Whoopie Cushion Warfare

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4252 of the Bugle audio newspaper for an unremittingly visual world.

The one remaining pipe organ of truth in the derelict church of humanity.

Not my words.

I mean I put those words in that order but I did not invent the words capital plasmic that is my word splutteratronicism also my word and bluegora clastic who knows I am Andy Zoltzmann lord of all I survey and all I survey is me and when I survey myself I generally find that a hundred percent of myself would like a change of leadership joining me today from not one but two sides of the Atlantic this one and that one to be precise are firstly from a couple of miles north of the shed where I currently am sitting it's Nish Kumar hello uh Nish, how are you?

Hello Andy, hello buglers.

I am

as we discussed just before we got on air recovering from a lurgy Andy but novelty value it was not COVID-19.

Oh right well that's exciting.

It feels really old school just to be coughing up lumfuls of phlegm

with no

inference that a bat from China is to blame.

It's a great feeling.

It's a really great feeling.

So

who are you blaming instead?

I don't know.

I'm going to say, I guess just it's another classic random animal slash country combination.

I'm going to say

a Venezuelan monkfish.

Right.

Okay.

Fair enough.

It's about time someone took those fuckers down on paper too.

Also joining us from considerably further west, his words carry to us on the winds of the Gulf Stream from New York City.

It's Hari Kondabolu.

Oh, it's very nice to see you all.

Andy, again,

I appreciate the respect you have shown me by sticking to my two Indians rule on your podcast.

I don't like being outnumbered, and this is exactly,

you know, it's...

It's also a pleasure to be on with Nish, but I would have taken Anuvab as well.

Well I think you know it's you know to a broad extent it's you know demographically representative of

the the the uh the human race as as far as we can get with three people.

Um

I do feel like, and without wishing to tip too much to the content of today's show, I do feel like China would have something to say about that.

And women.

And numerous, I mean we could go on.

I mean, it's starting to look bad on so many levels of comments.

Oh, God.

This Indian Jewish Sausage Fest.

We are recording on the 6th of February, 2023.

Yes, it's February.

The work-shy Skyver of a month clocking in short once again this year.

According to Wikipedia, nothing happened on the 6th of February until the year 1579, which tells you everything you need to know about February.

It's shorter than all the other months, but still contrived to completely waste one of its days for the first 13 trillion-odd years of history.

In 1918, on the 6th of February, British women over the age of 30

got the right to vote, provided that they met minimum property qualifications

in the Representation of the People Act, a huge step forward

in British democracy, followed by further steps forward when they realised that the first step forward hadn't been

quite huge enough.

So, I mean, how do you think that's going, Nish?

We're 105 years on.

Now,

do you think I know you've many times expressed your opinion that it was the greatest mistake in British Democratic history?

I mean, you're going to stand by that now.

Listen,

we should get back to property ownership

being a contingent right on voting.

I do believe that was in the Tory Party Manifesto in 2019.

I haven't fully gone through it in a while, but I do believe there was something in there about reintroducing property constraints.

Unfortunately, most of the property in England is owned by currently sanctioned Russian oligarchs.

So if that legislation is brought in, it is going to make the 2024 election a very, very controversial one.

Also, I was reading that in that same act,

First Past the Post edged out proportional representation very narrowly in the Commons.

This is back in 1918 and unleashed so far 105 years of increasingly infantile oppositional politics.

So thank you very much to everyone who was in Parliament 105 years ago.

Well, it's absolutely fitting, Addi, that First Past the Post should win a victory that technically means most of the people didn't want it to happen.

Yep, as I've said before, First Past the Post is very good for some things, for example, judging who's won a horse race.

Not so good for parliamentary democracy.

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

This week, Billionaire Luxuries.

A special put-out supplement this week in association with our proud commercial partners, Extravagans, the world leaders in exorbitantials and opulentologicals.

We bring bring you the must-be-seen-to-have products for the billionaires that we know our listeners all dream of being, including the Bertrand La Ducelle Riandu 2 range unopenable handbag.

That do you enjoy looking minted, but are you tired of carrying stuff?

The latest accessory from Bertrand La Ducelle offers none of the benefits of a bag, but all of the visible expense.

Modelled on a normal handbag, but with no openings, the Riandu 2 bag is made of pure fake anaconda skin and vegan-friendly faux dolphin gills.

Is there anything anything actually inside?

Who gives a f?

