Kashmir, Cash and Cojones

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4259 of the audio newspaper now officially recognized as the one source of evidence for future historians of planet Earth.

Anything not covered in this week's show will in essence not have happened so do pay attention i am go on have a guess you really should get this one i'll leave a gap for you well most of you got it right well done i am andy zoltson this is the 14th of april 2023 as we record and i am joined today by the voice of the southern hemisphere herself alice fraser and representing every single person who has ever is now or will in future come from live in or have any other link to the renowned continent of asia anuvab pal hello both of you hello andy uh we have a Tri-Continental bugle today.

Anuvab, you are in New York City.

Yes, I'm visiting New York City, Andy.

I was called in for the deposition of President Trump.

So apparently, he's a liar, and they got in touch with all the other famous liars in the world.

I'm a very well-known liar in India, and they wanted to do a comparative study of lying.

And so, I'm just here for the weekend to depose, and then I'm gone.

Okay, well, that sounds like a lot of fun.

And but can we believe you?

He's both brothers.

He's the liar that always tells the truth and the liar that always lies.

Alice, you are in the continent of

Australasia.

Is that a term people still use or not?

People still use Australasia.

I mean, the continent specifically that I'm on is the other one, the Australia part of that.

I'm an old school Australasian.

I call Oscondwanaland.

And you can't make me change, you can't make me grow legs, I'm just gonna stay here.

You're currently

about halfway through the Melbourne Festival or a little bit further.

I've tipped over to the point of the Melbourne Festival where you give up.

That's basically, you know, the first week your audience are half full and you think, oh, maybe I'll get word of mouth.

And then second week, you're like, ah, that word of mouth.

And then third week, you're just like, fine, fine, this is what it is.

we are recording on the 14th of April on this day in 1912

the British passenger liner Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sank

but I see that as typical negative anti-British reporting to me British hero ship Titanica Britannica selflessly attempted to reunite a lost iceberg with its Arctic ice sheet mummy by giving it a good old knock northwards.

Was partially successful before then volunteering to be a new luxury seabed feature for North Atlantic's hard-working deep-sea creatures.

So let's look for the positives in Brexit, Britain.

I've always thought the Titanic was a story of victim blaming, Andy.

Why are we blaming the ship when the iceberg was right there, you know, not resolving its issues?

Absolutely.

You will not get a word of argument from me.

On the 15th of April, tomorrow, as we record, in the year 1755, Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language,

the first proper dictionary of the renowned language.

Turns out he missed out quite a lot of words, including internet.

He did have internet spelt I-N-T-E-R-N-E-T-T-E,

which was a female resident of a jail.

Photo bomb, he missed that word out as well.

He did have portrait painting bomb, albeit wasn't quite as common as the photo bomb these days.

Just took a lot more patience and logistical planning.

Some words he did have in, including shithiad, which he defined as the epic journey of a rascal cad or bastardus jilli pigging scruffernuckle, or that rascal cad or scruffer knuckle himself.

That word is often mispronounced today.

Some words, of course, have changed, including hangry,

which was a term at the time in which someone fell into a temper whilst disputing the validity of their judicial conviction whilst being led to the gallows.

Deplatforming which was the opening of the trap trapdoor at those at that public hanging and woke in those days meant the state of having been roused from sleep.

That's changed incredibly over the years.

Also included a word that we now know have no place in our shared vocabularium, including including empathy, perspective, compromise, and calm, constructive debate from different viewpoints, accepting there is more than one way of seeing an issue or problem and that others' views may be valid and relevant even if we personally currently disagree with them.

That was then the longest word in Johnson's dictionary now.

Sadly.

Absolutely.

There was a man called my knowledge of British literature is not vast, but

there's a man called James Boswell, who I think wrote a book called Samuel Johnson A Life, which people consider the first and even today the greatest biography ever written of an individual.

That is, of course, still Andy Zaltzmann A Life in Cricket comes along.

So it's only temporarily for 350 years.

It's the greatest biography ever written.

Everything is temporary.

Everything is temporary.

Even mathematics, I think it was only 250 years ago.

But you know, there we go.

We'll take it.

