Air Combat For Dummies

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4253 of The Bugle.

It is Monday the 13th of February 2023.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and today we're looking back on another week in which not everything in the world has gone as well as it could have done.

And until it does, we will keep keep this show going.

I promise to can it as soon as a global utopia is established, but it does have to be a sustainable one.

I'm not packing it in whenever the world has a perfect week.

I want a minimum of 10 years of solid utopian bliss before we wrap the bugle up.

So we will continue until then.

And joining me as we strive towards this

perfect world from the Californian state of California in San Francisco, it's NATO Green.

Hello, NATO.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

How are you?

Have you sort of shot any spy craft down out of the skies in San Francisco?

You know,

in this moment, it's hard to say whether the preferred outcome is the things in the sky are Chinese spyware or an actual alien invasion.

I don't know which one I want more at the moment.

Joining us from the Netherlands is Rhea Lena.

So, Rhea, where exactly are you?

Are you above or below sea level?

Well, actually, do you know what?

I'm actually hovering exactly at sea level because I managed to harness one of those balloons and it just, and it's just low enough to keep me hovering.

So, you know, so the cuff of my jeans is wet, but other than that, I'm okay.

We are recording on the 13th of February 2023.

On this day in the year 962, Emperor Otto I and Pope John XII co-signed the Diploma Ottonianum.

What a diploma that was.

It was an agreement in which Otto, the highly rated king of Germany and Italy, would you believe, recognised the controversial young pope as ruler of Rome.

Well, was it the right call?

Well, just two years later, John XII was, according to unconfirmed reports, chucked to his death out of a window by an angry husband who reacted quite badly to finding the Pope engaged in some distinctly non-Vaticanacious intercoursular congruentials with his wife.

Not the ideal Pope death.

As long-term buglers may remember from previous worst pope ever discussions, John XII was a spectacularly low-grade pope.

He was impoped at the tender age of 17 or 24, but let's say 17.

He fell somewhat short of pontifical standards.

He indulged in bribery, not one, not two, not three, but fornications.

He turned the sacred palace into a distinctly unpopular brothel.

He blinded, castrated, and murdered priests, which is the kind of thing that would definitely get him cancelled these days.

And he was a bit into devil worship, which is definitely not in the job spec for his modern-day successors.

And as I said, eventually killed by a jealous husband, a far cry from the classic modern-day Pope death, which generally involves getting really old and stopping breathing.

So it was what an exciting day for John XII in 962, albeit that it didn't last.

Otto himself remained king of Germany and Italy until his death in 973.

And I guess you have to think it's lucky he died then, because if he'd survived until the late 20th and early 21st century, he would have been put in a very awkward position as king of both Italy and Germany in the World Cup semi-finals of 1970, 1990 and 2006, as his two countries went head to head for a place in the final.

We are recording, as I said, on the 13th of February, which means that tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and that is our section in the bin this week, a special Bugle Valentine's Day pull-out section, in which we ask, should St.

Valentine be cancelled?

The third century martyr and heartthrob was canonized for his services to the greetings card industry and his extraordinary miracle in which he turned the anonymously sent short and rubbish poem into a universally acknowledged gesture of amorousness but does st Valentine's silence on the recent comments of rapper Kanye West mean that he that he is no longer a suitable role model for today's love-struck Romeos and Juliets besides as patron saint of beekeeping as well as overpriced meals out is St.

Valentine responsible for the dangerous trend of people sending swarms of bees to their beloveds, often causing at best a significantly ruined picnic and at worst a panicked get those f ⁇ ing bees out of my fing bedroom.

We investigate with the leading cancellologist, Streville Grunard.

Also, we ask leading cardiothoracic surgeon Flaustina van deschnaut whether the heart is an appropriate symbol of love in 2023, given that hearts have been possessed by, and it should be said, used by the likes of Hitler, Putin, and the aforementioned Pope John XII.

Besides, if you actually give someone your heart, Van der Schnaut's research suggests that it would range somewhere from messy and awkward to rapidly fatal.

And finally, St.

Valentine's Day, obviously predominantly a commercial festival these days, we look at products that could do with a bit of a financial fillip by becoming associated with romance and therefore bought and given as Valentine's Day gifts.

So to boost various struggling industries, the most romantic bugle vegetable of the year is the parsnip.

