Dynamic Pricing means listen now or The Bugle owns your home

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4314 of The Bugle, one of the world's undisputed top billion non-visual newscasts.

The most reliable source of unreliable truth that you could possibly rely on.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann and if you can't stand the heat, bad luck.

It does increasingly look like the heat is here to stay.

Broadly, I mean, not necessarily where you personally are, depending on your location, time of year, the weather, and of course, what type of clothes you're wearing.

If any, no judgment.

Anyway, on a global level, the heat relative to previous heats on Earth and recent millennia is definitely here to stay.

So if you can't stand the heat and you are, for example, wearing Antarctic exploration kit on a hot day in a busy commercial kitchen whilst doing star jumps, frankly, I can't help you.

Your problem, you find us a solution.

But do enjoy the show.

Anyway, what am I doing here?

Is this my job?

We are recording live as we speak, as we so often do when we're recording, in an underground bunker.

Bunker or recording studio?

Chris, I can't remember.

I mean, there's two women in it, so

I think it's probably important to clarify.

We are here in London, where once the lonely auroch whimpered soft in the moonlight, going back a while, admittedly.

And I'm going to be joined by two of the following five people.

See if you can guess which two.

Alice Fraser, Axel Rose, Josephine Bonaparte, Rhea Lena, and Peter Bruegel the Elder.

If you guessed one and four, you're correct.

Well done.

Well done, Googlers.

Alice, welcome back to the hemisphere.

Thank you.

It's been a while, isn't it?

I am so delighted to be in what I think of as the correct hemisphere for my skin colour.

And

you mentioned Axel Rose, who I think is really underrated.

Weal Rose gets all of the credit for progressing human history forward, but actually, Axel was the vital part of the technology.

Ria's how's your summer been?

It is so good to be here.

You may call me Josephine.

Okay, right.

Okay.

It was good.

It was, you know,

it had some sun in it.

I never knew when.

The number of times I left the house and went, oh, could have worn shorts really irritated me.

But, you know, and here's September.

So yay to the school run.

Before we start, I would like everyone to bear in mind that I have just just completed a 26-hour flight with a nearly three-year-old and a six-month-old.

I also just want to tell everyone how to blag their way through security at Doha Airport, which is as they pull your bags aside as suspicious, you have your three-year-old vomit directly into the security bucket.

That's what they call them.

They wave you through.

That is a good tip.

It doesn't work for adults, though.

No.

Especially if they find little condom baggies in the bucket, then you're really in trouble.

I also, can I just do a call-out to a listener?

I assume he's a listener, the man who unlocked the door and finally came out of the parents' room after 10 minutes of waiting for us to f off, looking like a mildly sheepish 35-year-old man who'd had a nap instead of a family of four.

Yeah, I just want him to know that he should go himself very much.

And I just hope he's a bugle listener who really likes my material so he can hear this and know that the look that I gave him as he slunk past me, a lady stood with a a feverish, weeping child vomit soaking into my bra, was the perfected pinnacle of my full contempt for everything that he stands for.

He is the shithead who refuses to admit that he's been bitten in a zombie movie and he has no social conscience at all.

I want him to go stand on one leg in a salt leg.

I just think he's.

What an asshole.

Well, sorry.

Let's target Beagle Demographic right there.

But what if he was listening to him?

Selfish, solipsistic, narcissistic, baby space thieves.

But how do we feel if he was actually listening to an episode while he was resting in the family room?

Yeah, I would want him to know that he should go himself.

Yeah, okay, family.

What a dick.

Anyway, we are recording on the 3rd of September 2024.

If you travel back in time, just 358 short years, then you'd have been saying if you can't stand the heat, get out of the city of London.

It's just down the road from here.

The highly controversial Great Fire of London

would have been on day two of five.

If only we could find a way of entertaining people for five straight days that didn't involve burning the city to the ground.

I'm sure someone's working on it somewhere.

Tomorrow's National Wildlife Day, apparently.

There's a special new scheme this year on National Wildlife Day to bring wildlife to everyone.

All zoos and aquariums in the world are going to be leaving all the animals' cages, enclosures, pools, and tanks open for the day to try to rebuild those broken bridges between humans and our fellow earthbound species.

Good luck to everyone who lives nearby.

As always, this section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week.

Well, it's also National Skyscraper Day, apparently.

So we have a skyscraper facts section for you that's going in the bin, including, fact one, the definition of a skyscraper is nothing to do with the height of the building.