A quick section in the mid this week to commemorate

the leaks that have emerged recently from America, we have some exclusive bugle leaks that we've managed to acquire and are now leaking, including that Prince Charles is close to brokering a peace deal with Aaron's son ex-Prince Hartholomew, whereby the former role will rejoin the family business in a new ceremonial as the Duke of Dudeship, in which he will attempt to make the monarchy more cool.

America is in advance talks to sell Donald Trump to Saudi Arabia.

Britain is rumoured to be be considering an application to join South America with the possibility of Uruguay becoming part of Europe

in a part exchange deal.

And singer Ed Sheeran apparently is, when not singing his oddly popular songs, a covert operative for Interpol responsible for the personal slayings of no fewer than 250 drug lords, warlocks, and mafia hypercheeses over a 30-year reign of terror.

Those leaks exclusively from the bugle.

Oh, it's good to be back, Andy.

I want a history book that says Ed Sheeran's Reign of Terror as a section.

Matter of time.

Matter of time.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, India.

We're beginning in India this week.

We're going to do news from all three of our countries, but we're going to start, Anuvab, with India.

And, well, I mean, Indian politics, politics, as discussed on this programme

variously over the years that you've been doing it, trying to understand Indian politics as an outsider is like a duck trying to understand astrophysics.

It is, you know, you know, i it's good to give it a go, but you must accept that you will never succeed.

So just bring us up to date with the latest developments, including the opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, who has been kicked out of parliament.

So, yeah, I mean, look, Andy, I started doing the bugle in 2014, and

after talking about,

I think somewhere around.

I'm pretty sure it was 2016.

2016, somewhere there was a lot of time.

I mean, you might have sneaked into a couple of recordings.

I was

secretly doing the bugle three years before I started doing the bugle.

Were you impersonating John Oliver for the last year that he was doing it?

When I'm not John Oliver, I am a short, balding Indian man.

I have two different personas.

That's why I'm in New York.

I'm John Oliver here.

Yeah, exactly.

When we started to talk about Indian politics in 2023, I know even less than when we started.

And we talk about it every week.

India's opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, was just thrown out of parliament.

And the reason this happened is because there was a complaint filed by a man called Purnesh Modi, a leader in

Prime Minister Modi's BJB party.

Now, just keep in mind the names.

The guy who filed the complaint, his name is Purnesh Modi.

The Prime Minister's name is Modi.

And the reason the complaint was filed was that in 2019, Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition, during an election rally, said, why are all thieves in India called Modi?

And he was referring to two other Modis.

So we're in a Modi metaverse right now.

The Modis he was referring to was

an Indian billionaire diamond merchant called Neerav Modi who stole a billion dollars from an Indian bank and didn't repay it and the founder of the IPL Cricket League, Lalith Modi,

who ran away from India under charges of financial chicanery.

So, by the way, both these other Modis are in London.

One of them is in Wandsworth Prison and the other one is in living in Hyde Park.

So those two Modis.

Wait, wait, in Hyde Park like a duck or in a house near Hyde Park?

Like a duck studying astrophysics.

You know, which is needed.

So both these Modis in London.

Rao Gandhi gives a speech saying, why have all Modis, why are all Modis thieves?

Why are they running away to London?

A completely unrelated Modi, Purnesh Modi, gets upset with this, goes to the Gujarat High Court and goes to the Gujarat lower court and files a complaint.

And the judge convicts him

saying, you know, I'm a Modi.

He's saying all Modis are thieves.

This is a direct affront on me, Modi, and Prime Minister Modi.

And the judge gives him a two-year suspended sentence.

Now, if you buy Indian constitution, if you have a criminal

conviction, you cannot be a member of Indian Parliament.

However, it is important to note that you can have a criminal charge and be a member of Indian Parliament.

In fact, at the height of this glorious situation in the mid-80s, there were a number of members of parliament who did up to 30 or 50 criminal charges.

But they were not convicted.

Rao Gandhi has been convicted for two years.

He has to give up his seat.

And now he's going on rallies around India as a convicted criminal defamer because the charge was for criminal defamation.

And he's attracting even bigger crowds than he was attracting earlier when he went on his rally across India, which we talked about.

