Quirks and Perks - BONUS BUGLE!

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, it's producer Chris here.

We're back in a few days, but it's Lent slash Hanukkah slash all the other good things.

So here's some excellent unheard moments from recent records.

Before that though, we are touring the UK in the spring.

Get tickets at thebuglepodcast.com.

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All these great announcements.

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Paid subscribers, you get the third Ask Andy in your feed next week.

And top tier super buglers, we have recorded your exclusive vinyl-only show.

You have until the end of the year to become a top-tier subscriber and get your name on the artwork.

Does it contain the audio cryptic crossword?

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It was recorded.

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50 50.

now on to the fun we've got some great clips from recent shows including alice fraser stuart lee felicity ward james nikisee mark still and of course andrew zaltzman play the tape

other environment news now and um well icebergs are on the move uh our civilization of course uh as we've heard repeatedly on this show and uh from our uh former home secretary soella Bravman over and over again.

Our way of life is under threat from things and people coming over here and taking everything from us and now

one of the world's biggest icebergs is heading north and threatening our shores.

The romantically named A23A

made its first break for freedom from Antarctica in 1986 thinking there must be more to life than this.

But it hadn't properly planned its escape route and got stuck.

But now the 15,000 square mile frozen whopper

which is quite literally bigger than Jesus, and in fact, bigger than Jesus, Greater London, and New York City combined, is rampaging northwards.

I mean, are you as terrified as I am by this?

Well, you know, you've attributed motive to the iceberg.

You said it's coming over here to the actually, you've got to look at where it's coming from.

It's coming from somewhere called the Weddell Sea.

And the Weddell Sea was described in 1950 by Thomas R.

Henry as, according to the testimony of all who have sailed through its berg-filled waters, it it is the most treacherous and dismal region on earth.

So it may be that

the icebergs just want a bit of a holiday, you know, and like see the world of it and get not just not just the Weddell Sea.

In fact, I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said, when an iceberg is tired of the Weddell Sea, it is tired of life.

But yeah, the the Weddell Sea has not got a lot going for it.

It's got a gyre in it, you know, when the thing that sucks all stuff in and

I mean, there's n it's just wants a break, I think, the iceberg from the Weddell Sea.

Okay, fair enough.

I mean,

the Weddell Sea is the opposite of the very big sea.

Sorry, sorry.

No need to apologise.

If described by Elmer Fudd from the Bugs Bunny cartoon.

So it's the A23A.

That's the name of it.

I think I broke down there once.

I was thinking

of it being described, the iceberg was stuck to the ocean floor.

And I think about it as like when I have a night out and I'm wearing high heels and I'm walking along and then I get my foot stuck in a grate and then I've got to slowly go back and sort of jiggle it and take it out.

Maybe that is what's happened to the ocean floor, but it's happening at a glacial pace.

Right, okay.

So that's actually what's happened.

I see.

That or

the ocean is warming up.

And the iceberg wants to move somewhere colder than the Antarctic.

So it may be slowly heading towards Suella Braverman's heart.

It's possible.

I mean, I guess in terms of, you know, looking at this as a positive for the world, is it possible that this giant iceberg, 400 meters thick, could be coaxed up the west coast of Africa, then forced through the Straits of Gibraltar and plonked at the far end of the Mediterranean to literally cool the Middle East situation down?

Do you think, I mean, is a massive iceberg really the only way to lasting peace in the Middle East now?

It's possible.

It might take some time though.

Right.

I don't know if you've ever seen an iceberg in a hurry, but it's still imperceptible to the human eye.

Right.

Well, another positive environmental story, apart from escaped icebergs, is that eating chips can save the planet.

That's the headline from this week's news.

That a transatlantic flight powered by used cooking oil managed to do one better than the Titanic and make it all the way across the Atlantic.

A Boeing 787 potatoed its way from London to New York without killing a single fossil using sustainable aviation fuel.

Now is this a classic case of corporate greenwashing and grandstanding?

Is it a distraction from the bigger challenges of properly decarbonising our economies and our ways of life?

Or is it a genuine breakthrough?

Yes, yes and yes.

Three out of three.

Got to be happy with that.

Yeah yeah.