It all depends on the relative location of the top of the building and the sky.

A garden shed catapulted upwards from the top of a mountain is, temporarily at least, a skyscraper.

But a 500-metre-high tower in a heavily polluted city such as Delhi, where the sky has ceased to exist, not a skyscraper.

So, make sure you get

those right for tax purposes.

Fact two, most so-called skyscrapers are not actually topped with any sort of scraping mechanism.

Many have a pointy bit at the top and are thus sky jabbers, others a smooth, rounded summit, others just a flat roof.

Very few have anything that can actively scrape the sky, and the sky, moreover, is hard to scrape in common with many non-solid things.

In any case, the sky generally self-repairs very quickly after being scraped or even having some of itself scraped off.

So basically, skyscrapers don't exist.

And your material has become very laden with this kind of stuff since you signed up with Big Sky Fork.

Of course, that was my wrestling name.

Does that mean that the Gherkin's more like a sky massage gun?

I believe so, yes.

I'm glad you went with that option.

Yeah.

Family show.

Well, if only because you don't want to be using glass in that.

And finally, Jimi Hendrix was obsessed with skyscrapers.

The original lyric in the song Purple Haze

was Excuse me while I Scrape the Sky.

And the title of the song itself was Purple 280-metre-high tower combining residential and commercial spaces.

And then someone told him it was in the wrong sense, the wrong tense.

It was rise instead of rows.

Oh, there we go.

No.

That section is in the book.

Would that have made it purple highs instead of colour paints, yes.

Top story this week, music.

Well, another festival season has been consigned to the record books for historians to pour over the stats and work out who the best band or solo artist of the sum was based on some complicated algorithm, no doubt.

So we lead off this week with a bugle music section.

And,

well, I mean, there's only one place to start, really, because the world has been ironically and appropriately rocked to its core by the astonishing revelation that free market economics do not always treat everyone with respect, fairness, and honesty.

The dynamic pricing scandal relating to the Oasis reunion tour,

I think that's really got to the very heart of what it means to be alive.

And to what it means to be an Oasis fan.

Yeah.

The question is.

So if people don't know what this is, there's dynamic pricing going on for Oasis tickets.

They started on sale at about £130, £150 and

by the time that they were getting towards sold out, they were going for about £300 or £400

a pop.

I'm sort of okay with dynamic pricing as long as it works in both directions, that you're allowed to kind of shoot your prices up to take advantage of people's desperation, but you have to give refunds proportionate to the level of disappointment people feel when the concert is a bit shit.

You could actually make money by going to a bad concert.

Well, this is the thing, yeah, exactly.

Because what people think they're buying is a ticket back to a time that they were in when Oasis was together.

So when life was easy and they had a full head of hair.

But actually what you're most likely to get is a couple of old guys who remind you of how old you are now and haven't been playing music together for famously for ages.

And they'll be walking their way through their greatest hits with a mix of bitterness and nostalgia.

And I want $200,000 back, thank you.

I mean, they might not even be together by the time the tour happens.

Those two are so volatile.

To be fair, that's that's what people are paying for.

This is a gambling enterprise in the hope that they will break up on stage while you're there.

So it's not, okay, well, then in that case, we're not paying for a music concert.

We're paying for like the comeback of the Jeremy Kyle show.

Essentially.

I mean, they could be at either ends of the stadiums, arenas.

Wouldn't you love it if there was an envelope of DNA and they come out?

Surprise, you're not related.

Well, it is set to be the not really necessary cultural event of 2025.

And what did you say, the tickets being flogged at inflated prices prices as the British public's desperate nostalgia and desire to pretend this stupid millennium never started has

seen them queuing around the virtual block.

And you can understand it, I guess, the chance to see a fascinating sociological experiment in which we finally discover whether the unstoppable force of the chance to earn shitloads of money, as essentially a covers band of your own former band, can outshunt the immovable objects of a stubbornly simmering sibling rivalry.

It could be

sensational.

I would queue up if it was Harry and William.

Right.

I would totally queue up.

Playing Oasis covers.

Yes.

Yeah, with Megan and Kadon backing vocals.

That's a show I would watch.

The term dynamic pricing,

I mean, that's one of the great euphemisms of modern life.

Oh, yeah.

The dynamic is thrusting.

That's what's happening.