It's obviously so expensive that the only people who would own it can afford to hire someone to carry their bits and bobs for them anyway.

Also, we look at the Afflu Away Wrist Coupe, gold-plated, fully functioning coop for small pet birds to be worn in place of a watch, ideal for hummingbirds, spudgery gars, nano-parrots and the very fashionable new self-trimming bonsai condor.

And we review the Viticult Micro Vineyard 3.0R, that's the red wine version, the personal vineyard, which is the size of just four upright fridge freezers, can fit into most decently sized yachts with minimal structural adjustments.

The MV3R can produce a vintage quality wine in just 24 hours, speed growing the grapes from aggressively modified seeds, using the mechanical auto-squidger to trample the grapes ready for wining, then hyper-fermenting the liquid in anything from 90 minutes for a nouveau wine to 4 hours for a mellower tipple.

Priced at just £299,000, the MV3R starts paying for itself quickly enough as each bottle produced costs costs just an estimated £800 in grapes, electricity, and running costs.

So it really is accessible to even the lowest grade of billionaire.

And of course, the Jacuzzaphone, a musical bubble pool that translates your bodily aura into relaxing smooth jazz.

All those

must-have billionaire accessories are in our section in the bin.

You are a fascinating man.

I stayed quiet.

I listened to every single word and I kept thinking, wow, where does he find the time to write things like this?

Or does it not take long at all?

He has two children.

Yes, and

they write most of it for me.

I bet your children, Andy, they're far too sensible to write any of this sort of stuff.

My elder child did say to me when they were, I think, about eight years old, Daddy, I'm getting too old for your jokes.

I think it's good that the bugle, like the hit HBO comedy drama series Succession, has now employed a wealth consultant.

Well, I think that's all the money flooding in from our special offer on

merchandise.

Chris, is that still on or is that finished now?

Hang on a second.

Let me go on the Bugle podcast.

Jesus Christ.

I've got no idea.

Guys, this is bad even for us.

Yeah, it's still on.

There you go.

Bugle merch on sale.

Jesus Christ.

My bugle socks have holes in them.

Oh.

Are there more bugle socks?

I would like more bugle socks.

Okay.

Right.

Well, go to the shop.

Top story this week.

America and China are on the brink of war.

All of this due to, and I choose these words carefully, a balloon.

I think everyone who has kept even a quarter of an eye on the world this millennium so far, and another quarter on the entirety of human history before that, will have known that it could only ever have been a matter of time before things came to a potentially nuclear war-packed head between the USA and China.

But I don't think most of us would have expected the beginning of the inevitable species-annihilating conflagration to have come in the form of a balloon floating over Montana.

That is not how Armageddon was supposed to happen.

Nish Hari, this is, I mean, it's a truly extraordinary story that this

spy balloon floating over Montana causing a major diplomatic incident and a challenge for

one of the biggest kind of challenges for Joe Biden of his

balloon.

I mean, this has happened before.

This is basically what happened with Sputnik and Russia back in what, like, the 50s.

Like, that's why I referred to this to the weather balloon as Sputzy Dong.

That seemed better than General So Sputnik.

But, you know, I mean, first of all, it was obvious it was a spy balloon because it was wearing sunglasses and a mustache.

Though I was questioning if it was a spy balloon because it was hovering over Montana.

So...

Like, what kind of intelligence are you looking for?

Are you looking for the newest horse gossip?

I mean, by the way, the people in Montana in reaction said it was the most exciting thing that ever happened.

Nish, I know that you gather intelligence on your audience members by floating a balloon over the auditorium at all of your gigs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't have to fly very far.

Yeah.

But it's quite extraordinary.

And the Pentagon, as described, the Pentagon is famously vocal as a building, the headquarters of the U.S.

Department of Defense, one of the most loquacious buildings in the world.

The Pentagon described it as an intelligence-gathering balloon.

What does this say about humanity in 2023 that

this device, which is essentially a device from the late 18th century,

is being used now?

It suggests to me that the Chinese Secret Service has employed Phileas Fogg to take over its surveillance operation.

The f are you using a balloon to spy for?

Balloons are used for two things: children's birthday parties and settling wages between Victorian English men.

But it has caused absolute chaos.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called off a visit to Beijing in light of what I am referring to as balloon gate.

The US Secretary of State claimed that it was a surveillance balloon's presence that caused him to cancel the thing.

