AI is taking over the world!

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4291 of the Bugle audio newspaper for an unapologetically but increasingly annoyingly visual world.

I am Andy Zaltzman, the former 38-year-old, coming to you live and pre-recorded from the shed where truth comes to die here in South London.

The sky is blue, the grass is green, the fox has scrapped on the patio again.

It's an oasis of unchanging calm in a universe of chaos, by which I mean my career has plateaued.

Joining me this week to hold up the mirror to the world, to ask the world if it's happy with its haircut, and then to mutter under our breath that the world looks f ⁇ ing ridiculous with that self-inflicted mullet, I'm joined by from New York City, USA, the land gripped by a potentially incurable case of election fever, the kind of fever that produces harrowing hallucinations, inexplicable behavior, and a slow and agonizing death.

It's Hari Kondo Bolu.

Hello, Hari.

Hey, Andy.

How are you?

It's been a while, actually, since

you've been on the bugle, haven't you?

Yeah,

it's been a minute.

Thank you.

Why do you ask me how I am every single time I'm on?

Oh, right.

You know the answer.

Every time you say it, it's like saying, Hurry, so you still don't know how to read and you don't follow the news at all?

Like, why do you say that?

Just say hello, and every time, with the is better than are you alright, which

as an American, every time, as an American depressive, every time I hear that in London, it'd be very startling.

Well, it's just

the way we Brits have always introduced ourselves to people pretty much ever since the Romans came over here, and we made them feel probably slightly more at home than would have been ideal with hindsight.

Anyway, it's great to have you back on the show and

joining us from Dublin, Europe, it's Neil Delamere.

Hello, Neil.

How are you?

I'm very.

Thank you for asking.

I think it's a very polite way to start the conversation.

I am excellent.

Thank you for your concern for my welfare.

And how are you?

Adequate.

Adequate.

Excellent.

I'll see you're welcoming the Romans and we'll raise you, us welcoming the Normans in 1169.

Which, in hindsight, I mean, it went well for the King King of Leinster at the time.

But after that, I think so'd division is the easiest way to say what happened in the next 800 years.

I'm sure that these things will work through these things in no time at all.

We will.

We will.

We'll touch on certain related matters a bit later in the show.

We are recording on the 12th of February, 2024,

the morning after the Taylor Swift Super Bowl, as it will surely forever be known.

We will talk about that later.

Did you both watch it?

Yes, I did.

Yes, I think I did.

I've no idea what I watched, I'll be honest with you.

It may have been a prolonged

usher-tete fever dream I had.

I was up till half past four in the morning watching it with my son, so I might not be at my absolute peak of

alertness today.

Anyway, on this day, in 1429,

the Battle of Herrings took place near Rouvre in north France.

So what happened, you may ask, and why is it called the Battle of the Herrings?

Well, to be honest, I didn't read beyond the first line of the Wikipedia entry,

which entertained me because it's called the Battle of the Herrings.

It was during the Siege of Orléans.

Now, I know some people believe the Battle of Herrings, Battle of the Herrings, was the origin story of the British comedian Richard Herring,

famously

immortal, of course, and his battle to the death with his brother Principal almost 600 years ago now, doesn't time fly very much the Kanan Abel Romulus and Remus story of British comedy.

But it wasn't that, sadly.

It was, in fact, an English military victory.

It's been a while since we had one of them.

But back in the 15th century, you didn't have a human rights lobby jumping all over you saying, How about negotiating like grown-ups, everyone?

Simpler times.

It was a battle during the Hundred Years' War between England and France.

Bloody hell, you can barely get a one-year war off the ground these days without everyone complaining.

And, well, having not done my research, I assume the English under the seven-year-old King Henry VI intercepted a battalion of French soldiers trying to swim to freedom in herring outfits up the Loire River by using a mixture of fishing rods and hastily improvised nets.

They caught the fish apologists, and that's the origin of the term something fishy is going on.

Also, due to the way, with Victory Assured that the English, just for fun, used cricket bats to whack the stragglers whilst wearing primitive eyewear to protect their eyes from the ranted Loire water.

The term fish hits and goggles, which transmuted mistakenly, as language often does over the years, into the commonly used English phrase fish hits and giggles.

Let me just check if that was the case.

It wasn't.

Sadly, it wasn't.

It was something to do with a fight over a convoy containing lots of barrels of herring.

Worth several hundred people dying for, in my book.

But anyway, history is.

Can I ask, was this in Orléans?

It was near Orléans.

Right, so the maid of Orléans is famously Joan of Arc.

Yes.

You're noticing a kind of a...

They like to smoke things.

Yes.

By the looks of things, both fish and teenage generals.

Yes.

I don't know if they cooked some of the herring on the same barbecue that they cooked Joan of Arc on.

I'm not sure.

I think it was a couple of years before.

The Joan of Arc hot dog incident.

