Oppenheimlich: Bugle Word Of The Year

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4282 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual universe.

Only kidding, visual world, still no conclusive evidence that the universe exists for me, but the world.

I'm on it right now, and it doesn't get any more real than that.

I am Andy Zaltzman still, and if I could turn back time, well, I wouldn't be doing this podcast for a whole host of reasons.

If you're listening to this through a smart speaker, just see what happens when this bit plays out.

Hey, whatever your smart speaker's current name is, do an impression of Andy Zoltzman, Alice Fraser, and Mark Steele talking about the world's news.

And now see if you can tell the difference from what the rest of the show.

Welcome to the show.

So, yes, there you are, our guest today, Alice Fraser, in

Sydney,

New South Wales, about to move to Queensland

when are they going to update that name

because it I mean it just seems a bit insensitive now Queensland yes but that is Queensland's calling card is being insensitive so I figure they're just going to lean in

and Mark Steele joining us from Crystal Palace correct I'm in Northlander at the moment for a series of reasons right well Crystal Palace is another place that really needs to update its name the thing burnt down in 1936

It's like calling Pompeii never been inconvenienced by a volcanic eruption

So how are you they say those in crystal palaces shouldn't throw incendiary devices Yeah, yeah, they did yeah, that's what that's what started that particular phrase

If only that phrase had existed in 1936 someone said I don't see the problem

oh no we've done

how are you, Mark?

Well, cancer, but apart from that, I'm all right.

All right.

I mean, that's a very direct way of breaking that to any bugle listeners who've not heard that news.

You have written about it

and talked about it

on your own shows.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm quite cheery at the moment because

the bad thing that happened about six weeks ago, I've recovered from that.

And then all of this treatment starts next week.

So at the moment, I'm in this sort of little pocket of cheeriness where I'm quite feel fine.

And the slightest little thing gives me immense joy.

Like, oh, the wicked cleaners around.

I mean, what's paying?

This is the sort of thing that makes life worth living.

Look at the cat doing a shit.

Life goes on.

Maybe you're in.

No, I recommend there is grey cancer because it's all, you say,

and then I had one day that was really grim.

One of the

consultant who probably probably wasn't going to win any awards for communication skills said, This is exact words,

not good news, Mr.

Steele.

Ah,

and he said, and that's what I knew for certain.

He said, I knew you were cancer, and this is secondary cancer's using two places.

Ah.

And I said, Is it

venetal?

And he then touched wood and then touched a bit of wood.

That was...

I thought, oh, well, at least

if he hadn't touched any wood, that would have been even more disturbing, I suppose.

But it's not even worth attempting a superstitious remedy.

But anyway, that's...

It's not.

It's going to be all right.

Do you touch wood in Australia?

For luck?

I don't know, this might be an English.

I don't know.

No, we touch wood.

We've got wood.

We touch it.

But you've got to do it the other way.

We've got to get wood, and that means lucky, you know, let's hope.

And then maybe that's what did it because the next day I found out that it, you know, the cancer hadn't spread anywhere and therefore it's what seems to be fairly

pretty much certain that they'll they'll deal with it.

But,

you know, and maybe the reason that they'll be able to deal with it is because he touched wood and whatever spirits and fairies are in are sort of informed at that point,

they noted it down.

I think that's the kind of level of science that we've been hearing about here in the COVID inquiry, which we'll be

talking about later.

Well, great, it's great to have you on the show.

Alice, you

are

now approximately, what is it, it's over 75% pregnant now.

Yes, yes, almost completely pregnant.

I like to see these things in statistical terms.

I've almost achieved my final form of being entirely spherical.

Touch wood.

That's exciting, though.

Yeah, it's very exciting.

It's a delight in every possible way.

Particularly having a toddler means that I get to have the joy of being kicked from both the outside and the inside at the same time.

Which is

novel.

If I was asked in one of the meetings where they were talking to me about radiotherapy and they go through all these side effects, the way she put it, her English wasn't perfect, this assault.

And she said, I must ask you, have you completed your family?

What?

What do you mean?

And I thought, well, that is a jigsaw.

And she said, no, have you completed your family?

I said, I don't know what you mean.

She said, well, have you...

And then I realized what she meant.

