Razing Arizona

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4299 of the world's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world, The Bugle, with me Andy Zoltzmann.

Not me from your perspective, of course.

I do tend to see these things from a very self-centered standpoint or sit point.

Anyway, what is the self these days?

Is it time to ban the concept of self and force people to live in the third person?

Andy Zaltzman certainly thinks so.

He's changed his mind on that in the last 30 seconds and feels all the better for it.

It's whatever time of day it is where you are right now, but it wasn't when we recorded the show, or at least it wasn't yet.

It was, however, the 14th of April, and I am joined.

Sorry, slip back into that egotistical selfhood again, all habits and all that.

I am joined, or I was joined from your perspective.

This is getting too complicated, by just two of the 8 billion or so people who were ruled eligible to be Bugle co-host this week.

Chris, I think we might need to tighten our vetting process, get it down to one or two billion, simplify things.

But I'm delighted that those two are in inverse order of north to south latitude.

Did you latitude or longitude?

I can never remember.

In the southern hemisphere's famous

one.

Shall I just start again?

In the southern hemisphere's famous Australia region, it's it's Alice Fraser and way up north, or two miles up north from where I am in the shed, it's Nish Kumar.

Hello, both of you.

Hello, hello.

I'm also, I should mention that I'm not the one making old man grunting noises, it is my small child.

That was your wrestling name, wasn't it, Nick?

Old Man Grunting Noises

undefeated, still the champion.

Yeah, so Alice's

latest child, the sequel,

has featured on a couple of recent bugles in action once again.

And I don't know what, because as we've discussed, he's passed some physical satire on the world in a previous bugle.

What do you think he's got lined up today, Alice?

I cannot wait to find out.

I feel like that's...

Whatever he does, I'll find charming and no one else will.

I feel like that is the rule.

You can have one thing, Andy.

You can have one of two things.

One, you can have me on maternity leave, or two,

you can have no baby, but you can't have them both at the same time.

What have I always said about football players and buglers?

If you're good enough, you're old enough.

Alice's baby is good enough to bugle.

Get him on the bugle.

There's a baby on the bugle.

He drops our demographic listenership by at least 10 years, I reckon.

This is how we get the next generation on.

I've been saying you need to get more Gen Z co-hosts.

Arguably, you've overshot by a good sort of 18 years and you've gone slightly too young.

I think you've gone back round to whatever generation A is again.

But let me tell you, this is how we breed the next generation.

This kid is going to be doing pun runs and overusing the word before we know what's what.

Well, luckily, that was bleeped out, so we couldn't understand it.

Yeah, Chris is really working the live bleep this week.

Normally, he edits them in, but because of the presence of a baby, Chris's bleeping finger is working overtime.

The finger's going to fall off a section too.

I mean, occasionally, just any word beginning with a hard C or an F just gets bleeped out because he's got to act fast.

But

I hope no one talks about trees.

I've got a funky cough.

Nish, how have you been?

It's been a while since

you were not available for the live tour.

Have you been?

Yeah, I guess I've been pretty good, Andrew.

I've not reproduced, which obviously puts me one down on this podcast.

Now that this podcast is a podcast exclusively of child producers,

I am,

yeah,

I don't know where I've been, to be honest with you, Abby.

I feel like I've had the last few weeks, I've achieved very little.

I've been been giving my opinions on things.

Nish, I would like to take issue with your suggestion that anyone in this Zoom room but me has actually produced a child.

Yeah, that's right.

Come on, team game, Alice.

Team game is a team game, Alice.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

It's a team game.

The striker doesn't.

Cheering from the bench at best.

Tadme in, coach.

Physically impossible.

One person has produced a child, and the other two were harrowed witnesses.

Oh, actually, Addy did catch one of them.

Oh, I did catch one of them.

In absolute fairness, Addy did catch one of them.

Yeah, I did.

Super catch soft hands.

If someone in the audience catches one, you get to keep it, right?

I don't think so.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this on the bugle before, but in an Edinburgh show I did when my first child was

a few months old, I had an awards ceremony, in fact, just before the bugle began, I had an awards ceremony in the second half in which I awarded myself an award for something.

I can't remember what it was, but it was like giving out awards for, I can't remember, stupidest people in the world or whatever.

And anyway, so I thought

my wife brought the baby in towards the end of the last show of the run, and I thought it'd be funny to get the baby on stage, or Alex Higgins, when he won the World Snooker Championship in the 1980s.

I thought it'd be quite a funny moment, quite a touching moment of

father-baby bonding.

The baby, however, disagreed in extremely vocal terms with this and

just started bawling.

So, what I thought would be quite a touching moment became child cruelty.

