complaining about the stratospheric hypocrisy of this.

I think we just have to accept at this point that democracy is gone.

It's withered to dust.

It's gone.

Just let it go.

And sorry to keep bagging on, but frozen's got into my head evidently.

but it also highlights the difference between the two candidates and the barriers they have to negotiate that one is trying to prove that she did do something entirely legal and the other is already found to have done shitloads of things that are very very illegal and i can't understand how the boomerang of justice is just smashing itself in the face on this one um if uh harris did not work in mcdonald's it would be quite an odd thing to have made up if she was 15 years old currently that's actually quite a cool lie Right, okay.

Like if she was 15 and she came into school and said, guys, I got a job at McDonald's and I can get all the little free winning stickers from the Monopoly game and just you'll have free chips for all of the year, then honestly, it's worth lying.

Yeah, if she did tell that specific lie, I think that might swing the election her way, to be honest, if she promised free stickers.

If everybody was like, oh, hang on, I might get a cheeseburger that they've kept under the counter.

I mean, to be fair, that is Elon Musk's tactic, is promising people an entry ticket into a $1 million lottery.

Yes.

Obviously, it's a slightly troubling sight, this Musk giveaway, seeing a deranged gazillionaire trying to buy the election result he wants.

I'm sure pretty much the entirety of ancient Athens is giggling in its grave.

But yeah, so he's offering $1 million to randomly selected registered voters who have signed a petition in support of First and Second Amendment rights, which and those rights essentially boil down, it often seems, to the right to call someone a before shooting them dead, which I'm pretty sure is what Georgie Washdog and the Split Squad intended back in the day.

But in some ways, this is, I mean, it might be illegal, it might not be illegal, it's certainly legally problematic

at worst or best.

I'm confused.

But is this not one of the most American things in history?

Promising randomly selected people a million dollars to sign a petition they may or may not believe in.

This is the logical end point of American democracy for me.

I can't see where it can go from here.

I did see a photograph of the first woman who'd been given it, and he hadn't yet launched it.

So it really was a surprise ambush lottery.

So it's just a woman on stage holding a giant check for a million pounds, and Elon Musk thrilled, jumping with his hands above his head.

That little jump that he's doing, he's trying,

I have it on good authority that he's doing that little slightly awkward-looking jump so that he looks like an X in the air.

He did claim on X, formerly known as X formerly known as Twitter, formerly known as Twitter, that

well, he shared a post which said that Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of

Meta, Meta, formerly Facebook, formerly Facebook, said that Zuckerberg did the same thing in 2020.

And this claim would have been true had it been true.

Or if by did the same thing, he meant did something demonstrably and obviously different, then that would have been a fair point, I guess.

But Zuckerberg's $400 million

was not given directly to voters, which is quite a big difference, I think, and was given to non-partisan organisations to help facilitate election logistics.

So it's kind of the same, but not the same in any possible regard.

Christopher Columbus news now, and well, scientists' latest sidetrack from the necessary is to have a look at the DNA of Christopher Columbus, aka Chrissy Colon, the controversial mid-second millennium ocean bothering freelance navigation celeb and brutalities of colonialist colonialist exploitation megastar.

But they're trying to find out where he was actually from.

Who gives a shit it was ages ago is the obvious response, but that's a response we're going to try to avoid on this esteemed newscast.

It's always been assumed that he was from Genoa.

But I mean, could this change history if we find out that he was, in fact, I don't know, from Tunbridge Wells or

maybe Johannesburg?

I mean, it could change our whole conception of

human history.

Well, they can't trace him back.

They don't know where he's come from.

His origins are lost in the mists of time,

like the battle between werewolves and vampires.

This, Andy, is why we shouldn't let people of humble origins become famous.

We should stick to Nepo babies because their parents are keeping meticulous track of their early lives for the record books, certain that they'll be able to achieve whatever they desire.

You just have to commit to only making already rich people famous.

A lot of what Columbus was doing was trying to make rich and famous people even richer and more famous.

He was just doing it for them.

Can I say, though, now his DNA has been put on file, what's happened is that the American police have been able to link him to a number of historical crimes.

If anything, the American police, they're saying that he's patient zero of all crimes in America.

I tell you another funny thing, he's got his results back.

You're not going to believe this.

Part Cherokee.

So many Americans get it, don't they?

It's a sort of a dystopian thing, of course, because once they've fully mapped the Columbus genome, they're going to launch an island

full of Columbuses, cloned Columbuses.

Don't worry, they can't breed.

They're all female.

You'll be able to visit

and see how it goes.

Well, it's very important to know more about historical figures like Christopher Columbus.

So we present for you now the Bugle Christopher Columbus Fact Box.

