The Bugle Welcomes Our Alien Overlords

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4266 of The Bugle, the world's foremost audio refuge from reality.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and today is the 5th of June 2023.

And if I'm not very much mistaken, this is the day on which in exactly 20 seconds' time, the planet will be struck and destroyed by a giant asteroid shaped like a golf ball, thought to emanate from a shank drive in a distant galaxy during a game between Roman number one ranked god Jupiter and a local deity.

The asteroid has taken around 1800 years to get here.

That's when the game took place.

We assume Jupiter lost because he was never quite the same again and faded from prominence thereafter.

And it should be hitting us about three, two, one

now.

Oh, well, it turns out I was very much mistaken.

Oh, well, it's never nice to be proved wrong.

But it does, however, clear the path for me to record another issue of the bugle and my two guests today.

Firstly, representing the entire continent of Asia, and everyone and everything who lives there, comes from there, has any ancestral link to there, once saw a TV documentary about Asia, or even just occasionally thinks about it.

From Mumbai, it's Anuvab Pal.

Hello, Anuvab, how are you?

Hello, Andy.

Hello, I am well.

It just touched 42 degrees in

Mumbai right now.

And this might be shocking, but there are actually

no people on the streets of India because it's so hot.

It's about 5 in the evening here.

When I say no people, I mean we're down to the last million people.

There's still a few people.

Just to make the last million people on your streets, do you mean?

My street, correct.

Correct.

So yeah,

that's been happening.

And

very quickly, I should also mention that last week India got a new parliament.

Oh.

You guys had left one behind

a while ago.

And finally, they decided that

we should build one of our own.

Right.

We talked about this in our BBC series, didn't we?

Based on an Xbox controller, isn't it?

Yeah, correct, correct.

It's a hexagon.

The one the British built, Edwin Lewton's, that was round.

And this one, Prime Minister Modi personally oversaw the architectural design of it.

And his architect,

not Albert Speer, the other guy, Bimal Patel, that was the name of his architect.

He built this parliament to fit over a thousand members of parliament.

So, right, right.

The old one fit 549.

So I don't know what Prime Minister Modi's plan is, but at some point we might have the largest number of parliamentarians ever put in a building.

Right.

Well, I mean, that's right.

Maybe that's just part of the heritage that you've

inherited from the British time because

our Parliament, we have 650 MPs plus, I think it's up to a thousand lords.

So they can't all squeeze in at once and most of them are asleep.

But even so, I mean, this is this ridiculous, ridiculously large number of MPs, given the ridiculously small amount of votes that put them there, particularly in the House of Lords when the votes that put them there are zero.

Can I just ask you who the largest, the fourth largest voting bloc is in the House of Lords at the moment?

Does anyone know this?

Is it the bishops?

Yep, the Lords Spiritual,

as they are officially known.

Right.

Well, that's good news for good news for God, more of whom later in

this show.

Joining Anivab and me representing the rest of humanity, past, present, and future, don't let them down.

It's Tiff Stevenson.

Hello.

Hello from the book nook.

I was trying to work out what 47 degrees was in Fahrenheit because, weirdly, at school, we had a Fahrenheit.

I learnt Fahrenheit.

Everywhere else in the UK, it's degrees.

But I knew if it hit 100, we'd get a day off school.

So I think officially, that's 107.6

degrees Fahrenheit.

So from 42 Celsius is 107.

So essentially, you could just carry an egg into into the street and it would just slow poach

within, I don't know, eight minutes?

What do you reckon?

I hope we could do that live on the street.

It sounds easier than my method of tipping some white wine vinegar into a pan and then whisking it and or involving cling film.

Kling film, yeah, you can plop the egg into some cling film and tie it in a knot and you get a poacher.

You've got to cut it all off afterwards.

I think it's probably environmentally friendlier for us all to just fly right to mumbai okay you see

the benefits of a cross-continental podcast you guys could give me recipes and i've got an oven right outside the door so i could just walk up and

try things and come back

we are recording on the 5th of june as i mentioned the 7th of june So Wednesday of this week is apparently Global Running Day.

The obsolete but still strangely widely used form of foot-based transport, in fact, celebrates its 100,000th anniversary this year.

Running was invented in 97,977 BC, of course, by an early human who cleverly realized that you didn't have to keep something on the ground at all times, unless you're playing snooker, of course.

It was a good lesson for humanity to learn.

Never take tips from a snake.

How long did it take our species to learn that?

This opened up the possibility not only of faster movement and fewer instances instances per person of being eaten by a dinosaur, but also paved the way for the evolution of sport.