The most romantic piece of furniture of the year is the mahogany sideboard.

The romantic vehicle of the year is the tractor.

And the most romantic animal of the year is the rhinoceros.

Because, you know, if people start sending rhinoceroses as romantic gifts that will encourage a commercial breeding program which could save the species that section in the bin

top story this week Vladimir Zelensky has visited the renowned continent of Europe including the United Kingdom which is technically sort of part of the renowned continent of Europe it's been well a very exciting time for Europe to be visited by by Zelensky, the Ukraine president and former comedian, a man who seems to see nothing at all wrong whatsoever with making other comedians in their 40s, whose surname begins with Zed feel really quite shit about what they've chosen to do with their lives and careers.

He went on a whistle-stop tour of Europe last week to try to gain support, assistance, and above all, fighter jets.

And he returned home after visiting the UK, France, and Brussels with applause and admiration ringing in his ears alongside the unmistakable sound of people saying, yeah, definitely, we'll chuck you some fighter jets, of course, no problem.

Why wouldn't we?

Yes, mate, of course, at some point for sure.

Not right now, but absolutely.

I mean, it is really tricky.

It was an interesting thing to watch politically,

this visit.

Natural, did it

make big news

across in America?

Yes, it did.

I mean, I watched the video, Zelensky got to meet King Charles, and I watched the video, but I watched the video with the sound off.

And if you watch King Charles's lips, you can clearly hear him say, see him saying, so this is what a Jew looks like.

So,

and yeah, as you said, he asked for fighter planes, he didn't get fighter planes.

The UK offered to train fighter pilots without giving them the planes.

So, what use is the training with no planes?

It's just a paperback copy of Air Combat for Dummies and watching Top Gun on Blu-ray.

And then pilots get to go back to the Ukraine and stand in a field shouting at Russians, I dare you to park that plane over here.

He also met

Rishi Sunak, who said that nothing is off the table in terms of support, and nothing can be off the table doesn't mean that something

is on the table.

Yeah, I mean, it's quite possible, Rhea, isn't it, that there isn't even a table.

So you can say that nothing is off it or on it if the table, as it seems, doesn't actually exist.

I mean, especially when you're dealing with Rishi, who can barely see above the table.

So it's possibly that he was speaking in good faith.

He just has no idea what is up on the table or not, as the case may be.

Do you know what?

You know, it's true that the Brits are, I think we're war obsessed.

If you walk around London in particular, most of the statues are war statues.

And when we saw Zelensky come, you could just see all these little boys getting so excited because a war hero was in their midst.

And it was...

It was kind of sad and pathetic to see.

And then they made him go and see the king, who can't, who definitely can't give him any fighter jets.

You know, what can the king offer?

I have a pedophile brother that's dying to get involved.

Can he be of use to you?

Because we can't use him over here.

And Zelenxi's like, does he come with a plane?

No, thank you very much.

And I thought it was just cruel anyway to send him to the palace as if to go, look, ours is still standing.

He gave an impassioned moving speech to Parliament that really showed British politics at its very best, our parliamentarians coming together as one under the banner of supporting democracy and then, for once, shutting the fk up and letting a grown-up do the talking.

So that was an exciting moment for us.

They met in Westminster Westminster Hall, which is quite a historic building, built in the late 11th century.

Its plate hosted coronation banquets, the impeachment of Charles I,

that resulted in a disappointing reduction in the average number of heads still attached to the body of British monarchs at the end of their reigns.

We're still hoping we can bump it back up to one.

per monarch, but it is going to take something pretty special.

And of course, more recently, Westminster Hall hosted Queen Elizabeth II's ceremonial shuffle past.

But it was quite impressive.

He managed not to be distracted by the magnificence of the largest clear span medieval roof in Europe above him in Westminster Hall.

Thank you, the internet.

And he gave Parliament something it's really very unaccustomed to: a leader speaking with clarity, fluency, coherence, honesty, directness, and passion.

And it's really been a while since any one senior in the same set of buildings has managed more than any one of those in a single speech, or indeed in some cases, an entire career.

It was kind of hard to know what

to do.