How is Orleans spelled?

Is it O-R-L-E-A-N?

With an S on the end.

Like

one.

It's going to be New Orleans.

Is that what it's supposed to be?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

Oh, that's wild.

Yeah, that's the wildest thing about this story, all right?

That's the wildest thing about New Orleans.

In fact, it's pronounced New Orleans.

Yeah, all the herring.

See, that's how herring would originally be caught, and they had one moment, according to French mythology, of how to get out of the net.

And what they would do is they'd take off their top, and they would be given beads.

And the beads would go around the herring's neck, and they were let free if their breasts were sufficiently impressive.

Are we learning, Huglis?

Are we learning?

Anyway, history is written by the winners, so we're going to ink that particular version of the Battle of the Herrings into the history books for all time.

Our section in the bin this week, well, Wednesday, the 14th of February, is, of course, Valentine's Day.

St.

Valentine, the anonymous Bishop of Horn, as he himself described himself back in his third century pomp, the patron saint of epistolary card-based stalking, has his Saints' Day on the 14th of February.

But why did Valentine become anonymous anonymous with love and courtship?

Well, as well as being the patron saint of love and lovers, also

according to catholic.org, he was the patron saint of young people, which might explain some things about the history of the Catholic Church.

But let's move on from that.

Also, the patron saint of many other things.

He spread it around, the big V, to be fair to the lad, including bees and plague.

So if you're sending someone a Valentine's card this year, try to be authentic and factor in all of St.

Valentine's hobbies.

I don't know how you do that.

What rhymes with stung by a swarm of bees while suffering fatal bubos?

I'm not entirely sure.

But for our section in the bin we have a free valentine's day audio valentine's message for you to play anonymously to someone that you are romantically interested in it's very clever technology uh the technology hijacks your intended belovedables bluetooth headphones and plays your valentine's message over whatever they're listening to at the time but with no way of them knowing from whom the anonymous love message has been sent the audio is also disguised so it doesn't sound like your voice so the recipient of your anonymo amorosity cannot recognize you as the sender.

It comes with a special heart sound effect at the end.

So, here is your audio Valentine's message.

Please use it wisely.

Roses are red.

Violets are blue.

A kind of violet, kind of blue, admittedly.

You are stuck in my head, I'm dreaming of you.

And if you let me be yours, I promise I will conduct our relationship committedly.

The reason for that rather heavy-sounding heart is not because of the heaviness of the love-struck heart, but it's that we had to use an ox heart and a butcher.

They wouldn't let let me use a human one at the local hospital.

They said they needed it for a transplant or something.

Anyway, that's your Valentine's Day message in the bin.

Pretty f ⁇ ing weird tradition when you think about it.

Top story this week.

AI is continuing to take over the world.

Hugely exciting moments in the history of the AI gradual takeover of this planet.

The jailed cricket legend Imran Khan has claimed victory in the Pakistan general election using AI to make a victory speech.

Obviously, when you're in jail, it's quite hard to make an official victory speech, but he has authorized an AI version of himself to claim victory.

I will not try to explain the politics of Pakistan, suffice it to say it's f ⁇ ing complicated.

An oversimplified version of that complexity in the aftermath and aftermaths of the election is that a former prime minister who had previously been convicted of numerous crimes and was living in exile to avoid going to jail,

but was recently, just in advance of the election, in fact, exonerated and allowed back into the country, is claiming victory, as is another former prime minister who had previously not been convicted of numerous crimes, but has now recently, just

in advance of the election, in fact, been convicted of numerous crimes, de-exonerated, if you will, and is now in jail from where he claimed victory.

And I mean, this surely is

the future embracing us within its warm and terrifying embrace.

That's, that now you can claim victory in an election whilst in jail.

And this might prove useful, Hari, for certain candidates in the American election in the not too distant future.

I mean, this, you must be hugely excited by this.

Oh, are you talking about using AI to a weekend at Bernie's Biden?

Yeah,

just keep him up as long as we possibly can.

This technique, I mean, it is the future, but it's only like part of the future.

Because, like, you know, Nawaza's party, I'm sure, could have released a video of Imran Khan accepting that said something completely different.

My name is Imran Khan, and I love bacon.

If you voted for my party, it's because you eat pig and spurn the will of Allah.

Also, I played cricket while wearing women's undergarments.

P.S.

I love India.

I have recently married a Danish cartoonist.

Here is our photo album.

It is quite possible that he did play cricket in women's underwear by repute.

He might have had an opportunity to collect quite a bit of it in his very handsome heyday.

Hey, if it's working, you don't change it.

You don't change it.

Imagine being caught with women's underwear and going, listen, I have some superstitions and I won wearing a G-string once, so now I just have to do it.

It's not my fault.

Do you remember he approved this message and they AI'd it out?

Do you remember when if you wanted to get a message in or out of a prison, somebody had to put something up their bum at some point?