So do celebrate Global Running Day for making life bearable.

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

This week, a teach yourself mime section.

We give you some classic mime scenarios, and I will show you how to mime them.

Admittedly, this is a podcast, so I hope you can pick up exactly what's going on.

Scenario one: a person stuck inside an imaginary glass box,

a person stuck inside an actual glass box,

a former prime minister sitting in front of their well-worn mirror, coming to realise how they will be remembered by history,

a tennis player thinking they've won a match point at Wimbledon before realising they're actually in a river surrounded by crocodiles,

and a horse walking into a bar.

That section in the bin.

Can I just say, I would like to see an Andy's Oltzman mime show.

Quite a lot of my audiences have been thinking that, actually, while I've been talking at them

over the years.

Top story this week, supernatural beings.

Well, since the dawn of time itself, us humans have wondered whether there is something bigger than ourselves.

Pretty quickly, we realized there was.

A hippopotamus, for example, or a mountain.

But that didn't stop us wondering whether out there in the infinite bigotude of the skies above, there were people or things like us living on distant stars, maybe made of green slime, or looking very like us, but with unconvincing prosthetic heads, or with the kind of human-like bodies affordable within the budget of a 1960s TV sci-fi series.

Or even, we wondered, were there deities toddling along on the top of the clouds, amusing themselves by ruining our lives for their own entertainment?

And over this past week, we've had to examine the existence of aliens and gods once again.

We'll address this, we'll address the aliens first.

NASA, the celebrity space-bothering American government agency famous for such smash-hit missions as Apollo 11 to the moon, spoke for the first time about the many UFO sightings it has investigated.

Now, Tiff,

I know you have been abducted by aliens on more than one occasion, so this is a subject very close to your heart.

I mean, you can tell us about those occasions

if you want, but I mean, this is this is hugely exciting.

They're basically, you know, they pretty much admitted that the aliens are already here.

Yes, they've described them as unidentified aerial phenomena, which sounds a bit like a cirque de sole show.

UAPs, UAPs, doesn't have quite the same ring as UFOs, but yeah, NASA is doing a study

into unidentified objects.

It's different and separate to the Pentagon study.

So it's like the sharks and the jets are flying saucers.

They're actually going to be competing, rival gangs.

I don't know who the guy from Blink182 will join, but maybe that's the main storyline.

But yeah, so unidentified aerial phenomena.

My mate, Gavin actually spotted floating glowing lights deep in the Welsh countryside one night and thought it was a UFO, but he was actually peeled up and turns out it was the underneath of an XR2.

So we all make mistakes.

Yeah, so they're investigating the phenomena.

They've been getting, I believe they've been getting grief for it.

I'm interested in the fact that whenever we talk about an alien race, we always assume they'll be uniform in their ideals or personalities, like they're going to either be entirely malevolent or benevolent.

But what if there is just one alien that everyone thinks is a dick?

You're like the alien that walks into the bar and everyone rolls their giant eyeballs at.

Just Doug.

Everyone finds Doug objectionable.

Oh, God, it's Doug again.

He's going to tell us about his divorce.

But I welcome the invasion because that means that they'll actually take us.

When they say take me to your leader, we can actually find out who's really running shit.

Because I'm not convinced it's

uh any of our governments at the moment so yeah yeah they've reported um apparently there's 50 to 100 sightings a month reported uh in the USA and NASA said the number of those sightings which are quote possibly really anomalous is just two to five percent but I mean that adds up if there's let's let's round it all up 50 sightings a month and only five percent of them are are you know genuinely anomalous genuine ufos or uaps that is tantamount to almost almost 2,500 alien visits to Earth this millennium alone, and more than 300,000 since Egyptian civilization started taking off.

Is that coincidence?

I don't fing think so.

I mean, another thing just on the branding of it, as you say, UFOs no more, now rebranded as UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena.

Thank you, Brussels.

Or is it the woke?

Who are we blaming for this nonsense?

I don't like change.

But Anuvab, I mean, how has this news gone down in

India?

Well, you know, we have so many objects flying around in the sky that are not regulated by the Department of Civil Aviation that we've lost track of what a UAP is and what it's just like a person or a cow flying through the sky.

We just

lost track of what's going on.

But I'm particularly interested in this online abuse part of it.

Because Tiff said, you know, a lot of these people who are doing this research are getting a lot of abuse.

And my question to you guys is,

who's this abuse from?

Is it from people who don't believe that what is found is the kind of alien they'd like?