Which led me to some research, Alice Andy, about whether it is a bad thing to be a political leader and go to jail.

So I found a man called Eugene V.

Debs, who

was an American man in an Atlanta penitentiary serving a 10-year sentence when he lost the 1920 presidential election.

And more recently,

There's a host of other people.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in the middle of an ongoing corruption trial.

Brazil's Louise Inasio Lula de Silva was in jail and now president.

Imran Khan is about to be arrested.

Prime Minister of Malaysia Najib Razak is currently in jail.

Argentina's Christina Fernandez de Grichner, vice president, was convicted of fraud but

but given a prison sentence.

South Korean president Park Gyun-hee was sentenced to 24 years for corruption.

Nicolas Sarkozy has of France two separate cases.

He's been sentenced to prison and he's appealing.

So I'm beginning to realize that prison is not the exception.

It's the norm and

so I'm surprised that Britain hasn't caught up with this because this is clearly very unfashionable for your politicians to be out of prison.

Yes, well, I mean, we did have a, Boris Johnson had a bit of a run-in with the law, which hastened his departure from his completely absurd state of being Prime Minister.

So, I mean,

in terms of

Indian politics,

obviously we must respect the judicial systems of all countries, but is it a bit suspicious that India's main opposition leader appears to have been excluded from parliament on the basis of what appeared to be just a bit of a joke.

Listen,

this thing about India becoming a fascist state, I don't agree with it.

I've said this many times on this podcast.

If anything, it's gentle fascism.

It's fascism.

If fascism was done by Etsy,

if fascism was done by Lululemon, this is what you would get.

You know, this is an independent judge who has independently convicted him.

Now, the judge happens to be in Modi's home state.

The judge happens to like Modi.

The judge is probably called Modi.

I don't know.

And maybe the judge is upset that people named Modi should not be called thieves.

It could be a number of reasons.

Andy, but we have an independent judiciary set up by you.

And

me personally.

You personally

set up the judiciary.

And, you know, I think it's really unfair to say that the whole state machinery is, you know, is sort of being moved around just to convict Raul Gandhi.

Now, it is true that the government of India has changed the way judges are appointed, so now Modi has a direct say in judge appointments.

But again, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about here.

Nothing, nothing.

It's an independent thing.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess in terms of

whether or not you trust a government, I guess there's a certain checklist, step-by-step checklist you go through in deciding whether or not to trust a government.

I mean, for some people, the question is simply, is your government the government?

In which case, that's enough not to trust them.

But, you know, you might look for more.

You might look for disqualifying opponents from parliament, suppressing dissenting voices, eroding social harmony and public institutions, and building ridiculously massive statues and naming stadiums after yourself, despite you not being very good at sport.

Those are things that might all kind of tot up the don't entirely trust me vibe, which might be why there's a certain level of skepticism towards.

There is, there is.

But I think some of these things, institutions, democracy, are too hyped.

You know, like Modi's asking some basic questions.

Like, why does the judiciary have to be independent of the executive?

You know, why can't we all be one happy family?

I mean, these are questions that, why can't I have a say in the appointment of the judges?

Why does the election commission, which conducts the world's largest free and fair election, have to be so free and fair?

You know,

why can't I meet the election commissioner right on the eve of elections and ask how the voting is going?

You know, if my friend Donald Trump can look for 12,000 votes in the state of Georgia, why can't I get into this?

We all learn from America.

Why can't I get into this?

You know, there are certain institutions of democracy which I think Prime Minister Modi sensibly is questioning.

You know, what are the values of the big D?

You know,

another question being posed to Modi at the moment is the decision to host a meeting of the G20

in a city called Srinagar, which is in

the Indian-administered part of Kashmir.

Now, Kashmir,

Anuvab, is a region that has has been, well, I think disputed might be slightly underplaying it.

This decision to host the G20 in Srinagar has been criticised by Pakistan as irresponsible.

And it does seem like a curious decision.

I mean, India is a big country.

It is, you know, has a lot of people in it.

It is humping itself merrily towards the one and a half billion population mark.

It has, according to Wikipedia, 46 cities with a million or more inhabitants.

Srinagar is one of those 46, just a few horny weekends away from 1.2 million people.