He got a lot of applause and then some extremely equivocal backing uh as it turns out that you know the the fighter planes that we said we'd definitely really absolutely like to give him don't technically exist he asked for help then they didn't do anything and then they waited until he left and then they said they would definitely do something and when asked what they would do and when they would do it it seemed like they said we will definitely

buy rubberary what what have we been doing all this time in terms of defense in terms of where we're focusing

what little people power we have?

I mean, it's a real, can I say shit show on this?

You can absolutely say shit show.

It's a real shit show.

It's an absolute shit show.

And then Boris is there, you know, waving his underwear at Putin going, go on then, hit me.

I just, like, it's the last thing we need.

An unnamed cabinet minister quoted in the Independent said, we haven't got any f ⁇ ing jets to give.

Again, a rather more direct way of addressing the situation.

And there was

the moment that really stood out for me was that gift that Zelensky made of a fighter pilot's helmet, which he handed to the House of Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoylis, a symbolic and rather pointed gift of a fighter pilot's helmet on which was written, we have freedom, give us wings to protect it.

And in terms of gifts, it wasn't just a gift for the sake of giving a gift, was it?

It was a gift with a message.

It was sort of like giving someone a set of baby socks on a second date.

It's very much demanding something or giving your multi-millionaire uncle Trevis a book entitled How to Rewrite Your Will to Give More Money to Your Nieces and Nephews.

It's a gift that is demanding something in return.

And all credit to Lindsay Hoyle for not spoiling the moment by saying, Got one, or

I don't need this, mate.

I don't own a fighter jet.

Or just saying he's going to stick it on eBay.

So it was impressive restraint.

Andy, I gave a gift like that once.

So, Rhea,

besides being a comedian, I'm also a union organizer.

And many years ago,

we were trying to get the city to hire nurses for the county hospital.

And we marched into City Hall with hundreds of nurses and

hundreds of empty nurses' uniforms to symbolize the vacant nurse positions and had nurses chanting through the corridors and dumped hundreds of empty nurses' uniforms on the mayor's doorstep.

And it was a very dramatic moment.

It was a gift to the mayor to give them the empty nurses' uniforms to fill.

And the mayor appreciated it so much that they called my boss to demand an apology.

An apology?

Were they not in the mayor's size?

I don't understand.

It was seen as too aggressive an action.

Zelensky then went to Europe after his visit to the UK.

For any of our British listeners, if you don't remember Europe, it's that bit between Dover and Africa from memory.

And

he asked Europe for fighter jets as well, which didn't make us in Britain feel particularly special.

I thought he wanted our fighter jets, not just any fighter jets.

So that rather undermined the message of his visit.

Boris Johnson, as you mentioned, he suggested sending Typhoon jets to Ukraine, which is the kind of thing that's much easier to promise when you're not actually prime minister anymore and haven't thought through the logistics of whether those particular planes would actually help, which, according to some experts, they wouldn't.

They're not technically the right type of planes that Ukraine needs.

So it's good to see Boris Johnson still has the completely vacuous token empty promise club in his political golf bag, all set for his long-awaited return.

And as you said, the fact is that our defense equipment at the moment is in a sub-optimal condition, as is probably the case for most countries around the world.

I saw one expert, albeit an expert that I made up, said that the UK is ready for a defensive war of anything up to 19 minutes in duration.

Zelensky told the EU that a Ukraine that is winning should become a member of the EU,

and that if the Ukraine that is winning gets to join the EU, a Ukraine that is losing gets to become a member of the Wu-Tang clan, I think.

And he said the report about his speech said that lawmakers stood in sober silence as the EU anthem Ode to Joy was played.

And nothing says joy like sober silence.

European Parliament President Roberta Mitsola said that the response to Putin's war against Ukraine must be proportional to the threat, and the threat is existential.

When she says that Putin's war is an existential threat, she means that Zelensky could transform into a cockroach,

be executed, and discover that there's no God and life has no meaning.

Yeah, no, he went.

So he went to France to ask for planes, but then he went to Brussels to ask for EU membership.

Yeah, you know, and he and he was sort of saying, well, our economy is in a mess.

We barely have any energy.

You know,

our people are poor and hungry.

And they said, yeah, we just got rid of the UK.

Why would we let you in?

That's like one for one.

That doesn't make any sense.

It was really interesting, actually, because he spoke in Ukrainian when he was in Brussels, but he spoke, well, he spoke English everywhere else.