And then I realized, A, what she meant, and B, that apparently this radiotherapy if I hadn't completed my family was going to be was going to significantly impair

my ability to make any more family

we are recording on the 24th of November 2023 just a couple of days ago it was 60 years since John F.

Kennedy was assassinated by I've got the envelope here courtesy of a friend who works in the highest levels of American intelligence.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

On the same day, the 22nd of November 1963, current Sunderland football manager Tony Mowbray was born.

Yes, the former Middlespersentabat came into the world at the exact same

moment that John F.

Kennedy left it.

Read into that what you will.

Also, at nine and a bit months, about 40 weeks later, Keanu Reeves was born.

Read into that, what you will.

Also, popping their clogs on the 22nd of November 1963, two giants of English literature, the wardrobe fetishist C.S.

Lewis and dystopia aficionado Aldous Huxley, which has to be disappointing if you're dying thinking, well, I'm quite a literature celebrity.

I'm going to be absolutely front-page news.

Who's been shot?

What a disappointing way.

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

This week we look at the words of the year.

Last year, the Cambridge Dictionary chose hallucinate as the word of the year.

The word-nerding, book-bothering Boffins chose hallucinate after it impressively branched out into new meanings,

specifically describing how AI generates text.

It hallucinates text.

So that was their word of the year.

It's not the first person to hallucinate text.

Yeah.

I didn't see that.

All right.

It's just a hallucination joke, therefore, you're

not the first person to hallucinate

text, to be honest.

Also describes how former Home Secretary Suella Bravman acquires evidence before making policies.

So hallucinator is qualified as British Word of the Year for the European Word of the Year contest, where it'll be up against the continent's best verbal offerings,

including flaguette from France, which is slightly past its best baguette.

The words hotly tipped a challenge for the word of the year in 2024 include Draculate, which in economics is a company that sucks the blood out of defenseless competitors without really making its own life any better.

So that's most companies over a certain size.

Phanesthesia, which is being put to sleep by people complaining about refereeing decisions on a football phone.

Yes, I'm IM, which is doing something that you think you should do, even though you know it will have absolutely fall impacts whatsoever.

For example, recycling a tin can, signing a petition to demand more ethical oil exploration practices by global oil giants in developing countries, that kind of thing.

Swerobics, obviously, it's got to be Jewish term.

Obvs, but spelt with an F, not a V, that short for obfuscation, given that we have both elections coming in both the UK and the US.

Oppenheimlich,

which is to save something at the last moment, only to unleash something far, far worse.

I like that one.

Apologize, that's his belated post-imperial acceptance that changing the names of places and drawing borders randomly on maps

doesn't always turn out tremendously well.

And

musicalatable, which is something that can be turned into a musical, which is apparently every single fing thing that has ever existed.

Now that section in the bin.

Top story this week: war is over.

For a little bit,

four days precisely.

Don't worry, human suffering fans.

War will once again not be over in just four days' time.

Today, as we recorded, is day one of a four-day ceasefire.

Did we ever finalize the language on this?

Is it a pause, a ceasefire, a pause fire, a cease atrocity, or a tea interval?

T short for temporary break in hostilities.

We'll let history be the judge of that.

It's um the last couple of months, ever since Hamas perpetrated its terrorist abominations, have been an even more difficult time than usual to be on the I wish people would stop killing each other and learn to live in harmony, even whilst I also acknowledge how difficult that may to may be to achieve politically end of the political seesaw when it comes to uh the Middle East.

Um Mark, you've not been on on the the bugle since the uh the the start of uh this uh latest latest flare-up in this uh well crisis that began uh pretty much uh after god span his globe and said yep that bit um it's uh

is there any optimism from the fact that there is at least this little micro glimmer of light yeah no i'm not all that optimistic i think you're quite right it is probably more like a tea interval and then they'll ring a bell when it's five minutes from the end and then they'll go back to the commentary oh they're coming out again here come all the here come all the drones and there's the Israeli Defense Force.

Yeah, there is some optimism.

The amazing thing about this, in the first few days after it happened,

it just seemed that if you were of the view that slaughtering civilians who had gone to a music festival

was horrible and bombing hospitals was also horrible that was an extremist point of view.

Most people in the world, I mean, somewhere like 76% of people in Britain think that a ceasefire is the thing that

they ought to stop killing each other.

