JD Vance: Sofa King Weird

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to the first post-summer hiatus bugle of the year, following the first and only official summer hiatus of the year, if you ignore the micro hiatuses we tend to have between each episode of the Bugle.

Because whilst, of course, we are on call 24 7 365 and a quarter whenever satire is needed apparently podcasting non-stop all the time just to avoid the accusation of having hiatus is not worth the hassle these days although it would make chris's job editing it easier if he didn't have to edit it at all anyway here we are this is issue 4313 the world's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world with me and is ultimate here in the sacred shed of unquenchable truth in south london and i'm joined firstly by someone whom i first met.

When was it?

Back in April 1980.

When she was complaining about pretty much everything, as I recall.

Hasn't really stopped since.

It's the quibbling sibling, Helen Zoltzman.

Welcome back, hello.

Thank you, Andy.

It's been a couple of years since I've been on this show.

Was there a family feud that I didn't know about?

Oh, I don't know, actually.

Not that I didn't hear about it either.

But

maybe we've both been blocked by everyone else.

Damn.

I don't know.

Well, that hurts.

Well, I haven't really thought of it like that.

You are currently on tour with The Illusionist in the UK, which we will give a proper plug to later.

How's it reaching out?

Just started last night.

How'd it go?

Just started last night, yeah.

Well, I printed some tea towels as merch, and I'm doing a great trade in tea towels.

And I think maybe it's more of a tea towel tour with a show tacked on at the front.

Well, you know, that's something.

I think that's basically where all showbiz is heading towards just the global big tea towel is taking over the industry.

Yeah, this is just a normal-sized tea towel, though.

No one's going to get smothered by it.

So it's reassuring.

Uh also joining us from over land and sea and then land again.

Quite a lot of sea, then quite a lot of land, following a relatively short bit of land at the start.

In San Francisco, it's NATO Green.

Happy late August, Nato.

Welcome back.

How's your summer been since we last spoke?

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

As you all know, I am

involved as a citizen.

So I was out in my neighborhood knocking on doors, talking to voters, trying to there's a there's a race for our local city council, basically.

And so I was talking to voters in support of my candidate, and I knocked on someone's door.

And I said, hi, I'm NATO from around the corner, talking to you about my candidate, Jackie Fielder.

And the person who had come to the door said, NATO Green from the Bugle.

So shout out to Alex on Folsom Street, Bugler.

And

Alex, you know know how to vote.

Either you could vote for decency or the end of history, but it's really up to you.

I mean, I don't think those two are mutually exclusive.

I mean, I'd quite like to see both, actually.

You know, a polite end of history would be the last thing anyone's expecting, I think.

Be a

nice little twist in the tail for humanity.

We are recording on the 26th of August, 2024.

On this day in 1883, Krakatoa, the celebrity Indonesia-based volcano, really got its eruption on, turning skies a particularly embarrassed shade of red.

Across the world, a plume of ash, ash bloomed up 50 miles in the air.

The kaboom was heard almost 3,000 miles away.

And the whole thing made Craxie one of the biggest global celebrities of the late 19th century, along with the likes of Monikin Imperialism superstar Queen Victoria, tuberculosis, cricketer and hipster beard inspiration W.G.

Grace, painter Claude, Showmida Monet, and electricity.

Krakatoa was right up there with the big guns of the late 19th century.

So, why did Craxy crack it up in 1883?

Well, who knows?

Who knows what motivates a volcano these days, even, and less so in the 1880s?

It looked like a classic cry for help to me.

What do you guys think?

What was the

rationale behind Krakatoa erupting in such spectacular fashion?

When you were a middle child, Andy, were you ever starved of attention and had to erupt just to get someone to notice you?

Well, I did have a few moments like that, yes.

So, yeah,

I guess there's got to be a frustration as well at being a volcano and being denied the freedom to choose your own path in life, very much

stuck where you are.

And,

you know, there's certain expectations that come with being a volcano, and I guess there's a lot of pressure to live up to that.

It was the cancel culture of its time.

Well, it cancelled itself by blowing itself up

and

ceasing to exist as a volcano, I guess, and having to build again from scratch.

But anyway, fair play.

That was back in 1883.

It is also today,

the 26th of August.

Apparently, it's International Dog Day.