Like, that is how you gauge commitment.

Anybody can just really, he's sitting there with a script going, yeah, I want myself to say that.

If you really want to gauge commitment, you go, Imran, you're going to have to cut this speech short because John has to bring it out.

And I mean, you've got pages and pages and pages and pages.

That is how you tell.

It's very weird to see, if you're from Ireland or the UK or this side of the world, just how powerful the Pakistan army is.

It's just an odd thing to see, given that we've seen so much

hand-wringing over the dwindling numbers of the UK armed forces in the last couple of weeks.

A friend of mine is from London and he lives in Dublin and he said to me, like out of the blue, Neil, there's 80,000 people in the army now in Britain.

80,000.

You could fit all the British Army in Croke Park Stadium.

And I said, I don't think I'd let them in again.

It hasn't always gone well there, has it?

You know, fooling me once.

Yeah, shame on me, Andy.

That's that's what I would say there.

At this point, I believe AI could do anything.

At this point, if you had told me that Andy Zaltsman has died 10 years ago and the bugle has been presented by a George Foreman grill with an accent, that would be it.

You're a soda stream with a classics degree.

I'm firmly convinced you died in like 1997.

A couple of quotes from some of my my early reviews there.

The classics degree.

He's bubbly, but ultimately calorifically of an important.

So as you said, Nawaz Sharif, he's the former prime minister claiming victory.

Imran Khan, the other former prime minister claiming victory.

The main difference between the two candidates, other than the fact that one is in jail and one

isn't, but until recently should have been, was that Imran is one of the greatest cricketers in the history of the sport.

But he's incurred the wrath, wrath, as you said, of

the Pakistan army.

Now, Pakistan democracy,

again, it's always hard to look at another country's democracy from an outside perspective, but it seems to have long operated on the traditional one-person, one vote basis, but added one army more votes than all the one persons put together, which is a key part of it.

David Cameron, the foreign secretary, God rest his soul, if it's ever found, said there were serious concerns over the fairness and lack of inclusivity of the Pakistan election.

And this is David Cameron we're talking about, who has just been plonked into the House of Lords without being elected so he can take up one of the most important positions in government.

So he knows a f ⁇ ing thing or two about unfairness and subverting democracy.

So his words carry a lot of weight.

So the 1992 World Cup winning captain is in jail.

He was ousted from power in 2022.

His supporters say the 362 Test wicket fast bowling all-rounder has been convicted on trumped up charges for political reasons.

But his opponents

say the 7,500 international run scorer abused his power and betrayed his people.

Since being ousted, the 71-year-old former Sussex and New South Wales player has faced numerous different convictions.

Charges have included leaking state secrets, for which he's serving 10 years in jail, corruption, 14 years, contravening marriage laws,

seven years.

His wife was also jailed, and taking 40 wickets in a series against India in the 1982-83 season with one of the all-time great displays of fast bowling.

His space, skill and mastery of the arts and crafts of boltsmanship were simply unplayable in a series in which no other bowler thrived.

No years for

that crime.

So I hope we've filled in some of the gaps.

I have several questions.

I have

several questions.

First of all, arts and crafts of bowling.

I can understand the art of it.

At what point does he fashion some sort of ball or bat himself?

Is there a craft involved?

Have I

the craft in the infinitesimally different way of using the fingers, of angling the seam, of breaking the wrist, that like the corner.

Okay, okay, all right.

All right, that answers my first question.

Secondly, I don't really understand cricket that much, but is it right, from what I've seen, if he makes a run from prison, does somebody else have to run into the prison?

I think that is the case.

Is that how it's done?

From about 22 yards away?

Yeah, yeah.

That is the case.

If you smuggle something up your bottom into a prison, is it called something in the crease?

Look, Look, we're going to have to do a bit of background checking on that, but let's assume the answer is yes.

Okay.

Andy,

just quick correction.

Earlier you had said Omar Sharif instead of Nawaz Sharif.

Omar Sharif

is an actor who passed away several years ago.

It was in the film Lawrence of Arabia.

Oh, right.

Dr.

Shivago, filmed in 1965.

Okay.

He has nothing to do with the Pakistani election.

I don't want to start spreading that now.

That's just all sorts of confusing.

Did I genuinely say that?

I think so.

All right.

Pet, if I'm wrong, we can cut this out, but I'm pretty sure.

No, we can keep it in even if you're wrong.

I'm happy with it.

Look, it just shows that in modern democracy, you can't trust anything.

You know, would

Omar Sharif be a better or worse or more legitimate prime minister than Nawaz Sharif?

I don't think we can answer that question.

So let's just leave it.

I think we can.

I think we can.

And the answer is those smoldering, if-dead eyes, I would give them a go.

But like I said, I think this is great news.

I think the controlled use of AI in politics can only be a good thing, apart from it obviously potentially being and already being a very, very, very bad thing.