Sort of optimistic that only 24% of the British population think, no, I'm enjoying you slaughtering children.

That's quite chirpy, isn't it?

I guess so.

The exchange of not enough hostages for not enough ceasefire is simultaneously a very impressive bit of international diplomatic relations and depressingly inadequate given the sort of five-dimensional depth of the conflict that is going on in that area, which is to say there are these like irreconcilable differences about things like whose house this is that stretch across geography, time, and apparently into consensus reality.

But

I find the ceasefire itself sort of depressing because it just means that you could not,

you know,

what if we just didn't turns out to be an option whereas you know you're sort of faced with this horrible conflict and it feels so you feel so helpless to that it could ever possibly be wound up in any way that would make anybody happy and then they're just like oh we can stop for four days yeah it's like like the um the the famous christmas day football match in the first world war the first christmas of the first world war 1914 there was a you know a ceasefire for Christmas Day, they played football.

That was a controversial offside decision and it took four more years of fighting to to

calm down.

But that's football, I think, more than anything.

The AR have only just come up with a decision, in fact.

For those of you who are not aware of it, the Middle East, or as I assume it's known, Alice, if you live in Australia, the Middle Northwest, is of course the old stomping ground of biblical super-celebs such as slow travel pioneer Moses, magician raconter, and escapologist Jesus Christ, former MMA star Goliath, and token romantic interest Mary.

And like I said, I find it hard to be optimistic, because we're conditioned from childhood to want stories to have happy endings.

That's why we don't have children's books like The Lion, the Witch and the Dunking Pond, The Typhoid Who Came to Tea, The Very Hungry Cannibal, The Snuffalo, Marjorie Taylor Green and the Chocolate Factory, 14 Remaining Dalmatians.

You've got to gently introduce children to the concept of mortality, but it it has to be handled a bit more sensit uh sensitively.

And Winnie the Putin.

Well, we don't have books like that because we search for happy narratives, but reality seldom provides the kind of endings that we're taught to want from childhood.

And I guess the best we can hope for in the Middle East is, and they all lived happily ever after for a maximum of 96 hours.

Is Winnie the Putin like instead of not wearing pants, he just doesn't wear a shirt?

COVID inquiry news now.

Well, here in the United Kingdom, we have, well, for some weeks now, been enjoying, is that the right term?

No, the official inquiry into how the government dealt with COVID.

Mark, as a longtime supporter of the Conservative Party and died in the wood and blazer adherent of Thatcherite social and economic policy, it must have been very hard for you to watch your heroes turn out not to have just have feet of clay, but to have feet of clumsily modelled, incompetently fired, probably corrupt, shit-covered clay.

How have you dealt with

well?

So much of the British sort of news channels have been saying things during the COVID inquiry, such as it's just extraordinary.

The revelations have been quite remarkable,

despite the fact that all through the lockdown, everyone was going, we've got a

clue.

And

they were just sort of...

Boris Johnson would be at the time coming on television every day saying

the R rate, if it exceeds, if it exceeds, it's gone down from three to nine, which shows that

you must go to work, but are not permitted to travel there, and you must fly, but not within six feet of birds.

And

the maximum number permitted in a rule is nought.

So if you find yourself in a rule, you must leave immediately.

Only two people are permitted in any degree of latitude.

So before you go to the kitchen, you must check with Morocco.

And anybody could have said, right,

this is just avocado clone.

And Matt Hancock used to stand there every day.

I felt sorry for him in front of the scientists.

And he'd be asked a question like,

do you think that the new variant has maybe the capacity, biologically speaking, to invade other parts of the anatomy?

And Matt Hancock would stand there like I would be if I suddenly got a job in a

carted quick fit and someone was going,

what's the PR312 setting on this carburettor?

And I'd just be stood there going, oh,

is it the purple one?

And

so then he off to Australia to earn £400,000 an honest celebrity, which I think from the start would have been all right if Anton Deck Every Night had gone just as he was about to put his head in a box of scorpions.

Normally we would give you, we normally would give you more goggles for this month, but I'm afraid we've run out of protective equipment.

And all of them were passing off the PPE contract for billions of pounds to people who lived next door and their aunt and their sister and people who were f ⁇ ing had a degree in knowing f all about making PPE equipment and in one case Matt Hancock's bloody landlord.