Other great euphemisms, of course, include, for example, Hot Dog, Gentleman's Club, in the UK, Public School,

and USA

so but it's not I mean I guess you know ripping people off at every available opportunity is what we didn't fight the Cold War for

but could have fought it if it ever got hot so you know you know it's paying respect to all the people who could have died in the Cold War had it ceased being cold more than it did and of course you know long gone are the days when anything just had a simple value in itself apart from of course some tickets to my very reasonably priced tour show that

from November the first

through to

quite deep into next year actually but but buy tickets to a tour that should be all getting how deep like are we scraping are we poking

I don't know

I don't know

I'm so glad we're filming this

can we please close this out

oh no no please go online and see the video of this and what Andy's doing with his fingers the tour definitely fondles fairly deep into next year

Fondles.

I think the fondles are going to be the support man in the ice.

None of them would grab in 2025, by the way.

But I do think, you know, if we're going to

have dynamic pricing for

music, theatre, whatever, sport, we should apply this principle in other areas of life, such as criminal sentencing.

whereby you know the judge can say well the prisons are quite empty at the moment so your minor traffic offence is going to cost you seven years in a maximum security jail bad luck or with healthcare you know there's a lot lot of demand right now, so if you want that appendectomy, you're going to have to have a triple bypass as well.

Another option would be for Oasis to do their bit to control the price by promising that they will only be doing stuff on their new concept album, basically the 17th century chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont.

Just to see that enthusiasm dissipate.

But, I mean, it's going to cost a lot because it's not only the ticket, of course, you've got...

hotel and you've got backup accommodation when you smash your hotel room to pieces to give yourself the full rock experience.

The merchandise to prove that you've been there, otherwise, what's the point?

The food.

Although I assume that there will be three bits of round bread with every ticket, it seems only right if you're paying that much money for a ticket to see Oasis, you get a roll with it.

Oh, God.

Fair response.

So let's assume that the whole thing with all the tickets plus all the

other things you need to get there and stay there and to eat and all that.

costs you, I'm going to make up a figure here, £3,000.

What could you get for that money?

Well, you could get at least 300 copies of the Oasis album standing on the shoulders of giants, which you could then glue together into the shape of a giant and stand on its shoulder for the ultimate Oasis experience.

You could pay an Oasis tribute band to play to you personally whilst you're having a bath,

get a nice acoustic in a bathroom as well.

You could buy tickets for every single one of my torsions.

Or you could get,

well, I think around about

400 automatic dancing popes.

Not real popes, little toy dancing popes.

I mean, I would totally go Catholic for a dancing pope.

Yeah.

I think we all would.

Could the dancing popes, like, hang on a rope and sell soap?

Well, I...

I mean, I'm into this.

One of the

great triumphs of

my childhood was

at a raffle at a village fate.

I won a pope on a rope, which was a pope-shaped bit of soap on a rope,

which I then gave to my confused father for his birthday.

And then, just, I don't know, 35 years later, he died.

Did you know?

Just so do wash with popes, but please wash with popes responsibly.

Let's have some other music news now.

Alice, you are the Bugle's official Taylor Swift cor well, you are the

main Taylor Swift.

We have several sub-Taylor Swift correspondents, of course, as all news organisations do now.

Yes.

Bring us up with the latest in the Swiftian universe.

Well, that is to the point, rather, which is that news can no longer be reliably expected to reach the hearts and minds of the people unless you attach it to Taylor Swift stuff.

Sports going the same way, actually, as well.

It's terrible.

You have to have someone in the audience in a pair of flashy shades in order to make anything worthwhile anymore.

So

Taylor Swift has been at the heart of an argument about inflation, just as Oasis are at the heart of this economic discussion, but also at the heart of a discussion about terrorism, because apparently there is a group of terrorists growing and growing whose main claim to fame seems to be that they planned, but did not succeed in an attack on a Taylor Swift concert, going for the heart of the culture, as it were.

But I can't wait to hear her album about what bad boyfriends they would have been.

How disappointed she was.

But I'm sure there will be some sort of smell or something that'll pull pull her out of it.

She's very good at the sensory.

I just feel like it's an sort of an indictment on our culture that news stories about a growing terrorist group need to hook the name of Taylor Swift onto them in order to be clicked through past the headline.

It might be a smart way of getting everybody to imbibe the news, though.

Do you know know what I mean?

Make every story related to Taylor Swift.

I mean we all understand a little bit less about economics because of her influence on inflation.

I always think I understand inflation.

And then I read in an article about Taylor Swift and the effect she's had on inflation.