It's great.

I mean if you can if you can power it on oil that hasn't been got out of the ground then that's great.

But

we're going to need a lot of used cooking oil to do that.

So we have to think of other sources of non-got out of the ground oil.

I thought you could get oil that has been milked out of Eamon Holmes' face

on a daily basis to fly it.

To fly it.

But yeah,

it is great because it means we can keep having our holidays.

Look, I think it's great for the British people.

British people absolutely love using oil.

They love it.

I was shocked when I came over here and saw people cooking their whole breakfast in two inches of oil.

Imagine if you're a British pilot.

You finish your fry up, you go back to the kitchen, you grab the pan, you walk outside, you open the little petrol flap on the plane, and then you just pour it in and off you go.

My concern is for flight sabotage because it means in the middle of the flight, if the plane explodes in the air, all the remnants of the passengers will unfortunately taste delicious.

Oh no, but that might be good in one of those situations where everyone ends up in the Andes and has to eat each other.

They've sort of been pre-marinated.

Delicious.

Oh, this is so sad.

Crunch.

Doesn't even need seasoning.

We're in the Dead Sea.

Everyone's got salt on them already.

Ow.

I mean, I guess a much greener and longer-term solution would be to alter the human genome so that whatever gene gives us geographical curiosity and the desire to travel the world is...

removed completely from our species.

So you basically make everyone American.

Or an axolotl, which live in the same fing lake for thousands of years and never go anywhere.

Staring into the abyss, weird little animals.

Hashtag be more axolotl.

Other animal health news and well jellyfish

have been getting stressed.

It's not just humans that are dealing with the heightened anxieties in modern life.

Jellyfish are too.

And it's been apparently mining, deep sea mining, is causing them stress.

This is like Arthur Scargill versus Margaret Thatcher all over again, but the bottom of the sea with jellyfish.

I mean, I guess it must be quite hard.

This is another scientific experiment, maybe slightly more use than rat boners in space, but it must be quite hard to tell when a jellyfish is stressed because they don't often look stressed.

But it is also quite hard to read the inner thoughts of a faceless sea globster with alarmingly 1970s style wandering tentacles that looks uncannily like the unwanted love child of an overpriced umbrella and some forgotten Christmas macrame.

But obviously the scientists have managed to do this.

Increasingly, companies are looking to mine minerals from the depths of the ocean because despite the fact fundamentally no one knows what is really happening at the bottom of the ocean but it's almost certainly not to be trusted and full of weird creatures with waggly bits that you don't want to see banging on your window at 4 a.m.

But crucially there are these precious minerals lurking there too, meaning that it has the full undivided attention of the world.

These minerals could be used to make, for example, a scrunchable iPad so that you can screw it up and throw it at a wall like you would a normal piece of paper after losing a game of naughts and crosses against yourself.

So I mean this is...

I mean it does seem that there is however well creatures hide themselves, whether it's the absolute bottom of the ocean, humans will still find a way to f up their lives for them.

Yes, they measure the stress in these jellyfish by faking out

plumes of sediment in a controlled environment, seeing how the jellyfish reacted, because that replicates what happens if there's mining happening on the ocean floor and these jellyfish produced excessive amounts of a protective mucus

and also sort of healing

enzymes in their bodies.

And I find it incredibly inspiring, Andy, the idea that I could protect myself by covering myself in a coating of mucus.

So I feel like I'm going to launch a new safety product from walking alone at night, which is just

oh, yes, mucusoid

from proxy and gamble.

Yeah, so one hand you've got the mace, you're spraying them.

The other hand, you've got the mucus, you're spraying yourself.

I felt so safe this

weekend.

Yeah.

I don't know how you get a stressed jellyfish.

Do they get all their bits tangled or something?

Like when your laces get in a mess.

No, no, they just look they just look calm and then they take it out on their wife and kids later.

Yeah.

In other Britain news, the government's net zero minister has claimed that oil and gas are not the problem for

the climate.

Alice,

you are a fan of science and logic and hope and the future as you are incubating another

person that's going to have to live through the future.

Can you

explain

why the net zero minister was right, that oil and gas are not at all the problem?