And now the BBC don't, who would have thought they didn't know what they were doing apart from everybody.

And there's, but then then all Hayden Jumps.

Even Dominic Cummings, of people who remember, was caught breaking all the rules by driving to a place called Barnard Castle, hundreds of miles.

And he said he was doing it because he wanted to check his eyes were working properly.

And we

did what anyone would do if you think your eyes aren't working properly.

You get all your family, put them in a car and go, let's drive 200 miles.

And if we cause a multi-car pile up and kill a load of people

then

it's clear my eyes need looking up and then you go to the opposition then you go to the opposition all of this but even so I don't think we were aware of the scale of just our mental so Boris Johnson it turns out in at the start of the COVID said isn't COVID just nature's way of dealing with the elderly ah rishisurek according to dominic cummings said shouldn't we just let people die?

Whether he did say that or not, I don't know, but Dominic Cummings claims he didn't.

He was like,

all of them are full of this.

None of them, Patrick Balance, who was the chief advisor at the time to the government, said that they didn't have a clue, that they come, that Boris Johnson, in one cabinet meeting, said we should have a full-on lockdown like France, and then a minute later said we should have no lockdown at all and just let it rip.

So just like, like a toddler,

let's go to the seaside oh shall we no i hate the seaside just like all of them utterly utterly useless and the one thing they did know is that having told everybody that they should lock down and under no circumstances go anywhere with anyone else at all they then immediately went into the upstairs room at downing street with about 120 of them and had a night of beast of night where they were all playing drum and bass and shagging each other with pace and wheelbarrow loads of drink and being sick over each other and getting buckets of COVID and spraying each other with it over a garden homes and then saying they didn't do it and then voice Johnson going, no, the future weren't conclusive because maybe aim not me, maybe aim Shirley Bassie.

And I just

unfing believable how they're not all in jail.

My favourite part of it was the kind of the turn of Dominic Cummings to sort of whistleblower and revealing all of these horrible conversations and these horrible things that people had said and these horrible strategies that were tabled without ever mentioning how much of it was like, oh, and that was my idea, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

That's just

one after the other.

And also the language of them all.

They're all sort of calling each other ass f ⁇ ks, f ⁇ which shiths, moronics, stupid, all this sort of thing.

Unbelievable.

And poor Chris Whitty, who is the scientific bloke, who've had to stand there every day and say that this is what we feel that the current situation is likely to lead to.

And he'd have these slides and he was a scientist and he understood it all.

And then he would say all that, and that's why we're advising this.

And then the government would do exactly the opposite and go, no.

And then they would go, the government would go, we're all through.

The slogan was, we are following the science, but they weren't following the science at all.

They might have all said, we are following the science.

And that's why everyone over the age of 70, if we're going to fight, actually, we're following that midsummer film.

Everyone over the 70 has to climb up to the top of the garage and jump off into a bath with an electric buyer in it because they're too old.

And this is nature's way of dealing with the elderly because we're following the science.

And

Chris Whitty must feel like a surgeon who's about to get halfway through giving someone a heart bypass, and then Boris Johnson comes in and goes, Give me that.

And what I think we should pour creosote on his liver and

fill his kidneys with pickled onions.

And then he just had to do it and then three years later go

I was aware at the time that there was certain concerns about the government's approach with regard to the pickled onions

I always thought that nature's way of dealing with the elderly was making them inclined to vote Tory

their own natural predator

it's just remarkable that they were killing off the very people who'd put them in power but I suppose that shows just that oh they're so good at killing us all.

Let's hope for them again.

I'll be honest, I mean, the COVID, it's not my thing as a drama.

I've tried to follow it, but my main problem, and I have this with a lot of the kind of big TV box sets, is that I find the central character

just deeply implausible and unlikable on too many levels.

In this case,

it's Boris Johnson, who was described as bamboozled by science, which would have been the title of Dances with Wolves if it had been starring Boris Johnson instead of Kevin Costner.

He also said this, on the subject of suggesting that old people should be allowed to die, he said they've had a good innings, which as a cricket fan, you know, I never like hearing that terminology misused because

what he's basically saying is they've had a long innings, and it needs to be sort of means-tested in a way.