And then in Brussels, where the working language is English, he spoke Ukrainian because he's like, I want to feel at home here.

You want to feel at home here.

And it's a tricky balance.

I don't have a punchline for this.

I'm just explaining the news now through the Beagle.

I would just say, I just was fascinated by it that he went, I want to feel like I'm at home here.

And my heartstrings are just like, yes, I want it to be a happy ending.

I love a happy ending.

But then if you look at the Balkans, there's some Balkan states that have been standing in line for a very long time that you sort of of go, this is tricky, because what message are you sending?

If you want to come in fast, get to war and we'll let you in straight away.

I don't know, you know,

that's the last thing that we need.

Well, particularly, you know, from a British point of view, if we want to rejoin the EU at some point, does that mean we're going to have to have

a war with Norway or something to get our way back into the EU?

These things get very, these were not discussed before the Brexit vote in 2016, which is irresponsible politics.

I think we could win that war, though.

A war with Norway.

Really?

Right, because you already said it.

We've got like 19 minutes worth of artillery, and they have such good labor laws that they probably insist on the entire military having a holiday for their own mental health after 15 minutes.

I think we're in.

In his speech to the EU, Zelensky said, quote, the sooner we get heavy long-range weapons and our pilots get modern planes, Emmanuel, the earlier our pilots can get modern planes, Olaf, the more powerful will be our tank coalition.

I thought it was funny that Zelensky was on a first-name basis with the heads heads of state, like not addressing people by their respectable titles.

It was as if he was doing a military aid version of Paul Simon's song 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.

Give me a tank, Hank.

Give me a bomb, Tom.

Give me a grenade, Wade.

Give me a bazooka, Luca.

Give me an M16, Gene.

There was one moment of truly extraordinary bizarre 21st centuriness when, at a United Nations meeting, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd appeared on a big screen on a video call from the Swiss Alps at the invitation of Vladimir Putin's Russia and then got zinged by the Ukrainian ambassador with one of his own lyrics saying he was just another brick in the Kremlin's wall and I think I don't know where the 21st century can go from there.

Roger Waters on a big screen at 60s Rocks are on a big screen talking about the Ukraine-Russia war getting zinged with his own lyrics.

Unless a pregnant Rihanna had floated down from the ceiling on a special platform whilst he was doing it, it's hard to know where else civilization can go from that moment.

American news now, and Joe Biden last week delivered his State of the Union speech.

We are now past the halfway point in his presidential term, and not long now until we get stuck into the inevitably putrid journey into the rotten rotting heart of democracy that will be the 2024 presidential election.

NATO, what did you make of Biden's speech and what it said about where America is at this point in his presidency?

F you, Andy.

I thought we tried to avoid punching down on this show.

Biden's speech was good.

I mean, a lot of most of the discourse, as they say, the coverage of the speech focused on the heckling QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene showed up in a white fur coat and jeered and yelled during Biden's speech.

She basically showed up looking and acting as if cocaine were a person.

And

people were yelling at Biden.

And I understand that this wouldn't be as shocking to you because you have question time in parliament.

But imagine that if you had to watch question time and if half the parliament were armed with AR-15s and were also, instead of humans, actual puffer fish,

just like bloated and spiny to scare away potential predators.

There was also an altercation where Republican Senator Mitt Romney confronted noted liar George Santos, and they had a tense exchange in which Romney said, You don't belong here and you should be embarrassed.

And then apparently Santos asked Romney for a donation of $5 million to an imaginary charity.

So

there was the mission of which is to graft a sense of shame onto himself, but he intends to use that money for rent.

In the official Republican response to the State of the Union, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Biden is captive to a woke mob who can't even tell you what a woman is.

Now, can't tell you what a woman is.

I'll tell you.

I'll just cut to the chase.

A woman is someone who tells you that they're a woman.

Like, I don't normally go through my life and meet someone, and they're like, hi, my name is Elizabeth.

And then I go, prove it.

If anyone, I meet anyone with a ladylike demeanor, I say, clits out, dicks out, like rock, paper, scissors.

Let's see what we're working with.

They yelled at Biden.

They jeered.

They called him a liar.

Biden got a lot of credit for handling hecklers as a comic.

I respect that he didn't go to the usual comedian's comeback

of saying, hey, Republicans, leave me alone.