But, you know, there you go.

Is this the same one of your children that said you were too silly to be a patriarch?

Yes, yeah.

But that was that was a solid six or seven years later.

So, yeah.

Every single element of that detail is pure Zoltzman.

Bringing a baby on stage, already a mistake.

But also, the fact that the baby was brought on stage in reference to Alex Higgins winning the World Snooker title, everything about that,

everything, that cocktail of parental negligence and obscure sporting referencing is pure Zoltzmann.

That's what you've got to do as a parent.

You've got to introduce them to who you are as a person early in their life.

Anyway, shall we crack on with the show?

We are recording on the 12th of April 2024.

Tomorrow, the 13th of April, it will be happy 281st birthday to one of America's founding daddies.

Is that too informal?

Dads?

Fathers?

Co-parents?

Let's go with that.

Thomas TJ Jazzy Jefferson would have been 281 if he hadn't, sadly, spoiler alert, died.

He was the third president of the USA, and his place in the top 10 best ever presidents lists looks pretty secure for now.

There don't seem to be too many challenges who might knock him down the rankings.

Although it was a bit easy to be a good president in the pre-mass media days when it took someone several weeks and at least one horse to tell you that you were the worst f ⁇ ing in the history of the universe.

Well bleached again, Chris.

And 14th, Sunday, the 14th of April.

Well, the 14th of April was a bad day for Abraham Lincoln, one of Jefferson's successors in 1865.

Picked up a bit of a theatre-going injury.

Historians have recently uncovered Linkey's review of that play, Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., written on his deathbed.

And the review was this: I'm all in favour of experimental theatre, breaking the fourth wall and challenging the audience, making them contemplate the way things are and the way things could be by stretching the boundaries of art.

But frankly, that went at least one step too far.

Special effects were good, though, arguably too realistic.

Two stars.

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

This week, a special Pompeii section, some exciting new discoveries have been made at the ancient volcano-preserved Roman sites of Pompeii

near Naples.

They found, well, as always,

some naughty frescoes.

The Romans, of course, not afraid of pornograffitiating the shit out of a wall.

But not everything they left behind when Vesuvius got its volca noodles boiling up good and poppy was quite so racy.

In fact, only an estimated 88% of all Roman relics are, in fact, pure, unadulterated filth.

So amongst the 12%,

well there's a fresco of, well, actually, this is more in the 88%, a fresco of the multi-franchised celebrity god Apollo trying to seduce the Trojan priestess Cassandra.

This was a genuine find.

And it's quite a simple picture.

But Cassandra, of course, famously cursed to tell the truth, but for no one to believe her.

And looking at this picture of Apollo naked, but for a cloak draped over one shoulder, the truth she might be telling him that he is choosing not to believe is that, yes, it does look really very small.

Amongst the

internet, amongst the latest discoveries also are a scroll containing secret plans for a lunar catapult

that the Emperor Nero had developed a couple of decades previously.

A time machine, apparently built in the year 2291, and then repaired in 2143, Plus, traces of American eternal life-obsessive Brian Johnson's underpants.

Read into that what you will.

They found a slice of very burnt toast, which, if you look at it from a certain angle, has the face of Nigel Farage on it.

And also, the body of a politician from Pompeii, preserved for all eternity by the eruption, in the middle of a speech in which he is not only denying that there is anything to worry about, but also claiming there is no such thing as a volcano.

Some things never change.

Also, there was a report about the Middle East situation, which was pretty shit back then, to be fair.

Some things, well, many things never change.

And also, what looks like a very hastily painted picture of a man pointing at an erupting volcano and mouthing what looks like a very rude Roman swear phrase that roughly translates, if my memory serves as, holy fing f ⁇ Strigils, who pulled Vulcan's finger.

So

some amazing finds being made.

And to mark

these incredible finds,

and it's amazing to think actually that without Vesuvius, we wouldn't wouldn't have discovered ancient Rome at all.

But in fact, Vesuvius hasn't had a major eruption since 1944, which I think is something to do with EU health and safety regulations.

Or Vesuvius being so worried about the social media backlash if it erupts again that it just doesn't think it's worth a hassle.

But anyway, to mark this discovery, we are giving you buglers your own audio Vesuvius eruption.

In 52 weekly instalments over the next year, you can recreate the famous 79 AD eruption to mark the 1945th anniversary of the superstar Kano blowing its cranky top.

These 52 installments will lead up to the eruption and its aftermath.

And here is part one of your Vesuvius audio story.

Oh, there you go.

It does get a bit more exciting as things.