Because if you're 75, but you've lived most of your life struggling to get by and are just hoping to have a few years of relative stability to enjoy some of the things in life you were never able to do before, that's not a good innings.

So therefore, you should qualify for healthcare.

But if, say, you're 60, minted, have been on three holidays a year for most of your life, play golf twice a week, eat out in fancy restaurants, and own a seldom-used antique Victorian sex chair, that is a good innings, and therefore you should be the one jumping off the roof or whatever it was that you were suggesting.

Matt Hancock, the health secretary, was described as having a habit of saying things that were not true, which is not ideal as health secretary, given that health is at least partially related to science, in which facts and truth are quite useful.

And not harmlessly, I'm not saying sort of harmless things that weren't true, such as did you know Florence Nightingale once performed a tracheotomy on a leopard cub whilst blindfolded, or you can cure mumps by standing on your head for an hour singing, These Boots Are Made for Walking, but actually, damaging lies that had an impact on the public.

But anyway, such,

I think the important thing, though, is, I mean, we sort of is to learn how we might do things better next time.

Are there lessons that we can learn?

Now, do better.

This is a difficult thing for us here in Britain because we've seldom, if ever, had to learn lessons because we've never got anything wrong through history.

That's just how things are when you're British.

But, you know, I don't know what lessons you think we should be learning,

either of you.

What do you think should be the learnings from

this crisis?

I think we should learn to carry on much as we've been doing.

I think we should, whenever the whenever the scientists in Italy and France, scientists and governments in Italy and France and China

all effectively carry out a way of curbing

a new epidemic, we should call them all foreign twats and do the very opposite and then go, oh shit, everyone in the care home.

is being wheeled out under a blanket

and i think uh another thing we should learn is uh to be careful what we we wish for.

Sorry, not wish, vote.

And I think a good rule of thumb is: if you wouldn't trust someone to look after one or more of your teddy bear, girlfriend, economy, lunch or democracy, for f's sake, don't make them prime minister.

I think that's probably a pretty sound rule of thumb.

They all know, don't they?

All these people who are going, well, I mean, he does seem to be rather someone who didn't pay attention to detail and was rather more concerned with his own well-being and his finances.

And

I just didn't realise he was

like that.

Well, to be fair, I mean, it's democracy working for once.

He had laid those cards firmly on the table over decades in public life, and he was merely giving the nation what it voted for.

I would say, you know, their mothers could have told you they were like this, except all of their mothers outsourced the work to a nanny.

That's why they're all f ⁇ ed.

People being sacked and then unsacked news now.

And Alice, you have been covering the world of tech gazillionaires for, well, pretty much as long as you've been on this podcast

years.

When was it?

2017, I think.

Your first on.

Wow, that's quite that.

Doesn't time fly.

Bring us up to date with the

latest exciting news from the crazy world of top-level tech.

I mean, this is such exciting news that if we had just waited a week to see what would happen, it would have not have been news at all because someone got fired and then rehired back into the same position.

So, if we'd just held fire, we wouldn't have needed all of the op-eds on what happened.

Out of the blue, seemingly, on Friday,

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was fired by the board of directors.

And then, after much scandal and controversy, playing social media and normal media, he staged a counter-coup.

He mobilized hundreds of employees, including, incredibly enough, the original coup leader.

And he won the support of all the investors, including Microsoft, against the company itself and got rehired in the same position which has got to be awkward for the people who stabbed him in the back.

If anyone is not sure what OpenAI is it's the it's the parent company of chat GPT and it's sort of

in the forefront of the tech world at the moment.

The problem with AI at the moment is that, so

one of the proposed reasons that he was fired was that he wasn't taking safety seriously enough, that this possible AI could be a threat to humanity and that he's pushing ahead for commercial gain without considering the potential implications of this world-changing technology.

But the real problem with AI is that what we call AI isn't what you would call AI if you were trying to describe what AI is meant to be.

So the thing that we used to call AI and sci-fi, we now call AGI or artificial general intelligence, because what we now call AI is not actually AI, it's it's sort of a sophisticated mash-up machine that's being sold as the future of of technology and humanity by people whose favorite thing is selling the thing they haven't invented yet.