As well as his well-known non-discovery of the United States of America, Christopher Columbus also discovered the cubic centimeter, which by good fortune happened to coincide with his initials, which he used to name the unit after himself.

Known in other countries as Christobal Colon, Columbus developed the colonoscopy and invented the semicolon, a new piece of punctuation dedicated to his out-of-wedlock son Ferdie.

Also, and this is a little-known fact about the disease-spreading resources NABA, the famous TV detective Columbo took his catchphrase, just one more thing, from Christopher Columbus's habit of taking just one more thing from wherever he happened to have landed when it seemed like he'd done all his pillaging and was about to leave.

Christopher Columbus in all did four tours of the Caribbean.

That's as many as the great Indian cricketer Rahul Dravid managed in his test career, by coincidence, although Dravid left considerably less humanitarian mayhem in his wake, accumulating runs with characteristically calm precision, built on a flawless defensive technique and festooned with elegant attacking strokes when the opportunity arose, in sharp contrast to Christopher Columbus's MO of murder, violence, and slavery.

The differences between Columbus and Rahul Dravid do not end there, however, with Dravid being a universally admired figure in the cricketing world, whilst Columbus has seen his reputation tarnished by things like the things he did and their long-term repercussions.

Also, Also, Rahul Dravid twice scored three test hundreds in a series in England, which Columbus never even came close to.

Those are your Christopher Columbus facts.

Australia News and King Charles has gone to Australia as head of state and resigned.

Sorry, where's the rest of the sentence gone?

Sorry, let me just find it.

resigned himself to the idea that Australia should be in charge of its own destiny and make its own decision about whether he should remain official Charles in charge or whether Australia should pick its own Charles to be in charge.

Alice, you must be so excited by the royal trip to

your homeland.

I am so excited by the permission that he's given us to do the thing that we were always allowed to do.

I mean,

I don't know if you've heard, but people have always had the right to guillotine their leaders or even just tell them to go fuck off.

It's sort of the nature of leading a whole bunch of people.

Hang on, I actually think this will be news to the British, who I think are convinced that they have to bow down and lick lick the boots of those in charge.

So this is going to be big news.

I mean, look, it's a complicated situation in Australia.

Australians love the royals.

We just adore them, but we also don't really want to be a monarchy.

Does that make sense?

It's like, they're so great.

They are just, you know, they're just so monarchy, but they're...

The monarchy chemistry just isn't there anymore.

You know, it's sort of like you want to be, why don't we just be amiable co-parents and best friends who go on holidays together, but also be grown apart as people and as lovers.

And maybe we'd we'd like to see different heads of state, please.

But we'll buy the tea towels.

We absolutely will buy the tea towels with your faces on them.

This is, I mean, the whole future of the Australian tea towel industry really relies on

what happens with the monarch.

It was 25 years ago

the last referendum and KC3, King Chucky Trebles,

his Royal Highness.

Highness is for queens, isn't it?

Hainer is for kings, I think.

I forget.

He's in Australia, accompanied by his longtime squeeze, Queen, not the the actual queen,

so weirdly apparently officially Queen Camilla.

Josie, I mean, we've

obviously the monarchy in the United Kingdom goes back to, I think, 13 billion BC when God appointed the first

molecule as official king of all the Britons.

And, you know, we've retained.

Known as a monarchule, actually.

We've retained the monarchy.

Ever since you do look jealously at Australia as a country that might at some point in the next 100 years move on.

You know me, Andy.

I'm a staunch royalist.

Absolutely bloody love them.

Can't get enough of them.

I think it's one of those things where the utter absurdity of the situation is often kind of put on the back burner because it is the way it is.

So when I was watching the news about this, I watched the head of the campaign group Republic in Australia just very calmly going through it.

And he said, well, to be head of state, you normally need three things.

The first of those is you should be from that state.

And just hearing that, like, yeah, I guess having a head of state who lives so far away, he needs a stopover to get to the place

doesn't feel that authentic or reasonable.

And then I am also for me, what would be so glorious if they were to get rid of the monarchy would be the piss that would be boiled.

The monarchist...

The people who love the monarchy are without doubt the saddest fucks to walk this earth.

And I would love to see them sad.

And it's one of the reasons why, despite the fact that I know she herself was in and of the establishment,

It's one of the reasons why I do

love and kind of semi-deify Princess Diana because the idea that she annoyed those people to that extent.

Do you know something fun?

I was doing some research about Princess Diana for something else, not anything weird, just a normal amount.

And I found out that there was a Princess Diana look-alike contest in 1985.

And I got really excited.

It was in Montreal.

And I got really excited because I was like, what day is that going to be on?

Obviously, it's going to to be on Saturday because the French for Saturday is the same day.