You know, or is it just people, I mean, I could see myself getting very angry at a scientist and saying, that's not an alien, you know, and just writing a bunch of vitriol against that person.

Because, you know, I have a specific view, I think, like all human beings, and what an alien should be, which is an object riding a cycle with a bunch of very young kids in a Stevens people.

You know, like

Each one of us had their own thing and if it doesn't fulfill it, I mean I think abuse is needed.

It's almost required and you have to vent and these are good people to vent too.

But I also feel like this particular unit of NASA,

NASA constantly gives us updates, right?

And it's all over the Guardian and the BBC.

And it's tiny updates like

they possibly found some jet streams on the moon, you know, which could indicate the signs of water.

But fundamentally, aren't we all interested in only one question?

Right?

That's what we're after.

So we lost, we just, you, you just weren't quiet for that one question.

It's the aliens, it's not me.

They've shut me off.

They've shot me off, guys.

I think the question that Tiff asked is really the pertinent question, which is: the only thing we're all interested in is: have we found Doug?

Have we found Doug?

Where's Doug?

Every other report that comes out from this unit of NASA, no wonder it attracts abuse because it's just distracting.

Well, also, no wonder it attracts abuse because it's happening in the year 2023 when everything attracts abuse.

I mean, the news report said that the senior research official Dan Evans at NASA's Science Unit said members of the research panel had received online abuse and harassment.

Do we even need to put that in news reports now?

Can we not just assume that sentence is attached to anyone in any news story?

We all know it's happening.

I'm not saying it's right.

Panel chair David Spergel said, if I were to summarize in one line what we've learned, it's that we need high quality data.

Because of course traditionally with UFOs, we've relied on kind of low quality data and that no longer suffices.

Because traditionally, when it comes to UFOs, we've relied on low quality data, such as 100% of Mike from rural Wisconsin claims to have been abducted by aliens directly from his underground bunker.

80% of people who know Mike think he's bullshitting, but the remaining 20%, i.e.

Pete the Prepper, who owns enough vacuum-packed, powered, powdered food to last for 43 years, thinks it definitely happened.

So we are looking to raise the quality of the statistical research that goes into working out whether the aliens have taken us over.

Mike needs to hang out with my friend Gavin in the Welsh countryside for a little while.

I think one of the fun things is when they do actually get here, we'll be describing everyday things to the aliens.

That's always been a little thought experiment hasn't it i was thinking the other day how would i describe mascara i'd be like well it's like trousers for your eyelashes um

describing your iphone it's like a misery brick everyone must carry their burden and scroll it whilst they take a shit

so we can just

yeah

how would you go about defining you know explaining test cricket to aliens i think that might be the thing that protects us as a species that we we start explaining how we've developed this form of entertainment that goes on for five days involving people repeatedly throwing a ball at someone else 20 yards away

and at the end sometimes no one has one.

I think they might then think that we're just better off leaving us to our own devices.

I think it's our greatest defense.

Cycling is the greatest thing ever invented.

I also feel like it's always unexpected things that, you know, people always think aliens will want to go to Washington, D.C.

and take take control of the White House.

Like in all the movies, they always want to control some seat of power like Beijing.

What if they want like things we're not expecting, like mango milkshakes?

Things that

nobody's thought of.

Yeah, what if they just want to go to Ibiza and get absolutely blotted?

They're coming over to join the cast of Love Island.

Doug wants some dating opportunities

since his divorce.

It was quite, I mean, there was a lot that was quite entertaining about this report, including the explanations for some of the objects that were sighted in the sky,

a lot of which turned out to be just fairly ordinary objects,

commercial flights, for example.

A Bart-Simpson-shaped weather balloon.

Now, this was initially thought to be proof that aliens had come to Earth.

and had the capability to turn cartoon characters into giant flying versions of themselves that would soon destroy us all.

Now this raised obvious concerns, stroke hopes, delete according to how much you want humanity to survive, about giant crime-busting dogs floating around the world, the return of dinosaurs.

I know Flintstone fans will be particularly concerned about that.

And also, worries about enormous, irritating rabbits looming over us, eating the world out of carrots and constantly questioning medical professionals.

Other explanations for objects sight in the sky include that it was the Frisbee that the Soviets wanged into space to try to get Leika, the Cosmodog, to press blast off in her rocket.

Boris Johnson's ego.

Also, one of the reported sightings turned out to be a cow, which, having jumped over the moon in the traditional manner, was now returning to Earth in a controlled re-entry to avoid roasting up as it entered the Earth's atmosphere.

Was it following Mr.