And now I can't tell if up or down is bad.

I can't tell they go, oh, it would have gone down, but she made it go up, but it'll be done by the end of the summer.

And I'm like, so, and the Bank of England didn't foresee this, and they didn't take it into account.

I'm like, okay, so what's the good bit?

The Bank of England, we're gonna make it 2%, but then she made it 1.9%.

Wait, what?

I don't, I have no idea.

Did she have a good effect, a bad effect?

Is the Bank of England even in the game anymore?

I don't.

I mean, what's your best medium of communicating things like this?

Do you need like a Taylor Swift Bank of England cage match, kind of?

If they could make it rhyme, that would help.

If it had a middle eight,

you know, I'd be able to remember it.

I think we need to.

I don't know if I understand more or less about inflation now that Taylor Swift is involved.

But I'm just raised a rather charming scenario that the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee sit down poring over the concert listing, saying, well, although Swift is not coming this year, it appears Selena Gomez is doing an arena talk, so we need to factor that into a.

But is she doing dynamic pricing?

And how does that have an effect on

inflation in general?

But yes,

so she's affecting inflation and she's growing terrorism.

Is that right?

Right.

So she's cancelling herself.

No, I think she's just tangentially related to the terrorism and in order to make people pay attention to terrorism.

People are like, oh, terrorism is so early 2000s.

So they want to hook it onto a, well, not a rising star, a risen star in order to make it jazzy again.

Because

if it's threatening our way of life and our culture, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Sounds a bit weird.

You know, maybe xenophobic to talk about that thing.

But if they're coming for Taylor Swift, we can all get on board.

I mean, it is scary.

With her, not with them.

I just want just

get on board with her, not with what they're trying to do.

I just thought...

I should state she is,

by all accounts, opposed to terrorism.

Taylor Swift.

I haven't heard her made a public statement about it today.

But if you play her songs backwards, very much an anti-terrorist vibe going on.

Donald Trump versus the world of music now.

And

some of music's most famous stars have been complaining that Donald Trump is using their songs.

This is a story that seems to crop up pretty much

every time there's a major election anywhere, as music artists have their songs used completely out of context by people with whom they fundamentally disagree with on everything.

The White Stripes

have complained.

And you'd think, I mean, it's quite a weird thing for Trump to use the White Stripe.

I mean, the Seven Nation Army is the kind of international cooperation that Trump seems very skeptical of.

Abba also apparently have complained, Bruce Springsteen.

I mean, it's,

I know, yeah, there was a time when

he was walking on stage using an excerpt from an issue of The Bugle,

and I was very upset by that.

That's just

totally in a

bit about Michelangelo from way back.

But

it must be quite annoying if

you've created a song

to mean one thing and some hunt comes along and tries to make it mean something else.

And it's incredible as well because

he was using the winner takes it all from ABBA,

which, as we know from the last election, he did not take it all because he won it, didn't he?

But he did not get the presidency.

So it really doesn't work for him in any way, shape, or form.

But I think that these musicians, I'll be honest, I think they're missing a trick because, of course,

the campaign have said we have bought the licenses from their equivalents of what we have over here, which is PRS.

And so we're allowed to use the music unless the artist has to write to the licensing board and say, you are not allowed, my music is not allowed to be used in a political, in a political way.

So I assume that they're all doing that now because they can't technically sue the campaign because permission has been granted.

But I urge these musicians to think again because I think there's a lot to be had by having your music used by Trump.

First of all, if you, I mean, I was a musical comic, so I have music registered with PRS.

And one of the things that happens is you get paid according to the size of the venue.

And as we know, all of his rallies are attended by millions.

So that's billions.

I mean, that's a lot of money to be had right there.

People listening to your music.

And I, so I wanted to just, because I know he sometimes listens to the bugle, and I just wanted to offer my music to him if he wanted.

I could rewrite some of my songs so they're a little bit more appropriate.

One of my songs is called I Was Coming.

I was coming, I was coming when you came.

So I can rewrite that to I Was Winning, I Was Winning, Then You Won.

It's Not Easy Being yellow is my version.

Of course, it's not easy being orange.

The internet porn song, no, he can just have that one as is.

But I have options.

You should see what I can do with ping pong balls.

I'm sure he could work with it.

UK news now.

And well, we touched on this briefly last week, but it has been a very strange summer here in the UK.

It's our second episode back.

We briefly mentioned it last week.