I presume it's pro-dog rather than anti-dog.

But

have either of you marked this in

any way?

I feel like every day's International Dog Day to me.

I welcome all international dogs,

except the ones that have weird personalities because their skulls are too small.

Sorry, person eugenicist.

Which is one of the weirder fashion trends of recent years.

I think the average dog now just looks a lot weirder than the average dog 40 years ago.

I don't know.

I haven't looked at the science of that.

Anyway, tomorrow, International Dog Day, we give you a free bugle pull-out.

of the great human speeches as they would have sounded if they'd been given by dogs instead of people, including Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,

Jesus H.

Christ's Sermon on the Mount,

Emmeline Pankhurst's Freedom or Death speech from 1913,

and finally, Jack Carnum's commentary on Cliff Thorburn making a 147 maximum break at the crucible in 1983.

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

This week we have a quick review of the Olympics.

The Olympics happened, well, pretty much, I think they started after our last episode.

I don't know if that's coincidence or it is coincidence.

I'm just having that confirmed.

Did you, I know neither of you are nearly as obsessed with sport as doctors recommend, particularly if that doctor is me.

Did you watch any Olympics?

For Pacific Coast time, where Nato and I both live, it was on an inconvenient time.

Right.

I don't have the powers that you do, Andy, to go nocturnal for sport.

But I had just flown back to England in time to watch The Last Day with our mother.

And it turns out there's a lot of really weird cycling events, and I don't understand why humans invented them.

I think that's the joy of sport, is that, you know, there's so much that humans could concentrate on that would really benefit the species as a whole, but we have devoted a huge amount of our brain power to developing things that distract us from the things we should be doing.

And sport is right up there.

And ridiculous cycling events.

I mean,

the break dancing seemed to get quite a lot of traction.

A lot of scandal there.

Huge, huge scandal.

For too long, the Olympics has focused on people achieving high quality of performance and winning.

And,

you know, I think if it wants to accurately reflect the human condition, it should just be people winging it and failing.

Someone has to come in last at the Olympics.

Exactly.

Yeah, and I think there should be like an inverse podium, just like a ditch for the last three in each event.

Like a graveyard.

The person who finishes last, just their head is just poking up above the ground and then one step up for the so like you know the anti-podium of shame for us to celebrate failure.

Also a huge controversy over events not included, despite the fact that a number of ridiculous and tedious events were included,

including the International Human Cannonball Association has protested about the lack of inclusion of cannonballing as an Olympic sport.

Because modern military equipment could potentially transform the art of human cannonballery.

And who would not want to watch?

That as an Olympic event to see which athlete can keep a rock-solid aerodynamic body shape as they're blasted 180 miles across the French countryside using the very latest in ballistic technology.

That, to me, is the future of sports.

Also, riderless dressage was excluded once again.

I mean, controversy reared it out with stories of horse bullying in the dressage.

So, I think it's time to accept that the event would be a lot more exciting.

If instead of one highly trained horse and an elite-level rider troodling around for no apparent reason, doing ridiculous dancing, they just released 30 wild horses into an arena and see what happens.

That, to me, is better television.

Were any of the Zaltz people break dancing enthusiasts back in the day in the 80s?

No.

I don't think it was legal in Kent, in Tunbridge Wells.

Can you remember?

The Spinal unit forbade it.

Yeah.

It was far too Tory a town

to allow break dancing.

Or any kind of dancing.

Yeah.

Other than

a slow waltz with someone dressed in a Margaret Thatcher outfit.

I I think that's the only legal dance in Tunbridge Worlds when we were kids.

Aren't they getting rid of horses from dressage

or from the modern pentathlon?

So next time it will just be competitors leaping over jumps on their own.

Yes, yeah.

Which to me

will be more exciting, I think.

Or if the horses can ride the athletes, that's

only fair.

Will the athletes have to clop together some coconut hearts?

Anyway, our Olympic section is in the bin.

Top story now.

And when we last recorded, Joe Biden had just announced he was stepping aside and that Kamala Harris would be the Democratic candidate in the forthcoming election.

NATO,

as

America gradually or rapidly declining into a pit of its own self-inflicted despair, correspondent, bring us up to date with what has happened in the intervening weeks since late July.