It's 31st biggest city in India on the list,

but it's the only one of the top 85 most popular cities in India in the controversial Kashmir region.

So it would have been quite easy for Modi to choose to host the G20 somewhere less provocative.

But by that logic, there were 84.

I don't know if he just threw a dart at a dartboard in which there were 85 cities, and it just happened to land on Srinivas.

It might just be bad luck, but how else can you explain this decision?

A topic that doesn't often come up on a comedy podcast is the status of Kashmir.

It's not up there with, you know, Tinder dating and so on.

But I'm going to give it a shot, Andy.

So, Pakistan has just said India's irresponsible move is the latest in a series of self-serving measures to perpetuate its illegal occupation of Kashmir in sheer disregard of the UN Security Council resolutions.

So

Pakistan does not consider Kashmir Indian territory.

Right.

Now everybody might be asking what on earth is going on.

So Andy, I thought I'd give it a shot and take your listeners back to nineteen forty seven for a brief summary of what this problem is all about.

Okay.

But but before you start this, Anivab, uh would it be wise for uh any any British listeners of a historically sensitive disposition to turn the volume down to around about zero?

Just a little bit.

I mean, if there are any

relatives of Lord Mountbatten,

I think they may need to go back and sort some stuff out.

Everybody else, you can listen.

They did have a role to play.

On 1947, Kashmir's population was 77%.

percent Muslim, 20% Hindu.

It was ruled by a Hindu king

who, to complicate matters, saw himself as British.

In 1903, King Hari Singh served as a page of honor to Lord Curzon at the Grand Delhi Darbar.

We all know what page boys are famous for, and ruling Kashmir is not one of them.

In 1930, Hari Singh attended the first roundtable conference in London.

He suggested that Indian princely states should be made independent of India.

So the British were considering a country called India and he retorted saying,

India, what on earth is that?

Because he wanted his own kingdom.

In 1947, after India gained independence, Kashmir could have joined India, could have joined Pakistan, or remained independent.

This king maneuvered in such a way that he wanted to play India and Pakistan off each other and get stuff from both of them.

He was so unpopular that his ratings at the time, when there were no polls, was around minus 2%.

There was an armed uprising against against him in a place called Poonch,

supported by Pakistani militants.

They wanted to overthrow him.

He reached out to India for help.

Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was ready to send troops, but the Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten,

advised the Maharaja that if you want troops, then you have to sign a document saying you accede to India.

And the Maharaja signed the instrument of accession 26th October 1947.

So as Indians, we have to thank Mountbatten, who by all accounts had no idea what he was doing, for kindly giving us Kashmir.

And I'll explain this to you in terms of Disneyland.

Okay.

Andy, I think this is the best way to explain it.

You're in Disneyland, okay?

And you've paid a day pass for all the rides.

There is a special ride that you haven't paid for.

There's a guy on the ride, you see this guy's falling.

You say, I can help this guy so he doesn't die.

The guy in charge of the ride says, okay, if you do that, I can give you this ride for free.

You say, I wasn't thinking of that.

I was just thinking of saving this guy's life.

But sure, I'll take it.

That, in a nutshell, is the history of what will probably be the next nuclear war.

Right.

Well, thank you for explaining that

so clearly for us.

It's such a fraught area, Andy.

Inviting the G20 summit there is like a man whose wife has been repeatedly asking for a divorce inviting his tinder date to a romantic evening of bowling in the backyard of his soon-to-be ex-wife like it's yeah yeah that's exactly what modi is doing yeah he's making a statement saying oh oh sorry there was another important thing kashmir had independent status till 2019 in 2019 modi repealed that independent status so they are it's been revoked so they are no longer an independent autonomous uh country so india now fully runs runs it so Modi said now that I run it I can buy a house in Kashmir I can do the G20 summit in Kashmir

I can open you know a theme park with water slides in Kashmir I can do whatever I want come world and that's what he's doing well I mean if he opens the theme park with water slides in time for the G20 summit that this could be one of the great moves in global politics because

so often these summits are rather serious events yeah I've always said global politics isn't wet enough

But if you've got all these world leaders having an absolute blast, going down water slides, having fun with each other, is that not going to open the lines of communication that could make this apparently provocative move into something that will be seen as step one towards eternal global peace?