Samadi,

so excited about this.

It was on a Thursday.

Oh, that's so disagreeable.

Vondra D doesn't even work as a pun.

Yes, the last referendum Alice was a millennium ago,

but in 1999, which is 25 years ago is the time travelling crow flies backwards.

It was a 55-45 win to keep the British monarch.

as head of state for Australia to retain that umbilical founding link to the glories of medieval European feudalism, which is not something you want to snip off in a hurry

in the 20th century.

But I guess the benefit of having a monarch from outside the country is to avoid having to choose an actual Australian as actual head of state with some actual shit to do, which would be quite a tough choice, I guess.

Yeah, well, I mean, we have such

visceral cultural cringe about our own productions that I think that's really what won us over in the same way as comedians have to go over to the UK and then Australia will accept them as being semi-decent uh i

i feel like if we're going to have a self-made uh head of state a self an australian head of state they'll have to go and do a little bit of rulings maybe maybe in america maybe they could be the mayor of new york or something before they come back and are really given a shot at the big time it'd just be so embarrassing like i just can't imagine us doing any ceremonial stuff that wasn't incredibly embarrassing like just dangling themselves off a hills hoist and going around the things that we've decided are cultural markers of australiana that you can like if you go go back to the 2000s Olympic ceremony all of those things that we think it's just some some

in a wig jumping into a billabong holding a jumbuck being like look at me I'm the jolly swagman king like it just oh I can already like oh just keep Charles forever please oh god is there anyone that you would like genuinely Alice that you could think of that you think they would they would be good look i think we'd have to do it as a kind of either either a cricketing thing um or potentially like a best barbecue thing or

just pick a man in stubbies mowing his lawn.

I mean, of course, just recently, Alice, Australia had a referendum and decided it still wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea of its Indigenous peoples having a non-binding advisory voice sometimes in parliament.

So is it ready to risk someone who isn't a blood descendant of William the Conqueror taking over as a non-executive figurehead?

I mean, that's a huge step, isn't it?

Huge.

I mean, we will always, always, always, if we possibly can, revert to mean.

That's Australian conservatism.

And by mean, I mean apparently

we're reverting the age of criminal responsibility back to

10 after it briefly jumped up to 12 in the Northern Territory.

That's exciting news for Australia.

Most developed nations are pushing to raise the relevantly jailable age of children to 14.

The country Liberal Party, which is in charge of the Northern Territory, it's in power up the top end, claims that lowering that age to 10 is the key to curbing youth crime,

despite the advice of doctors, human rights groups, and Indigenous leaders who are suspiciously unified against it.

But Andy, look.

It's actually a compliment that Australian children are very advanced.

It's a very proud moment for our great nation.

You know, just as it's worth boasting when your child walks or talks early, the court system in the Northern Territory truly believes in the adult-level maturity of its 10-year-olds who are causing trouble.

I should be specific.

It is Indigenous 10-year-olds for whatever reason.

The Northern Territory's delinquent white kids just haven't been considered advanced enough to be jailable in high enough numbers.

Can't slam any of them behind bars in their race car pajamas.

So we really need to look at closing that gap.

It's not that I don't think there are shitty 10-year-old children in the world.

There are plenty of shitty 10-year-old children.

It's just that I don't think, and I'm going out on a limb here, I know, I just don't think any 10-year-old should ever be in jail.

I wouldn't jail Tween Hitler, Andy.

Zero 10-year-olds should be in jail.

I reckon you need to be at least Bat Mitzford to go get into duty.

What do you think?

Liquids are evil news now and some surprise news from the National Gallery in London that all liquid is pure evil.

It's banned liquids other than baby formula expressed human milk.

And I assume human milk just says expressed milk.

I'm going to guess it's from humans rather than other animals.

And prescription medicines.

Large bags are also evil.

They're going to be prohibited.

This follows attacks on paintings

by protesters who have caused

unconscionable damage to some picture frames.

So, I mean, this is just another step in the annoyingification of everyday life in that, you know, just basic things like going to an art gallery now become fucking irritating.

If you can't even take a flagon of mead into our great national institutions anymore, what are we as a nation?

What are we?

It's so depressing, Andy.

I mean, to make the obvious point, there is one liquid that you can ban which would stop oil protests, and that's oil.

But

more seriously, I reckon we're going to find, you can take prescription medications in, so I reckon you're going to find an angry teen who needs a a prescription for three liters of red paint to solve their climate change anxiety before too long.

And also, this just seems like such a short-sighted policy because if you're banning people from bringing in liquids outside their bodies, you're limiting them to only maybe three or four possible liquids that they could be using to express themselves.

I tell you what, though.

They may have banned liquids, but they haven't banned gels.