Last night at dinner, someone was telling me about having eaten a delicacy that was a fish marinated in its own urine.

And

nothing else describes American politics quite as perfectly as that image.

We sit here on August 26th.

The last episode that you released was right after

Biden stepped aside and Kamala Harris consolidated Democratic support.

On July 13th was when Trump was shot in the ear, and then the Republican convention.

It was dark time for Democrats.

It's only been six weeks.

It's been such a whirlwind of six weeks.

It's been dizzying.

Six weeks is such a fast amount of time, as the Republicans call it, the appropriate length of time to bring a pregnancy to term.

I'd forgotten about the ear thing.

That's how long it's been.

But also, NATO, election campaigns in the UK are only six weeks.

This all have to happen in in that period.

I am jealous.

That is enough reason to shred the Declaration of Independence and return to the bosom just so that we can shorten our election period.

Do you know, Andy,

you've been off the air this whole time.

Do you know how much of a hardship it has been for me personally as a white male comedian to not be podcasting?

I actually did go on the obituation room and other podcasts.

I've had so many takes.

I am dying from all of my pent-up takes.

I've had blue balls of podcasting my takes.

The bugle hiatus in the summer of 2024 is literally the most violent man-made disaster to happen to anyone since Chernobyl.

It's like the, it's been very confusing for me also because as someone who votes for Democrats and also hates the Democrats, do you know what I mean?

Like, I, you know, as you know, like, I'm not big on teams.

I don't enjoy, you know, we, I don't enjoy, I don't not root for things.

My team is the international working class.

I think this might finally be our season.

We've made some trades.

But the, the, you know, like, my team,

they're my team.

I grudge them.

I resent them, but they're also

craven, feckless idiots who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, like a junkie whose drug of choice is mediocrity, who will will sell one shoe on the street uh not a pair just a single shoe to buy to get a fix of mediocrity and so it's confusing to like have the democrats pivot from their decades-old strategy of being tedious uh losers to seeming to try something completely different and out of the box and try to win um

and uh and care about anything and it's been like flawless execution uh by the Democrats.

When Biden, his polling was in the toilet,

Democrats

were telling us that democracy was at stake with Trump, but then acting like the stakes were lower than that.

Like it was just stakes at stake.

You know what I mean?

And then Nancy Pelosi, my congresswoman from San Francisco, like I hate her, and it's mutual.

She hates me too because one time I delivered a seven-foot styrofoam spine to her office

and her staff have never forgiven me.

But

she kept, what was amazing, like she was the nail in the coffin for Biden stepping aside because she kept saying, she kept going on the news and saying, well, you know, Joe Biden is running out of time to make a decision.

And then five minutes later, Joe Biden would come on the news and say, I already made a decision.

And then she would come back on and say, he really has to make a decision.

So

Sunday, July 21st, 11 a.m., Biden drops out.

Kamala declares immediately there's 44,000 black women on Zoom raising money.

By 4 o'clock, Tennessee's Democratic Party is the first state delegation to pledge their delegates to her.

By 5.30, Charlie XDX tweets the Kamala's brat.

So by the end of the day of Monday, Kamala had raised $81 million, which is the biggest single-day fundraising hall in history.

And then on Tuesday, J.D.

Vance blows up the race by referring to Kamala Harris as a childless cat lady.

And I think when historians look back, this will be the moment that Trump lost.

Because polling suggests that we're in the middle of the biggest gender gap in elections where women overwhelmingly support Harris and men support Trump.

And there's a scientific explanation for that.

And there's a technical term, which is that male Trump supporters are bitch-ass f boys.

And

calling out childless cat ladies is a provocation.

They have poked the bear because one thing we know about childless cat ladies is that they have time on their hands and can hold a grudge.

So now they're swinging into politics.

By Wednesday, that same week,

the entire discourse of the election has changed.

And

the serious debate that is convulsing American politics is, does J.D.

Vance couches?

That was like,

it turns out he may not, but we've had to spend a lot of time talking about and answering the question because we believe that the Republican vice presidential nominee and senator from Ohio would be someone who would a couch if that was happening.

He hasn't denied fing the couch.

I mean that's that speaks volumes of the man and the couch.

I mean like you said there's no evidence that Vance has had carnal relations, not just with a couch, but with any piece of soft furnishing.