Absolutely.

This is what Modi is questioning.

Why do these summits have to be this boring?

Why does democracy have to be so democratic?

These are the questions we need to answer in 2023.

These are the cushions I have on my couch instead of live, laugh, love that say

lubrication and gravity solve a lot of problems.

Australia news.

Alice,

one of the big issues in Australia at the moment is the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, which is due later in the year and is causing quite a lot of

political rumpus.

Can you

explain it to us outsiders and bring us up to the state?

For those of you who don't know

the idea of an Indigenous voice to Parliament is mainly exactly what it sounds like, and people feel about it mostly how you would imagine they would feel about it.

It's the idea that there'll be a role now for a body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

They'll advise the Government of Australia on things that affect Indigenous Australians.

People who object do so mainly because they're like, but that means they'll have an opinion on everything, because everything we do affects the the Indigenous people of Australia, to which the answer is yes, yes.

There are also the people who think it's a distraction from the pursuit of treaty, which I feel would be a better outcome or something that we should be focusing our political energy on, which is fair enough.

And then there are the people who think this whole debate is a waste of time because they're saving up their empathy and historico-racial accountability for a rainy day where they might need it.

The Australian Electoral Commission has launched a public education campaign, hoping to improve knowledge of the Australian Constitution which currently sits at the level of what we've got a constitution and the referendum process and also hoping to combat misinformation and disinformation because they're anticipating a wave of misinformation and disinformation.

It is fascinating to watch the government talking about all of the preparations that they're making to combat disinformation and misinformation because it's basically them just continually saying we are not equipped to deal with the internet.

We know for a fact that we can't do politics and yet we're about to throw a massive voting party on an incredibly complex and fraught historically laden subject.

It's like inviting people onto your yacht while ostentatiously reading your How to Drive a Big Yacht for Dummies book in the hope that will make them feel safe.

Referendums

in recent times have a bit of a checkered record, and if I may quote what a very wise man once said about the Brexit vote, is reducing massively complicated social and political issues to oversimplified binary choices, right or wrong.

And

Australian politics always looks for rifts, I guess, and in the same way that politics in every single country

looks for rifts.

But it does seem to, I guess,

you can see there's an element of scepticism about

allowing

this voice, because it represents something of a betrayal of modern Australia's heritage.

It was a nation founded on British imperial values, which included not listening to the voice of the Indigenous population, either by ignoring it, silencing it, or stealing all its food and natural resources.

So all it could say was, please going to to have some soup.

Also, don't forget the period where it was defined as the flora and fauna.

That's fun.

Yeah, well, we've chosen two stories here that really are giving Britain a bit of a historical kicking to get the shook.

But it's quite hard, actually, to find many news stories that don't do that at some point, if you go far enough down the line.

I don't know, Andy, I'm obsessed with the government misinformation website.

I find it so immensely unconvincing.

It feels like if a government releases a website intended to combat misinformation, it makes me think this website looks sketchy.

Like it just, there's something about a government misinformation website that just makes me feel like, are you just pretending to be combating misinformation in an attempt to make me trust you so you can misinform me more effectively down the line?

And because it's a government website, the answer is yes.

Yes, absolutely.

Don't trust them.

Well, we've done India and Australia.

UK news now.

Everything is rubbish.

There's really not a lot more to add.

I'm trying to get the UK section done in under 15 seconds, otherwise I'll start getting upset.

I mean, the Home Secretary is a racist, not according to me, but according to members of her own party.

So that's not me saying it.

I'm being purely objective and reporting what her own supporters or...

People who should be her own supporters are saying.

Yes, it's increasingly hard to escape the sensation that we are, but a withered husk of a mirage of a fiction.

But still, Team GB.

It's only coming up to 11 years since London 2012.

We've still got that.

We've still got that.

Hey, Andy, on the bright side, it used to be you'd have to walk into a lake with stones in your pockets and stay underwater for ages, but now you just walk into a river and you will immediately melt.

That's fun.

Yes.

Yep.

There's, I mean, literally, there is shit everywhere.