And that's a real loophole for the Just Up Oil oil lads.

They're going to be seeing a whole world of slime, gunge, pastes, and that.

That's just the gels.

They've not even said a word about gases.

You can sneak in a big thing of helium and then make all the sculptures float around.

Or you can make all the paintings have really high-pitched voices.

Do you know what as well?

If they're going to ban liquids from these galleries, I want them to be consistent.

And that means drain the Damien Hursts.

Drain them.

I want to see that shark decompose in real time.

I mean we've all seen the film Sharknado.

We know quite how dangerous these creatures can be.

Snowboarding news now.

And this is, I mean, I'm not sure we've had a snowboarding section before.

We've mentioned jet skis in the past, but I'm not sure we've done a lot on snowboarding.

But snowboarding has has been

in the news.

Josie, I know you keep an eagle eye on all former Olympic snowboarders to make sure they stay the right side of the law, but

you've picked up on one who's failed to do that.

Yeah, very sad.

From a community that was already cool, for someone to then become a kingpin of cartels,

slow down.

There's no need, is what the international snowboarding community has been saying.

Ryan Wedding, who's 43.

I mean, is he single?

We don't know.

know with a name like that you'd assume not ryan wedding in 2000 he was in the winter olympics representing canada and since then he's gone off the rails and the rail i think is a snowboarding term if that's good he's gone off the half pipe again i'm i'm not that it's gnarly he's become a very prominent drug dealer and what's What's funny about it is,

I think

he must, he's hiding out in Mexico and that must be very sad for him as a snowboarder, because he's looking at the hills, knowing there's not a fleck of snow up there.

He's got all these skills, he can't use them.

And what I think he must be doing is when he has the big drugs meetings, he'll get out all the cocaine, get it all in a big pile, and then just kind of smooth it out.

get on the board, show him what he can do.

If anything, that's why he's so successful.

If you can have someone snowboarding along a hundred weight of cocaine,

fair play to him.

He's the lead suspect among 15 other suspects who are running this cartel.

Apparently, he's accused of ordering the murders of three people,

including an innocent Ontario couple who were killed in a case of mistaken identity in 2023.

That is...

Two out of the three people he's accused of having ordered murdered being the wrong ones.

That is, I feel this is proof, if anything, that snowboarding isn't a real Olympic sport because that level of attention to detail just would not go in the real Olympics.

You need to be on target, you need to be efficient.

I guess what this shows is how difficult it can be for former elite sports people

when their time comes to move on from sport.

How do they replicate the thrill of competition, the excitement of performing in front of a crowd?

And Ryan Wedding has obviously decided that the only way to do that is to become involved in one of the world's most destructive industries and leave a trail of human devastation devastation behind him.

So, I mean, that's, I guess it's in a way, you know, replicates that excitement of plummeting down the hill on a plank of wood

at high speeds.

But it does seem a bit of a logical leap.

It's also a race to the bottom in some ways.

You know, if he ever gets caught and

he has to make a quick getaway, if he's not at the top of a hill, he's fucked.

That's it.

He'll have the board and he'll be saying to people, look, I'm sorry, I really, I want to run away, but the conditions are terrible here.

If he's trying to run away on a flat surface, both of his feet are attached to the board, so he's just going, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop, hop.

That brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

Thank you very much for listening.

Sorry, we couldn't do a show last week's show.

Sorry, this week's show was slightly late.

So we'll be back with an actual bugle in the week beginning the 4th of November.

We will hopefully have a sub-episode for you next week.

Don't forget to buy your tickets.

Do all of those tour shows, and there will be some extra dates added shortly.

Josie, anything to plug?

My book still exists and I would love people to buy it.

It's called Because I Don't Know What You Mean and What You Don't in Short Stories and I just am still proud of it and I'll be plugging it into In the Ground.

Plug from

Beyond the Grave or even in the Grove.

I have a podcast.

It's the sister podcast to this podcast.

It is the Glossy Magazine to the Bugles audio newspaper to the visual world and it's called The Gargle and you can find it on all podcast listening devices.

I also have a book coming out and the book is called A Passion for Passion and it's available on unbound.com.

It will come out on the 6th of Feb and I'll be doing a book tour around in the UK in February to help promote that.

It's a very very very silly book.

You should read it if you like romance novels or if you have no idea why people read romance novels.

If one of those two people should definitely read this book.

Also if you want to join my writers meetings.

I do two writers meetings a week on Patreon, patreon.com slash AliceFraser and you can get access to all eight of those writing meetings to a week for a dollar a month, which is deranged.

And I really should change that.

I think it's very kind and fair.

Yeah,

jack it up.

At least trouble with times, jack it up.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

Until next time, 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.