But the fact, as you say, that this has rumbled on for so long is in many ways worse, because I guess it shows that

vast swathes of the US electorate believe that he is the kind of person who would.

And the fact that he hasn't

now that surely suggests NATO that there's a quite a high probability that J.D.

Vance has had romantic advances rejected by a couch.

And

I mean, that's not vice presidential quality, is it, really?

Yeah.

I want a vice president who knows how to close his deal with the couch.

So how did this come about,

the couch?

I think it was just someone tweeting that in his book, Hillbilly Elegy, on a particular page, he talks about f ⁇ ing a couch with a rubber glove between the cushions, which I believe not to be part of the text of the book, but I haven't read it.

Right.

But it was believable enough that everybody ran with it.

yeah.

And I guess you know, with novels, it's as much about what you don't write as what you do, and you know, the fact that he hasn't written it basically suggests that he was thinking about it.

Sure, and the list of things that have become, I mean, by the end of the week, the Democrats have sort of settled on this like frame about the Republicans, which is to talk about them as creepy and weird.

Like, they had been talking about Republicans as being a threat to democracy, but they are like, these guys are just weird.

Yes, maybe J.D.

Devance did a couch, but he did go on an interview and refer to his children as my wife's children.

I have a question

about people trying not to seem weird during election cycles, NATO.

Because in Britain, politicians will try to eat something in a way that real human beings do it.

And so there'll be all these pictures of them eating a sandwich with a knife and fork or trying to eat a pizza with a straw.

Does that happen in the US?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

There's, I mean, well, the J.D.

Vance one that just happened.

Did you see the donut shop?

I've lost track because there was like Mountain Dew.

There was

Philadelphia.

It's a lot of food trouble with this guy.

That's that's how you connect with people, I guess.

Is so, yeah, there's this video of

J.D.

Vance going into a donut shop in, I think, Georgia and attempting to connect with regular people.

And as a comic, it is his behavior is recognizable as like someone, a comic trying to do crowd work and bombing the biggest bomb in the history of bombs.

Like, just,

you know, being like, have you ever seen a comic do crowd work where they're like, hey, what do you do for a living?

Oh, I got nothing.

Okay, what do you do for a living?

Okay, I got nothing.

Okay, what do you do for?

Okay, I got nothing.

It was just, that was his way of connecting with the people at the donut shop.

Is he was, how long have you worked here?

And they'd be like,

I don't, a while.

I don't know.

My favorite example of that, there was one election

in 2012.

Paul Ryan, the Republican vice president nominee, staged a big photo op of him being connecting with the common man by going into a kitchen and cleaning pots that had already been cleaned.

That's how politicians do it.

By the end of that week,

Trump is having a rally, and he says to a crowd,

get out and vote just this time.

You won't have to do it anymore.

Four more years.

It'll be fixed.

It'll be fine.

You won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

And everyone freaked out that they thought that that meant Trump was going to planning to end elections in America.

And first of all, like most Americans vote every two years.

It's not like,

you know,

voting is a huge, like, oh, thank God, I don't have to vote once every two years.

Like, there's lots of things that I do every

less frequently.

I have relatives that I see less than every two years.

So, the, but

that people thought that he meant that he would end elections, but he was talking out to Christians.

He said, My beautiful Christians, he could, I think he thought that he was going to bring about the rapture.

And

as we know, there are no elections in the book of Revelations.

That's just a translation choice.

Who knows what really went on?

Did the devil get there undemocratically?

Who can say?

Then, then he does an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists and says about Kamala Harris.

I don't know what she is.

She was Indian and now she's black.

And

you know,

Andy, you know, Bugle co-host Hariko Dabalu, his brother was in a popular rap group called Dust Racist.

Yeah.

And so since then, it reminded me of one of their songs.

And since

that interview, I've just been going around humming to myself,

I've got a black lady, I've got an Indian lady, I've got a combination black and an Indian lady.

So then the following week, Robert F.

Kenny Jr.

explains to Roseanne Barr that he hid a dead bear in Central Park 10 years ago.

And

did you

did this story reach you?

Let me who has never buried a dead bear in Central Park cast the first stone, Nathan.

Well, it wasn't, okay, so the bear is roadkill.

He stops to pick it up.