I mean, he's saying oil and gas are not the problem for the climate, but the carbon emissions arising from them are,

which is

some word chopping, the likes of which I have not seen since somebody put all of the words into a blender

I see it's it's sort of a guns don't kill people argument like climate change doesn't kill people trying to breathe toxic chemicals while underwater or on fire kills people

I sort of don't understand what the point is other than to be a Smarmi f

like I don't

who's he convincing of what

he just wants us to gather up oil and gas and make statues out of it and fondle it in the darkness.

Like, I don't understand.

I think, well,

I'm in favour of that.

Certainly, fondling statues in the darkness, I think, might be

our national motto, actually.

And certainly, it's something that numerous members of the government have been caught doing.

This is why you're banned from the Museum of Cricket.

You know that.

Do not tell me there is not at least five members of the current Conservative government that have not fondled the statue of Robert Clive outside the Home Office at the dead of night.

At least five, possibly more.

He said, I don't think supply is the key driver.

It's demand we need to focus on.

And I guess, you know, if you wipe out humanity, that demand is going to drop.

So, I mean, can we

is he barking at the right burglar here?

And when we're talking about supply and demand, Andy, why are we not focusing on the and part of the sentence?

Can we get some research into the what is this man trying to achieve other than to reduce the the aggregate meaning of any word use out of a human mouth for the future of mankind I really

if I were there I would want to kick him in the knees and run away

just which also begs the question are those people outside intents actually homeless people or are they people working for the minister of net zero trying to decrease the demand yes well it just It bespeaks this frustrating unwillingness to engage with the actual issues in favour of sound bites and

little point scoring that are going to happen in the public forum.

And that's irritating in day-to-day life.

It's irritating when it happens in favour of, instead of political policies being put through, but it is far worse when the thing that's on the line is the actual Earth.

In other food news, China has apparently grown lettuce and tomatoes on its space station.

Now, personally, cannot fathom the logic of trying to do this.

When you think of who astronauts are, they are kids who never grew up fundamentally.

Oh, I want to be an astronaut.

Well, the rest of us grew up and got proper jobs.

But these overgrown fantasists ended up waddling around in spacesuits, pretending to do scientific research whilst actually just imagining, negotiating with aliens and being constantly fascinated by zero-gravity toilets.

These people are not going to eat vegetables.

That is a fact of space travel.

Astronauts are children.

I'd work on chicken nuggets you can grow in space, and maybe the odd sausage, possibly ice cream with sprinkles.

But this is, I mean, what is the point of growing lettuce and tomatoes on the space station?

I mean, also, it seems to me that those are the two wettest and most droplety of the salad possibilities that you could have, which in zero gravity feels like a problem to me.

Yep.

Well, I could see, I mean, bits of lettuce floating around a space station.

That's

actually a nightmare, isn't it?

Well, this is apparently all aimed towards having China putting a pair of astronauts on the moon before 2030, which is very soon.

But who wants to go to the moon if you're just going to eat lettuce and tomato?

I mean, that's a long trip for a salad.

A couple of other news stories now before we go.

Alice, story from Australia.

I'll just give you the headline and then you can explain what's going on.

Man Bites Crocodile.

Obviously, this is the logical end point of all news.

Just talk us through it.

Yeah, I mean, this is one of the best stories because it's also one of the most Australian stories.

It was a cattleman, he walked towards a river to investigate some fish who were behaving oddly, and a crocodile bit his foot, which is, you know, usually

the beginning of a story that ends with a man dying.

But in this instance, it ended with the man biting the crocodile

on the eyelid, which I imagine is the only place a man could bite a crocodile that would cause it trouble

that is within easy reach when you've got a foot in the crocodile's mouth.

And the crocodile released him and he managed to make it to a hospital and is now fine and will apparently walk out within the next week or so.

The biggest danger, of course, being that crocodiles don't brush their teeth

and his foot got badly infected.

But I I feel like that's

the best case scenario of your foot getting bitten by a crocodile.

One final, very important item of news.

James, I know this particularly got your attention.

Patrick Dempsey, the

actor.

Is he an actor?

He is an actor, isn't he?

I've never heard of him actually before.

He is an actor.

