Assad Day For World Peace

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4264 of the Bug

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Hello, sorry about that at the beginning.

This is the Bugle.

It's issue 4264.

It's the 22nd of May 2023.

And I am joined this week by two guests again.

Firstly, that's all the introduction they need.

Firstly,

for the, I believe, officially umpteenth time on the Bugle, it's Nish Kumar.

Hello, Nish.

Hello, Andrew.

You know, when you said,

just bear with me, because I've got a really silly opening today.

And a look of dread filled on the Zoom call with concern about what something you would caveat as being very stupid would be.

I think you absolutely delivered on it, Andrew.

That's good.

That's good.

I think you absolutely delivered on it.

Also joining us for the second time on the Bugle.

Warm welcome back to Josie Long.

Hello.

Thanks for having me back.

Well,

thanks for coming back.

You have a book coming out this week.

I do.

It's a book of short stories.

Well, there we go.

We usually do plugs at the end, but

tell us.

Let's do it all the way through.

Okay, yeah.

Like, I'll try and work it into each of the

news.

Well, I mean, what is news but a collection of short stories, really, when you think of it in those terms.

I will say, this has been form-breaking for the Bugle as a podcast in terms of having the plug early, but it has continued the long-standing long-standing tradition of plugging things appallingly, given that no one's mentioned the title or the date the book comes out.

You've got to leave a bit of mystery.

Yeah,

we'll solve that mystery, which is, and a mystery can be a short story at the end of

this podcast.

It would turn out that Nish did it.

It is the 22nd of May 2023, And what a day to be recording.

Because it is today

just 568 years since the Wars of the Roses kicked off at the First Battle of St.

Albans on the 22nd of May 1455.

Richard, Duke of York, defeated and captured Henry VI of England, who, of course, had become king as a baby.

If you're good enough, you're old enough, as the old monarchy saying goes.

And the Battle of St Albans was a pretty piss-poor effort to be honest but it did start the Wars of the Roses a three-decade squabble that resulted in lots of people being hacked to death in battle including celebrity car park resident Richard not as bad as Shakespeare suggested the third who was hacked to death in the manner fashionable at the time at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 it all kicked off as I said this day in 1455, the Battle of St Albans, a half-hour effort with disappointingly few people being hacked to death.

Not really what the fans wanted to see from a 15th century battle, battle, to be honest.

But things picked up.

And just six years later, at the Battle of Towton, the hacking to death element of the war had become so advanced that in a 10-hour slaughterfest, an estimated 28,000 people were hacked to death in a single day of all-action, metal-clanging, flesh-splatting mayhem in Yorkshire.

That, of course, is the upper end of the estimate, but f it, it's 2023.

Let's talk about the past like we talk about the present.

It was at least 28,000, if not millions.

But 28,000, that would have been over 1% of the entire population of England killed in a single day of hand-to-hand combat.

You've got to admire the work rates involved in that.

I just don't think our youngsters would put the effort in these days.

It's estimated that the battle involved over 3% of the entire population of the country.

So it was the equivalent today of 2 million people meeting for a right old ruck in the Sainsbury's car park in Tadcaster.

Do you know what though?

That'll be a great day to go to the swimming pool.

you know like you know when there's like a world cup final yeah yeah and you go at the garden center or something and it's deserted

and you know what actually if you were interested in buying an axe perversely that's the best day right you don't have to be so surely sure yeah surely all the axe shops are sold out

and to be fair if you run the axe shop and you're not going to the

battle you won't get respected in the future

well because you want to get some pictures of your axes being used.

I just sat there desperately trying to draw and paint as quickly as humanly possible.

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

This week, a patents or patents section, whichever you want to call it,

also linked to anniversaries.

In 1849, Abraham Lincoln was issued a patent for an invention to lift boats up, making him apparently the only American president ever to hold a patent.

And in 1906, the Wright brothers were given a patent for their so-called flying machine.

So to commemorate these historic moments, we look at some of the most exciting current patents pending, waiting for clearance before they are unleashed on the market, including the Strop Tech Tantrum helmet.

In today's angry, highly strung, conflictional world, we all like to wobble out every now and again.

