Bonus: Frogs, Seagulls and Bees

Hello buglers, welcome to Bugle issue 4302 sub-episode A for absolutely we will be back next week with a full episode but for now here is a free bonus sub-episode featuring some choice cuts and some of the newer co-hosts in the Bugle stable.

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Right, consider yourselves commercially nudged buglers.

Now let's start this sub-episode with an announcement from the United Nations on the climate with me, Nish Kumar and Alice Fraser.

In brighter news, the United Nations has said we've now only got two years to save the planet.

Probably still not quite enough of a deadline until it's in the 10 to 15 minute mark.

I don't think our politicians and our business leaders are going to really take it quite as seriously as they might.

Simon Steele, the UN's climate chief, warns that global warming is slipping down politicians' agendas.

And that is assuming that any of our politicians still have agendas because the literal meaning of agenda is things that need to be done.

That's doing stuff.

Now, a word they should be using rather than agenda is things that need to be said.

Now, what's the Latin word for to say?

Let me just go back through my mental role index.

That's dicare.

So, not agenda, but

dickender.

Dickender.

That seemed more appropriate.

Who says your degree was a waste of time?

Exactly.

Not me.

If you can find a better Latin syntax joke

on a podcast this week, well done.

Two years.

What do you know about dicenders?

Two years.

Two years to save save the planet.

It's been a very circumcision heavy show this year.

Two years to

save the planet.

I mean that's that's that seems all right isn't it?

I reckon we can do that.

You can get a lot done in two years.

If I know people and I do know some people that means we have no time to save the planet.

They say scientists are saying that

halving climate damaging greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 is what we need to do if we want to prevent catastrophic rises in temperature.

It's not going to happen.

It's just not going to happen.

It would involve some people giving up some stuff.

Specifically, 20 groups, 20, 20 economic powers that make up 80% of the world's greenhouse emissions would have to stop trying to make a million dollars a second.

Think of, you know.

It's just absolutely not going to happen.

You know, think of the influencers.

How are they going to review items from Amazon if we all have to downsize our emissions?

How is Shell Oil meant to keep quadrupling its murder rate of babies?

Like, we need to

just accept it's not going to happen and start buying waterproof hats and kayaks that flow.

It's good news for the kayak industry.

I mean, this is this is one of the things that, you know, there's not a lot of balance in environmental coverage.

I mean, and you know, we like to be balanced on the bugle, so we should say that there are still some people who believe the entire environment is a hoax or that it's exaggerated and we actually only need a little bit of the environment, like a nature park somewhere.

Or this idea that, as you say, global warming will benefit humanity in a lot of ways.

Great news, as you say, for the kayak industry.

Also, there'll be much less area of the sea covered by ice caps.

So that's more room not just for kayaks,

but also for billionaires to tootle around in their mega yachts.

All that spending, of course, trickles down and

benefits local economies, but good luck finding a f ⁇ ing polar bear that will say thank you to

a Russian oligarch.

And also, we'll have much more efficient shipping routes directly across the North Pole, saving on a few and benefiting the environment.

Also, once more of Canada becomes inhabitable, it should be able to take, let me just do the maths, a lot of land there, based on the population density of Toronto, it should be able to take about 8 billion people.

So basically, everything's going to be,

it's good news for ice hockey fans as well.

It's going to make

the Canadian franchise in the NHL much more competitive.

So

yeah, there are good things.

There's good things from.

At last, revenge for the Titanic.

Exactly.

The problem with being in the UK and reading this news is they're talking about it slipping down the government's agenda.

We don't have a government, okay?

We've got a building, we've got a parliament building, but unfortunately, all the rooms just have signs on them saying gone fishing, okay?

Gone fishing while I still can.

Yeah, exactly.

The idea that,

specifically to view this through the prism of the British populace, the idea that it's slipping down the agenda suggests that there is an agenda.

Whereas at the moment, the only thing on our government's agenda is find a job for when we all get sacked.

It's very, very difficult.

Last year, there was a big COP28 summit in Dubai, which had 84,000 people attending, all flying in, not helpful.