In many ways, our rivers are just living metaphors for the state of our national politics

Now it's time for a bugle currency section Alice you are the bugle's cryptocurrency correspondent.

I know you are as fascinated by cryptocurrency as it is with you for those of you who are unaware of it cryptocurrency is made-up money that is even more fictitious than real money already is but which has proved occasionally more stable in financial crises than real currencies even though it's less real than them.

Although at times it's also even more unstable due to some kind of glitch in the space-time continuum, that means that reality doubles in on itself and the whole thing falls apart.

So,

Bitcoin remains the most well-known cryptocurrency.

Of course, there are others.

There are others, including Swiss Dollar, Crooked Oath, Evirium, Deludo, and Hallucinate, many of which are struggling.

But

just

the environmental impact of Bitcoin is proving to be,

well, in layman's terms, fing massive.

Oh my goodness, Andy, yes.

If you think of Bitcoin, just think of it like Schrodinger's currency, but the cat is Tinkerbell, and you have to believe in it really hard so that when the box opens, the money's real.

I know all money is Tinkerbell, but some money is more Tinkerbell than others, and Bitcoin is it.

Another way to think of Bitcoin is

Bitcoin is to money what pornography is to sex.

In theory, it's sort of the same thing, but one is way more flashy, and you're not sure if the physics works, and it's maybe illegal, and someone's definitely going to strain a groin.

Another way to think of cryptocurrency is cryptocurrency, when you buy it, you're not getting scammed, you're investing.

in the opportunity to scam someone else in the future.

But one of the best ways to think about Bitcoin is if you imagine

Bitcoin, it's like money, but if money were literally only a record of how much electricity you have wasted,

what happens is Bitcoin is generated by the complex machinery of computers doing sums that nobody needs doing.

And as a result, the sum, you get a cryptocurrency

minted.

And what people are doing, because people are people, is they're making these massive plants to generate Bitcoin, which is to say to generate nothing, just to waste electricity.

It's like you waste electricity and then someone prints the receipt and then you can use that receipt to buy milk.

But they don't use the receipt to buy milk because cryptocurrency is good for very little except buying criminal enterprises and

pictures of apes smoking cigars.

Now, these massive power plants that are used to waste money occasionally stop wasting the electricity and sell it to people for real money as another way of making money

that is more like making money than the other way of making money.

I don't know.

It's so depressing, Andy.

It's almost impossible to wrap your head around how depressing it is.

And in terms of the amount of electricity used,

I read that it's more than

Argentina per year.

That's Argentina, the renowned

massive South American country with more than 40 million people in it.

To put it in further context, Bitcoin uses more electricity every minute than the entire Roman Empire used in its entire 500-year stint as Europe's leading power franchise.

So,

because because they're not actually making anything in these massive factories, they can turn off the factories whenever they want, which allows them, as these massive energy drains, to save and make money by manipulating U.S.

power markets.

So, they can avoid fees that get charged during peak hours.

They can resell the electricity at a premium when people are desperate for it.

They can be paid to offer to turn it off so that they're less of a drain on the system.

Even if this were renewable energy, which it isn't,

it would just be an unconscionable waste of electricity that could be being used to do anything good.

Can I just quickly add that hallucinic,

the currency that Andy Zoltzmann just invented, should be a Bitcoin if it isn't.

I mean, if we can have Solana and Ethereum, Hallucinich should absolutely be a Bitcoin.

Of course, even though cryptocurrencies have become increasingly prominent, real currencies still exist in many ways, the original cryptocurrencies.

And the dollar, the American dollar, is

struggling to retain its position as the world's number one ranked trad currency.

Anuvab, I know you

have been hoarding all currencies for many, many years.

Tell us about the dollar's current state of affairs.

Yeah, so this just very quickly, this topic has fascinated me recently

because there was a consortium of countries that got together around 2005 and they were the BRICS currency countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and I don't know what the S is, Slovenia?

I have no idea.

And they were supposed to be the next world power, and we know where that went,

except China, which sort of killed everybody.

But

these countries often meet and come together and still want life to be like it was in 2005.

And

their latest agenda is to de-dollarize the world.

China and Russia are leading it.