A summer of kind of rather monochrome governmental behaviour rather than the kaleidoscopic fluorescent chunderstorm we've become used to.

We had

the far right hijacking a brutal tragedy to try to advance their delusionally sclerotic agenda, but the people of Britain rejecting and countering that.

And then we had the court system, which I think is still processing a drunken disorderly case involving a cricket fan who got a bit overexcited in 1938 when Len Hutton beat Dom Bradman's test record score at the Oval.

Suddenly, speed cranking into action action and dispensing well-merited instant justice to some of the especially repugnant rioters and fury stokers.

So where are we now as a nation?

I don't know yet.

We'll keep you posted over the next, I don't know, 10 to 20 years here on the bugle as we see how things evolve.

Suffice it to say for now that the far right has proved once again that the social virus of pseudo-patriotic, historically inane shit Hedry has not been entirely eradicated, despite all the Darwinian evidence suggesting that it really, really really should have been.

Well then Chuck D, time for a rethink you old dead bearded loon.

It's a tricky thing as somebody who keeps coming back to the UK and trying to decide whether to live here or not because you've got on one hand you got like oh no there's race riots and on the other hand you've got like oh good they're being arrested that's

yes I feel like it on one hand it looks like the the social fabric of society is breaking down and on the other hand it looks like the social fabric of society is working.

I'll be honest, I don't know why you came back.

All you had to do was write something on Facebook.

They would have arrested you for that.

You didn't have to be here.

Yes, a strange, strange summary.

Let's look now at some education news.

Ofsted, the organization that rates schools is going to change the way that it marks schools from a one-word summary to something that actually tells you what is happening in your kids' school.

Now, I think this is this is progress.

I mean, one-word summaries are the kind of thing that might be appropriate in a social media clip with the boy band who have a new single coming out or at the end of a show trial for example guilty is usually sufficient or in a football commentary goal just keep quiet in between or in describing american republican presidential candidates but fundamentally reducing any complex issue to a one-word summary is

ridiculous

even my performance in the comedy zone at the edinburgh festival in 2000 which i will admit was not the most nuanced and complex of creations in the human uh artistic canon required two words in the observer to sum it up grindingly and mediocre.

So it feels that

offstage ought to be going into more depth,

Rhea, than single words.

I know

you've got kids in the school system.

I think this is great news, because yes, I do have kids in the system, and I've been struggling with this system for years.

If you don't have kids, we have four levels at which we can rate a school.

Outstanding, which is what everybody wants.

Good, requires improvement, which of course is famously hyphenated and inadequate.

And if you're found inadequate these days, then your school is automatically academized, which Alice basically means that if you run, say, a carpet company, you can then run the school.

Because that makes perfect sense.

Yeah, we drew that in a straight line a few years ago.

I thought Academized was when they wrote a fictional series about you running some sort of wizarding school.

It could be, or it could just be, you know, a normal state school from which two boys then take over Saturday night night television for the rest of our lives.

Well, it's interesting to me because I feel like on one hand, having a one-word summary of the performance of a school is congruent with the way that parents get the reports of how the school day went from their children when what they want is a detailed report and they'll get, you know, fine.

Needs improvement.

Oh, that's that.

I mean, that kid's in top set if you get that kid.

But I've been using this system for years, not just to describe schools.

I've been using it in other areas, which is why I'm glad that we're making it a little bit more comprehensive, because I've been using it to describe my ex-husband for a long time.

And obviously, when we first got together, he was outstanding.

And then it kind of went from good to inadequate.

But it isn't enough.

Like, that doesn't hold out, you know, an evening with girlfriends over cocktails.

I need more than that.

So I'm glad that we're going to give schools a school report now.

Yeah, all feedback should be specific and actionable.

Specific and actionable.

Yes, I feel like all feedback should be specific and actionable.

What are you trying to do?

Improve education?

Don't come over here with your foreign ideas.

I mean, it does seem to make sense.

I mean, summing up a school in one word is bound to be insufficient, like summing up a novel in a single grunt or describing a...

a journey as a mark out of three

in which if it's one you died on the journey but anyway but a report card system to replace the one-word summary that to me makes obvious.

So say if you've got a school, because obviously

not every aspect of a school works to the same quality.

If you've got a school that's, for example, just won an Oscar for Best Musical Score from the video for its Year 7 Nativity play and has provided interpreters for a United Nations summit from its GCC modern language classes, but has a chemistry teacher known as Boom Boom Betty who's grown up three consecutive science labs due to mixing up grams and tons and copper sulphate and nitroglycerin and that has a ritual novel-burning assembly every Wednesday.