But of of those people, 2,000 were fossil fuel lobbyists.

And I have to say, are we coming to a point where it is not a good idea to invite the people you're legislating against to your party?

I just wonder if that might be styming our ability to actually make conclusive policies that might actually reverse the effects of climate change.

If every time it gets brought up in a meeting room, one of the 2,000 out of 84,000 people attending just goes, ah, ah,

ah,

talk about something else.

Ah!

Ah!

I don't know what lobbyists do, but I assume it's that.

Yeah, again, you know, we're telling the history of humanity in some very accessible terms on this show.

Well, I suggest we do a Kickstarter where all of us together fund a lobbyist to represent the interests of the people.

Right.

Yeah, I'm not sure that's going to work, Alice.

I think what we need is to harness AI

and allow political lobbying on behalf of people from the future using AI lobbyists.

That is the only possible way.

And also a new law.

We need more eclipses.

I think that would help.

That eclipse actually did quite a lot in terms of stopping sunlight getting through.

Just need more of them.

We need a new law.

I mean, Andy, you say getting AI to represent the interests of the people from the future as satire, but that is literally what the rabbit hole that the effective altruist movement went down.

Yeah.

Yeah there's a problem with going down a rabbit hole is that they'll generally send a ferret down after you to

does that stack up?

Let's say yes.

Also a new law so that politicians are cryogenically frozen when they leave office and then brought back to life for one year every 25 years so they can see what their true legacies are before being refrozen

for the next 24.

And I think then you might have politicians acting with a little bit more

long-term strategy.

Finally, Pitt the Elder would come to see that his bath shitting was frowned upon.

In many ways, that was just Pitt's

pre-emptive metaphor for how we've treated the planet, so he deserves a lot of credit.

Obviously, the end of the world is not nearly as important as domestic politics in the UK.

And the good news reached us here in this blessed land that Rishi Sunak's Rwanda scheme is alive and not at all well.

I discussed it with Alice Fraser and Alastair Barry.

Let's just quickly touch on this.

We talked about Rishi Sunak trying to find some good news

to put to the public.

His bizarre Rwanda scheme is now underway.

And the exciting news for this country is that one migrant has been sent to Rwanda.

Rwanda albeit not quite under the scheme the government has been

promoting he um he went after receiving a three thousand pound payment inducement

bribe to voluntarily go to rwanda so one migrant has gone um it's not entirely clear how offering people three thousand pounds if they turn up then leave will dissuade people from turning up but look politics is like god it moves in mysterious ways and most people don't really believe in it anymore and even many of those that claim to believe in it are only saying so for show.

But anyway, one migrant has been Rwanda.

And let me just check the latest.

Yes, all the trains are now running on time.

Good quality social housing has sprung up in quite literal droves around the country.

Funding for social care, mental health, youth services, education, and yeah, everything else is rocketed up by, I'm going to say, 364%.

Queen Victoria is back from the dead.

Communities are once again joyously, communally singing harmoniously in the streets, just like they used to in all the old musicals.

And England has won the Euro 2024 football tournament already.

So it is kind of working.

You have to give Zunak

credit for that i mean it's a sign of the future i remember back in the day when you had to rwanded things by putting a pencil in and turning it around

i'm just i'm just i'm just thrilled to have been here at the inception of of the word rwandered as a verb i think it's a tremendous linguistic development that um and he was he volunteered i mean he was already found to be an illegal immigrant he was going to get kicked out anyway and someone went we give you three grand can we say it was rwanda and he went uh well you're right i mean further to the elon musk flag um idea for holidays i've got a cunning way to raise more money which is i'm perfectly prepared um to be deported to rwanda for three thousand pounds i will make no arrangements to uh to have any settled status in rwanda which means they will send me straight fat straight back i think i can probably do the round trip in under 24 hours and walk away with three thousand pounds and i'm absolutely delighted to get on board i mean if it's all a question of stats isn't it that if you just count everyone leaving the country to go on holiday as

an asylum grant being kicked out of the country, then the government is doing a very, very good job, I think.