And the patent-pending Strop Tech Tantrum Helmet is 99% soundproof, vacuum enclosed, with extra oxygen pumped in for peak rant endurance, and is set to be the must-have Fury Tech accessory in the second half of this decade, with its one-way mirrored surface to give you facial privacy whilst ranting incandescently about the universe.

The tantrum helmet also offers reassuring validation of any opinions expressed in your tantrum, no matter how fruitily worded or socially unacceptable, with a range of thumbs-up and smiley-faced emojils projected directly into your eyeballs.

Recommended for use by inhabitants of all known inhabitable planets.

And also the Productivision anti-sleep chair, which comes with a built-in wasp's nest.

It's their latest corporate efficiency

aid patent pending on that as well.

Which, of course, previous efforts have included the Bladder WAS Celerator, which claims to reduce the time taken for office workers to urinate by an average of 12.7 seconds per WAS, which could save the average office-based company up to £364 million over just 4,000 years, although the warranty only lasts for two years.

So that patent section is in the bin.

Didn't Bladder WASCELERATOR play for the England cricket team in the early 20th century?

I think he might have done, yeah.

I'll check my stats.

Top story this week, comeback news.

Well, we all love a bit of nostalgia, hence the popularity of vintage clothing, period dramas, 60-year-old snack rappers washing up on the beach as a metaphor for the decline of human civilization, patriotism and dressing up like a baby and paying someone to congratulate you for vomiting.

But not every comeback is welcome, and it seems that Bashir al-Assad, the Damascus douchebag, the Syrian serial shithead, the Ba'athist, Ba'art shit, crazy baastard, the notoriously unsivled civil warmonger and strifeophile, has wheedlewormed his way back into mainstream politics.

The I'm Sexy and I Know It fan appeared at the Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia and even told his fellow leaguers that he hoped his Elvis-style comeback would herald a new era of peace.

Now, I know, Nish and Josie, you're both massive fans of the concept of peace.

I mean, how do you feel to see Bashir al-Assad suddenly jump in on the peaceful bandwagon after all these years?

Well, listen, it's a multi-level disappointment.

Obviously, it's a disappointment to see Assad be welcomed back into the international poll, but it's a double disappointment that he didn't go full Elvis and do it in a black leather suit with his name spelled out in red lights behind him.

Yeah, if you're going to come back, come back.

Can I say something that is not clever, and I'm not proud of it?

That's pretty much the motto of this podcast.

However the fk you say that in Latin.

But I I've spent a lot of time listening to people make jokes about people's appearances.

And often with like a middle-aged man, people will say, oh, they look like a thumb.

or especially they'll say, oh, they look like a bollock.

And

as I was the first person, when today I was looking at the photo, and I was like,

ah,

but he really

does.

Like his face, there's a photo of him looking to one side, and I was like, This man is the embodiment of a ball sack from the locker.

And I know it's not about his conduct or anything like that, but I feel like it's my moral responsibility to point this fact out.

And how much do you think

the facts facts,

as you describe it, that he looks like

a nadger has influenced the way he's conducted his life?

I mean, is this

a sort of rebellion

against the difficulty of looking like a testicle?

It's Kafka-esque.

Yeah.

He woke up one morning.

Yeah.

It's interesting psychologically.

Nish Bashar Alisa, as discussed on the bugle many years ago,

used to listen to I'm Sexy and I Know It.

I know that's very much your internal soundtrack whenever you walk on stage or start recording the bugle.

Yeah, I remember that story being covered on this podcast.

And yeah, it was because they seized some of his assets, including his iTunes purchase history, right?

And

that's how we found out he had purchased, and I guess we have to assume, listened to, LMFAOs, I'm sexy, and I know it.

I don't know if he listened to that again to g himself up before the speech, but

it's definitely worth bearing in mind.

Also, weird fact about LMFAO, they are an uncle and a nephew, which I don't think ever gets to.

There's very fact.

That's illegal.

I feel retrospectively disgusted that I enjoyed that song.

Yeah,

it's definitely very, very strange.

He addressed

the summit of the Arab League, which was taking place in Saudi Arabia.