Because not only does it allow politicians who've been incarcerated or Imran on dubious grounds, despite their outstanding cricket stats, to participate fully and openly in the democratic process, but it also allows, for example, awful politicians to be made to say reasonable reasonable things.

Because, I mean, technology always tends to head towards the negative pile driving of the soul of humanity into the deepest available abyss.

But why not harness the wizardress witchcraft of AI to make, for example, Bashar al-Assad make a moving speech in favor of animal rights, or the late Silvio Berlusconi to expand on the importance of respect and equality between the sexes, or even Donald Trump to say something that doesn't make you want to curl up into a ball and sink into a 200-year hibernation.

As you hinted at, we can bring dead politicians back to life.

Hari, would you not, with the 2024 U.S.

election, would you not rather have Abraham Lincoln versus Frankie Roosevelt than Donald Trump versus Joe Biden?

I would still have that.

I would dig them up.

All right, so even without the AI, you'd just take the corpses.

Yeah, okay, I think that

not that much of a difference at this point.

We're talking a matter of years.

But I think the most importantly importantly with AI being used like this.

It brings honesty to the lies that blight our politics.

Because we know politicians are bullshitting us.

We're human.

That's the way we roll.

But if we know that it's a lying version of an actual politician that is lying to us, that is easier to take.

It's like a double negative.

I think.

Lie times lie equals truth.

Or is it lie plus lie equals two lies?

Either way, either way, it's better for all humanity.

Volcano AI news now and well hugely exciting development in the world of previously unintelligible almost 2,000 year old scrolls.

Three students have won a $700,000 prize for using AI to translate text from scrolls that were buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

These were part of a collection of over 800 scrolls that were discovered almost 2,000 years after Vesuvius quite literally blew its top in a dispute over whether or not people should be living near a volcano, a dispute that the celebrity mountain won quite conclusively at the time.

This is massively exciting, Neil.

I know you're

obsessed with

the ancient Roman world, particularly not only the ancient Roman world, but also how it interacts with any sort of

volcanology.

Yeah.

If that's the word.

Yeah, this is extraordinary.

Students did this.

Three students used AI pattern recognition that they built themselves to solve a 2,000-year-old mystery.

When I was a student, I ate a ram's testicle as a deer.

Beast lads.

And let me tell you one thing.

You have to take that in stages.

Stage one, get a good, firm grip of the ram because this bad boy is not expecting what's about to happen next.

And the second ball is even harder because he knows what to expect after the first one.

Anyway, this is amazing.

The CT CT scanned these scrolls, which, by the way, is a massive kick of the teeth if you've been waiting for hospital tests.

You're on a trolley and they wheel in a scroll into X-ray and go, listen, it's fine.

The tumor's only getting a little bit bigger.

We need to look at what's in these 2,000-year-old papyrus messages.

It could be something very, very time-sensitive.

And it's thought that they were found in what is Julius Caesar's...

father-in-law's house.

That's what they reckon

that's what the location is.

And then this morning, I don't know if this is just breaking news.

Have you seen this?

They found Caesar's diary.

Oh, right.

It's actually Caesar's Julius Caesar's diary.

I mean, you probably haven't seen this, but I mean, I can read it out if you wish.

The diary of Julius Caesar, aged 55 and three-quarters.

Heading into town later on.

Lads night out.

Woo!

Brutus has been in a bit of a mood lately, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

I invented a salad this morning.

I haven't decided on a name yet.

A Julius salad.

No, that's not right.

Anyway, today is the 15th of March 44 BC.

Always wondered what the BC stands for.

I suppose we'll find out eventually.

My back is still at me.

Everyone is recommending acupuncture, but I'm not so sure.

I've been sent out to get bathroom stuff.

Cleo is still refusing to accept her diagnosis of lactose intolerance.

Anyway, I'll write more tomorrow, I'm sure.

Peace out, J-Dog.

That's very interesting.

I mean, we wouldn't have gotten this insight without AI.

That's right.

That's what the BC

stands for breaded chicken that goes with a salad for

an extra fee, I think.

Oh, of course, yeah.

I love how these scrolls took.

The article I read said that

there was a monk who painstakingly had to open these scrolls over the course of years so they wouldn't fall apart.

And then you have to, they got this incredible machine to analyze it.

They had this contest where these brilliant brilliant students finally pieced together pieces of the scroll to figure out what it says.

And what it ended up saying

was

they assume it was from the philosopher

Philodemus.

He apparently, in those segments, those passages they translated, he writes about music, food, and how to enjoy life's pleasures.

They spent all that money and time and energy to discover an ancient blog.

That's all that to just find out what a guy thinks about the stuff around him.

Like, rest of the scrolls, I assume, will be a mix of reviews of local eateries

and erotic fanfiction based on the Odyssey and the various poems of Ovid.