One word doesn't really cut the mustard, does it?

You need a bit of nuance.

Yeah, and I would have said that school is good at the arts, shit at science.

Well, every year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, there is a controversy among artists about the giving of star ratings for comedy shows in reviews.

That the five-star rate, you know, out-of-five-star rating system is inadequate to fully encompass the experience of a comedy show.

It is very reductive.

And what if the reviewer is just an idiot and who just doesn't get the comedian?

And then everyone reads this controversy and checks the comedians who are complaining to find out who gave them one star.

If only the stars were accompanied by, say, a few paragraphs of explanation about the show and what the reviewer felt when they were there.

I mean, is that crazy?

Am I being crazy?

That's, yeah, that's very retro, I think.

I didn't realize that's what the stars were for.

I thought it was just describing what kind of person the comedian was in the rudest possible terms.

Yeah, there were quite a lot of pricks and s back.

How many stars do Jewish comedians get?

But yes, they're now going to expand them into like more school reports.

So I'm looking forward to reading the school reports of schools.

But I feel like we should be giving the school reports and we should be giving the schools back.

They give these these inane.

If you have kids, they have a system where everything is automated.

And so all of your kids get the same phrases, you know, like shows potential but needs to reach it.

And I feel like that's the same thing.

If my kids come out with C's, I'll be like, Well, that school showed potential, but they never reached it.

You know, we just need to, I think we need to flip it back on them.

Yes, if this school applied its brilliant intellect, it might have better outcomes, that kind of thing.

Exactly.

Or, you know, or the teachers, you know, head teacher, you know, needs to develop better social skills.

Plays badly with others.

The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, Starmer, said the new graves will not confuse parents.

And it's nice for once to hear a politician expressing faith that the British public can understand something more than one word long, which is progress, I think.

What does Brexit mean?

Brexit, thanks for clearing that up, you

idiots.

Right.

To be fair, that's a criticism that can be levelled at both sides of politics.

Love is love, and Brexit means Brexit.

The horseshoe effect in full.

Horseshit effect.

Let's have a quick look at the

state of the American presidential campaign.

In particular, J.D.

Vance,

who appears to be, I don't know if he's an Achilles heel for Trump,

given that Trump appears to be 100% Achilles heel.

Free.

He has no heels.

If you

don't like him.

Podcast from...

2021 has emerged in which Vance said that professional women choose a path to misery in prioritizing careers over having children.

He also said, you know, so he said pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning, but they all find that the value system leads to misery.

Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar described the ignorant and xenophobic rhetoric spewed by Vance as, quotes, dangerous and un-American, which I think were the two qualities that Trump was looking for when

he picked Vance.

I know both of you are massive fans of

J.D.

Vance and are hoping that he'll

rule the world.

Listen, the man's wife is...

Do you know Usha?

His wife?

She's Hindi, personally.

And I am a massive fan of any white man that finds us attractive.

I don't know entirely how to be funny about this.

In a world where it is almost impossible to afford a house in any major metropolitan city in the world on a single income, it is imperative for women to build a sufficiently stable career that they can flush 40 to 70% of it down the toilet for a few years without losing their ability to pay rent or survive for the rest of their lives.

That takes like time and energy and effort to build your career.

Right, but if they stayed home, imagine how clean that toilet would be.

But I mean, the alternative, right, is to stay at home.

You've got to just find a rich man who has a house.

You'd be completely financially dependent on a guy who may or may not turn out to be a cockhead who leaves you for the secretary.

Or you can bring, or you can, you know, sort of try and have it both, but bring up your children as a stay-at-home, insecure rental mother.

Look, I have managed to build a career that is sufficiently sustainable to build care work so that I get to be the kind of mother that I want to be.

But that's in part because I grew up with a chronically ill mother myself and I had to look after her when I was starting my career, right?

And so now I get to do the kind of job that I want to do and be the kind of mother that I want to do.

And the only sacrifice I make is most of my sleep and my sanity and

presumably my bone density.

But most jobs, you know, like J.D.

Vance

doesn't

kind of factor in the calculations and sacrifices that might be as stark as like the physical well-being of your children versus the emotional well-being of your family, home life.