I've said it before and I'll say it again the guy in Pompeii who has forever been immortalized with his hands on his dick look it up most relatable figure in human history

absolutely the most relatable figure in human history I know that there are some quote-unquote scientists who have said it's possible that his hands were not on his dick and it's just it's just fallen that way and it's just buried it's a trick of the burial but what is more likely that that has happened or someone has looked out the window seen the the end coming, and thought, one more for the road, lads.

History's most relatable figure, the man who masturbated at the site of Vesuvius Erupting.

Well, you know, also, Cassandra was probably impressed by Apollo's small penis.

Didn't they like a sort of a dapper, gentlemanly little penis back in the day?

Well, it does seem from the sculptures.

They were very trendy.

Missed my era.

I'm only in the frescoes.

Mine's gentlemanly.

it always wears a top hat.

Missed my era.

I think mine had its top hat chopped off pretty early.

Family show.

Family show.

Right.

Family show myself.

Chris.

Chris was complaining about how long it took us to get to the top story during the live talk, but I think in terms of non-live shows, we're pretty much hitting the 15-minute mark here, Chris.

Yep.

Are you proud?

Well, I don't know.

I think, I mean, I think the intros to the bugle have got longer over the years, and I think it's probably

like a subconscious desire to avoid having to talk about actual news.

Yeah.

This isn't ill-disciplined, Chris.

It's satire, okay?

It's structural satire.

And it's self-preservation.

It's emotional self-preservation.

And I will also notice that as we get into the news section, Alice has symbolically taken the baby away from the recording station.

And that makes total sense.

Get the baby away from the news.

He did a massive push.

Respect.

Respect.

Top story this week.

The world has been plunged into darkness.

All light extinguished, bar some slight flickers, as if to reproach us all for the wrongs that have led to this.

Surely a divine punishment for what humanity has wrought upon itself and its planet.

Oh, it's fine again, just a few minutes later.

Yes, it was eclipse week.

A great week for fans of celestial metaphors.

But was this week's eclipse a warning sign from a higher being that now is the time to repent and repair our planet or next time we will be truly doomed to an eternal chasm of inescapable nothingness?

Well, to analyse and interpret the seemingly inexplicable phenomenon that was the eclipse, isn't it lucky that I have two of the absolute best celestial harbinger interpreters on the Portent and Augury divination circuit today, Alice and Nish?

I mean obviously science can't explain shit like this.

So, what would you,

how would you two interpret what we saw over North America this week?

Well, Andy, it's an extraordinary thing when the universe lines up a cosmic trick shot of people's

language I can understand rotating around in the whole.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Alice, even you are making snooker references now.

Too brute.

So, this is the problem you know there was an eclipse I was told that I didn't know there was an eclipse coming I've been trying to get off my phone so I didn't know I didn't know that it was arriving and I had already sacrificed like six maidens before I thought to google it and realized it was meant to be happening and it was going to go away though luckily for the maidens it was over quicker than you'd expect so there were only about 60% sacrificed which was embarrassing to walk back

Actually, I am in Australia, so I'm not in the path of the eclipse.

I was told once never to look at an eclipse, so I've been avoiding all photographic evidence of the eclipse.

I've just been asking my friends what it looked like.

Nish, how would you

interpret the eclipse?

Oh, I see what's happened here.

Yep.

Darkness covering light.

This is an act of cosmic wokeism, Andrew.

This is political correctness, God insane.

The white sun being obscured by the darker moon.

Oh, I see.

Hitting quotas, are we?

Space?

Unbelievable.

And then to add a layer on top of that, we've got to look at it through special glasses.

Oh, no.

This happened in North America, the continent of freedom.

And part of those freedoms is the freedom to look directly at the Sun until your retinas burn to uselessness.

Every act of this is evidence of a culture of wokeism, the woke mind virus, that has gotten run absolutely absolutely amok.

It's infected space, it's infected glasses.

Where will it stop, Andrew?

Right.

Well,

I don't know, but I mean, if America is burning its retinas, I think that would complete the full set of critical faculties that it's lost in recent years.

Well, Amazon has to recall a bunch of eclipse glasses for being completely non-functional.

And

googling of all my eyes hurt has gone up by about 50% in some affected areas.

Yeah, yeah.

How long long supposed to see sun?

In terms of how it compared with other eclipses, for me, it was a bit disappointing.

It didn't really do anything new or unexpected.

It was the same old, same old, really, very derivative of other eclipses.

I mean, sure, that's maybe what the Eclipse fans want, but I prefer to see something that pushes the envelope a little bit further through the letterboxes.

My main beef with it was I didn't really see the point of it.

because it was so short.

Sure, it got dark, but there was hardly time to have a cheeky nightcap, pop my pajamas on, hop into bed, do a crossword, read a page or two of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and then settle down for a nice long sneeze in my normal nocturnal ritual.