Yelpius Maximus, I think.

It was mainly reviews.

Well, if the erotic fanfiction is anything like some of the frescoes that have been discovered in the Pompeii and Herculaneum, it is going to be absolutely monstrously filthy.

It's just going to be a picture book, isn't it?

Wangs everywhere.

But while it was with the eruption in 79 AD, preserved the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum pretty much as they were, an incredible historical resource.

Although when aged one and a half, my elder child did do a little bit of rearrangement at Herculaneum, which was quite interesting.

I don't think that bit should go over there, darling.

Okay, you win.

But I'm sure it wasn't that that important.

So, but this is only we've only deciphered a tiny fragment of these 800 papyras.

You say there's a lot of

speculation about what they could contain, lost scripts of classic works of literature and drama, details of the history, life, and politics of one of the most influential civilizations in the entire history of Italy, the original Latin versions of J.K.

Rowling's Harry Potter novels.

They could also contain the first draft of the laws of rugby union, although only 800 scrolls have been found, so it probably wouldn't be all the the laws of rugby union.

And they could also contain proof of whether Robert Oppenheimer was really the guy who invented the nuclear weapon rather than, as some people now think, the ancient Greek science whiz Euclid.

Though some people being you, buglers, I've planted the idea.

That is the power of new media.

It is slightly dispiriting, I think, coming as we do from the 21st century, that

papyrus rolls submerged by a 400 degrees Celsius pyroclastic flow almost 2,000 years ago have proved more durable than crucial WhatsApp messages exchanged by leading political figures during the COVID crisis.

I don't think that brings any glory to the modern age.

But if you're a spy, you know, and you know, when they read the meet-up point or whatever for the dead drop and then they light the piece of paper, surely this is just f that entirely.

You can't ever get rid of anything because in 2,000 years, some student

is just going to decide for his final year project to read through your ashes.

American news now.

Harry, what the f is going on in America?

I don't know.

Right.

What do you mean?

Two elderly men

are arguing publicly about who's going to end the world.

All because we elected a young black man to be president many years ago.

That's what's happening.

And now these two old geezers are going at it.

It's just horrendous.

Horrendous.

When the Bugle relaunched, Hari, you did the very first episode with me in New York.

And that was just before the 2016 presidential election.

Did you think that eight years later

we'd be here with Trump and

Joe Biden running for office?

I didn't expect eight years later.

Right, okay.

So this is all it's all

every day is a bonus.

Oh, good.

So specifically, well, Trump, I mean, it's quite hard to narrow down Trump to just one little section of the bugle every week these days, but he

did something that I don't think many American presidential candidates would have done in the past, and that is encourage an enemy nation to attack America's allies.

He basically said,

in a a speech, he reported a conversation he said he had when he was president, saying that if a NATO country had not paid its bills, he would encourage Russia to do, quote, whatever the hell they want.

I mean, this,

I mean, it's going to make the world exciting if he starts applying this

if he wins the election.

Exciting is one word for it.

Yes,

it's an exciting turn of events.

The logic.

I would encourage Russia to attack countries who are in an organization that was created to protect countries from being attacked by Russia.

Like, like, also,

doesn't attacking a NATO ally mean that other NATO members would have to respond?

It's like, Russia, hurt Portugal.

NATO, attack Russia from hurting Portugal.

Like, it's just,

it's a real ma, it's a mafia don type thing.

Like, it's like,

like, Like if Portugal doesn't pay its fees, well then Portugal, maybe you don't pay your dues.

And when Russia attacks, I look the other way.

Maybe it takes a few extra hours to get there.

I don't know.

Donald Trump is just walking around knocking over busts of Ferdinand Magellan going, oh, look, it would be a shame if I broke the next plane.

Oh, you got a bust of Henry the Navigator.

Oh, it will be an awful shame if it was replaced by this bust of Catherine the Great, if you know what I mean.

You know, when you don't book a seat like on a plane, you don't upgrade yourself and then you find out that there's a free seat and you haven't paid for it and you look at the suckers who did pay for it and you've gotten the same result as them.

That's what Ireland feels like now because we haven't joined NATO and it looks like you're all going to be attacked anyway.

The White House called Trump's comments appalling and unhinged.

And I guess the problem for Biden, Hari, is that no matter how hard he tries to convince voters that he can be as appalling and unhinged as Trump,

he just can't match him on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

No, no.

That little bit of integrity, knowledge, and expertise has prevented him from saying batshit crazy things on a regular basis.

And keep in mind, this is without Twitter.

It would be so much worse if it was like when Twitter was using, like when Trump was using Twitter all the time.

This is, you know, the occasional public statement.

So, you know, it's going to get, if he wins, it's going to be bad.

It's going to be really bad.

In fairness, Biden does say, he does get mixed up.

He doesn't say horrendous stuff like that, but he does get mixed up.