And he said that uh it was an irresponsible act uh the chinese communist party is uh saying that it was not a surveillance balloon and was in fact uh just designed to monitor weather unfortunately the chinese communist party is not exactly the boy who cried wolf but it's the boy who was found to be repeatedly spying on the wolf and filing details about the wolf over a number of years it is a very very deeply strange story.

The Global Times, which is a Chinese state-backed state-backed tabloid newspaper, wrote in English on Twitter, a website that's actually banned in China.

So this very much

was aimed specifically at the Western audience.

Wrote, the balloon itself is a big target.

If balloons from other countries could really enter continental US smoothly or even enter the sky over certain states, it only proves that the US's air defense system is completely a decoration and cannot be trusted.

Congratulations, the Global Times.

You win the award for making things even fing worse.

The last thing this powder keg already needed was a tabloid sprinkling more gunpowder all over it.

The US government released a very troubling statement that I was very upset by reading.

It seemed very,

call the troops out in a hurry.

This is what we've waited for.

This is it, boys.

This is war.

The president is on the line as 99 red balloons go by.

As 99 red balloons go by.

Well, since you bring up one of the great achievements of the 1980s at RH, I remember as a child going to the Farnborough Air Show

in the late 1980s and seeing the stealth bomber when it was new.

And it was, I can't remember, 86, 87, around about then?

This sort of undetectable, hyper-futuristic piece of unfathomable destructo-tech plucked from the outer reaches of the sci-fi imaginative realm.

It could evade enemy detection and deliver payloads that could wipe out millions of years of evolution, but in a really cool manner.

And 35 years on, we've got a f ⁇ ing balloon with a GoPro strapped to it.

What has happened to our species?

I mean, it's just the start of us just...

The inevitable return to just living in caves and sticking up hinges when we get a bit scared of stuff.

I mean,

they could have...

China could easily have made this work.

If they had just put something on the balloon, like an advertisement saying, eat at Arby's, we have the meats, like that would have thrown us all off for some period of time.

Oh, yes.

One of those Arby weather balloons.

They could have just floated it in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Oh, that would have been a lot easier.

Just, you know, in between Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, just a Chinese surveillance balloon.

Hiding in plain sight.

Yeah, it absolutely would have been.

Also, can I just, I mean, I know this is going to make make me sound naive, and I'm not, and I've never claimed to be a military tactician.

Can't you just shoot the out the sky?

As far as I understand, there is no one in the balloon, and it's just floating around with solar panels that provide it with the energy it needs to keep moving, and then various receptors that are sending signals to wherever it's come from.

I don't think you need to be top gunned to take this thing out.

Well, the balloon was eventually shot down by an air-to-air missile.

The remnants were taken in for questioning.

And

in an eerie echo from history, there were reports of balloon modelers from around the USA being rounded up and held in internment camps.

Those reports were just made up by me.

But it does.

Clearly, relations with China are set to be a key squabble ground in American politics over coming years.

Republicans and Democrats competing to appear hawkish against the looming balloon threats, which, if left unchecked, could see children as young as naught able to see unlicensed balloons floating above their neighborhoods, sending crucial data back to Beijing on matters ranging from the stocks of timber available at Mike's timber yard to the traffic situation outside Snutterbridge Elementary School at pickup time on a Wednesday afternoon.

No one in America is safe from this airborne snoopery.

So,

will Joe Biden be goaded into launching an American counter balloon that could float across the Pacific into Chinese airspace in as little as, I don't know, six to eight months if the winds work out?

I mean, is that what we're looking at now?

I mean, Biden probably is calling for two to three balloons,

and his advisors are probably going to have to talk him down.

And then after nap time, he would have completely forgotten about it.

So, luckily,

we're not overly concerned about what Biden might do.

I don't know why the U.S.

is angry.

To be perfectly honest, like,

are you angry that China didn't have the decency to not be caught?

Like, what is it?

Like, you don't see our spies pulling this type of high profile shit China like we all know this is happening balloon a balloon was a weird way to do it but yes like we're all we're all pulling all sorts of stuff

if we're gonna send a balloon to spy on China here's my pitch Mr.

Bean

shape it like mr bean mr bean is massive in china they'll be excited to see him floating over us and then the next thing we know bam he's fed back all sorts of key information i'm available the pentagon if you're listening.

And we know you are.

It's just, you know, we do risk escalation here,

though.