And to pretend that that is mainly the fault of feminism or liberalism or anything other than the kind of rapacious consumer capitalism, landlord, managerial line go-up bullshit you spend most of your time worshipfully nuzzling the asshole of is disingenuous to the point of just absolute derangement.

Go yourself and deal with the baby that emerges, J.D.

Vance.

I mean, I have to say, overall, I'm a massive fan of his presence in the current election because I think that he is single-handedly going to be the reason for Blusis.

And I'm grateful for that.

I mean, the fact is, it always...

surprises me when you find out that someone like that does have an interracial marriage because

Usha is Hindu.

However, in her last, she made a speech in Milwaukee

where she did not bring up anything to do.

She didn't bring up her upbringing.

She didn't bring up her personal faith, didn't bring up the fact that they have an interfaith relationship, none of it, because last time she did, she got loads of vitriol and hate for it.

So it...

I just think it's going to, I think it's going to backfire.

And I kind of hope it does.

I think even Trump is realizing that he picked, you know, he said, there's an interview where he said, why did you pick J.D.

Vance?

And he went, well, the guy loved me.

He loved me.

He's a great fan of me.

He picked me.

He loved me.

So we picked him.

And I went, even, even Trump is seeing how bad a mistake that was when a month after Kamala,

Kamala, I saw her kids in the thing explain how to say her name.

Now I have to go through it every time they go.

You say, Kama, like a comma, and then la,

because she's here.

Kamala.

So about a month after Kamala was on the scene, even Trump on True Social was going, oh, I had a dream last night that Biden changed his mind.

And he said, no, actually, I am going to run.

And then at the DNC, they actually ratified him instead of her.

And he's also now beginning to regret J.D.

Vance because he clearly went, oh, hang on a second.

I'm the white asshole on this ticket.

You can't also be a white asshole.

There's not room for two white assholes.

Benny loves me.

Benny loves me.

He thinks I'm amazing.

So choose a path to misery, I think.

I mean, that would be quite a winning new slogan for the Trump campaign if I feel I need to freshen things up a bit from make America great again just choose a path to I think that could be a vote winner

and finally this week dead whale news now and well huge controversy in the the whale community a beluga whale named Valdemir

has sadly passed away he's been found dead

in presumably in the sea

off the southwest coast of Norway.

There have been

allegations that he's a Russian spy.

Now he's been mysteriously silenced before he could be questioned

about it.

So he's been floating around off the coast of Norway for years.

He's sort of a hero to the people.

They discovered him some time ago.

He's wearing a harness that says property, equipment St.

Petersburg on it and has a mount for what is presumably a camera.

The Russian government will not comment on

this harness and so people assume that either he's a spy whale or possibly a therapy whale.

If he is a spy whale, can I just put out this advice to any other spy whales that happen to be floating around?

Don't wear a harness that has

equipment St.

Petersburg.

Britain on it.

I mean it's no brainer, right?

Double bluff.

I mean this, yeah, this, I mean, I don't know where we are.

I don't know where we are in the sub sub-aquatic spy Cold War business.

It's possible that he's just a surviving relic of the Cold War.

He's got a lot of enemies, though.

I mean,

it's hard enough to be subtle when you're passing a briefcase on a park bench and being a beluga whale at the same time, let alone if you're wearing a harness that says equipment St.

Petersburg on it.

They've got him in a cooled area and they're going to do an autopsy on him to find the cause of death.

And we will know if the body disappears before that autopsy takes place that there's been some something fishy going on.

Oh,

come on.

Come on.

Can't beat that.

I mean, I think that's a Krilla line.

I heard a rumor that this whole whale spying thing is spreading,

not just Russia, spreading across the world, and they're recruiting an increasing number of whales.

I don't know the source of that information, so cetacea.

Oh, my gosh.

Just, oh, okay.

Blow hole in one, Andy.

Anyway.

I tried to

call Moscow to find out, just try and get someone to say whether or not it was their whale, but all the phone lines were down.

I

tried to ring them up to get an answer, but I just got a humback.

I'm gonna call that one a fluke.

It was discovered actually by these father and son, Norwegian

people who were out in an amphibious cross that needed to be, that can be rowed in water but can be driven on land.

It's called an oar car.

Or filler, no giller.

I'm very much enjoying this.

You do have a skill that I do not have.

But I just couldn't get any answers out of anyone.

People said that one time I came up against a real narwhal.