That's not really the weird part.

He's going to save the meat.

It's a little bit weird, but he picked it up and then threw it in the back of his car because he didn't want to be late for falconry.

He had a busy day of falconry and then went to dinner at a steakhouse that cost $70 a steak.

But the weirdest part wasn't hiding the bear in the park.

It was hiding a dead bear on a bicycle.

Not much hiding room on a bicycle.

To give the impression that the bear had escaped from the circus and died of the heartache of not having crowds to entertain.

And then, like, so the, you know, the election is polling is started, starting to shift, huge fundraising, surges in volunteers.

And then the VEEP stakes settle out, and Kamala Harris picks Tim Waltz, Minnesota governor Tim Waltz,

big West, Midwestern Energy, progressive tax record, or track, progressive track record, former high school teacher and football coach.

He's like, he's like Vice President Ted Lasso.

He's really, really crushing the polls.

We're seeing a huge lead for Democrats among people who yearned to have been unconditionally loved by their father.

So that's, and then we get into the convention.

It's been a wild time in America.

Are you okay?

No.

No.

I mean, it's been so unpredictable.

And like all of the energy and excitement, like I don't, like, I'm somebody who tends to just like, I tend to hate any politician.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, if it was whoever it is, if they got, if I love them, you know, as as soon as they got in, I would hate them just on principle.

But like all of the energy and the incitement, enthusiasm, like it's very moving

to see how inspired people are by like

the turning tides in American politics.

People are talking about this joy-based campaign, Beyoncé music, pop culture.

You know, the big Republican line of attack against Kamala Harris is that she laughs too much because she seems fun and can dance.

Like, it's all

it's

a very confusing time.

Right.

So, so, Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., who you mentioned, he was standing as an independent.

He's now pulled out and endorsed Donald Trump, which is not traditional Kennedy family behavior, being as they are famously not

Republicans.

But, I mean, in terms of Trump's campaign, which has been faltering, could this endorsement of someone who has

hidden a bear on a bicycle and then buried it in Central Park, could that really win over those floating voters of people who think bears deserve to die but like them to be buried in major financial centers?

Yeah, I mean, well, I think

here's the thing is, and you've seen this both about Kennedy, but also about, you know, there are some other, you know, Jill Stein is running as a Green Party candidate again.

And Democrats in particular get really worked up about third-party candidates.

And what I, as someone who's paid close attention to a lot of elections,

people forget, like, a lot of that is, there's a limit to how much you can do about that.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, anyone who is on the ballot will get some votes.

And those votes are not necessarily based on anything rational or ideological.

Just for one example that I keep handy for exactly this conversation, in 2018, there was a Green Party candidate for Congress in Ohio who got 1,000 votes and claimed that he was descended from aliens, that

his family, his distant relatives originally came to planet Earth from the Pleiades star cluster,

and that he got a thousand votes and it was a race decided by 2,000 votes.

So if you have, anyone who's on the ballot will get some votes.

And those votes could be someone likes the name, they don't like the other candidates, they have some philosophical belief, they had a stroke while they were filling out their ballot,

they thought it would be funny.

Like, who knows?

There's just some, there's a bunch of statistical noise in that.

And there was

just a Democratic primary race in Arizona that was won by like 36 votes

in a congressional race.

So, I don't think that you can assume that

RFKs,

the people who supported Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

supported him because he was an anti-vaxxer.

These are not deep thinkers.

They're not like

policy-based optimizers in their political decision.

So there's not a lot of rational actor theory at work here.

So I don't think that they're going to sort of necessarily follow the calculation of

them going for Donald Trump because

RFK said so.

They are just as likely to

write in as a write-in candidate

COVID-23.

There was one story, Helen, that you picked up on with regard to JD Avance, which is that his supporters are carrying around

tubs of semen.

uh to express their support for vance and yeah isn't that adorable yeah fan culture producing some surprise results again.

It might not be Axel Seemanandi.

It has not been confirmed what is in the cups that they are carrying or hanging around their necks at MAGA rallies.

But they've got a little picture of J.D.

Vance on and the words J.D.

Vance full family kit.

And in their minds, it's a diss at people that use fertility treatments.

like Tim Walls did or Michelle Obama did.

Really, it seems like an incredible self-own to me.