Like, he said this week that

when that report came out and it said that he was an

what was the phrase?

He was, he had a poor memory and he would come across as a sympathetic, well-meaning older man, but with a very poor memory.

and then he did the press conference to allay everybody's fears that he didn't have a poor memory and he said that the president of Egypt El-Sisi was in fact the president of Mexico so I mean how do you mix up such distinct and different countries it is very easy surely to keep such famous stories about those places

clear in your head like whether it's little Zorro being floated down the Rio Grande as a child in a in a basket that later took his name and then years later parting the Red Sea and fleeing with the Israelites, or Davy Crockett fighting the Nazis at the Battle of El Alamo.

I mean, and that is a portmanteau between El Alamoin and Alamo.

And if you can find a better pun on Mexican and Egyptian battles, I am all for ears, my friends.

Do you remember a couple of years ago when the Evergiven blocked the Suez Canal right in the heart of Tijuana?

Do you remember that?

There was a suggestion that the captain got distracted listening to the famous Bengals hit, Walk Like a Mexican.

You remember this?

In 1965, when Carlos Santana played the lead in Dr.

Chivago, he put Mexican acting on the map.

He laid down a marker and it was him.

It wasn't the president of Pakistan and the Sharif.

It was Carlos Santana.

You cannot confuse these cultures.

Is it for this that goddess Bastnet, the cat of Ra, hunted Speedy Gonzalez?

Surely not.

Is it for this that Cleopatra killed herself by being bitten on the breast by two Chihuahuas?

No, no, it's not.

And apparently she was so bitter about being vanquished by Octavian, the the dogs licked a line of salt, down the shot, and then beat her to kill the taste.

I couldn't even get to the end of that sentence myself.

I mean, to be fair, like, confusing Mexico and Egypt is a mistake any American could make.

So

it's not going to hurt him here.

Trump's defenders and enablers have claimed that he doesn't really mean what he says when he says these things.

And to be honest, I don't know if that would be better or worse.

I mean, for a start, A, he clearly clearly does mean these things.

But if anything, he probably actually reined himself in a bit when he merely said that he would have encouraged Russia to do what the hell they want.

I think what he probably meant was chances are these countries are one or more of French or German.

So frankly, I'd nuke the cheese and/susage eating f ⁇ ers myself

as soon as I can lock myself in the Oval Office with my big red button and 25 burgers to keep me going whilst I watch Armageddon unfold on Fox.

So if anything, we should be grateful that he's, you know, obviously developed some kind of verbal restraint.

You mentioned

the Joe Biden case there, the inquiry that found that Biden had willfully retained and disclosed classified files, but did not charge him

and said in a 345-page

report that was, well, extremely uncomplimentary,

said that the president had significant limitations in his memory and it would be difficult to convict him because, quotes, at trial, Biden would likely present himself to a jury as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.

I mean, I guess it, again, it tells a lot about the strange world of American politics in 2024.

That being a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory, obviously that's not ideal for a presidential candidate, but it seems to be worse than being an antagonistic, malevolent, cantankerous, elderly with a poor and willfully selective memory.

But I guess such are the times.

What a choice, Ari.

What a choice America is facing.

I mean,

you gotta Trump's old to you have to remember, Biden is like an old 81.

That's a ridiculous thing to say, but he's like an old 81, and Trump is a young 77.

Like,

you can see the difference.

I mean, I think my way, like, my test to see if someone should be president or not is, do you trust them behind the wheel of a car?

Perhaps the country is a a bad idea for Biden.

Still not going to vote for Teddy Kennedy, then, is it?

Even though he's no longer with us, but that's not the main reason Harry wouldn't vote for him.

Biden is meant to have shared his classified information from his diaries with his ghost writer.

Now,

is anybody else feeling uncomfortable given how old Biden is with the term ghostwriter?

It just feels too close to the bone, doesn't it?

I mean, they're getting given all this shit for bringing documents home.

Like, I believe his response was, of course, I brought documents home.

Otherwise, I would have forgotten what I did.

Also, they were in the basement, no, the garage of his Delaware home, and he was, wasn't he living in, he was living somewhere else in a different state at the time.

And like, I'm moving at the moment, and I have no idea where anything is.

There's no way he knew that.

I could open the fridge and Lord Longford will be talking to Shergar about the fourth secret of Fatima.

You haven't a f ⁇ ing clue what's anywhere.

And never mind being 81.

He didn't know what was going on.

He didn't know where anything was.

So I'm going to give him a pass on that.

Let's talk about Tucker Carlson, please.

Yeah, the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin.

I mean, possibly one of the...

It's going to go down as one of the all-time great conversations in human history, isn't it?

I mean, you sort of mentioned uh moses um you know one of his his chat with god that ended up with him uh introducing the tablet uh to humanity that's ruined our children's lives so much um but carlson and putin that's got to be that's got to be right up there in terms of of you know human communication hasn't it how he got that whole thing down his throat is just unbelievable

i would imagine they warmed them up with a small one and then a slightly bigger one, given that it's Russia, and then a slightly bigger one and then a slightly bigger one.