Or, you know, that might be not your thing.

Maybe you didn't even have time to race to your local nightclub and get your groove on all night long, Nish.

But

it was four minutes of piss-poor pseudo-night for me.

Not impressed.

One star.

But if you've missed the solar eclipse, Buglers, due to being in the wrong place in the world, as the three of us were, don't worry, there is a regular daily earthular eclipse in most parts of the world when one side of the earth blocks the light out from the sun from the other side of the earth.

So enjoy that.

You missed out on the rarest solar eclipse.

I'm not surprised you weren't a fan of the eclipse, Andy, because

for you that's pretty conservative play.

Just playing for snookers by obscuring the view of the sun.

And

you would have preferred a more audacious three-planet plan

if the moon had tried to knock the sun into Venus.

Now I'm making snooker jokes.

This podcast has too many American listeners for us to be doing this.

The next total eclipse was scheduled to take place on the 12th of August 2026 across parts of Europe.

A combined bid by Iceland, Spain and Portugal secured the rights to a two-minute long eclipse.

But we are just hearing that the rights to that 2026 eclipse have just been bought up by the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund.

The trajectory of the eclipse will now travel instead over the Arabian Peninsula, circling around Riyadh four times before disappearing off into the Indian Ocean.

Apparently, it was just eye-watering the amount of money they threw at it.

Too good for the cash-strapped moon to turn down and the sun.

Sure, the sun's raking it in from the solar power boom already.

It doesn't need the money, but as we all know, there are generally only two things that the already hyper-wealthy want in life: more and more.

So, I'm afraid

trips fans in the Iberian Peninsula, you're going to have to go to Saudi Arabia.

I think I really had the wrong idea about eclipses, Andy, because of the amount of extremely trashy adventure books I read as a kid.

I was pretty sure they happened basically

any time you were being menaced with being eaten by a slightly problematically described tribe, who would basically

make an eclipse happen, and their primitive fear would cause them to release you into the narrative.

Ah, the spicy-smelling dwellers of the shadowlands.

Bold title for your first Edinburgh title.

Listen, the reviews reflected it.

I don't like a partial eclipse because it suggests a failure of conviction on Bonnie Tyler's behalf.

Every time I hear it, it feels like it's partial eclipse of the heart, like she's just given up.

Turn around if you want.

Yep.

I mean, also, a total eclipse of the heart is really just, well, that's something that passes in a few minutes, isn't it?

And then you get back to normal.

Not all it's cracked up to be.

In what an exciting development in terms of the TV coverage of the eclipse, a Mexican news outlet

was sharing footage that had been submitted by viewers and accidentally

showed what can only and accurately be described as a man's ball sack

after a prankster sent in in footage featuring his

naggers.

I mean, personally, I don't have a problem with this because I think, as a planet, as a species, we've gone too far away from our ancient traditions of adding fertility symbols to absolutely everything that was published in the media.

I mean, sure, media has changed from daubings inside caves, primitive statuary, weird shit in temples, and great big plonkers on hillsides.

But still, what is wrong with adding what is, of course, one of the all-time symbolic icons of human species regeneration, the testicle, to a news story about the all-enveloping darkness coming over the world?

I've got no problem with this at all.

I mean, Nish, I can't remember if in your various TV shows, I can't remember if any of them were ever cancelled due to testicles on screen or if it was always something else.

No, we can't blame the balls for that, Andy.

Let's not blame the balls for Quibby.

Let's blame the idea of what if YouTube wasn't free but was worse.

The full context for this, a story I imagine has simply inundated the Bugles inbox.

Chris won't give any of us access to it because he knows what would happen.

We'd start replying to a lot of the fan emails with abusive messages.

But

I imagine this is,

Chris has received little else this week.

RCG Media's 24-hour news show was doing a story about the eclipse when the anchors showed clips that had been sent in by fans experiencing the celestial phenomenon, only to fall victim to apparently what is, and again, I'm getting this from news.com.au, an Australian news website.

So I can only go by the information I've been given here.

And as we all know, if there's one thing Australia can be trusted to do, it's produce people that tell the truth in the news media.

Apparently, this is a well-known prank in Latin America of just

popping your balls out.

And so

they showed clips of people enjoying the eclipse.

And then one of the clips had a man dipping his testicles into the frame, blocking out the sun.

The ball bag eclipse.

And very, very few news outlets

were able to resist the phrase:

the news news outlet aired the man's testicles

very much but I feel like this is just desserts this has come up and this is what happens when you have a media that spends 10 years asking people to join the conversation you deserve to get a teabagged

from from some

prankster but I'm also I'm struggling to understand the vetting process for this these videos presumably they were not live faces there's no vetting process what vets mostly do is cut balls off.