Like how ultra-right wingers are like, yeah, I'm not going to eat vegetables.

Good for you.

Enjoy constipation and marlin curtain.

Maybe it is his gentleman.

You thought tea towels were good merch.

I still do actually.

I'm thinking they're even better merch all the time.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, it is one of the weirder things, even in the catalogue of craziness that is American politics, branded sperm donation cups, mocking the infertile.

And

I mean, I don't know quite trying to understand why this has happened.

It's made me think that maybe

we should just retire.

But yeah, well, I think we should just retire the word because

it generally comes before something you don't want to hear, because you're still clinging to a vestige of hope for your species, or it comes before something that is patently wrong, or it just presages the words

just because.

So I think this story exemplified.

We have to stop looking for reasons for things happening.

Yeah, they're just yes anding it.

They think JD Vance and Jiz, and they're like, yes, and

gonna make my own gizz cups and wear them.

And here's what they're missing.

Look, it's so I have 16 year olds, twins.

We went through infertility treatments.

It's a horrible experience.

I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

The only good thing about infertility treatments is medically assisted masturbation.

You get to go to a doctor's office and jack off under the supervision of medical professionals with

evidence-based supplies available.

So, of all the things that they're going to knock about infertility,

they're making fun of literally the best part of infertility.

Well, we will, of course, have full world-exclusive coverage of the final 70-odd days of the American election to see whether Donald Trump, the sex pest, fraudster, delusion monger, tantrum thrower, and Hannibal Lecter fan, can win over floating voters.

I mean, that seems like

a collection of character traits that ought not to work, but this is America we're talking about.

Harris pledged a new way forward at the Democratic Convention.

And I guess the problem for her is that the old way backwards has generally been quite hard to beat in American politics.

But anyway, we will have full coverage over the next few weeks.

All other world news, and there's only one place to begin, Helen.

You are our dead penguin correspondent, and

the world's most famous.

Yes, the world's most famous gay penguin, Sven,

has sadly passed away in Australia.

He's waddled off to the great penguin enclosure in the sky where the herring grow on trees and the ice grows naturally into the shape of a bobshead run that pumps you into the sweet salty sea at thrilling speeds after you slide it slide down it on your penguin tum-tom.

And he's passed away at the age of 12.

A very sad moment for

penguins, the universe over.

Yeah, he died of natural causes.

That's some comfort.

No foul play.

But Sven was famous around the world for being in a six-year relationship with magic.

another male penguin and gay penguins actually very common gay animals are extremely common.

And people would love to pretend.

Thanks to the woke lobby, there weren't any until 15 years ago, Max.

Yeah, just bandwagon jumping.

But the unusual thing about Sven and Magic's relationship was that they co-parented and

they would take turns to take care of their eggs.

They raised two children together.

They divided up the roles of going to seek food.

And

the way that penguins woo each other is with song.

And Gentoo penguins, which are Sven and Magic,

also collect pebbles and present them to each other to build a nest with.

It's kind of symbolic.

And also because they can't really go shopping for other wooing gifts.

After Sven died, magic burst into the morning song of a penguin and all the other penguins joined, which apparently is much more unusual.

And Magic is still collecting pebbles, suggesting Magic is open for a new partner already, which is fast, but grief does different things to be done.

Let's not judge that.

Let's not judge that at all.

Yes, I mean, when Sven penguin his last, you say, I mean, it was a very moving

magic burst into mournful songs, supported by the rest of the penguins.

Haunting a cappella renditions of penguin classics, such as I'm So Lonesome I Could Honk, Waddle Me to the Moon, Krilling Me Softly,

and Subterranean Homesick Herrings.

So, the Gen 2 penguins, so that's because I know we have sort of Gen X, Gen Z.

So it's Gen 1 and Gen 2 with penguins.

So these are more modern penguins with more sort of

open lifestyles.

Yeah, they've got Bluetooth.

Yeah.

It's the love that...

that dared not speak its name or the love that could not speak its name because the two lovers were penguins and didn't have the capacity to speak.

But it has really captured the imagination of the world,

this relationship, showing everyone that maybe as a planet we become more accepting of relationships that would once have been scorned and shamed, particularly if the participants in those relationships are penguins.

Participating in the kill your gays trope, though, because that is a problematic one in popular culture.