Well, I mean, basically, they did this sending of the one man back in order to distract from the fact that the Home Office had been sending thousands of asylum decision letters to the wrong addresses,

giving a new meaning, I assume, to the phrase, return to sender.

But they're not only sending these letters to the wrong addresses, they're also misclassifying children as adults.

So on Sunak's watch, the government will go to the wrong house to attempt to deport a child who's being wrongly classified as an adult.

It just feels

like, again, we can all be going on holidays on this.

Just say that you're

a large man from somewhere you're not meant to be from.

The technology being used for this, the Home Office are sending letters.

I mean, the idea that anyone could slip through the net of the Home Office and

the UK Postal Service.

I mean,

this is our great war.

It's visible from space.

Visible from space.

I mean, they should just start using agencies that might have some sort of effect at taking people overseas.

Jet 2, Ryanair, even, I feel Ryanair would be a much more effective asylum policy than anything they appear to be using.

What was interesting, as you say, Alice,

they misclassified children, sent letters, obviously, with a penny black on the

full scap envelope.

But at the same time, they were doing that performative cruelty thing the day day before the local elections of uh dawn raids on asylum seekers, just and playing to the lowest common denominator as they often do, and and it up again everywhere you look.

I was actually, I went to do uh, some shows overseas uh last week in Athens, and I came back and every e-gate in the country in the UK was down.

So, the queue at Stanstead was like two hours when it's normally nothing like that.

And I tweeted this, and I honestly, I got this the amount of vitriol I got, this is nothing to do with Brexit and I had to go I didn't say it was I just said

this is shit we can't do anything in this country although I did add to that that you do think any country incompetent enough to think Brexit was a good idea shouldn't be trusted with cutlery let alone E-Gates Rwanda or anything else that might be difficult

In other political news, well, exciting times for cricket fans, the former England cricketer Monty Panassar,

who took 167 test wickets for England, played a key role in England's extraordinary test series victory in India late in 2012, a very fine cricketer,

is to stand as a parliamentary candidate for George Galloway's Workers' Party.

I mean,

I'm not sure that...

taking 167 test wickets and playing that key role in one of England's greatest ever series victories and even despite a lack of prowess for the bat somehow batting for over half an an hour to save a crucial ashes test against Australia in Cardiff ultimately paving the way for England to win that series in 2009 is that enough to be an MP well by modern standards yes it's more than enough but I'm still I'm not entirely convinced by it now I've met Monty Panassar a few a few times he he had a perfectly rhythmical classical left arm spinners bowling action but that is not the same as having a detailed nuanced grasp of international politics, sadly.

And this was perhaps revealed when he claimed that the Workers' Party he's standing for wanted to leave NATO in order to curb illegal immigration, which isn't strictly an issue for NATO as a military alliance, or even unstrictly an issue for NATO.

Although.

As a political sentence, it's certainly a googly, right?

He was a finger spin.

He didn't have any mystery deliveries.

He had an arm ball, it's more

very consistent, got a good dip on the ball,

big, strong fingers, got a lot of turn, but he didn't actually bowl a googly, Alice.

So you're blaming it

struck from the record.

Well, I think you'll find that disguising left as right is a slightly sort of googly-ish thing to do.

There was a wonderful article on it in the Times that

towards the end as well, he did come over as very much the sort of, you know, it's all about the billionaires.

The problem is the billionaires and people working hard in this country.

The billionaires, I attacked them, and it was all working men.

Then he went on and on.

It was like two paragraphs of it.

And then at the bottom, he just said, he's also called for a ceasefire in Gaza.

And you thought, well,

favorite my favorite thing in the entire um article was just it was I actually wrote it down I said Panasar who has never voted

and you go well that's where we are you're clearly overqualified yes um but then you know we look at it you say you know to leave NATO to curb illegal immigration I guess by leaving NATO Britain would become much more likely to be successfully invaded by for example Putin's Russia or looking further ahead if Trump wins in November Gilead or by aliens or by vote of all hypervolved card or by Britain hating hating Godzilla.