Already a bad start.

What is this?

An international football tournament?

Anyway, he said that the summit was a historic opportunity to address crises

across the region and said he hoped it marked the beginning of a new phase of Arab action and called for peace in our region, development, prosperity, instead of war and destruction.

And it is a very strange thing.

I guess when you start making these speeches, you've got to start with your first audience, which is yourself.

So maybe this was a really profound moment of self-reflection from Assad.

He also said that it was important to leave internal affairs to the country's people as they were best able to manage their own affairs.

Which, again, is he talking to himself?

Because I'm pretty sure he wasn't too worried about foreign interference when he was allowing Vladimir Putin to arm him so he could bomb his own people.

This is a pretty extraordinary piece of, I guess, historic amnesia from the League.

There were various protests in Syria, and

some of the protest signs said Syria cannot be represented by Assad the criminal.

But listen,

being represented by a criminal at this point in human history, that's just par for the course.

That's just absolutely par for the course.

It would feel weird not to be.

And also, you've got to think, you know, 12 years ago, he started a civil war in his own country,

but now

everyone's bored of it.

So it's fine.

That's how those things work.

The Emir of Qatar walked out before Big Bash began his speech.

Noah feels, mate.

We've all been there.

But I mean even so Assad's return to the international stage or the fact that his return did not take the form of him confirming his name and home address before hearing a list of charges.

That sits uneasily, I think, with anyone who's not a fan of state-run violent suppression and genocide.

We did actually ask Bashar al-Assad to appear on the bugle to give his side of the story, but he said he was busy.

So unfortunately,

he can't.

But

what does this portend for the future of

Syria and the

region?

Do you remember when Rangers were really corrupt?

Yeah.

And they got demoted to the very bottom league.

So that's what happened.

I think he's like, he was kicked out of the Arab League and he had to do just home fixtures.

Right, work his way up back through the

apparel.

He's obviously worked his way back up.

Right.

And so people have to just ignore what happened before.

It's an interesting Glasgow perspective, because you you live in Glasgow now, don't you?

Seeing everything through the

I do and I I live for the Rangers.

If I lived in Glasgow, because I'm I'm Jewish, I couldn't support either Ranger.

I think I'd be part of this or the Jewish club.

I forget.

I forget how it works.

This was the best one because

they slag off both the Queen and the Pope.

It's very retro.

The love that dared not speak its name.

He didn't even go the normal route.

for rehabilitating a disgraced reputation and starting his own YouTube account.

That's we all know.

That's the route.

He should have been doing front-facing videos where he talked about crackpot conspiracy theories to recover from being publicly disgraced.

He should be on Joe Rogan.

Yeah,

he should have gone straight on Rogan.

That's the traditional route for rehabilitating your public perception: smoking a fat stogie with Joey Rogues.

Maybe that's why he said he was too busy to come on the bugle.

Yeah,

it's another sad day in the history of international relations.

It is, but I am so eternally in awe of Syrian people and the fact that they continue after 12 years of brutal civil war to be so kind of

just

indomitable.

That's a word that I only read and it's very hard to say.

But it is incredible and I think about it in terms of the UK where basically we go on one demo once and then talk about how it failed for the rest of our lives and about how that really turned us off politics for a generation.

I feel like that is the inspirational part.

The local council puts up a bollard we disagree with and we just vow never to leave the house again for the rest of our lives.

But it wasn't just Assad speaking at the Arab League, aside from some excellent football banter between the leaders about

whose sports-washing efforts are winning most silverware and some fun golf chat about which professional golfers are particularly enjoying the war in Yemen.

The league also hosted a Ukraine leader, Vladimir Zelensky, and Zelensky accused Arab leaders and other leaders around the world of turning a blind eye to Russia's invasion and human rights atrocities.

I do think Zelensky is wrong on this.

I don't think it's a question of turning a blind eye.

I don't think any of the leaders he pinpointed, Arab or otherwise, who've given active or tacit support for Putin in the last 15 months, have turned a blind eye.

I think they looked at the situation with perfectly functioning eyes and decided, yeah, yep, we'll just let that slide.

So it's not, I don't think it's a question of

blind eye-ness.