If you show a gay couple, you have to kill one of them.

Oh, right.

That seems

still progress to be made.

Yes, they're very much the Achilles and Patroclus of the Sydney Aquarium Penguiliad.

They stayed together through six difficult years in the penguin community as the renownedly flightless species had to negotiate COVID, global war, global warming and its disastrous impact on penguin property prices and accusations that penguins are not actually flightless but just lazy.

So it was a difficult time to be in a

same-sex penguin relationship.

And the two,

as you say,

they co-parented two penguinfants, Lara and Clancy, who are named, of course, respectively after Sven's favourite West Indian cricketer and Magic's favourite Cold War spy novelist.

And the two young penguins were reportedly literally speechless after the death of Sven.

Burglary news now.

And

this was a story that

caught my eye.

A burglar in Rome

was foiled after he became distracted whilst burgling a flat by a book about Homer's Iliad, which he saw on a bedside table, picked up and started reading.

Mid-burglary.

The occupant of the property woke up and confronted the Homer-obsessed burglar, who, despite frantic efforts to build a decoy horse out of bits of wood, was apprehended by the police.

I mean, it's, I mean, he needs to to try harder, that's for sure.

He's useless as a burglar.

But anyway, it's,

I guess it's a good lesson for everyone, isn't it?

That,

you know, that it's very, very dangerous to study ancient Greek literature.

You know, it took me four years at university to

work that out.

But I mean, it's, it's really...

It's very, it's a very, very risky thing to do in many situations, I think.

Yeah, because in any of the reports, I have not seen evidence that this person was actually actually a burglar.

It just seems like they broke into someone's flat and started reading,

which is just breaking and reading, isn't it?

That's not burglary.

If it was a burglar, he would have stolen the book and read it later.

I guess so.

They're a thief of knowledge.

Yeah.

He also said that he was trying to break into someone else's flat

or into a BNB.

but then saw the book and got he thought the book belonged to the BNB that he thought he'd broken into and had a a read.

I mean, I guess we'll let the Italian court system be the judge of these things.

But I guess, I mean, it is quite an interesting new angle in home security because, you know, we see all these adverts trying to make you paranoid about home security and all the products that you can have to

make your home more secure.

But if it's as simple as just leaving an interesting-looking book in every room, surely that's, I mean, that's got to be a huge step forward.

I mean, what book do you think would be most likely to distract a burglar?

Oh, Valley of the Dolls.

Oh, right.

That is

the ultimate trash read.

Very compelling.

Just leave a copy outside and they don't even have to break a window to read it.

Right.

I actually have a book that I leave out on our coffee table just to distract people.

And the book is called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism.

Well, there you go.

And have you ever had your house burgled?

No, because people just show up and read the book and then they leave.

There we go.

Committed to the revolution.

Yeah.

I don't know how many copies that book has sold, but there should be one in every house

on this planet.

I'm going to suggest something on polar exploration with lavish illustrations.

I think that would be fun.

Oh, nice.

Confusingly, when I used to work in a bookshop, the windows would get broken quite regularly, but people wouldn't steal anything, even though a lot of the books in the windows were worth hundreds of pounds.

Right.

So why did they break the windows?

Just shit and giggles?

Maybe.

Maybe they were pressing their faces up to the glass so firmly to look at the books that the glass could not hold.

Was it in that bookshop, Helen, that you bought the book that you gave to me entitled Through England on My Knees, A Brass Rubbing Odyssey?

It seems likely, Andy, because that bookshop was very close to our hometown, Tunbridge Wells' brass-rubbing centre, which lately

is now a nightclub.

Yeah.

Have you read it?

Brass rubbing centres have gone the same way.

It's much harder to have a brass-rubbing odyssey these days.

Yeah, it's quicker.

I mean, it is one of the greatest book titles ever.

Through England on My Knees, a brass-robbing Odyssey.

Particularly just because of Through England on My Knees opens up so many possibilities of what the book might be about.

I assume they were doing that to be provocative, but I could be wrong.

They could have just been factual about the nature of brass robbing.

Poisoning news now.

Helen, you're, I mean, you've long been obsessed with poison.

Sure.

Why not?

Yes, everything's fair.