So they just received a load of videos and thought, whack that on the air.

No one's going to have dropped a couple of balls into these shots.

Let's just put them straight on the air.

It is, in a way,

what this person has done with their ball bag is really give us a salutary lesson in the importance of vetting your content.

Chris would not simply allow audio clips from the listeners to go on the air.

Why would he not allow that?

Because he knows our listeners and he knows that those clips would be obscene beyond belief and contain huge amounts of libel about historical figures.

Can you libel the dead?

I'm not sure you can, can you?

You can libel the dead.

I'm not sure you can.

I don't know, legally.

Absolutely fantastic.

Pitt the elder used to take dumps in the bath.

Wait, well, he was in the bath or from the outside of the bathroom?

From the outside.

That was his thing.

Sue me, PTE.

You got nothing.

Might explain why Pitt the Younger was such an angry man.

His dad was a bath dumper.

Right.

How do we get on to

what he did shitting in the bath?

Let's get this f ⁇ ing show back on track.

Right.

So we saw Literal Darkness make its pitch this week, but how has Metaphorical Darkness responded?

Well, pretty impressively, actually.

The Doomsday clock is well known.

We've talked about it on the Google before.

It generally hovers around one or two minutes to full-blown midnight, aka Armageddon.

But I prefer, as a cricket fan, to consult the Doomsday Light Meter.

So exactly what level of doom-laden gloom is hovering over the planet right now, threatening the prospect prospect of any further play after tea?

Well, looking at it now, well, I think they're definitely going to have to come off.

It's, well, I mean, it looks pretty metaphorically dark on the telly, and it's always actually quite a bit metaphorically darker than it looks

in reality, of course.

It's certainly not safe to face the metaphorical fast bowling of the Middle East or Ukraine wars, and it's not really even fair to try and expect people to take on the wily spin of the environmental crisis.

So, frankly, we're f ⁇ ing.

Was that too crickety?

I mean, we had a few complaints, Chris, on the live talk that there was not enough cricket in the show.

This is what happens when you don't include North America on the live dates.

People said we were hoping for a few more cricket references.

Not enough.

On every single show, you screamed at people who didn't like cricket.

Oh, no, I did do that.

Yeah, yeah.

I did do it.

But I don't think that made the edit, though, did it?

No, no, fair.

Well, it made the edit in the room, Andy.

Oh, yeah, Chris is live bleeping.

He's not live editing.

Yeah, I feel like podcasting has given me real damage in life because now if I say something I don't mean or if I'm in an awkward situation, I say, don't worry, it won't make the edit.

Try it next time you're making love.

Cut that bit.

Don't anything I say, Chris.

I will not be censored by you.

So let's look at the Middle East situation.

And yeah, I mean it's not fixed itself, disappointingly.

And Iran attacking Israel was just what the doctor ordered.

But unfortunately, the doctor is unqualified and a covert psychopath.

Not what an actual doctor...

Yeah, it's Dr.

Kvorkian.

It's what Dr.

Kovorkian ordered.

It's not what an actual doctor would order if the Middle East and indeed all humanity was that doctor's patient.

In terms of steps to achieve some sort of potentially durable peace, the idea of Iran attacking Israel, that is about as hope-inducing as turning up at your local swimming pool and seeing Godzilla checking in for his first day as a lifeguard.

It's just, it's not, it's hard to be, it's hard to be optimistic at the best of times.

There has been some talk of a ceasefire with America putting increasing pressure on Israel as the scale of human devastation and suffering continues to increase.

But as often in the Middle East, it's not really a case of two steps forward, one step back.

It's not even one step forward, two steps back.

It's more a slight, potentially forward twitch of the left big toe than repeat Bob Beeman's backwards to a very obvious cliff edge.

So, Nish, the prospect of Iran getting fully involved in this conflict,

not great, I'd say, as a, you know, as a as a

broad fan of global peace.

Yeah, as a as a broad fan of global peace, I'd describe myself as being not even just a broad fan, I'd describe myself as being a specific fan of global peace.

I'm a very specific fan of people not shooting at each other.

I think

credit to everybody involved.

You've managed to find the one way of making things worse.

We were all scratching our heads.

How can you possibly make this situation worse?

How is it possible?

And then there was an airstrike conducted on the Iranian consulate in Syria.

Israel is being widely blamed, though it has not officially claimed responsibility for the attack.

But everybody involved has managed to find a way to make things worse.

President Joe Biden has promised Israel iron-clad support.