And, you know, I mean, there are concerns that China could soon have the capability to launch an aerial whoopee cushion

that could float across America making disrespectful flatulence noises during military parades and high school proms.

And, I mean, this...

It is that serious.

China did insist the balloon was just a misunderstood weather balloon that had floated astray in search of some really awesome weather to impress its friends with.

Republicans accused Biden of a dereliction of duty in allowing the balloon to roam free across the USA, cavorting brazenly with American clouds and humiliating the world's leading superpower.

And I guess it is true that Biden is the first president not to spend every weekend air cycling in a special pedal-powered dirigible around the perimeter of the USA, a sky balloon height, armed with a crossbow.

So it is his fault.

But it does leave Sino-Americanian act relations at an awkward point.

China has urged cool-headed handling of the dispute, suggesting that they have not been keeping too close an eye on American politics these last six or seven years.

And a second spy balloon was seen over Latin America, according to geographically vague reports.

But no spy balloons, Nish, have been seen over the United Kingdom.

Now, surely this is a further dent to our national dreams of relevance in the post-Brexit world.

But where's our spy balloon?

Do we not mean anything anymore?

Hey, come on, China.

We'll tell you.

We'll tell you stuff.

We'll write it on big towels and hold it up so that the balloons get a better view of it.

Unfortunately,

the only thing you'd

clean if you spied on Britain is just piles of flaming garbage.

They seem to be setting fire to their rubbish for warmth.

I'm not sure the United Kingdom is the threat it once was.

Balloon out.

I mean, all the US had to do was get the balloon and get our clowns to turn it into a giant middle finger and

send it back.

Listen, I would urge all of the people of America

to assume at all points that a Chinese surveillance balloon is watching you and have a precautionary middle finger waving every time you leave the house.

In other American news, the coldest ever wind chill in the continental USA has been recorded in New Hampshire, minus 78 degrees Celsius.

That is minus 108 Fahrenheit in old money.

And when I say in old money, I mean, that's when temperature could be used as money and exchange for food, which is, of course, the origin of cooking, interestingly.

It's the coldest ever wind chill recorded in North America.

But Hari, my question to you would be this: how much of that wind chill is physics, you know, the actual physical temperature, and how much is metaphorical windchill with the icy blast of a potential second presidential term for Donald Trump

and the demolition of the social fabric of America, the already tatty, poorly repaired, stupidly designed in the first place social fabric of America that still bears the pus stains and caked in vomit of Trump's first term in office and its rumbling aftermath.

Might this not just have been a regular chilly winter's day, maybe two degrees Celsius, but with the metaphorical wind chill knocking it down 80 degrees to a lethally Antarctic and dark, dark winter of the soul?

I'm not a meteorologist, but am I on the right lines, you think?

Hmm.

I think you have a misunderstanding of how metaphors work.

Oh, right.

Their impact is minimal.

into real weather conditions.

Oh, that's disappointing.

Honestly,

it has has been terrible.

And one of the worst things is it's led to a scary increase of comedians saying, when's the global warming getting here?

And open mics all over the country.

That is such a good observation, Hurry.

And it's something that's always missing from any dystopian film.

Like,

there's never a bit when there should be, where there's a hack comedian in a stand-up club saying, when's this global warming getting here?

And then a chill blast through and freezes before.

I really do hope that hell freezes over, though, because then several women from high school will owe me dates.

Self-deprecation.

You win again.

It says that there's been

that residents from Manitoba to Maine are being urged to limit their time outdoors until the end of the once-in-a-generation cold snap.

And I've got to say, I really am sick of the number of once-in-a-generations we are racking up here.

At a certain point,

we've got to admit that this generation has had a lot of once-in-a-generations, and it's all adding up to this generation being the last generation.

But Nish, you're assuming that the generation being referred to is a human generation rather than the generation of, I don't know, a worm or a mayfly or perhaps even a virus.

There is good news.

There is good news.

Oh, that's what's that?

Well, I mean, parts of Canada reached as low as negative 58 degrees Fahrenheit.

I believe you still use Celsius, which is strange.

But it is good if you're a Quebec separatist because apparently it's cold enough that Quebec might just snap off of Canada and

you'll have your independent Quebec.

Extinct birds being pointlessly brought back to life news now, and a biotech company is planning to bring the dodo back to life.

The absolutely useless, flightless bird that didn't taste very nice but was still hunted to extinction back in, I think, the 17th century, could be waddling back into existence for no fing reason.