They do not want the US dollar to be the world standard anymore.

And it's fascinating to me because the US dollar is as strong as it could ever be.

The US economy is doing very well.

And China and Russia are saying we need to trade in something else.

Now,

it's a very good idea not to have a currency behemoth, of course.

But the problem is the alternative is coming from China and Russia.

I don't think we are near the day that if I left my children an inheritance in Juan or ruble, they would be happy.

And that is why I don't have children, Andy.

All right.

So that's the best way to avoid having to make these awkward decisions.

Yes.

I store all of my money in what I call crypto currency, which is money that only comes good after you die.

So, you know, they say you can't take it with you, but the it in that sentence is real money, and this isn't.

So maybe you can.

Buy, bye, bye, and find out when you die, die, die.

That's my selling point, Andy.

I've used it to buy a bridge that I can sell you later after this podcast.

I think I'm largely leaving my children cricket memorabilia,

which I'm hoping will become the world's leading currency at some point.

Bugle art and aesthetics section now.

The aesthetic story is from an article in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, which is not a publication that I believe we've mentioned before on this show.

And it includes in its conclusion,

this is one of the greatest, I don't know if it counts as like a full academic conclusion, but these words were written as the conclusion.

Ultimately, it was barely possible to identify a quotes beautiful scrotum.

We must instead speak of the least ugly.

And it's a paper on scrotum aesthetics and the increasing trend for people

having

cosmetic surgery on their nutsack.

Now, of course, the male scrotulia has long been regarded as the ugliest, silliest, and most comical part of the human anatomy, ever since the renowned species designer God rattled off the human form in a few minutes towards the end of a very busy week and had to tag on a few appendages right at the end after realizing he'd forgotten bits in the rush to meet his deadline.

But it's now become part of the vanity industry.

Now, human vanity has been one of the few growth industries of the third millennium so far, continuing and even building on its impressive form from the previous two, three to ten millennia.

And,

you know, here it is that

cosmetic ball sack surgery

exists.

How have we reached out of all the insane things that this millennium has thrown up so far?

This has got to be right up there with the most ridiculous.

Well, Andy, this is the thing.

You know, we have increasingly these visual aesthetic feeds coming into our faces, into our eyes all the time, how people should look, how things should look, how parts of your body should look.

Many people feel uncomfortable in their bodies and are seeking plastic surgery to address it.

And if they've done that, if they see a part of their body that they think is ugly, they think, well, I should try and get plastic surgery to make this look better.

The problem is with the scrotum that people know when it looks wrong, but they don't know when it looks right.

So they're just sort of generally tightening it, but there's no real aesthetic sort of rule of thumb about what direction it should be tightened in, what shape it should be when you're done.

People are just like,

fix it.

But there's no such thing as a beautiful scrotum, as the paper concludes, just the least ugly scrotum.

So I feel like we're all in unknown territory here.

And I completely agree with Alice.

Just to add, you know,

I feel like all life at one point or another is just scrotum aesthetics.

We know what's ugly, we don't know what's beautiful.

I think Picasso had the same problem.

I guess for the Nutsack to become the latest body part to

supposedly benefit from the morphic lunacies of the vanity industry.

As I said,

it is strange.

And I was reading about some of the options that are available.

One is a hard casing in a bi-ovoid shape made of practical and durable polypropylene with an attractive mahogany veneer for that kind of classic antique look.

You can get a molded wax coating similar to that found on E-Dam cheese but available in a range of colours to suit every occasion.

You can get green bays for the snooker-loving testiculant.

LED implants to aid nighttime navigation.

You can have your scrotum stretched, flattened, pleated or scrimped and then polished and made water resistant with a hypoallergenic varnish, gloss or matte as required from Gonadia's intimate body resins.

Or you can even get scrotuline testicular braces in which you simply put on your testicular braces at night to gradually maneuver your boliches to the ideal location for you and over just four years of nightly

scrotoline usage you could end up with each nadger securely relocated anywhere in the waist area even as far away as the outer hip.

So I mean there are all these options.

In many ways I would say that's too much choice.

I feel like

for people who feel like their scrotums are insufficiently attractive, I have a few pieces of advice.