Spoon

over Button Moon?

I think that might be the first button moon reference ever on the bugle, which, what are we now?

We're heading towards 16 years in the Button Moon, the British children's TV show.

Quite hard to explain button moon to young people.

Basically, it was a TV show involving a couple of wooden spoons and some buttons.

That passed for entertainment in Aru, didn't it?

It did.

And the moon was a button.

The moon was a button.

I have no idea what this is.

I'm assuming this is something to do with two animated spoons and an animated button.

Not animated.

Not animated.

Actual spoons.

Oh, no, of course not.

Of course not.

Just two regulars.

That's too much technology.

I like how Tiffa's shocked at the idea of basic animation, even in 1980.

I think you can trace our national decline to when Button Moon ceased being on our television screens and educating our youngsters.

Chris, you must have watched Button Moon.

Yeah, I'm trying to...

Was it literally just Spoons with Googly Eyes?

Yeah.

And some kind of narrator.

Yeah.

And and that was it five minutes a day every day off to button moon will follow Mr.

Spoon button moon was the song it held this country together during the difficult decades of the late 20th century

I'll have you know it sounds better than the last three Netflix shows I've seen

they should be using this for the writer's strike yeah I'd love to see two spoons talking to each other you know I just have I just have one very quick question for you guys you know there's a fundamental assumption about intelligent life outside

that there's inherent curiosity in that intelligent life to reach out to Earth.

And therefore, we send these radio signals, we send stuff continuously to try to make contact.

What if they don't give a shit?

What if they're very happy, quite xenophobic, and are not interested?

They're listening to all these radio signals, but they don't want to get in touch.

Like an ex-wife.

It is possible, isn't it?

Also, it's possible that the radio signals they've received are

football phoning shows off the radio, and they figure that we are just too confrontational a species to be worth bothering with.

So, again, you know, sport is saving humanity.

Well, that's the um, that's the basis of Carl's, is it Sagan's contact?

But they're sending back stuff that we sent out to them, which is videos of Hitler.

I think that's the first transmission that comes back through.

Just other objects that have turned out not to be UFOs include a sighting of what turned out to be Elon Musk's new hyper brain, which is an expanding disc-shaped hard drive that originally fitted in his head.

But unfortunately, the tungsten silver alloy reacted on contacts with his brain and his ego.

Also, it expanded rapidly and burst out of his head and is now circling the world in a low orbit full of crazy ideas.

And the egg of an Airbus 380, they mostly don't lay when in flight, but every now and again one just stepping.

What is the egg made up of?

Is it just that frozen block of piss that is injected?

All eggs are.

So as I mentioned, I mean, this is, we are recording on the 5th of June 2023, the day before the night, which, if my two-dimensional predictions are right, we'll see the moon crash into up to 130 different stars.

And that could potentially clear a path without stars for extra UFO spotting.

So do direct your binoculars to the sky tonight.

By the time you record this, obviously that will be out of date.

Concerns have been expressed.

Sorry.

Just on the subject of the night sky.

Concerns have been expressed by the International Organization for the Inescapability of Consumer Capitalism that the night sky presents a worryingly vast area of unbranded visible real estate that could prompt people who find themselves staring into it for long enough to doubt the necessity of purchasing more stuff.

So the delicate world economy really is

endangered by not aliens so much as just the night sky itself.

So, I mean,

Tiff, you're a bit evasive when I suggest you've been abducted by aliens.

You didn't either confirm or deny.

I don't think I have been, although I did once do a gig in Yatten in Somerset, so I do have some idea of what it might be like to be surrounded by life forms with whom I'm unable to communicate in an atmosphere of mutual distrust and confusion.

So,

Annivab.

Are you asking if I've been probed, Dandy?

Of course not.

Family show.

Anivab, have you ever

been

taken by alien life?

You know,

there's a town in India called Jodhpur, which is right on the border with Pakistan.

And I was doing a show, I was doing a corporate show there, and no one had told me that the hotel I was doing a show in was in the flight path of fighter jet practices at night.

And they would often cross the sonic boom speed of sound thing while they were practicing.

So when

I began my show, you know, there were three sonic booms, it looked like giant explosions, and the entire, as first time this happened to me, the entire audience whom I couldn't see in the dark just ran, just disappeared.

And then

there was this zombie that

this rumor spread that there was an alien invasion from Pakistan, that they had unleashed a bunch of aliens into India, and that's what the sound was.