So who would want to come to a country that's about to be invaded?

So no one, leave NATO, problem caused, solved, caused.

Anyway, as the old political saying goes, a problem caused, there's another problem shelved.

And as the follow-up political saying goes, the problem shelved, there's basically a problem solved as long as it stays off the front page of the newspapers.

So you can see he might be onto something.

This idea that leaving NATO would help with this issue.

But it could be...

the start of a long parliamentary career.

It's obviously unlikely that he's going to win a seat for George Galloway's Workers' Party.

It could be the start of many unsuccessful parliamentary campaigns for the former England Left Armour.

It's hard to see him winning any of them.

But will he lose 50 election campaigns or will he lose the same election campaign 50 times?

And that is the most niche cricket reference I have ever done on the bugle.

I could explain it.

It goes back to a piece of commentary that Shane Warren, the great Australian bowler, had about Monty Panassar.

But I don't want to explain it too much because that was purely for me, Buglers.

And after 16 and a half years of this podcast, I think I've earned the right right to have 30 seconds of totally pointless

niche by my standards cricket reference.

Metaphor of the century, Andy.

Privileged to be here.

Well, enough of humans.

Let's have some animal news now, starting with amphibians.

Let's go alphabetically.

With Ian Smith and Anuvab Pal.

Apparently, frogs are screaming.

They've been freaking out, the frogs, clearly trying to warn us that the end of the world

is coming.

But they've been doing it silently, inaudibly, to the human ear, like sort of an amphibious Cassandra warning us that the end is nigh.

So yeah, they've been freaking out, but we can't hear them.

It's a very kind of British kind of freaking out,

doing so inaudibly.

But apparently...

More of those f ⁇ ing scientists who should be doing something better with their time than snooping on amphibians have discovered that frogs scream.

I mean,

as a child of the Muppets generation, this makes me wonder what the internal monologue of Kermit the Frog was.

I'm starting to reassess exactly

that jovial, kind exterior.

What was he bottling up?

It does change the plot to quite a few things

because we've been looking at frogs.

They're quite, I guess, quite sort of cutesy, making a little ribbit sound.

But what they're actually doing is insufferable, deafly screamed to every other creature.

Every other animal must be looking at humans as if to say, are these dickheads not winding you up?

They're so

like they should remake Wind in the Willows, but whenever Toad talks, the ears of the other characters start bleeding.

I think I've seen that version.

It's a very good version.

Also, like, who knew that there was all this geopolitics going on at the ultrasound level?

Like, there could be a whole Israel-Iran thing going on with

noises and missiles being launched and an iron dome of other animals preventing those noises.

And we pass by all of this.

Again, mammals, we're the problem.

You know, we don't hear any of this, just walk past it.

But there's a whole thing going on.

There's a council of the United Nations of Insects meeting discussing Tinder and frogs, these sorts of lunches.

And again, we just, we're ignorant.

That's what we are as a species.

But I guess, you know, looking at it, I mean, the frogs are only saying what we're all thinking,

which is incidentally what you should say to the parent of a baby or toddler who's wailing their head off on public transport.

It makes everyone feel better about the situation.

The specific frog involved are called leaf litter frogs, and they were filmed arching their backs and throwing back their heads and opening their mouths wide.

So it's possible that rather than screaming they just scored a goal or were appealing for LBW.

We don't know until there's more research into this.

So they recorded some audio apparently.

I mean even screaming frogs have got their own podcast these days.

But anyway it turns out that this was as you mentioned defensive ultrasound

which I think is a tactic that's increasingly popular in the Bundesliga at the moment.

But it was

some sort of high-octane grunge punk version of It Ain't Easy Being Green by the aforementioned KT Frog, Kermit the Frog.

Incidentally, Kat Tunstall, the Scottish singer, the KT stands for Kermit the, but that's not really on there.

So, yeah, I mean, there's a number of animals that use these sort of infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies to communicate.

Frogs join bats, whales, rhinos, dogs, pigeons, and cuttlefish, and a few other

that you can just add to the list if you want.