Is that a term?

It is now.

It's also a big swing to accuse people of having turned a blind eye at a conference hosted by Bohemid Bin Salman, a man who turned a blind eye to himself ordering a journalist to be chopped up and put in a bin.

Like,

bin Salman, I mean, that guy turns like P.

Girazzinuddin Zidane.

Who he probably would would have would have signed

I mean if if Zidane does at some point now become manager of Newcastle we will listen back to this

I don't know about this because it's not Scottish football which I'm not a big fan of Zelensky told the he told the Arab League bigwigs that Ukraine was defending itself from quotes colonizers and imperialists and thus appeared to invoke the Arab world's own history of invasion and occupation.

After all the support we and Britain have given Ukraine, and he starts slagging off colonizers and imperialists,

that is ingratitude of the highest water.

Two, Zelensky, well, you can have a go at the Beatles next.

Jesus Christ.

I'm just saying that Ringo's songs are not very good.

And after Paul was replaced with Cyborg,

he's downhill.

I'd like to apologise for that accent.

That's when he knows he's given too many speeches.

Once one of his Zelensky starts going off about Ringo's output within the Beatles.

And then you get a response from Ringo, like, peace and love.

I love it.

I'd like a summit between the two of them.

The Zelensky Star Summit.

Zelensky Star, yeah.

Yeah.

well, I think that.

I mean, and you're excluding Paul McCarney from that.

You don't want to get the other,

right?

He's still touring.

Maybe you could set him up to negotiate with Putin.

I don't know.

Come on.

Come on.

We look, I love to hear your balanaika's rigging out.

I've been very clear about my feelings about Russian culture.

Come on, keep your comrades warm.

Zelensky also.

I've now just bankrupted the bugle by quoting Beatles' lyrics.

You misspelled them, so it's fine.

Oh, yeah, that's it.

So it's about how it turns up in transcript.

As evidenced by the fact that I stayed clear of mentioning his back in the USRS.

That's out of copyright now, since 1990.

Zelensky also,

well, he had a very busy week.

He attended the G7 meeting in Japan.

That's right, the G7, the spiritual home of the non-binding verbal agreement, was back in action last week.

The leaders of the seven qualifying nations met in the city of Hiroshima in Japan.

Canada and USA, of course, qualified from the North American qualifying competition.

Germany, France, UK, and Italy from Europe.

And Japan represented Asia, Africa, South America, Australasia, Antarctica, and the rest of the universe.

Plus, special wildcard guest stars, a European Union, which is a non-enumerated member of the G7.

I think my member was enumerated at eight days old from what I remember.

I'm not entirely sure

what function

that that plays.

But anyway, it was.

Are you calling the European Union the discarded foreskin of the G7?

That's somehow worse than anything Nigel Farage has said about the European Union.

The aim of the meeting, the various discussions at the meeting, including further clampdowns on Russia, and also aiming to reduce

the reliance on China economically.

And from a British perspective,

I would say that's quite simply achieved, would you not, to reduce our reliance on China.

All we need to do is switch our manufacturing sector back on.

If we can find the switch and mend the fuse.

And actually, where do we leave the manufacturer?

I think it's in the attic.

Or was it in the shed?

I'm mixing up with the dehumidifier.

Or perhaps we sold it on eBay.

But anyway, look, we'll just sort it out.

What were the highlights for you from the the G7 Summit?

We've covered a lot of G7s on the view earlier, isn't it?

I'm just really devastated that they're putting sanctions on diamonds.

Right.

Like, for a long time, I was like, how does this war affect me?

And now

it's really biting.

Yeah.

You know?

Right.

You were going to get diamond grills on your teeth, weren't you, Jess?

Yeah,

me and Bear.

It was that thing.

Why did my brain do that?

I think it's funny to describe China as a threat to economic security when that basically is just like, you're doing better than us and we don't like it.

I'm going to start describing other comedians as a threat to my career security.

I was thrilled to see Italy there, obviously, because it's always good at the G7 to have fringe, whack job, right-wing conspiracy nutcases represented.

It's very important.