And it was only 40 minutes later it says no it's just a bunch of MIGs practicing

but I lost that audience due to due to aliens and my payment subsequently

you should have told see here if we hear that sound we would have just gone oh they've bought concorde back

correct you know on the topic of night sky advertising

How long before we see proper adverts on an overnight flight?

Like, you know middle of the night empty sky or going over the Atlantic why can I not see Walmart Kellogg's Nike because Orion has been taking up all of the

all of the advertising space for a long time

moving on from aliens to almighty beings what has been a tough week for the renowned deity God

after his

biography The Bible was banned in certain schools in Utah due to the vulgarity and violence contained within.

School Districts in Utah may also now ban the Book of Mormon on similar grounds.

I mean this is I guess this was just a matter of time because the Bible does contain an awful lot of passages involving people begetting and begetting each other.

And the unavoidable inference is that and please buglers cover your children's ears particularly if you're in Utah The unavoidable inference is that some Bible figures did imperflatate their bambonglers into other Bible figures, Virginia Blutes, and we cannot allow our children to be exposed to such utter filth.

Utter,

utter filth.

I'm not usually in favour of banning books, but for once, I think this is absolutely bang on the banana.

Adam was famously created with no underpants, so the early phases of the Bible feature a grown man wandering around with his junk plobbling and wobbling all over the place, which is the kind of thing that the church really needs to be editing out these days.

Whilst Adam's Genesis co-star and celebrity squeeze, Eve, began her career provocatively topless.

And

I mean, something had to be this is long overdue.

The Song of Solomon was pretty much the Debbie Does Dallas of the biblical era.

Whilst in terms of violence, clattering a popular magician and raconteur to a couple of planks of wood with a mallet and some mega nails is not exactly the kind of bedtime story that's going to get your children off to a sound night's sleep.

So for me, while people may think it's ridiculous to ban the Bible for children, I am absolutely on side with it.

What do you guys think?

One of the good things I think that's happened because of this book banning and the rise of Ron DeSantis and everything's going on in Florida about the Statue of David and finding that offensive for children is finally a really criminal group of people are going to be under scrutiny and they are librarians.

They've been the root cause of all evil in the world for a very long time.

And it's about time that they entered, you know, the crux of this culture debate.

And hopefully, many of them will be taken out of shot

for

keeping the wrong kinds of books.

Do they think the Holy Trinity is about a threesome?

Not just a threesome, but a threesome with a ghost.

There's a lot.

There is.

You're right, Andy.

The burning bush, that takes on a whole new meaning.

Same for Sermon on the Mound.

Now I come to think of it.

I agree with you, Andy.

Ban this filth.

Does this mean hotel rooms are putting free jazz mags in every top drawer?

It does seem that way.

It does.

It does seem that way.

But what's interesting is that they're sort of on this book banning, I was going to say jag, is it a book, you know, at the moment.

And the guy who put this rule in place, Ken Ivory, said, traditionally in America, the Bible is best taught and best understood in the home and around the hearth as a family.

What is a hearth?

What year is this?

People don't even have fireplaces anymore.

Also, if we're going to look at books that children shouldn't read, I think we should think about banning some of the kids' books, actual kids' books to worry about.

Because recently I had to explain the children's book Flat Stanley to my Scottish husband, who had never read the books and just was like, what is this?

This sounds like a horror film.

Flat Stanley, boy gets flattened by billboard.

His parents stick him in the post and just post him around the world.

His brother flies him as a f ⁇ ing kite before eventually he is pumped up with a bike pump.

Ban this filth, Andy.

Little old Mrs.

Pepperpot, the old woman who shrinks to the size of a pepperpot, claims she can talk to the animals.

Who is this mad woman?

She needs institutionalising.

Ban this filth.

Or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a book about a caterpillar whose eating disorder turns him into a beautiful butterfly.

Ban this filth!

Awful stuff.

Awful.

I haven't read Gruffalo.

Is Gruffalo a bad person creature thing?

It's very popular in India, Gruffalo.

Well, look, I mean, if you read any children's book through the right prism,

it is, as Tiff said, absolute filth.

Gruffalo, I'm sure, is

absolutely no different.

God, I can't even remember.

I mean, I must have read that book a hundred times in my kids.

He didn't do much wrong.

The Gruffalo's biggest crime was threatening to eat a mouse, really, at one stage.

And in the sequel, you could argue actually it was a fairly responsible single parent.

Just he happened to have quite gruesome features.

Yes, I mean, the law that was passed in Utah last year allows parents to request the removal of books containing pornographic or indecent material.

The purpose of this law, well, I mean, it's quite hard to know what the exact purpose was without going down a very dark, dark passage into the recesses of American Christian conservatism.