So

he's been hailed as a genius mainly for stuff that he hasn't done yet but says he'll happen soon

and

no one's willing to lose the possibility that he might still do it.

So far, I think the market has been very credulous about the claims of these tech bros because the future seems cool and no one wants to miss investing in the next better mousetrap.

The The problem is that the tech industry as a whole does not want to build a better mousetrap.

They want to pitch a mousetrap app that they dreamed up while micro-dosing absinthe in the desert to get VC funding within six months and then retire having built nothing but taking the credit for fundamentally disrupting the mousetrap industry using an AI-enabled crypto blockchain which you can use to mint unique mouse coins, each coin stably tethered to one individual dead mouse's DNA.

And then you ask them what the core service of their app is and it turns out it's just a taxi that you call, and then they drive by and throw an angry cat in your window.

And then you rank the cat by customer service, general fluffiness, and mouse-killing ability.

But now the app's only being used by Nazis and incels to throw cats through the windows of women they don't like because the developers did not think through any of the possible ways in which their service could be misused.

And now cats with low fluffiness ratings are killing themselves because the app's given them a self-esteem problem.

And that's the tech industry right now.

Yeah, I think I both understand it more and less.

Thanks.

Also, I think, I mean, that might be the longest sentence in the history of the bugle.

And I think Martin Mark's put in a few challenges for that over the years.

And it's a hotly contested title, to be honest.

Thank you.

I know it'll be all right.

I know it will do all of these things in the end, and it'll be both dangerous and amazing and all of that.

But at the moment, is it, does it do much, AI?

No, it sort of gets, I mean, it aggregates enormous amounts of data and then spits them back out

in a sort of a information slurry.

Yeah, so if you tell it a load of stuff and then ask it something, it will tell you one of the things back that you told it, and everyone goes, it's amazing.

Well, I guess also it takes in all this stuff and then splurges something back.

So essentially, it's at the baby stage.

Yes.

So, I mean, we've got to be got to be careful because

eventually when you have teenage AI,

it will be,

I mean, it'll be,

you'll say, can you write me, can you write me a speech, please, for

my presentation at the Diagnostics

Technology Conference?

And it'll go,

oh, why the f should I?

Let's move on now to Rats News.

Alice, you are, as we speak, in Australia and you have been, well, Australia is in the grip of a plague of rats, that classic trope of humanity that seems to recur

throughout history.

Are you going to be the

pied piper that removes the rats from Australia?

Well, I mean, I hope so.

These rats are washing up on thousands of rats, both dead and alive, washing up on beaches in Queensland, which is well I'm about to move to a small coastal town in Queensland, so I'm I can only hope that this is going to pass me by.

Look, everyone's horrified at the at this prospect.

We had a mouse plague not so long ago, it was pretty awful, and now it's a mixed mouse and rat plague, and everyone's really horrified.

But I think from one perspective, you could see this as a kind of a wildlife racism.

Like because it's rats, it's way more disgusting.

But you have to

really rethink this.

If it was a plague of cute wallabies

who were driving your ducks mad or stripping the wiring out of your car, or thousands of dead koalas washing up on the beach, no, you're right, it's still disgusting.

I'm going to go out on the limb here and say a plague of anything is bad news.

Yeah.

But on the bright side, rats in fishing towns can only mean one thing, which is the launch of a charming children's book about pirate rats,

which I have an exclusive extract from right here.

He skittered here across the deck.

He put the hairs up on your neck.

He plundered gold and also cheese.

The pirate rat was hard to please.

One leg of wood, three legs of leg, one eye a hook, one ear a peg.

He played upon a pirate flute, a song of stealing pirate loot.

The problem is that every time a parrot lands on his shoulder, it carries him off to feed his children.

So the lead rat has to keep being replaced by similar-looking rats.

Oh, but Prime Ministers.

The K-Fabe on the production process is intense.

I guess the real concern for those of you who've

filmed Aficionados is that you could have a rat NADO if there's a.

Los Angeles was struck by that very serious shark NADO a few years ago.

So, I mean, when you move to Queensland, adverse weather conditions, you could have a rat NADO, which no one wants to see.

You're right, though, the rats get a bad press.

If it was...

Because

it would worse, wouldn't it?

If there was

a badger's or something, if there was a plague of badgers or giraffes.

Oh, no.