It's been a couple of years since Trump, and now we've got George O'Barley back on there representing the QAnon and borderline QAnon community.

Nish, have you forgotten the UK there?

Oxfam

said in advance of the summit that G7 countries are currently demanding around about $230 million a day in debt debt repayments from low and middle income countries because, and I think this is, this is good.

A lot of people say, oh, this is

further evidence of the exploitation by the wealthy of the less wealthy.

But we G7sters, we know the importance of sound financial management and of not getting yourself into unaffordable debt.

And that message carries particular weight coming from countries such as the USA with its $31 trillion of debt and the UK with our tidy little government debt, which currently runs at 100.2%

of GDP.

We know how these kind of things can skew and fracture your politics and economy and we will not let our low and middle income buddies make the same mistakes.

So, I mean, it's I think this is one of the greatest things that

the G7 are doing is dredging the last pennies from less fortunate countries for their own good.

It does sort of suggest the fundamental problem with all of this in that you're not actually going to solve world problems if you don't invite people whose countries are being most directly affected by the problems in the world.

Like, it's like if you, it does suggest slightly an out-of-touch organization, which is obviously not helped by the fact that their first priority on the sanctions was diamond-based.

Britain news now, and the Home Secretary, Suella Bravmo, to give her her full title, the bafflingly appointed, then reappointed, and still in post-Home Secretary, Suella Bravman, is once again in the news this time it's been alleged that bravman having received a speeding ticket which is not a big deal in the grand political scheme of political things then asked civil servants to sort out a private driving awareness course rather than her having to do a standard course with members of the voting public according to the times newspaper which ran the story officials refused the request to become involved in her personal affairs after taking advice from the cabinet office propriety and ethics team did she break the ministerial code is the question that we should be hearing quite a lot uh regarding leading politicians?

A government source denied she broke it, but it's unsurprising, is it not, that these allegations have been allegated.

This idea of breaking the ministerial code, because it seems that at the moment the government breaks the ministerial code as frequently as promises wind or the hearts of British democracy fans.

I know you're both huge fans of Suella Bravman and have the tattoos to prove it.

This must have been difficult for you to see this

news this week.

I mean,

do I want her to be punished and resigned?

Yes.

Why is it the curse of being engaged with politics that you have to see these horrific moral vacuums going down for like a minor-ish infraction of the rules?

Like, did I want to see Ted Bundy punished for not finishing his law degree?

It's very hard to be like having to come out to support

the team I love,

which is conservatives being humiliated and

brought to justice.

But it's like the team are only playing against mascots for a charity event.

I'm trying to do sports metaphors for you by the way.

I do appreciate that, Joshua.

That's not necessarily your natural M.O.

I appreciate the fact that you're doing that for me.

Yeah, I mean, it is a kind of bizarre and slightly sort of technical thing, but a senior civil servant interviewed on the BBC said these actions are reported to be, quote, a real lapse of judgment, which at least niche is a step forward from Bravman's normal lapses of judgment, which are pretend performative lapses of judgment, which drive her policy.

So, I mean,

is this a sign that things are getting better?

Well,

I don't know if it's things getting better so much as it is absolute consistency, which we often castigate politicians for lacking.

We often say they're inconsistent with their expression of their values.

But breaking the ministerial code is the most consistent thing, Suella Bravo from the start.

It's her thing.

It's her thing.

She had to leave the job that she currently holds

previously because she'd sent an official document from her personal email, which is obviously a serious breach of a number of different laws and regulations.

But then, within six days, she was back in the same job after Rishi Sunak decided that it would be better to have somebody who'd just been sacked from the job in post for his own sort of personal ambition.

One of the cabinet ministers at the time gave it off the record briefing, which described her as a joke who shouldn't be anywhere near high office.

Unfortunately, that is the job description of this current iteration of the Conservative Party.

It is very important that you are a joke who ends up being nowhere near high office.

There is an interesting sort of glut of stories about about Braverman, of which this is one.

There's another one that's come out today saying that she tried to skip a vote on a migrants bill that she had kind of pushed forward so that she could do a photo opportunity at a police station.

And the thing with all of this is there's a sense that she's pissed off a lot of the Conservative Party.