I'm working.

I don't go to where you work and knock Tucker Carlson's dick out of your mouth.

But he did say, I shagged your mom at one point,

which was awkward because

he made it weird.

uh he said that republicans want to cut social security and medicare which they do and then they booed him for saying their own position out loud in public uh so he asked everyone to come together and say social security and medicare are safe and it was described as a masterful political move by joe biden because we can count on republicans to never lie for political gain he said folks a lot in the speech uh and if you had like played a drinking game during the speech where you took a drink every time that biden said folks by the end of the speech you would have had cirrhosis of the liver so bad,

you would have passed it on to generations of your descendants.

But the speech really focused on like rebuilding the middle class.

And he said, he said, like typical sort of Biden kind of like folksy homilies.

Like he said, when world leaders asked me to define America, I said I could define it in one word.

And I mean this, possibilities.

I would have gone with defiantly ignorant, but do you, Joe Biden?

And then he said, where is it written that America can't lead the world in manufacturing?

I don't know where that's written.

And that is an easy question to answer.

It was actually written in the North American Free Trade Agreement that Joe Biden voted for in 1993.

That's where he wrote it down himself.

He also said, and by the way, every time someone starts a small business, it's an act of hope.

And I would say it depends on the business.

I'm not sure I'd consider Dave's Suicide Emporium an act of

He talked about bringing jobs back and giving people pride.

He said, maybe that's you watching from home.

You remember the jobs that went away.

You remember them, don't you?

To which America said in one voice, no, we're Americans.

We don't believe in historical memory.

We don't remember anything longer ago than the last time the McRib was on the menu at McDonald's.

He wants to create jobs in pride.

I have a different proposal.

How about a middle-class standard of living with pride, but no jobs?

There's so much,

we have so much wealth here that by redistributing the wealth, we could get everything done, work two days a week, we could let the robots do the work and we could just write poems and f there we go.

We're reaching that utopia I mentioned at the start of the show.

I really enjoyed the speech.

I was really impressed.

I thought, I mean, first of all, I thought it made sense, which was great.

I mean, you know, I

did.

Is that not electoral suicide making sense, Rhea?

In the current political climate, is that not the worst thing he could do if he wants to win elections?

I think you have to remember, remember, like, this is Joe Biden, all right?

Joe Biden's been a politician for about 150 years, okay?

And we haven't seen this kind of sense from him in a little while, all right?

He's given a number of speeches, he said a number of things, and it's not often that you can go, hang on a second, you've connected A to B to C, and it actually makes some kind of sense.

Now, they're all allowed to kind of present the numbers in the way that suits them.

That's part of the job.

We understand that.

And he did, but I am a little bit worried.

I'm a little bit worried.

So, A, it made sense.

B, I thought he used those skills masterfully against the Republicans.

You know, hey, some Republicans, not all Republicans, but some Republicans hate old people and sick people.

And they're like, hey, that's not us.

And he went, Great, we're on the same team.

So I think that Kamala better sort of brush up a little bit because we might be needing her sooner than she thinks.

I know that Joe Biden thinks he's running in 2024, but

after the marvelousness of that State of the Union address, I'm not sure he's got it in him to get that far.

UK news, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has

had a little reshuffle in

his government.

Reshuffle is a composite word.

In reverse order, it's taken from kerfuffle, shamozzle, and really desperate attempt to convey a veneer of authority.

And

amongst one of the

stranger things that happened, and it wasn't a particularly major reshuffle as these things go, but he promoted a guy to become deputy chair of the Tory Party.

The former chair, Nadeem Zahawi, was sacked a couple of weeks ago.

A guy called Lee Anderson,

who gave an interview in which he expressed his support for capital punishment.

And he did so by saying, nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed, suggesting that this meant it had a 100% success rate.

Now, the problem with this argument is it's not really an argument in favor of capital punishment, as an argument in favor of the end of all humanity.

And I mean, some of you like about the end to all human life, but the crime crime stats are going to be sensational.

And 100% success rate very much depends on how you define success.

Because if you include fatal and irreparable miscarriages of justice, then I guess it might dip down below the 100%

mark.

And also, based on the number of MPs who've ended up on the naughty side of the law, if this is Lee Anderson's method of dealing with crime and preventing reoffending, Westminster might be needing a fresh supply of our current method of state execution.