Now,

the dodo is most famous for being extinct.

If it ceases to be extinct, what is the point of it living?

That is the question I would ask to both of you.

And also, is this the best use of humanity's boundless scientific ingenuity to bring back one of the world's most useless species?

I'm going to start with the second question.

No.

It is definitely no.

What are we doing?

It's like nobody has seen science fiction movies all the way to the end.

Like, what is you only see the premise?

I'm like, oh, that's a good idea.

Let's bring extinct animals back.

What's the worst that could happen?

Let's open a theme park.

Robots that

robots that speak to us, artificial intelligence advancements.

Good thing they absolutely won't rebel against us.

It's just absurd.

Like, we know how this is going to end.

But, but is this by focusing on the dodo rather than, for example, the T-Rex or the saber-toothed tiger, is this trying to counteract that by bringing back a species that was so f ⁇ ing useless that it would have no chance, even when it inevitably goes wrong and wants to conquer the world, that it's too useless to do that?

Actually, this is a safe species to bring back.

Based on the last, I'd say, sort of decade, what are the chances that we bring back the dodo and it immediately brings with it some ancient bird flu that's even worse than the current bird flu?

Like, it doesn't, it feels like we know how this is going to go.

We are in this bit of Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum is about to do a speech.

That's how it's starting to feel because they're also

not planning to stop with the dodo, they're also planning to recreate the Tasmanian wolf and the woolly mammoth.

Um, there are like quite a few species around the world that are going extinct.

Could we not stop them from going extinct?

As opposed to just picking random animals that are

a hairy elephant.

And I'll say it,

ugly bird.

I'll say it.

I would not a dodo.

I don't care if that gets me, quote unquote, cancelled.

I'm laughing too hard.

It's giving something away.

I mean, obviously, it was a bit of a slow day at Science HQ, and some bird probably

decided what we need is one of Evolution's least successful experiments back.

Not the good one, not the T-Rex, not the Auroch, the saber-toothed gerbil, the Pangean flying rhinoceros fish, the Airbus mega heron or the pointy beak snutterbuck, the fing dodo.

This is a disgrace, but it does tie in with a political story niche that was uh in the papers.

The comeback of Liz Truss!

Who

buglers who remember remember the renowned year 2022 may remember Liz Truss was Prime Minister for

about seven weeks, was it 49 days in the end?

And she has launched what is being described as a comeback.

I mean the comeback has come in the form of a 4,000 word article in the Daily Telegraph, which I think is fair to say was a fairly friendly newspaper,

which is really a 4,000 word journey into

the remarkable persistence of human delusion.

And but so if you had a choice

of one thing to come back, the dodo or Liz Truss, what do you think humanity needs more right now?

I don't know, but

they do not give awards for Segways.

I was about to say, my God.

Yeah, and until about three minutes ago, I understood why they didn't give away.

Now I've got no clue.

That is, that is an Academy Award.

Linking, resurrecting the dodo.

When you get it right, you really get it right, Saltzman.

I give you a lot of grief on this podcast.

Largely deserved.

Both for your

tedious wordplay and your scant knowledge of the basic tenets of the religion of Judaism.

However,

this

segue is quite extraordinary.

And the answer is the dodo would be more useful.

Liz Truss has, yeah, has, as you say, Andy,

started

a relaunch, like a wet firework.

And she's written a 4,000-word missive in the Daily Telegraph, which is

a newspaper whose political leanings are, I mean, are basically,

I've read Margaret Thatcher's biography and huffed a load of crystal meth.

Let's make some policy happen.

She has blamed

the

again for buglers who may not remember, and I'm including British buglers in here because I believe it happened so quickly, a lot of it just didn't register in the memories of a lot of the people of the United Kingdom.

Liz Truss was Prime Minister

for about a fart length

last year

before she attempted an economic plan that was so catastrophic, it blasted a huge hole in the British public finances that are still being filled in to this day.

And she was forced out of office in a cloud of disgrace.

But the thing is, disgrace only fuels Conservatives.

It's food to them.

Disgrace and racism are the two things that is keeping the British Conservative Party afloat at this point.

And she has now written an article for the Daily Telegraph where she has blamed the left-wing economic establishment

for taking her down.

She said the soul searching has not been easy.

It's been pretty f ⁇ ing easy, mate.

You fed up.