And she's done it most recently because last week she addressed something called the National Conservatism Conference, which was a conference that Labour MP Thuncum Debonair described as Conservatives Conspiracy Comic-Con.

Because she said, I love a bit of alliteration.

Now, I will say to you, Thungum, if you love a bit of alliteration, you've missed an absolute open goal there because it was absolutely Comic-Con for cs.

I cannot tell you what an open goal you've shanked, Thungum.

Oh, imagine her saying that on Politics Live.

This was actually in Parliament, which would have been even better.

It would have been even better if she called it Comic-Con for cs.

Yeah, it was a real

festival of the deranged.

There were all sorts of whack job theories put forward and all sorts of, I guess we could be generously calling them snafus, including the journalist Douglas Murray describing the First and Second World War as an instance of German nationalism having mucked up the

great muck-up.

Yes.

That's how I, that's how, in my synopsis for the film Schindler's List, it begins with the phrase, well, Germany had mucked up, and now it was time for Big O to step up.

Well, that's right up in the.

I mean,

the Pantheon of Great British Understatements is a well-packed pantheon.

That's right up there.

I feel most let down by the fact that it was hosted at the Natural History Museum.

You know, like they're inviting people who don't

believe in the exhibit

to speak underneath them.

But I feel most let down by the staff on the day because all there's so many cupboards that they could have pushed them into

and locked them into.

And in the long term, it would have been an attraction to visitors.

Yeah.

And I guess in some ways, you know, it's a good place to do a conference surrounded by physical metaphors for your political ideas.

And also for some of the attendees, I think some of the exhibits were in their target demographic.

so

but on this this Bravman story I mean it doesn't it's by far from the

it's far from the worst thing that that she has done and of all the the things that you know could bring bring her down it's been described it's been put forward as more evidence of a conspiracy to bring down Bravman, which now involves not just the left-wing cabal of secret wraith-like apparitions that have been allegedly running the Conservative government since 2010, according to some newspapers, but also the speedometer on her car and her own poor judgment and some of her fellow Conservative MPs.

Now, this was a story from April

this year.

William Ragg, a Conservative MP,

tweeted this.

This evening, having kept quiet for a while, I was struck by the lamentable hopelessness of the Home Secretary, remembering particularly her first week or so as an MP.

My clearest recollection of our Home Secretary's legal acumen came from her first day we had a presentation from the expenses watchdog, the IPSA.

Her question concerned whether a speeding ticket incurred during the course of parliamentary duties could be claimed on expenses.

This woman then became Attorney General, the leading f ⁇ ing lawyer in the country and a home secretary.

So

this is the context of why people is looking for anything to assist the process of helping the country.

This is like when murderers do a murder and the first thing they do is Google search how to get away with a murder

and they think to themselves I'm a criminal mastermind because I deleted it afterwards.

But I also think it's unfair to judge a conservative because basically she just got confused between which of her servants she was addressing.

It's not her fault.

If anything,

they've given her too many servants.

How's she supposed to know they're not the house ones?

They're the civil ones.

I mean, last week, she was also in the news for saying there was no good reason that Britain can't train up enough HGV drivers, butchers or fruit pickers in her efforts to restrain net migration, which under

her and her government's watch seems to be skyrocketing in the aftermath of the Brexit that was voted in to bring it down.

And so, of course, there's no good reason, but there are plenty of bad reasons.

The same bad reasons we don't train up enough of any other useful job in this country because we can't be asked, and it's f ⁇ ing cheaper not to.

It'd be a good triathlon, though.

So, wouldn't you want to drive the HGV?

Cut the head off a pig, hold that while you shove it full of apples.

Well, I'd watch it.

Chris, as a triathlete, is that

I mean, because, you know,

it's an event that doesn't always get a huge, huge audience.

I mean, do you think involving a bit of pig slaughter and fruit stuffage would help triathlet on?

Look, enduring sport, yeah, it often brings you close to shitting yourself.

And I think this only brings you that little bit closer.

So it's all fine.

New York is sinking news now.

And, well, this is bad news for the Big Apple.