And apparently it's not just whales either apparently during the the the the fight that led to the death of uh of the the spy whale um a spy cat um got involved um it was a I think an American spy cat fell off a boat into the sea and was

eaten by another spy marine mammal porpois

anyway I digress

fish bump

actually I had a friend who works for the British Secret Service Marine Mammal Division

he went undercover trying to look like a 1970s rock star.

He dived into the water to try and help out, which

didn't do any good for his artificially curly hair.

It ruined his perm

and his fur coat as well.

I'm not sure what animal it was made of.

It looked a bit minky to me.

And Finn.

He was saying.

I mean, I was going to go with that.

He was very upset.

And when you get upset, he used to like...

But when he got upset, you sounded really like the band Crowded House, and he let out a really big Finn whale.

I don't know how you do it.

It's amazing.

It's a disability.

I'm just

going to wade away over here.

Right.

Before you all start feeling too blue, let's move on

and finish the show.

So there we are.

I mean, apologies for what you've just sat through

for those, but you know, I've been having a whale over time.

Right, plugs time.

As I mentioned earlier on, I'm on tour for the start of November.

Do come along to all the available shows.

I just really want to say, call me Ishwael.

It's only £3,000 to see him at

every opportunity on tour.

You can either see 45

dates of Zoltzmann or one Oasis gig.

Your call, buglers.

Details at andyzoltzman.co.uk or elsewhere on

the internet.

Alice?

I am in the UK right now.

I'm running a Writer's Afternoon intensive class.

If you want to come along and write with me on Sunday, the 8th of September at the Bread and Butter Lounge, the application form is available at linktree/slash AliceFraser.

That's linktr.ee/slash AliceFraser.

You can get the application form to join me for a writer's afternoon.

I'm also doing a bit of stand-up here and there, so follow me on Blue Sky or X for the dates of that.

They're coming up.

I'll be doing Old Rope on Monday and various other bits and pieces.

Me too.

Old Rope will be my first gig back after a year off stand-up entirely.

So come and watch me be absolute dog shit.

Also, my book, A Passion for Passion, has a release date.

It's coming out on the 6th of February next year.

So buy it now and they'll know how many copies to print.

So

that's how the industry works nowadays.

You don't buy things after they've been created.

You buy them long, long before.

That's great.

i i'm actually doing um a gig on the 8th at the queen elizabeth hall on the south bank in london if you're in london so please come along seven o'clock what time is it mine's one till uh midday till 4 p.m perfect and then you can go go and write some comedy then come and see what i wrote earlier at seven o'clock if you do if you're in london um on the eighth um and then on the ninth i'm gonna be following alice at old rope because then

hopefully one of us between us will have some jokes we'll have some jokes i'm doing that on the ninth uh but just generally, just come say hi on socials.

Just give me a follow and say hello.

I'm then doing a charity show with Andy on the 25th of September at the comedy store where we will be supporting young carers aged 5 to 12.

We're helping them have a childhood.

So come along, support a good cause.

I'll be hosting.

Andy's going to.

I'm going to bring

10 minutes of absolute gold.

15.

He's going to bring 10 to 15 minutes of absolute gold and the other two hours because it's a charity gig.

I mean, that is a very, very worthwhile cause.

I didn't know I was a young carer until I was about 25.

We would have taken you to a house and given you a holiday.

Given me a childhood.

Given you a childhood and sent you birthday cards and stuff.

Oh, my goodness.

We would do that.

But also on is like Terry Alderton.

We've got Joe Bran.

We've got Jeff Norcott.

It's going to be a great.

It sounds like an amazing gig.

I might come along and watch it.

At least from the UK now.

Come along and have a child-free, non-miserable evening.

Because apparently you're...

Oh, no, wait, your kids make you happy.

Come and be miserable away from your kids like this wonderful gig that we're doing I quite like your kids I just met one before

yeah he's just so good

also I do a podcast called the Gargle which is the glossy magazine to the bugle's audio newspaper for visual world where we do all of the news but none of the politics so if you like the bugle but would rather it were less political um ours is the place for you to come so there you go also the the news quiz is back this week so you can find that on bbc sounds and from next week you'll be able to see me in a rare TV appearance on the show, Taskmaster.

Yay!

Which I'm so excited for this end.

We are all excited for this.

Anyway, I think you're going to nail it.

Right, it was a lot of fun.

Anyway, we'll be back.

Not next week, because of an absolute deluge of cricket, meaning that it's not possible for me to record.

The following week, we'll be back with Tom Ballard and Nish Kumar.

Until then, goodbye.

Bye.

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.