And given that Israel is run by Benjamin Netanyahu,

who, to be absolutely fair to him, is a mad c.

Let's be fair to him.

He's a mad c.

Given that he is in charge of Israel, a lot of us would prefer that President Joey B clad his support in a less durable material than iron.

Is it possible he could offer them a wool-clad support?

Is it possible that he could offer them an invisible cloak of support?

The steps that we're taking here are all, as you say, Andrew, in completely the wrong direction.

Biden has said that

has reiterated his urge to Netanyahu to call for a ceasefire and has said, I think what he's doing is a mistake.

I don't agree with his approach.

Now, I would say...

As the president of America, there is one pretty significant thing you could do to help

Israel not go down the wrong path, and that is stop buying them weapons.

If you were out on a night out with your friend and they had thrown up all over themselves, all over the bar and started three fights, what you would not do is say, I think what you're doing is a mistake, I don't agree with your approach, and then buy them another beer.

That is not what you do under the circumstances.

Right.

What goes on tour stays on tournish.

Listen, that may or may not have been drawn from Andy and my night out in Glasgow after a tour show.

I cannot get into the specifics of it.

Look, as we all know, international politics is a team sport in which every country is either a goodie or a baddie.

And obviously, when it comes to us versus them, their being dead is less dead-like than our kind of being dead.

So my advice, if you don't want to be upset by international policy decisions, is to decide that the people from your country and your country alone are the real people and the rest are just sort of hypothetical people in a point-scoring exercise in your high school's debate club.

That makes

well I think that's explained basically the entirety of human history in one single paragraph, Alice.

Well done.

America trying to go back in time news now.

And

Arizona has revived a law from 1864

that bans abortion.

And this decision has been criticised by Republicans who passed this law themselves.

So when Republicans have reached the point where they are appalling themselves,

you know that America has to take a long, hard bath with itself, ideally not in a bath from the Pitt family household.

So, I mean, I think it's a bit of a risky road for anyone to go down using laws from 1864, particularly the USA,

bearing in mind what was going on in the USA still in 1864.

Matt Gress, a Republican state representative, said, I categorically reject rolling back the clock to a time when slavery was still legal and we could lock up women and doctors because of an abortion.

Even Carrie Lake, a Republican running to represent Arizona in the Senate and a staunch Trump loyalist, called on the state legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.

Now,

when America has reduced Trump supporters to what is beyond their last resort, a call for common sense, you know quite how extreme this bit of legislation is.

I mean, this is the problem with a lot of Republican politicianing is that they don't want the thing that they say they want.

What they want is to be prevented from doing the thing that they say they want so that they can raise funds against the people who prevented them from doing the thing they said they want.

If they get what they want, they're the dog that caught the car.

I mean, you look at this law, if you've had a look at the law, if you're a kind of person who looks at laws like a massive nerd like me,

I can sum it up for you.

It's an old-fashioned law.

It's a good old-fashioned classic law back from the time where men were men and fetuses were people and women weren't people, but men definitely were, and let's be clear, extremely men.

And if any of the modern men who long for the time in which men were men were sent back to be men in that time they would immediately die they would get syphilis and they would be murdered for being offensively effette by a washerwoman with a rolling pin so

the thing that upsets me most about all of this is uh

that uh

when the law was originally passed Arizona was not even a state.

So if we're really going back to 1864 and we're really going into states' rights, then Arizona must no no longer exist.

Is there anything that sums up the complicated and almost incomprehensible state of American state legislature that Arizona can now restart a law from a time where it did not exist?

And I'll tell you what.

If we're going back to real American originalism,

they better start watching their back because the Indigenous Americans might have something to say.

For the good of America, we might have to restart scalping as a day-to-day practice.

Go back even further.

Let's see what a pterodactyl thinks about it, boys.

Come on.

Of course, this sort of touches on Roe versus Wade, which to many people is just a simple decision about the best way to cross a shallow river.

That's with or without a fox, a chicken, and some grain.

But in America, of course, it's become one of the defining issues of political identity.

And this age-old belief, Alice, that you mentioned that a woman's womb is an old entitled reactionary legislator's business.

And what puzzles me is that you would assume that anti-abortion groups would be the most enthusiastic and committed supporters and funders of freely and easily available contraception.

However, that assumption would be the assumption of someone who expects the world to behave with some vague sense of basic f ⁇ ing logic.

And many anti-abortion groups are also anti-contraception, which is like a road safety campaign group calling for the compulsory greasing of all brake pads on vehicles and for all roads to have 50 meter deep ditches full of poisonous snakes and sharpened rocks with no barriers to stop cars plummeting into them.

It makes no fing sense, America.