New research and sentences that begin new research never end well these days has shown that new york is sinking by up to a hundred meters a year it's actually only one to two millimeters a year but that is within the up to a hundred meter bracket so um again let's let's talk it up why is new york sinking uh well partly because it never sleeps and poor sleeping patterns can really affect your overall uh health um but also it's possibly because of the woke but largely it's because its skyscrapers are so heavy that the city is plummeting at breakneck speed towards the Earth's merciless molten core.

And if it carries on sinking at the current rate of one to two millimeters a year, it will drill through the centre of the planet and emerge in the Indian Ocean about a thousand miles off the coast of Western Australia in just 640 million years' time.

This is obviously a huge concern for those who have

long-term property leases in New York that they might end up in the Indian Ocean in, well, well under a billion years from now.

I mean, this is

got to be a bit of a concern when your skyscrapers are sinking the entire city.

I worry that there's no way to de-incentivise the building of them.

Because if I was building a very high building and somebody says to me, well, what's happening is this is sinking into the sea, my first reaction would be, build higher.

You might as well say it's floating.

Well, you couldn't even say that.

Because if somebody said to me, New York is beginning to float into the air,

my immediate reaction would be, build higher.

The researchers size shame celebrity skyscrapers, including the Empire State Building, the new One World Trade Center, the Chrysler Building, and the Trump Tower, which actually weighs as much as all the other Manhattan cloud botherers combined due to the inescapable gravitational mass of pure darkness within.

But, I mean,

this is a worry for all human, well, not just cities, but even villages.

You think that the weight of

a house could, it seems, fracture the Earth's crust these days because everyone is just so oversensitive, even planet Earth itself.

I'll tell you who is a huge, huge worry for.

It's a huge, huge worry for the Ninja Turtles.

These guys already live below ground in New York.

So, I mean, they're already...

I'm concerned for sewage flooding.

But yeah, yeah, it's also is it possible that Manhattan can no longer house the offices of Fox News because the presenters have become so thick

a drag on the entire landmass

Is that have we considered that as a possibility to be explored?

Well, we have now.

It's their only hope because what they're doing is manufacturing so much hot air that eventually it will lift it up.

They just won't be able to control the direction.

So we're going to have to somehow tether Manhattan Island.

If it floats out to the Atlantic, I guess that's not so much of an issue.

But if it floats inland,

could land in New Jersey.

It would be absolute

in Hindenburg all over again, wouldn't it?

I'll tell you what, though, we'll be in for a hell of a Bruce Bringstein album.

I just really like that the guy doing the research is a geophysicist, and he's got such a physicist's brain on it, that he was like

if you get repeated exposure to seawater you can corrode the steel and destabilize buildings which you clearly don't want and then as an afterthought flooding also kills people which is I guess probably

the greatest concern

he doesn't care about that he's not interested

Old news now and more research has shown that humans, the celebrity species, began romantically kissing each other 4,500 years ago, earlier than had previously been thought.

I mean, it does raise the question, this,

that what the f were they doing before that?

I mean, were people just getting straight down to it?

You know, for all the many thousands and thousands of years of evolution that brought humanity to the point where the smooch was invented four and a half thousand years ago.

Was it just pure business?

Also, what was the non-romantic kissing that was going on?

I've done a lot of that.

Previous canoodling experts have suggested that romantic kissing spread either from South Asia three and a half thousand years ago or from France

or from France around the same time that the shrug was invented or just in the 1960s.

But this new research has shown that Egyptians were smooching each other as early as 2,500 BC and who can blame them with their golden beards and slinky sphinx wear and their elaborate sarcophagi and their big pointy corpse holders?

Oh, yeah.

Mesopotamians were also at it.

Something about being in between the big rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, which when looked at from space do look alarmingly like a pair of seductive lips puckering up for a snog.

But I mean, what does this tell us about human civilization, Josie?

That it took us so fing long to get to

invent the snog.

Well, I was just excited because they were able to update their knowledge because they found ancient Mesopotamian texts that said that a married woman had come close to being unfaithful after a kiss and an unmarried woman was vowing to avoid kissing and having sex.

And that text was Grazia magazine.

Wow.