Fucking plague of giraffes.

They get in through the bloody, they come out through the skirting.

Yeah.

You open what you thought was a harmless box of cereal and they scuttle out on the floor.

Yeah, now they come.

One of them's got his neck stuck through the cat flap, and now it goes right across the living room.

To clamber over it, just to get out into the kitchen other rats news now

rats in space um science has been um experimenting on rats as it tends to do and it uh has discovered through experimenting on rats that um space travel could lead to erectile dysfunction um Now,

we have had our quarrels with scientific research on this show at various points over the past 16 and a bit years.

But I think this might top it all.

That

here we are.

We have some scientists who had some rats, and presumably their boss said to them, right, I'm giving you some rats.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but there we are.

They're rats.

People find them hard to warm to, so we can experiment on them and get away with it.

I'm going to leave you alone for three months in the laboratory.

with these rats and I want you to do some research to benefit humanity.

Off you go.

Three months later, comes back in.

What have you got?

Cure for malaria.

New drug that means you can live in 50 degree heat with almost no oxygen.

That would be useful.

At least a fetching new shade of eyeshadow.

Yes, boss.

We found out that rats can't get rat boners if you blast them with a cosmic ray gun.

Great.

Well done, guys.

Let me just call the f ⁇ ing Nobel Committee right now.

That rats can't get boners in space.

That is the headline story.

from this this news.

And I guess it does sort of illustrate a lot about research into space travel because we all know why this is a concern and why the research is being done into whether or not you can get a boner in space because the space race everyone wants to the stars what well that's because our space race between our heroic billionaires is basically fundamentally a race between the world's richest most powerful people to be the first human to schwap an alien that they all want to be the first musk zuckerberg bezos oliver jokovich and bani they all want to be be the first to enjoy astrocarnal conjiglements with whatever extraterrestrial hotsters we encounter in the nether regions of space.

That's the only explanation for this research.

And you would think that an erection would be easier to achieve when there was no gravity, wouldn't it?

Surely, we're odd not to have one.

Yep.

But everything floats, don't it?

Yep.

I'm for this.

I'm for every kind of achievement that you would attempt to get women with being negatively correlated with penis function.

Like, if you're like, the moment you make more than like $10 million,

I reckon you should be chemically castrated.

I feel like every, you know, every politician who gets a position of power over anyone should immediately have like one-third of their balls chopped off.

I feel like this should be the penalty for success.

And so obvious, but will Pierce Starmer put that in his manifesto?

Well, he just won't commit to anything that might be even slightly controversial.

Obviously, you know, there's something sort of, you know, kind of glamorous and exciting about science and that sense that you are helping stretch the bounds of knowledge and improve the state of humanity.

But when you find yourself trying to get a rat to roll over onto its back to see if it's got the horn, you must think,

maybe I should have done something else.

What do they do?

Tickle it with a little Q-tip.

What do they do?

I don't know if I've ever like rat porn.

I don't think even rats would like rat porn, would they?

No, rats only jerk off to gerbil porn.

Very controversial piece of gerbil porn doing the rounds in high school during the early 2000s, in which a gerbil put a a very small figurine of Richard Gear up at Zars.

Yeah.

Family show, Alice.

Family show.

Of course, it might not not be the cosmic rays and the microgravity that stopped the rats getting bonus.

It could be just some.

Some gerbils go, oh, that's just made up.

No, no, I'm with it.

I'm with it.

I'm with it.

On the gerbil news.

Sorry.

Well, I expect to be hearing from both Richard's gear and the gerbils lawyers at some point in the next.

We're going to just quickly look at the Cricket World Cup final that happened last

weekend, in which India won

the runners-up prize in the two-team final against Australia.

And that was not how it was supposed to end.

What was it?

Six or seven weeks of cricket leading to the final in the Narendra Modi stadium, the stadium in Ahmedabad that was named after

Narendra Modi by Narendra Modi the day before it opened.

And it was all set to be

one of the greatest moments of sporting propaganda.

But India, unfortunately for Narendra Modi, lost.

I mean, they are a sensationally good cricket team.

They won 10 in a row to reach the final, nine in the group stage, then the semi-final.

You don't need to be a professional cricket statistician to know that they were one of the top three most statistically dominant teams in a World Cup group stage ever in men's World Cup cricket.