No sense.

In other American news, Ted Cruz has got a f ⁇ ing podcast.

I've got a simple message, Ted Cruz.

Get the f ⁇ out of my art form.

With all due respect, which, of course, when it comes to Ted Cruz, there's no respect whatsoever ever.

This is a curious story in which Ted Cruz was supposedly doing a podcast for no money at all, but it turns out that a super PAC affiliated to Cruz has been receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in digital revenue from it,

fueling...

ethical concerns.

Now, do ethical concerns still exist in America?

Or is this a media assumption that there are ethical concerns?

Is it in a parallel universe in which America has taken a very different path to the one it has, there would be ethical concerns?

This fuels my ethical concerns, Andy.

Why the f ⁇ have I never been paid $215,000 for podcasting?

I'm a better podcaster than Ted Cruz.

I've never heard Ted Cruz podcasting, but I assume that he's never made a joke about the ability of the penis tip to scrape out competitor sperm from vaginas.

If you've forgotten, it was with frendulums like these who needs enemas.

I haven't forgotten.

I remember it every time I'm sad.

And it makes me happy.

Truly, that is your sistine chapel.

Yeah, if the tips of both of the fingers were the tips of the penis, that would be...

It is, I would also join Andrew in expressing my surprise that Ted Cruz has a podcast.

I really, the word podcast is not one I associate with Ted Cruz.

The main words I associate with Ted Cruz are, my God, I completely forgot about Ted Cruz.

What a.

He, yeah, so iHeartMedia has been paying into a super PAC aligned with Ted Cruz.

In fairness to Ted Cruz,

he

is an arsehole.

And I don't know why.

I think

the only surprise here is that his corruption is taking the form of a podcast.

I think we just assumed he was straightforward skimming off the top in a brown envelope the old fashioned way.

What happened to political corruption?

Yeah, it's good honest

corruption.

Good honest corruption.

What happened to just bags of cash?

Brown paper bags filled with money?

Why is it now being digitally transferred to a super pack?

Where's the romance?

Vinos Make Egger comeback come what about the brown bag corruption let's get some analog corruption back in here well maybe that could be the next thing we do on the bugles we you know both of you did the uh the bugle exclusive subscriber vinyl

maybe we could do a bugle exclusive subscriber cash in a brown paper bag that's that's how we want voluntary subscriptions to be delivered now actually sorry i retract that i retract that immediately because again i'm well aware based on the history of the the defamation of my Wikipedia page that if you threaten or offer some sort of avenue for these people no offense

to get involved and do something terrible and stupid they will do it so I would like to officially retract

how how's the vinyl coming along Chris are we uh

have we got them yet I actually got an email from them this week saying that they have approved the artwork and I will have a quote test pressing imminently Yeah.

So I will get a very, very special limited edition version any moment now

on orange vinyl.

And I will report back soon.

So if you did sign up for it, it's coming.

You should be receiving it soon.

That's very exciting.

Well, listen, Ted Cruz is not the only ex-politician that has a podcast.

I think it's worth just briefly drawing attention to non-UK listeners to the fact that George Osborne has a podcast.

George Osborne is the

ex-finance minister, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who in the David Cameron administration was responsible for the decisions that mean that nothing in Britain works anymore.

The sort of programme of austerity that

hacked the entire British state to bits.

It's the reason that the sentence, I took the train to see my doctor, is now a work of science fiction in the United Kingdom.

But he has a podcast where he gets to talk about how screwed up Britain is.

And he does it with an ex-politician who's more famous for dressing up as Jim Carrey in the mask and dancing to the song Cube and Pete on Strictly Come Dancing.

So Osborne and Cube and Pete have a podcast.

And for a long time, I was really

outraged by it.

And now I think of it as a genius piece of marketing because what's popular in podcasting?

True crime.

What What do none of these true crime podcasts ever do?

Get the murderer on.

It's really incredible.

You know, there's no Jack the Ripper podcast where Jack the Ripper says, well, you know, I did do a lot of murdering.

And I'll tell you what, I didn't have time to do while I was murdering, meal prep.

That's why this episode is brought to you by HelloFresh.

It does seem that basically going into top-level politics is now just a means of getting a podcast.

Well,

are we now reversing that procedure?

Is it Zolzman for PM?

Absolutely.

I'm ready for it.

One final story before we go now, and national stereotypes are living up to themselves news now.

It's turned out

that,

according to a documentary,

honey trap attempts do not work on French spies

because everyone in France is so busy having affairs anyway that the honey trap has no impact.

French spies' spouses are used to them having affairs, so there's no point Russia trying to trick French politicians or anyone in France, put spies, whatever, into having affairs because they'll be having them anyway.