But of course, the problem is that one person's pornographic is another person's sistine chapel ceiling, and one person's indecent is another person's absolutely basic human biology.

So it's interesting this law has now been sort of fired back and resulted in the banning of the Bible.

And again, I mean, the Davis School District in Utah decided that although the Bible doesn't contravene the law of Utah, it was not suitable for younger students.

And, you know, I had another read of it because it's been a couple of weeks since I read the Bible cover to cover.

And it does set a bad example right out the traps.

Start of Genesis.

I mean, nothing to do with violence or pornography.

It just sets a bad example.

It shows children that that if you rush a job just so you can have a day off, the chances are you'll it up.

And that is why the planet is such a mess today.

You make loads of mistakes as you're rushing it through.

You know, if only God had taken, I don't know, let's say 10 years to make a planet, it might have been less of a mess than it is today.

Also, it shows, you know, throughout the book, we see God's unwillingness to work through problems by talking to people, helping them learn about themselves and improve and reach a harmonious shared plan for a better future.

That is not what I want kids to learn about.

You know, how he deals with problems by flooding the entire world, reducing cities to rubble, mass infanticide, and locusts.

That is not how you deal with problems, kids.

This is why this book must be banned.

Quite aside from his questionable behavior, fathering a child with a young woman who is in a relationship with someone else.

That's, I mean, neither here nor there.

But I am glad that the children of Utah will grow up in purity and innocence.

I think it's actually quite an uplifting book about a child star who goes off into into the wilderness and stages a comeback.

Right.

Yeah, I guess.

In his later years, you know,

that's hopeful for

a lot of people in the entertainment business.

You say he was in the entertainment business.

To me, Tiff, that sounds like you're perpetuating the trope that Jews run showbiz just because of

how Jesus made it to the top.

Now, the whole thing about the statue of David in Florida,

I guess that school district wanted to ban it because David was nude.

Yes.

Now,

that would create a slight problem with most Greco-Roman architecture.

I mean, I have wondered, I mean, it is true that when you walk around and see a lot of Socrates and Plato in these museums, you realize that they held a lot of sermons without any clothes on.

And they were saying really, really intelligent things, semi-nude.

Yes.

And great, you know, but I'm glad Florida is asking the questions.

You know, who was attending these things?

And should these things be spread at business schools around the world now?

Yeah.

You know, like if you're teaching organizational theory at the University of Pennsylvania, do you need all your clothes?

Well, actually, I mean, you see the heights of

philosophy and science and creativity that the ancient Athenian civilization reached when, as you say,

the maximum you could expect was a half-assed cloth,

then maybe that's a lesson for humanity: that clothes have made us stupider as a species.

That's the only conclusion you can draw.

Well at least it's consistent.

If you're going to ban one book, ban them all.

Even if it fits with your agenda, I sort of admire it in a small way.

Like, you know, and in Utah, which is home of the Mormons, isn't it?

Yes.

You know, there's more Mormon than Mountain in Utah.

So

I like, I give them ultimate points for consistency.

Yes, I mean, the Book of Mormon itself could be banned, famously adapted from the hit stage musical and containing practical tips on the absolute deluge of admin that comes along with a commitment to polygamy.

How the f do people manage it?

When I read the headline, Andy, sorry, the first time you sent me this news story, I was thinking the two things you'd have wanted to ban were the Bible and the musical Book of Mormon.

Some people have said that, you know, this shows that really we need to find a way of living more harmoniously and having a slightly more nuanced position on what constitutes offensiveness.

And what I would say is that we live in an age where

nuance has had its day.

We simply cannot anymore

reach nuanced positions of mutual acceptance on anything.

And I would go, in fact, so far as to say that nuance should be banned outright.

It never helps and is always confusing.

It's pretty hard to this.

Ban this filth.

Ban this filth.

Political figures news now, and let's start in India, Anuvab.

A sensational story from the last week or so.

A government official was suspended after he ordered an entire reservoir to be drained after dropping his phone in it.

This might be the greatest abuse of political power in human history because it is simultaneously ridiculously absurd.

Essentially, he even argued that it was helpful because the water drained from the reservoir helps local farmers

and sort of a metaphor for human waste and the state of the planet today.

I mean I don't see there's any news story that could ever beat this one.

This is absolutely correct.

And that's the angle everybody took.

You know, the wastage of water.

you know, in a country that's starved, you know, one point at 1.3 billion people, we don't have enough water.