That's how we probably did it.

Tucker Carlson, who looks like Woody from Toy Story Mid-Colonoscopy, just covered himself in shame, didn't he?

He asked questions, talk about softball.

It was somewhere between the questions a royal would ask at the opening of a community centre and questions that you would ask at a teenage beauty pageant.

Or if you want to combine the two, the questions Prince Andrew would ask on a date.

He allowed a 20-minute lecture on Russian history from Putin and didn't fact check any of it.

And Putin, all the experts afterwards said he made up all sorts of shit.

It was like, oh yeah, when Jesus was born, the three wise men came from the east.

Now they were Stalin, Lenin, and Lev Yashin.

That's right.

The finest goalkeeper the Soviet Union has ever produced.

Anyways, it's a long story, but they gave Jesus a Sauron's ring of power and he went through the looking glass where he asked Boney M to kill the Romanovs.

And that is how the state of Russia was founded.

And Carlson was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds right.

He didn't ask any tough questions that a proper journalist would have asked the Russian premier.

Like,

what about Mario Paul?

How many dolls is too many dolls inside each other?

Should I Van Drago have just used his superior reach and jabbed Rocky into submission?

None of the tough questions that we all want answered.

I've always wondered that as well.

I mean, he clearly had the height, Harry.

He clearly had it.

Why was he getting dragged in?

He should have boxed.

He shouldn't have gotten involved in a brawl.

I mean, it's just.

He tasted blood when he killed Apollo and he just wanted more.

That's what happened.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

You see, many a man has lost

in a fictional boxing fight because of that.

I was going to congratulate you, Neil, on the first.

Well, this is now 291st episode since we've relaunched.

I think we did 294.

Yeah, I was going to say, well done on the first Levy Ashin reference, but I just did a quick search on my computer and I'm afraid I think it's the second Levyashin reference we've found.

Yeah, but I mean how long is

the gap between the two you see?

Well it was I found it looking for a word a word search in

issue 4058 so that's what 200 and

234 I was going to say Kanchelskis.

Right.

But Kanchelskis was born in Ukraine.

I just thought that would mix up stuff.

Oh that could have been very provocative.

Yeah that's what I thought as well so I thought I would go with somebody who was hardcore Soviet Union era.

Anyway, well done.

This is the research I do for you.

That's good.

That is what I expect, Neil.

And well done for stepping up to the plate.

Middle East update now.

And well, it's extremely hard to digest the news from the Middle East.

So I'm going to give it to you in five seconds in the form of a single sound.

Oh,

let's move on.

Sport now and well, the Super Bowl last night, an absolutely spectacular game that, well, shifted through various moods and

passages and ended up with a Titanic finish with Kansas City winning a second consecutive Super Bowl.

The how's it pronounced?

The Geifs.

The Geifs?

The Kansas City Kaifs?

The Geifs.

Beat the San Francisco 49ers

in overtime.

Hari, I I know you're a big, big sports fan.

It was intense and dramatic game.

I just want to congratulate Taylor Swift on that amazing catch in overtime.

The way she cut and then was able to, it was a pressure situation.

She just pulled it in, touched down.

She was so shocked she didn't even start celebrating because I'm like, I just caught a touchdown.

And also congratulations to Taylor Swift for throwing that touchdown.

her ability to stay focused in such a difficult situation a clutch moment and then throw it to herself was something else and so congratulations to Taylor Swift on her on her first Super Bowl victory that's why she's paid the big bucks one of the highest paid celebrities in the world and it's to do those kind of things under that kind of pressure I guess is why why she's worth that That's correct.

Yeah.

It was interesting afterwards that a number of the Kansas players and staff thanked God

for helping them win their third Super Bowl in five seasons.

And you know the old saying from science, if three or more people say something, it's probably correct.

That's also how news works as well as science and hype, of course, and religion.

And the fact that Kansas had God on their side, that does raise a few questions.

One, is God a swifty?

I think we can assume that he is.

Two, should God not be f ⁇ ing focusing on something more important than American football?

And three, why does God have it in for San Francisco?

Actually, let's probably not

answer that

too closely.

Also, is this the proof that conservative Christian America needs that Donald Trump is not the guy they should be getting behind?

Because it's well known that the Chiefs' win was part of an overt conspiracy by Taylor Swift to shape America according to her every whim and steal yet another election from Trump.

And God just helped Swift in the Chiefs to victory in a game that if played in a godless universe on the balance of play over the course of the match, they would obviously have lost.

So

Sean,

is this going to turn Christian America against Trump, do you think, Hurry?

No, well, first of all, this just proves that God is

a gambler, is a horrible gambler, and likes to rig it.