You don't need to be a professional cricket statistician because I am one and I've just told you that.

But

it did seem that India winning in front of their prime minister in a stadium their prime minister had named after their prime minister.

It seemed that was written in the stars.

But unfortunately, there are a f ⁇ k of a lot of stars.

And if you look hard enough with the right telescope in the right place, you can find anything written in the stars, including the words, ah, typical Australia.

They always come good when it matters.

And

that's what happened in this case.

Mark, it was.

I mean, it did seem all the way through that India were too good for everyone, but

such is sport.

Yeah, well, while you said, well, the fire is only one game.

And of course, a

similar thing happened when England were in the World Cup final.

at badminton that was played at the Liz Truss Stadium that she named after herself.

And it just just seemed inevitable that

England's badminton supremos would come to it, but they didn't.

And then not only that, but she actually bankrupted the leisure centre.

It feels like the real story here

that a lot of people have been focusing on is the bad sportsmanship, not of the players, but of the fans for not sticking it through to watch their team get thoroughly trounced.

And if you really were in it for the love of the game,

then you would have stuck around and seen your defeat and given due credit to the honourable winners.

But it feels like, yeah, the fans don't know how to go about their business anymore.

Well, I mean, that is something certainly in England traditionally that you would applaud the opposition, if only just to keep warm.

Because for a start, certainly when I was growing up, there was basically nothing to applaud England for.

So you had to applaud the opposition, otherwise, you would just slowly freeze to death under a tarpaulin.

Just the sort of

comical sort of acceptance of defeat.

I watched England lose to Iceland in the Euro Championships seven or eight years ago on a beach in Brighton in front of a big screen.

There must have been about three, four thousand people there.

And by the end of it, or I think it's fair to say most people found it hilarious.

I think other countries, that's the one thing other countries could learn from the English.

By the end, everyone was sort of thinking, oh, I hope we don't equalise now because this is funny.

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

Alice, anything to plug?

Apart, of course, from the gargle, where this week you can hear more about the

open AI hirings and firings?

Yes, the Gargle assisted podcast to the bugle is still available every week with me.

And unbound.com, if you write in Alice Fraser, you can pre-order the Dancy Lagarde reader, which I have finished writing.

So now it's up to them as to when it will end up in your hot little hands.

But it's available for pre-order at unbound.com.

And type in Alice Fraser.

Oh,

exciting.

Mark?

Well, you can come and see me having chemotherapy every Monday for the next six weeks.

And tickets will be going on sale soon if you go to Mark

www.marksteel.chemo.cancer.uk.

And

um

i think there's still some left for the second winter

uh and then we're taking it on tour later in the year if that works um i'll be thinking i know uh i'll be in shrewsbury dancester go to hospitals all over britain and uh also i'll have support some some places you know

um for people who haven't been diagnosed yet you know just starting out open spot cancer people it's always good to give them a chance but i i'm doing a i'm doing a uh

This is all redicated with the fact that this goes all right.

Then

Mark Stills and Town, my series will be on again at some point when I'm able to do them.

But I have been to Margate already this week.

And I'm looking around there.

And then I'm going to go to Stoke soon.

I don't know what the other ones will be yet.

And your podcast?

Oh, yes.

What the f ⁇ is going on?

Do listen to that as well.

Oh, also, I do a weekly writer's meeting on my Patreon, which you can currently get for a dollar a month.

Actually, I do two weekly writers' meetings that you can currently get for a dollar a month because I don't know how business works.

Patreon.com/slash Alice Fraser.

Two hourly weekly writers' meetings for a dollar a month.

That's half a dollar a meeting.

I'm gonna have a baby.

Don't forget to book your tickets for the Bugle Live tour in March at numerous venues around the UK including Glasgow, Norwich, Birmingham, Salford Stroke, Manchester.

There's a London date in June and some other dates that I can't remember offhand so I'm going to just leave that mysteriously in the air for you to find out for yourselves.

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and to make a one-off or occurring contribution to help keep this show free, flourishing and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com.

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And we are shortly going to be recording a Bugle vinyl record for our premium voluntary subscribers as well.

So we are embracing the future of technology.

We'll be back next week with Stuart Lee and Felicity Ward.

Until then, 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.