The

famous actor Alicia Silverston attempted to poison herself

in London and ate some random piece of fruit, as you do.

Asked on social media what it was, and it turns out it was deadly poisonous, other than not being deadly.

Yeah, I mean, you say random fruit as if she had just popped by a green grocer and picked something up um she was filming herself walking around and she did what every parent will tell their child not to do which is pluck a berry off a bush that they couldn't identify and she was like oh what's this and popped it in her mouth and it turned out to be uh solanum pseudo capsicum which is a nightshade um and then she went quiet on social media for a bit and people were like oh no oh no um she has now popped up to say that she's fine or at least alive and well.

She didn't necessarily say fine.

Who knows how this will

play out in the future?

Anyway, don't do it, kids.

Yeah.

Has she pledged to steer away from

just wild foraging of berries or not?

I'll have to say she picked it saying, oh,

is this a tomato?

And then she ate it and then she was like, well, it's definitely not a tomato because of the leaves.

And that might have been a deduction to make before eating it.

Yes, I guess.

Also, how many places in London are growing tomatoes out front?

I'll answer that.

Not many, not many, NATO.

You don't have a lot of found fruit harvesting expeditions in London?

Blackberries, yes.

Everything else do not.

And blackberries also only above dog urination height.

Finally, on our poison section,

Denmark had banned some South Korean noodles due to being dangerously spicy.

That ban has now been overturned, provoking joy in Denmark's spicy noodle-eating community.

What a day for them.

What a glorious day, Andy.

It's a partial an-banning.

Some flavours had been banned before, and a few of them have been un-banned, but some of them are still considered too spicy, too dangerous for the Danes.

Too much capsaicin content.

I mean, that's they say it can poison consumers, but I haven't heard about a lot of Korean people dying from eating overly spicy noodles from a packet.

I mean, it makes you think, you know, what has, you know, the decline of Denmark over the last, what, 1,200 years?

I mean, they used to cross the Atlantic in

homemade boats, these people, and now they're worried about eating an excessively spicy instant noodle.

And I think that's, you know, I mean, many many countries are struggling with identity, but I think Denmark maybe more than more than any other.

I don't understand, is the noodle spicy or is there sauce on the noodle that's spicy?

Well, you know, it's like a packet ramen, so you could probably cook it without any flavoring, but if you're adding the flavorsome parts, then it gets spicy.

But as revenge, Korea confiscates Trader Joe's everything bagel seasoning at customs because

poppy seeds are designated as a narcotic.

Oh, really?

So we've all got different standards.

Right.

I guess that shows why we'll never achieve world peace if we can have these arguments about poppy seeds and spicy noodles.

US still carries a hefty fine if you smuggle in a kinder surprise.

I think it's like a thousand or two thousand dollars.

Really?

Yeah.

Don't do it.

It's too risky.

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

Next week, we'll catch up on the other news that we've missed over the last few weeks, including some riots action, an unusually active riots season here in the UK

that

didn't show the nation in its best light, and then some counter-riots that showed it in a much better light.

Right, Helen, plug the remaining tours of your Illusionist tour.

Thank you, Andy.

Yes, the Illusionist is touring the UK for the next few weeks.

The show is called Souvenirs.

It's a good time.

not a sad time.

There's some excellent merch.

And the dates are at the illusionist.org slash events.

Don't forget to buy your tickets to my forthcoming stand-up tour, the Zoltgeist, beginning on the 1st of November.

All dates at andysaltzman.co.uk or elsewhere on the internet if you ask it nicely.

NATO, anything to plug?

I'm around doing some dates at Cheaper Than Therapy,

the show in Oakland called Critical Hit.

I'm also doing a second run of the residency with W.

Kamau Bell at Berkeley Rep, where I am the Andy Zaltzman to Kamau's John Oliver, which is to say the less famous and likable sidekick.

Don't forget, if you want to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to give a one-off or a current contribution to help keep the show free, flourishing, and independent, you can do so at thebuglepodcast.com.

Click the donate button, and subscribers will receive the universe-exclusive monthly Ask Andy Show, the latest edition of which has just gone live, Chris.

Just gone live.

That no one else in the history of humanity has been able to access that show apart from Bugle subscribers.

That shows what a landmark it is.

Anyway, thank you for listening.

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.