That's all it is.

He made a ton from Ganesha off this shit.

I mean, look, Taylor Swift

is a weapon that the left could use if anyone who's running the Democratic Party knows who she is, since they're all, you know, around Biden's age.

But the right hates her, and she has so many fans,

many of which are voting age, that actually could have some impact.

I have also heard that perhaps if she said something

about what is happening in Gaza, it would have an impact.

But of course, that's not going to happen

because, you know.

I guess, you know, the we are never ever getting back together does, you know, lay out the difficulties of a toothplate solution.

I was struggling for a punchline, and that did it, Andy.

Thank you.

I was like, come up with something.

Come up with something.

Riff something funny about Israel and Gaza right now.

I'm afraid I'm now out of Taylor Swift references with that one song.

I mean, thank God you rescued all of us there.

We're all reaching for why don't the other Middle East countries get involved and scrabbling around for Shake It Off, spelt S-H-E-I-K.

You rescued that situation.

Thank God.

Thank God, Andy.

Which God, who knows?

Let's not beat it again.

It was a compelling game, and Patrick Lahomes, the star quarterback,

struggled in the first half and then came through with some amazing play under pressure.

And

obviously, I watched a lot of sport both recreationally and in recent years professionally

and I have such respect for people who can do those kind of things on under pressure see you know a lot of the England cricket team and pressure situations because when I I often find myself crumbling slightly under the weight of potential victory towards the business end of a game of past the pigs on a family holiday when the opportunity to defeat my wife and two children looms tantalizingly within reach and I can just feel that tension gripping me, the decision making getting a little bit clouded.

The one time I took a penalty in a shootout in a football game as a student in a second 11 game for my college.

And I mean college in the,

not in the American sense of something with thousands and thousands of people.

This is a second 11 of about 300 people, most of whom didn't play football.

And I had to take a penalty and I dribbled it straight down the middle.

So slowly that the goalkeeper was actively laughing by the time the ball got to him.

And of course, that was that time I found myself having to stand in for George Foreman in that boxing fight in Kinshasa back in the day.

In what I must say, was a very realistic George Foreman outfit.

And I couldn't make my early superiority count.

I didn't keep that mental clarity you need at those moments.

I fell into the trap the other guy was setting.

What was his name again?

I forget.

But in mitigation, I was only 24 days old at the time.

But still, I really respect those who can perform with that level of brilliance when it matters most within the sporting universe's scale of mattering a lot.

It was, yeah, it was, it was, I was up till

4:30 UK time.

For you, though, there's some degree of comfort in the certainty in a world where we're influenced by many things.

And, you know, are you European anymore?

If Britain has

committed Brexit, are you, you know, are you, what religion are you?

What race are you?

I mean, I think there's some degree of comfort to take from the certainty that missing that penalty confirmed that at least you are 100% English.

At least you know that.

At least you know that.

Ouch.

Ouch.

Ouch.

Too soon?

Too soon?

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

I'd delight to have you both on.

Do you have any things to plug?

Harry.

My special vacation baby still available on YouTube.

They haven't pulled it yet.

They haven't pulled it.

Apparently, they can't.

pull it because the quality control isn't an issue.

You can still put it up even if it's...

No, it's a very good special, and you should watch it in three.

I got shows June 21st and 22nd in Bugle Stronghold, Dayton, Kentucky,

which is close to Cincinnati, to be very it's actually border Cincinnati.

And then Sunday, June 23rd in Cleveland, Ohio.

So, yeah, my website's hurrykundabolu.com, which obviously just means you type in hurry on Google and see what happens.

Yeah, I'm doing a full tour around Ireland and the UK.

I've added a few UK dates.

I'm doing London, Pleasant,

Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow on the stand.

And follow me on social media at Neil Delamere Comedy.

And

our fifth series of our podcast, Why Would You Tell Me That, is out in a week.

And we talk about really random stuff.

And I think people who like the bugle will enjoy it.

I will now plug the bugle tour.

In fact, we've got a QR code that you can.

It's an audio QR code.

So listen carefully.

From the top left, obviously, you start with a black box inside a white box, inside a black box protected to the right and bottom by a wall of white.

Then, top row, little white square, two little black squares, little white square, little black square, three little white squares, two little black squares, white square, black square, both little, little white square.

Just go to the website thebuglepodcast.com.

It's probably easier.

Live dates around

England and Scotland through March.

Do come to all of those shows.

Also, if you want to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to help keep this show free from advertisements flourishing and independent, go to the BuglePodcast.com and click the donate button.

Premium level subscribers will get our exclusive subscriber only vinyl record, which is currently in production.

And also a monthly Ask Andy show for our subscribers when I answer all of, well, some of your questions.

Thank you for listening.

Until next time, Buglers, buy your tickets to the show and goodbye.

You can listen to other programs from the Bugle, including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.

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.