And we humans can't hear any of it, which makes you think, what the f are they saying?

We are a naturally hypochondriacal species anyway.

We don't need this shit going on behind our backs.

I'm going to say this is another opportunity for the 70s comedian version of myself

to probably just say that I wish my wife was a frog, something like that.

I wish she was working on an ultrasonic frequency.

I can't understand.

Another drag of the cigar.

Ian, everything comes in cycles.

You've just got to bide your time.

Yeah,

I'm just waiting for my moment.

Sounds quite postmodern, actually, as a comedic idea.

Look, the Indian monsoons, they get a lot of frogs.

Every year, I see a bunch of these frogs.

And,

you know, I think a couple of weeks ago, I saw a squirrel punch one in the face.

And now I think I know why, you know, because someone told me, oh, the squirrel's going to eat the frog.

And I'm like, no, squirrels are vegetarian.

Now I just think it was because he was on a loudspeaker, probably in the middle of a Bollywood song, and the squirrel just had enough.

It just went and just gave it an uppercut, and as you should.

Now I know why.

Do you remember when

there was footage of a sort of riot at a football match and a Newcastle United fan punched a horse in the face?

Yeah.

Just the confidence to punch a police horse.

But but maybe we're not giving him the respect that maybe that horse was emitting an ultrasonic sound wave that only Newcastle fans could hear.

And he was just trying to stop the noise.

Yeah, that would explain.

Maybe maybe football fans do have a

another pitch that that is beyond normal

human hearing, which would explain why they all think there's some sort of conspiracy against their gloves.

Beyond this, I mean.

Yeah, that horse that Ian refers to became such a celebrity in the North East that years after it retired, when it finally passed away, it got an obituary in the local newspaper.

Its name was Bud.

That was a big story.

Wow.

It was just doing its job.

It wasn't running around central London.

It didn't deserve to be punched in the face.

Actually, I mean, some of the horses that

did escape in central London were wearing t-shirts saying, I am Bud.

So, you know, there's a solidarity there.

Beyond the frogs screaming,

well, children are also attempting to warn us of the end of the world.

And there's a story this week about a British boy who has won one of the few sporting competitions that I was not previously aware of, the European Seagull Screeching Championships.

Britain has produced, at a prodigious age of nine,

the finest seagull screech impersonator on the entire continent.

Now, obviously, as parents, we do tend to oversell our children's achievements.

Oh, little Tiberius just made a break of 12 at Snooker.

Brendel Inn read the blurbs on the back of all the seven Harry Potter books in just a week.

Quiplodocus won the Interrogator of the Week at Junior CIA Club.

He's only six and he wired the electrodes himself.

Yeah, well, my kid can screech like a fking seagull.

So who's winning parent of the decade this decade?

It's, I mean, truly a sensational achievement.

And, you know, I'd certainly know if either of my two children had achieved anything of this level in the animal screech impersonating world,

I'd be so so proud,

so very proud.

And it's genuinely an incredible impression.

You kind of think people are probably going to think, oh, what a silly competition this is, but I don't think people understand how prestigious the European Seagull Screeching Competition is.

And to have a nine-year-old who'd usually be operating in the under-12s leagues,

to be

not just in under-18s, but to be doing it in the full European competition against kids from Barcelona and Real Madrid.

But it's a genuinely incredible impression.

And what they don't say in the article is he did go a bit too far because he then started stealing everybody's food.

You've got to get into the party.

And you know,

as someone who's had to act not being terrified of a horse on Noah's Ark, you know,

you've got to get into that part, haven't you?

You've got to commit to it.

Another way I got into character for the ark is when

I was asked if I could swim before the casting

and at the time I couldn't.

But I didn't want to not get the acting part, so I just very confidently said yes.

And then had to have some adult swimming lessons.

And the first mistake I did is I booked the wrong type of adult swimming lessons.

So I was just doing a lot of sort of underwater sex stuff in the first one.

But then I found a man who could teach me basic breaststroke, which they did cover in the first set of courses as well.