And here is Rajesh Vishwas, junior bureaucrat in the Paraklo district of Uttar Pradesh, draining a reservoir to find a phone, right?

So went viral, this news story.

So look, Andy, this news story that went around the world basically went viral, accusing Rajesh Viswas, this junior bureaucrat in the Parathkot district of Uttar Pradesh, of draining a whole reservoir to find his phone.

And they said, you know, 1.3 billion people, we're short of water.

What is this man doing draining a reservoir?

The fundamental question nobody asked, and I think this is why it's a cruel world, is did he find his phone or not find his phone?

Was this exercise worthwhile?

And the first podcast in the world to report, Andy, because nobody's followed up on the story, that Rajesh Vishwas did find his telephone.

Right.

And he lost his job.

He's been suspended.

It's very sad.

He found his phone.

And three days of repairs of the phone have not yielded any results.

So he still can't use the phone.

Well, I mean, who would have thought that after dropping it in a reservoir and taking days to find it that it might have some water damage?

I mean,

the way he dropped it in the reservoir, apparently, he was taking a selfie, as of course you do whenever you're standing next to a reservoir.

Otherwise, how do you prove that either you or the reservoir really existed?

And he dropped his phone into the water, at which point he had two options.

Option one, think oh whoops that was careless oh well it's only a phone i can get another one and learn a valuable lesson about not taking selfies near reservoirs without attaching the phone to a flotation device just in case or option two empty half a million gallons of precious life-giving farming assisting water out of the reservoir over three days of pumping in an effort to find the phone and hope that being underwater for three days hadn't in some way damaged it Tiff, how do you think he plumped for option two?

That seems...

Here's the thought process.

Apparently he's a food inspector so he dropped the phone and he was just using the three second rule but taking it to its ultimate extreme i think normally when your phone gets wet you need to put it in a bowl of rice unfortunately he drained all the water that the local farmers were going to use to grow the rice so that's had the the adverse effect i like how much inconsistency there is in this story because

He claimed the phone had sensitive government information on it.

Because I'm like, if you drop the phone, just leave it.

If you're worried about sensitive information being found on your phone, surely one of the safest places for it is at the bottom of a fucking reservoir.

Moving slightly up the political power food chain from an Indian food inspector to the President of the United States of America, Joe Biden, who the White House has said is fine after he tripped over a sandbag and fell over on stage at an Air Force Academy event.

I mean, Biden could do without these,

the way that Trump will attack him for being even older than Trump is, he could do without these things.

And it does look increasingly Tiff, like America will essentially be voting for one of two living aging metaphors in next election.

Biden was a metaphor for the aging process of both humans and their civilization.

And no matter what else we do, we will eventually fall whereas Trump of course is an absolute Aesop's fable made flesh the tale of the city of f ⁇ wits who indulged in absolute

you can call them sheep and wolves if you want or ducks and sharks or pigeons and jet engines but it's clear what Aesop meant

but it's going to be a tough call for America assuming that they both win their party's representation between two flawed individuals I mean how do you choose between someone who occasionally struggles with trip hazards and someone who sexually assaults people, mocks the disabled, encourages insurrection,

undermines democracy, justice, press freedom, and pretty much every other underminable aspect of public life, who fosters racism, who engenders

absolutely everything, and spreads corrosive deceits that eat away at the fabric and structure of society, and who spends too much time playing golf.

I mean, Chris, could just edit that list down to under 10 minutes if you could.

Thanks.

So it's going to be a tough call.

Tough call for America.

Science news now, and well, Britain Britain has been rocked by well further evidence of the impending end of our species after a petting zoo in Dorset

accidentally created a new breed of killer sheep

It may not be a an actual killer sheep but let's assume that it is because this is what happens when breeds get cross-bred in in films.

What happened was a valet ram and a Shetland ewe

enjoyed some sweet willy love across the barricades that resulted in an exciting new strain of sheep creature that will surely one day destroy us all or be someone's lunch.

It's a bit early to say at this stage.

But the Rameo and Juliet encounter took place when the Shetland

broke into the fallet's enclosure and,

well, family show, enjoyed some quality sheep time together.

The love poetry flowed between them, was assumed to be love poetry.

It's a bit hard to tell with sheep.

Everything they say rhymes.

And with the result.

Bah, bah, bah.

the result of the eugenics was a lamb named

named Borghini because its legs hinge upwards vertically.

It's reportedly a very advanced species of hybrid sheep.

It's reportedly terrified of mint, which is a good if overdue evolutionary development for lambs, and a strong advocate of veganism.

So progress being made.