And I had to check the catalogue for this because we don't use it a lot now.

The Execute Easy Fatal Fast Instant Death Sox and the Guilt Trip Judicio Blaster 2000X Human Catapult, which are both surprisingly humane and actually quite fun,

but seldom used these days.

It's quite hard to see who he was trying to appeal to here if the Conservatives, who've seen their support dwindling spectacularly, are now appearing to try to appeal to to even fewer people than they currently are.

No, I think this is Lee trying to appeal to the far left because this whole thing about no one's ever committed a crime after they die.

I mean, that's the ultimate cancel culture, isn't it?

I think if he's not getting a few lefty votes after that kind of rhetoric, then you know, I think the Tory Party are doomed.

So, he's trying at least.

He's trying.

But I didn't realize this because the things that he says are sometimes so extremely Tory.

I didn't realize that he was actually a Labour counselor until just just before he became a Tory MP.

One of the things he said was, my youngest son cried when I joined the Tory party.

That was the toughest part.

Oh, really?

The hardest thing was breaking your own child's heart.

But,

well, well then, by all means, you are ready to be a fully-fledged Tory MP because you have no heart left.

You passed the test.

Well done.

And it's just this man's amazing though.

He's absolutely amazing.

One of the Momentum members said to him once, have you read read the works of karl marx and he went of course i've not nobody reads that rubbish

great so education is in safe hands as well

um i mean this he's boris without the charm dare i say it i didn't know anything about him and i but i saw that he was from nottingham and i have an old friend from in in nottingham and i and i just texted him lee anderson question mark and he wrote back twat

so

he claims that people come up to him and tell him you say what I'm thinking.

I'm not sure that's a good quality in a Conservative Party politician, like to just go around saying everyone's interior monologue.

Like, do you really want an MP sitting there all day being like, I would have sex with her?

I wouldn't have sex with her.

Did I turn the stove off?

The Tories are really struggling at the moment.

They're locked in a titanic battle with the Labour Party, but unfortunately for the Conservatives, they're the ship and Labour is the iceberg.

They've slumped to 23% in the latest polling.

James Cameron is sniffing around for the film rights.

And to make things worse, former Prime Minister Liz Truss, who you may remember last year completed an epic, I think it was 49 days in office, including her notice period at the end, has sort of launched a comeback with a bizarre 4,000-word essay in the Daily Telegraph, which is essentially a former newspaper that is now pretty much the Conservative Party newsletter.

And she defended her economic strategy in the manner of the manager of a zoo defending their headline-grabbing open cages initiative initiative whilst giving a press conference from inside the stomach of a lion.

It's hard to know what Britain needs less than Liz Truss making a comeback, other perhaps than Boris Johnson making a comeback.

But I guess this is the state of our politics, that they're never more than one article away.

I mean, I feel it's almost too soon to really tell if it is a comeback, because usually, you know, in all of the superhero movies, the baddie comes back, ta-da, you know, and then they wreak havoc, don't they?

But I feel like this might be one of those slapstick movies where she goes, I'm back, and then immediately falls off a cliff, and that's it.

So I think it's almost too soon to say, to call it even a comeback.

What we had was someone wrote a really long essay for no reason and put it behind a paywall so only those that really wanted to know about it read it.

It's clear that she obviously thought, because the hundred days in office

is a big moment for any politician.

They do it in the States for the president.

They do it here for the prime minister.

And she never got hers.

I mean, she's the shortest ever prime minister.

She never even got her 100 days in office.

And so I think she obviously planned to have this big, haha, he's not doing very well on Rishi, but Rishi isn't doing as badly as she had anticipated he would do in order for this to be her big moment to come back and go, well, let's refocus on what I was going to say was going to happen.

And he's pulled a few tricks out of his bag that she that she didn't see coming.

You know, he's just like, I'm going to focus on science.

And she's like, I don't know how to deal with with that.

I don't know what science is.

It was basically on her 100 days out of office that this article came out.

So obviously didn't want to miss out on that 100 days landmark, but unfortunately for her, it had to be after she'd been turfed out for historic levels of incompetence.

One final story before we go.

The Church of England, as well as voting to bless same-sex partnerships, is reportedly considering forcing God, the renowned front deity of Christianity, to use gender-neutral pronouns or face being sacked and replaced with Eddie Izzard.