You've never heard of Patrick Dempsey.

No.

My God.

He doesn't play sport, does he?

Patrick Dempsey.

He's a motor racer.

He's the one actor actor who's an actual athlete in motor racing.

All right, well, there we go.

Patrick Dempsey has heroically

won the sexiest man alive title,

seeing off the challenges of, amongst others, David Attenborough, the non-agenarian, wildlife, snooping, zebra-death, glamourising insect sex voyeur.

Antonio Guterres, the hang dog, sad-faced global crisis stitchian and blues man,

the UN Secretary General, a bit hackneyed for people to lust after their secretary, but anyway,

he missed out.

Former UK Health Secretary and bafflingly persistent polyp on the public teeth, Matt Hancock.

And he also saw off Pilau Snork, the fictitious entrepreneur who this week launched a new social media app called Block that automatically blocks anyone who either posts anything or looks at something someone else has posted, very much ahead of its time.

Also, claims to have developed a powdered internet service.

You just have to add water for a 5G signal.

But Patrick Dempsey has won.

He's also beaten off,

sorry, he's also beaten off the challenges of, well, you, James, and me and producer Chris for Sexiest Man Alive.

How did he do it and why?

Well, I think we've all had the Patrick Dempsey beats you off dream at one point or another in our lives.

He's taken the title.

No one saw it coming.

He didn't see it coming.

No one's quite sure why it's happened.

Saya Khalese, the South African rugby captain, exists.

Rugby purists would probably point out Adi Zavier, the World Rugby Player of the Year.

But as he's my cousin, I don't really want to promote him for being super sexy in the general public.

I just whisper it in his ear to give him the moral support he needs after World Cup loss.

But

it's weird that the award is still going.

It's weird that Patrick Dempsey got it, but since he's 57 years old and winning it, I feel it gives hope to many of us in our late 30s, early 40s, late 40s.

I'm going to go late 40s for me, very late 40s.

Oh, you know, and we should never forget that the two, I think, I think it was the two three first winners back in the 80s were Mel Gibson and Sean Connery.

So clearly, an award for all men to aspire to.

It's a beautiful thing.

He's a 57-year-old actor, which is like 30 in woman years.

That's progress.

Look, I mean, I don't know how it's judged.

I mean, I've never seen Patrick Dempsey unfurl a sumptuous one-handed backhand up a line or lean on a perfectly timed drive-through extra cover.

So, frankly, I don't understand why he's made it to the top of this list, but

there we go.

You know, jokes aside, he's no Jimi Anderson.

Absolutely.

He really isn't a Jimi Anderson.

And I feel

Jimmy's played long enough now.

It's the one accolade that he doesn't have.

And that's not enough people have been exposed to him.

But also, why can't we break the mold?

Why can't we get

someone less conventionally sexy to be the sexiest man alive?

You know, some sort of podcast host,

maybe a satirical news show.

Yeah.

I'm right on board with that.

Yeah, we could go alongside because I've got

my various and my trophy cabin.

I've got the least sexiest man alive title from a couple of years ago, so to get the sexiest man alive title, that would be go nicely alongside it.

The sexiest podcaster,

podcasting man alive, was Taylor Lautner, who played The Werewolf in Twilight.

So I feel like I have to dismiss

all of these awards.

Do you like Christmas music, Andy?

No, I hate it.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I thought so.

Yes, but I still don't understand why for one month a year, all commonly accepted standards of musical taste are abandoned.

What about Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift for You?

Because that album is unbelievably good.

Okay.

That is a good album.

It is.

I'll listen to that in June.

Like an absolute psychopath.

But he's not a very Christmassy bloke, was he, Phil Spector?

No, and he's, you know, he's got the voice of a pedophile.

Yeah.

Like, he's not a pedophile.

Well, not that I know of, who knows?

The voice of a murderer, maybe?

A A murderer, yeah, yeah.

If you really want to hear the voice of a murderer, keep listening to this outro.

Thanks for listening.

My own podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, is in its latest season.

It's a sort of comedy show, sort of about traveling, but largely about two friends accepting they're not as clever as they once thought they were.

Give it a listen now.

See you soon.

Bye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

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

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

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