Number one, don't lead with the scrotum.

I feel, I feel,

I mean, I feel like so much of dating now is sort of dick pick forward, whereas, in fact, I feel like the penis should never be your best asset, it should be the card you hold back and ideally present it at a point where it's sort of just a charming aspect of your personality.

Secondly,

if you are scrotally aesthetically challenged, take a tip from the comedy industry, in which there are many people who lean on comedy as a way of achieving attractiveness.

It doesn't need to be purely visual, attractiveness can be a number of facets.

Slap a couple of googly eyes on,

draw a little moustache, bring the charm to the panorama, and maybe it won't seem so upsetting to you.

And thirdly,

just hide them.

Just put a little hat on, just a little upside-down hat,

and hope for the best in the way that many people who are follicularly challenged on the top end, just put a little

fedora on top, fedora on the bottom, milady, up and down at the same time.

You know, after listening to this conversation, it's not often that I'm happy to be living in a poorer country, but now I am.

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

I think we've covered pretty much every relevant story that needs to be consigned to the history books.

Thank you very much to Alice and Anuab.

Alice, how much longer is your Melbourne show running for?

It's running until the end of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, which I think is about the 23rd of April.

Do come along if you want to see me do something

like comedy.

Also, you can listen to The Gargle, which is the sister podcast to The Bugle, the glossy magazine to The Bugle's audio newspaper for Visual World, or find me on patreon.com slash AliceFraser, where I'm running weekly writers' workshops now.

That's a thing that I'm doing.

Anuvab, any projects to plug?

Yes, Andy, 23rd of April, I am stopping by London to do a work in progress at 2 North Down near King's Cross.

It's called the Department of Britishness.

It tries to look at where Britain and India are today, which I feel like we've already done on the Bugle.

So I'm just stealing from there.

Yeah, and then I return in August for Edinburgh for 14 days.

Well, consider those projects thoroughly plugged.

We'll be back next week, and I will play you out this week with more entries on the Bugle Wall of Fame from our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join the Bugle Voluntary Subscription Scheme to give a one-off or a current contribution to help keep the show free, flourishing, and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

All of our wall of famers this week have conducted extremely important research on behalf of our great species.

Alexandra Keefe found an early manuscript of John Milton's Paradise Lost and its smash hit sequel Paradise Regained, proving that the 19th century poetry celeb's work was originally about him losing his keys and then finding them again sometime later down the back of his sofa.

Janos Ortman added further to this discovery by unearthing a series of letters between John Milton and his publisher who suggested that keys lost and keys regained would probably not sell that well and suggesting paradise as an alternative.

Jumping on board this particular literary historico research bandwagon, Raphael During joined the dots and found that Milton's publisher was none other than Sir Pensivald Gwynterrick, founder of course of the Pen Guin publishing house.

Sandra Schmidt added further to the sum of human understanding of 17th and 18th century English literature by discovering that Alexander Pope was not in fact a Pope at all.

It's a popular misconception, says Sandra.

He's not one of those people who took his name from his job.

But Alan Smith jumps in and points out that it is quite possible that when he was changing his name, having got his new job as a poet, he was just a little bit drunk and when he was trying to say poet, it sounded like Pope and was written down as such.

We may never know.

Lee Jackrell found that Shakespeare contemporary and pin-up boy of metaphysical poetry John Donne was so called because whenever he finished writing a poem or whatever he was hacking out that day, he would shout, Done!

According to Justin Christian's research, another 1600s quillwiggler, Milton's buddy Andrew Marvell, aside from rocking a distinct 1970s Argentinian centre-forward vibe with his trademark long locks, only did poetry because his preferred job, airline pilot, did not exist yet.

Moving on from poetry to salad ingredients, Carla Hoffman has unearthed almost unarguable proof that the origin of salad dressing was from a collision between two freight trains, one carrying olive oil, the other carrying vinegar, which were derailed into a field of lettuces with delicious results.

And David Murphy proved scientifically that cucumbers are edible.

For millennia, people had assumed they were lethally poisonous.

A key part of David's research was also the realization that cucumbers are easier to eat if you don't attempt to eat them whole.

Thank you to all 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.