That's obviously not what happened, but it's a story about gender, so all bets are off and all reality is off.

The story is that some people in the Church of England are considering advocating gender-neutral terms for God, or at least making God a bit less of a dude.

Where do you see this?

I mean, and where do you see this, you know, where do you see God taking?

Do you think he'll take it well?

They are a trilogy anyway, right?

Aren't they?

It's my rudimentary understanding.

What I find amazing about this is that this is the Church of England who just a week and a half ago decided that they would still not allow same-sex marriage in church, but now they're going to respect God's decision to be genderless or at least to be able to opt in and out of gender.

What I mean is it just boggles my mind that we are going to respect the gender choices of God.

And then once God has chosen a gender or not chosen a gender, then who's going to be the one to tell them, tell them, sorry, who's going to be the one to tell them that they then can't get married in their own churches?

I sort of like the idea of God having like a Schrödinger's gender, like God occupying all genders and none simultaneously until the moment of prayer.

And then for the duration of that prayer only, God resolves to a single gender.

That's a really good point, actually.

All this time, God has been a he, but God enters you when you pray.

So, what about all the men who who were like anti-homo, homo, you know, that were homophobic and yet allowing God to enter them as a he?

Like, it's just

God's a top.

I think we can all agree.

Is God a top?

God is a top.

On that bombshell, we do have to bring this episode of the Bugle to a close before we are all struck down by their vengeance.

Thank you for joining us.

NATO, any shows to plug to our listeners?

Sure.

If you're in San Francisco, I will be back at Cheaper Than Therapy on the 24th of February for two shows.

And

I have a couple of albums out.

The NATO Green Party and the Whiteness album.

Best place to buy them to support sending money to me and my family is through Bandcamp.

Otherwise, Mr.

Nato Green on Instagram, NATO Green on Twitter.

Rhea, anything to plug?

If you're in the UK this autumn, I'm going to be doing my tour, Reawakening, so I'd love to see you at one of those shows.

Go to my website, Riolina.com, for tickets.

Otherwise, keep an eye out on my Instagram and Twitter.

If you're on either of those, it's at Rielina underscore for new dates as we add them further afield and outside the UK as they come.

Well, thank you both for joining us.

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

To join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to give a one-off or a current contribution to keep the show free, flourishing, and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com.

Matthew de Cost suggested to the makers of Pokémon that they base their cards on fictional creatures rather than historical villains as they had originally planned.

In the face of initial resistance to this idea, Richard Haynes stepped in to make the persuasive argument that children would be more receptive to the likes of Pikachu and Bulbasaur than, for example, the 16th to 17th century Hungarian mass murderer Elizabeth Bathory and low-grade Roman Emperor Ela Gabalus.

Tom Begley further suggested that history might wind people up less in general if history books were rewritten to blame the great atrocities of human history on Pokémons, but this constructive suggestion was scuppered by a court case.

Tony Liang has calculated using an algorithm that the maximum possible number of Pokemons is 21 million, coincidentally the same as the total number of bitcoins.

Alexander Iosad overheard this and suggested replacing the US dollar with renowned Pokemon Charmander as the default global trading currency.

Albert Farkas was the person who discovered on rifling through some unattended archives that the Battle of Waterloo had taken place in 1815.

Previously, it had been assumed that Napoleon was simply abducted by aliens.

Jane Polyakov, on studying the first hot air balloon flight, which happened in 1783, 1783, featuring a sheep, a duck and a cockerel, came to the conclusion that it was probably just some French chef trying something fancy to impress the Michelin judges.

And Dave Anderson corroborates that research by tracing the origin of the popular British pub food classic, Chicken in a Basket, to that pioneering effort by the Mongolfier brothers.

Donald Clarke formulated an alternative theory whereby the Mongolfiers were in fact trying to solve a riddle along the lines of the famous fox chicken grain puzzle in which you had to get a sheep to fall in love with a cloud, a duck to fly without flapping its wings, and a cockel to get vertigo.

And Seth Guinels Kooperman invented the hyphen, initially in an effort to curb the continual elongation of words that had taken the average word length to 8.6 letters by the mid to late 20th century, from just 1.7 letters in the grunt-heavy 10,000 BC era.

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.