Well, I mean, this is

a charming love story in a lot of ways, isn't it?

It's beautiful, isn't it?

I like that Hank gets to have his name in print, the Ram, but the U is unnamed in case we slut shame her.

But she jumped the fence, apparently, because the heart wants what the heart wants.

So

Hank sounds like an absolute unit because they didn't even know she was missing.

Because apparently, he was so big you couldn't see her

in the pen.

But I'll definitely think of this story tonight as I try and get to sleep.

Look, I've never been to a British betting zoo, but they're turning into dens of sin.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I bet they've got copies of the Bible.

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

Thank you very much for listening.

Anything to plug, Tiff?

I will plug Catharsis, my podcast, also on the Bugle Network.

And there's a great episode out at the moment with Ian Moore, comedian, turned author, turned person at cricket with you for the weekend, Andy.

Yeah, yeah, he was a guest on Test Match Special.

His third attempt, well, the first time he was supposed to be on, the entire match was cancelled.

The second time he was supposed to be on, the game had ended by the time that

he could be on, so he finally managed to get on.

Third time lucky.

So have a listen to that.

Also, I will be doing a run at the Edinburgh Fringe.

One week of work in progress at the Monkey Barrel, and it's at midday.

So one week, come and check that out.

Anivab?

Well, similar to Tiff,

nothing to do with Ian Moore, although I find him lovely, and he was in Mumbai for three weeks many years ago.

I will be doing

a short run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

But here's the thing, this is what I want to announce about the run.

It's from the 14th to the 28th.

But

it's not me as a comedian.

What's basically happened is that Andy, Tiff, I'll be giving up comedy.

The show is titled The Department of Britishness.

And

I'd like to announce very quickly here that I've been hired by the Deputy High Commission to promote Britishness in India.

So that's going to be my new job.

You guys run down your country far too much.

And I think that there's great Britishness that has been lost in time, especially in India.

So I'll be going around promoting that.

So I'll be just mentioning the talking points of my new job after comedy in Edinburgh.

Who's going to manage the queues for the show itself?

That surely fits under the purview of the Department of Britishness.

It'll be quite austere, I think.

You can hear the current episode of the newsquiz via the BBC Sounds app or other parts of the internet

after that.

It finishes this week.

And if you like cricket, I'll be banging on about cricket in numerical terms for most of the next two months.

We will now leave you with our Bugle Wall of Fame.

Our voluntary subscribers who have helped contribute to the show to keep it free, flourishing, and independent to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

And here are the great contributions to human culture of some of our voluntary subscribers.

All of our Wall of Famers this week have been pioneers in the field of geography.

Samuel Price discovered that the reason that glaciers flow so much slower than rivers is not because they're made of ice rather than water, but because they are more chilled out, both literally and metaphorically.

They simply want to take their time to appreciate the wonders of nature.

Dan Milburn was the first person to prove incontrovertibly that pyramids and volcanoes are not related.

Much geological scholarship prior to Dan had held that pyramids were in fact very neat, very well structured, dormant volcanoes.

On the subject of volcanoes, Wendell Shepard formulated a now almost universally accepted theory that most volcanoes are upside down, hence the Earth has a molten core filled up with volcano-blasted liquid rock.

Melanie Cohen was the oceanologist responsible for working out that Antarctica is bigger than the Arctic because penguins are more careful investors and hung onto their land, whereas the devil-may care polar bears from up north sold theirs off and now have to bob about on bits of ice cap.

Greg Dawson worked out that the quantity, size and gloominess of rain clouds in the sky in different parts of the world is not in fact directly proportional to the number of poets living beneath.

Phil Haynes has calculated that there was supposed to be a large continent in the Pacific Ocean.

There's no reason for it to be so big, explains Phil, so it's quite clear that whoever designed the world meant to stick a continent there but forgot or couldn't be asked at the end of a long week.

Philip Jones worked out that in fact contrary to popular belief a relatively small percentage of roads do actually lead to Rome although that percentage has in fairness come down significantly over the past 1500 to 2000 years.

Ed Hockey calculated that the Grand Canyon is actually 35 times deeper than is popularly believed.

It only looks about a mile deep, but actually the empty bit stretches another 30 miles upwards, explains Ed.

We just tend to focus on the bit with sides, regrettably.

And finally, Scott Manson discovered that underneath the sands of the Sahara, there is an old ancient Roman hypercaust heating system covering almost 3 million square miles.

That's why it's so hot, Scott notes.

The weather is incidental.

Thank you to all our Bugle voluntary subscribers, and don't forget to join them now.

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.