I guess that we also have to credit this as the invention of foreplay because presumably if they weren't doing romantic kissing, they weren't, you know, warming up with some hand stuff.

But I think there might have been something completely different that we don't know about because it wasn't very good.

My daughter, who is four, invented a thing with her friend where they pulled down their pants and ran at each other's buttocks backwards.

Right.

And they called it a bum high five.

Right.

You say invented, but you obviously haven't studied the history of British private schools and the

sorted sports that emerged therefrom in the 19th century.

Some of which became codified into the sports we know today, others which

sadly lost to history.

That brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

We hope you found it suitably illuminating and educational, as always.

So, Josie, tell us more about the long-awaited book.

It's called Because I Don't Know What You Mean and What You Don't.

And it's about a lot of overthinking, over-anxious characters, and

they're short stories.

And some of them are funny, and some of them are very dark.

So, there's something for everyone, and you're except for people who don't like my work.

There's nothing for them.

I've actually read the book, and I thought it was brilliant.

It's really, really good.

There you go.

It has the official Nish Kumar seal of approval.

Yeah, that's as official as it gets.

So, once it's in the shops, on is it the 25th?

The 25th?

Oh, thank you.

Still haven't got the date out

You're also also doing some live tour shows I am yeah, please

have a look at

my Twitter and Instagram at JC Long and you'll be able to see all the dates.

There you go details on the internet.

Nish you have a new podcast.

I have a news podcast.

I'm now doing double bubble on the news.

I'm doing the news podcast and then I'm doing this show that makes fun of news shows.

I'm doing, yeah, it's called Pod Save the UK, and it's available wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also hear me on the news quiz, which is half-ish way through the current series.

You can get that on BBC Sounds.

Thank you for listening.

We will play you out now with more contributors to the Bugle Wall of Fame.

If you want to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to keep the show free, flourishing, and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Our voluntary subscribers on the Wall of Fame this week have all developed computer simulations to find out what would happen if people and things from history did things that they didn't actually do, and vice versa.

Drew Boeen ran a computer simulation on large statues and discovered that if they came to life, the Colossus of Rhodes would ask the Statue of Liberty out on a date, but the Statue of Liberty would turn the Colossus down.

Simon Cassell's computer simulation focused on what 15th century influencer Joan of Arc would have got up to if she had been around in the late 20th century.

Perhaps due to a rogue algorithm, it suggested that Joan would have been a top 10-ranked tennis player who would have won the 1997 French Open, during which one of the commentators would have unwittingly said she was on fire.

Derek Mead found that William Shakespeare, had he been around in the 1950s, would have written a mixture of film dramas about polar expeditions and Queen Victoria, advertising jingles for domestic goods and reports on football matches in the West Midlands.

Similarly but differently, Sam Bergman found that if Taylor Swift had been Jonathan Swift and vice versa, 18th century music would have been considerably livelier and 21st century pop would have had more songs about eating babies.

Nathan Clifford discovered that if 17th century painting star Artemisia Gentileski had been a prehistoric cave painter, she'd have done pictures of bison.

Really excellent ones though, but it was just the way people rolled in those days, artistically.

For his part, Ian Horsey ran a computer sim on cubism star Picasso to find out what he'd have churned out if he'd been an ancient Roman, which he obviously wasn't.

The upshot of that was some computer-generated frescoes that, shall we say, were not suitable for work, plus a weird sculpture of Julius Caesar with three noses and a guitar.

On the subject of the ancient world, Richard Perrin calculated that if Abraham Lincoln had been an ancient Athenian, not only would he have had a different taste in headwear and probably been a little bit safer in theatres, but he would have spoken Greek and still made moving speeches about battles.

Victoria Godfrey stuck 9th century algebra pioneer Al Khwarizmi through her version of this software, blocked him into the 19th century and found that he would in fact have invented the smartphone in 1867.

And similarly, Rob Abram concluded that the internet would have been developed almost a thousand years early if only Bi Sheng, the Song Dynasty Chinese printing pioneer, had got a bit of venture capital funding to push his ideas on a little bit further and a little bit faster.

Thank you to all our contributors to the Bugle Wall of Fame.

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.