Now, national stereotypes were always the entertaining, jovially acceptable side of prejudice.

And, you know, that's it's part of prejudice that we've all been able to enjoy whilst not thinking too deeply about.

And every now and again, a new story comes along that really taps into our innate elemental human desire to lump people who are from different places from us together into oversimplified categories to make us feel better about ourselves.

It's just who we are as a species, and the sooner we stop fighting that, the better.

Sorry, worse.

Better or worse.

What do those words mean anyway?

Anyway, honey traps have found their victims even more readily in this age of social media with dating apps and people being able to send pictures of their crunkle chunks and dangle blangles without even having to commission a painter or sculptor, like in the old days.

That's how Michelangelo, of course, got his interior decoration business off the ground back in the day.

In Britain, a Tory MP had to resign the party whip after being online honey-trapped and sharing contact details of his colleagues.

I do assume that is item one, two, or three on things not to fing do if you're an MP on day one in parliament, along with don't tweet the nuclear codes and never say what you actually mean.

But France is impermeable to the honey trap.

And I think

we should raise a glass of what the French would call red wine to France and

appreciate how sometimes the national stereotype can do the world a favour.

I love it.

I love it so much.

It's got Russian spies.

It's got French people being loosh.

It's got someone going, I'll reveal your secret.

And some Frenchman going, buff, I already told my wife about my mistress.

Every second Thursday, they catch up and bitch about my weird penis.

My mistress buys my wife birthday presents.

In fact, they are both having an affair avac each other.

And also, my best friend.

If you do not have a mistress as a Frenchman, Gerard Depardieux comes with a mouthful of Coco Vin, spits it directly into your mouth, and then he has an affair with your wife.

You cannot threaten me.

So, this all comes from a documentary that is being made about spying.

And the real quote is like alarmingly close to what you have just done as an act of satire.

A DGSE agent identified only as Nicholas.

It said in the documentary that the honey traps don't work because the agent generally said, Go ahead, show her, she'll understand, or she already knows about it.

It is, we are in a wafer-thin line between satire and reality with this story.

Uh-huh, the fco has been out.

It's like finding out British spies are not in danger of poisoning because none of their food is seasoned enough.

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

Thank you very much for listening.

Don't forget, there are a couple of London shows, live shows, in June, the 7th and 8th of June at the Leicester Square Theatre.

Nish will be doing one.

Alice, you're doing the screen for those, I think.

And

NATO Green will be physically in London for one of those shows as well.

So do buy all of the remaining tickets for those shows.

If you want to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to help keep this show free, flourishing and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button to make a one or a current contribution.

Subscribers also get access to the monthly world-exclusive Ask Andy Show when I

obtusely answer some of the questions you send in.

Alice, anything to plug?

I have a book.

It's called, it's on Unbound.

If you write my name into Unbound, it's called The Dancy Lagarde Reader.

Also, you can find me on Patreon, patreon.com slash Alice Fraser, where we do weekly writers' meetings and salons where you come in and have a chat, and you get that for a dollar a month at the moment.

Or more.

I mean, you can pay more.

I would prefer it if you paid more.

I've also got a podcast called The Gargle, which is the Sonic Glossy magazine to this Bugles audio newspaper.

So if you want all of the news but somewhat less of the depressing depressing politics, it's all there at the gargle.

Nish.

I've got a huge amount to plug, and as you can tell by the fact that I'm prevaricating over this, it's because I'm frantically googling myself for the details.

The thing that I do know is my

last show, Your Power, Your Control, which I filmed, is now available globally on all platforms.

So you can buy it on iTunes and Amazon and

whichever platform it is you interact with video.

There's a bit of YouTube apparently you can pay for.

That was all news to me.

It's been completely released by the people of Comedy Dynamics.

And also it is available as an album on Spotify and Apple Music and Tidal, which I'm hoping means that I get to meet Jay-Z, but I don't think it does.

Yeah, but yeah, so you can access

that show on all platforms.

And on Monday, the 22nd of April, I'll be doing a stand-up show in Berlin.

So if there are any Berlin-based buglers, any ick benign buglers, are doing a gig at the Quarch Comedy Club in Berlin on Monday, the 22nd of April.

And tickets are available on ticketmaster.de.

I also have a stand-up tour beginning in November.

Dates almost confirmed.

And I will

possibly at some point update my website with some actual dates rather than some dates from gigs fucking years ago.

But anyway, so keep, stay tuned.

Stay tuned, buglers.

But anyway,

it's quite a long tour that seems to stretch endlessly into next year.

So, details forthcoming at some point quite soon.

Until next week, Buglers, 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.