I don't take nearly enough classes.

There's so much going on in classes.

This is the thing.

Now, gentlemen, I just want to ask you: you know, I've been a big fan of Britain's imperial power for a very long time.

What took you guys so long to win the seagull competition?

Well, I guess, you know, Seagulls, you get Seagulls all over the world.

It's one of the more competitive sports.

I mean, it's like tennis rather than snooker in that regard.

So,

and you know, as you mentioned, this kid winning at night when Boris Becker won Wimbledon for the first time, I think he was younger than the winner of Junior Wimbledon that year.

I mean, that's the kind of level of prestigious

early achievement that we're talking about here with a nine-year-old winning.

My one worry about it, though, is that what have his parents done to make him this good, this young?

You see those amazing gymnasts at the age of 12 or 13 in them, you think, well, what kind of life have they lived?

And lived, and you know, to be that good at impersonating a seagull at the age of nine, it makes you think he must have been hot house since the age of like one or two.

It seems like Tiger Woods's dad standing over him with a swinging golf clubs from when he was a baby.

I mean, with his parents just like screeching at him like a seagull from the very moment he came he came out of them.

10,000 hours of intensive seagull impersonation training have probably gone into this.

So, I mean, yeah, it's a great achievement, but I do worry about what legacy of darkness within that it has left.

And I wouldn't be surprised if we hear from him age of 17 can't look a seagull in the beak anymore.

They've 100% got a seagull in his bedroom that he's been asking them to please

get it out.

I know this will help you.

Well since you enjoyed that bit of animal news now, let's have some more with Hari Kondabolu, Kondabolu, Ahir Shah, and me discussing a perennial bugle favourite, bees.

Finally, on this week's bugle, bees are evolving into an immortal amphibious hyperspecies.

This is a great concern.

We have tracked on the bugle over the last 16 and a half or so years.

The evolutionary race that we find ourselves locked in with numerous other species gradually overtaking us.

And the common eastern bumblebee is making a huge step forward to becoming the world's greatest species by evolving the ability to survive underwater for a week.

Now, it might be that it's not just evolved, this might be that it's only been noticed, but I saw a bee last week that had drowned in a puddle.

So, to me, this seems like pretty impressive speed evolution by the bee community.

And it does suggest that by the end of next year, they will be able to ruin picnics anywhere up to 9,000 meters below sea level.

So, I mean, this is a huge, huge concern.

I'm terrified that within my lifetime, humans will no longer be top dog on this planet.

I mean, I feel like,

first of all, this makes sense why you've never heard a bee talk about global warming.

Not concerned, right?

I always assumed it had to do with their conservative politics, but in fact, it's because it just doesn't concern them.

It doesn't affect them.

Also, for those of you who are wondering whether drinking honey straight from the bottle every morning increases your chance of survival during an era of global warming and flooding because you would be taking after the bee, it does not.

So my morning ritual still has no benefits.

I just which like right bees, they're always in the news, right?

Yep.

You can't keep them out of it.

They're front page hogs, right?

And but the bees are are always, it's either like, oh, the bees will all be gone by 2030, unless you sign our petition about the bees, and that's where you're back.

And then it's like, oh no, but the bees are coming back with a vengeance, and these are very violent bees that will sting you so badly.

And then it's like, oh no, the bees, they're running out again.

And now it's like the bees are amphibious.

I would just like for the bees to make up their mind as to whether or not they're fed.

It's constantly like, either they're fed or they're coming for us.

And it's like, where do I stand with relation to these bees?

There you go.

Well, thank you for listening to this Bugle sub-episode.

We will be back next week with all the stories from everywhere, including Donald Trump's defection to the Labour Party and all the rest of the news from all corners and crannies of the human world and soul.

Also, if you're in or near Tunbridge Wells on the 1st of June, do come to see a special one-off satirist for high show at the Trinity Theatre to raise money for arguably one of the greatest arts venues in Tunbridge World.

Do come along, tickets available on the internet.

Until next week, goodbye.

Hi, buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.