That's the amount of soul searching you should have had to do.

I'd be surprised if the soul searching was successful in the sense that.

I mean,

could she find a soul?

Is there one there to be found?

It's, I mean, listen,

it's everyone's trying to work out what she's thinking, um,

which has been true since she launched her political career, uh, certainly in the public imagination with a long speech about pork barrel markets at the Tory Party conference.

Um,

but the

there are still a group of people within the Conservative Party, Conservative MPs and non-MPs, but members of the Conservative Party, who still have support for Liz Truss.

Why is that?

Because I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the Conservative Party is a disease that the United Kingdom needs to cure itself of.

It is the syphilis on this great nation's penis and ball bag.

She's attempting to launch a comeback.

Now, either this is to essentially rehabilitate her reputation so that she can command some public speaking fees,

because that's quite a lucrative source of income for politicians who have been forced to leave office.

Theresa May, aka deportation spice, raises quite a lot of revenue from

giving her terrible speeches about how she was one of the shittiest prime ministers of all time.

She's been one of the best prime ministers of the last five years.

Arguably the best.

Yeah, she is.

I mean, yeah, this is what I mean.

Standards are low, and yet Liz Truss still can't get a booking.

Apparently, the rumors are she can't get a booking on the after dinner, speaking segue.

So, this is maybe some reputational rehabilitation.

But I genuinely believe she thinks there is a route back to frontline politics for her.

Because, as you say, Andy, the delusion at this point is weapons grade.

The delusion of her and our other former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is at this point visible from space.

You do not need a Chinese surveillance balloon to spot the level of delusion that exists in the minds of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.

And the worst thing about it is that they are probably both correct because Richie Sunak is sat atop a very, very fragile coalition of people whose only unifying principle is that they didn't want him to be prime minister.

And so there is still potentially a route back to power for Liz Truss, a woman who seems to have been breastfed by a car exhaust.

Jesus.

Is it possible that she's trying to make a comeback because she needs the money?

Yeah.

The Sunday Telegraph leader, the sort of opinion of the newspaper

this week, the same weekend that the newspaper published this huge article by her, said that the statist Tory establishment has had its turn and the party is cratering in the polls.

The free marketeers must now speak up.

Now, the free marketeers spoke up and they spoke through Liz Truss.

And by their own metric, aka the free market, they completely fed it.

They assassinated the pound.

Well, the free market, I mean, I think history has proved this,

is a.

I mean, this is, you know, it's a heartless piece of shit.

And, you know, it might, it might do some good things, but it is unquestionably at heart a.

And

that is a problem at the heart of our

heart of our economic system.

And I'm not sure you can ever truly

truly train it,

really.

I mean, I get

to me,

the way that we've we've treated the free markets over the years is it's like when a man has got a new dog and he has fed that dog nothing but sausages and scotch eggs for its entire life, and then he has seen fit to take that dog with him on a nudist holiday.

It's obviously going to come back to bite us at some point.

That is insane.

What you just said is insane.

I'm trying to.

It does feel like everyone is angry about everything at the moment in

Britain.

So, I mean,

what do you think we need to cheer ourselves up?

I mean, I don't want to say it, but story about Chinese spy balloon.

Is that what we need?

Just a Chinese spy balloon to distract us.

It might be creating a common enemy.

Coffin makers

and sewage attendants are on strike.

So we can't even eat shit and die.

Oh, dear.

What have we become?

That is how bad things have got in Britain at the moment.

And, you know, in terms of the workers' right to strike,

it is incredibly important.

The right to strike is an incredibly important democratic right.

So the Conservative government has seen mass dissatisfaction and a series of worker demands that often are not even vaguely commensurate to inflation.

and it has snapped into action and passed a bill that makes it increasingly difficult for workers to go on strike.

There's a minimum service levels bill that passed through another reading of the House of Commons this week that would require certain public service workers,

a certain level of public service workers to remain in work regardless of strike conditions.

Listen, you don't.

These people are cs.

Like, they are.

Like, I'm sorry to say it.

I'm sorry to reduce it to this.

We're supposed to be like mending fences and like building bridges between the divide, but it's so hard and people don't talk about this enough.

We talk a lot about the polarization of politics, but what if they're just surprisingly?

Right.

I mean this I guess the irony of the

the minimum service level from the government that has brought about a country that has in which everything has stopped working.

It is possible that that the end of Britain, the f the final scene of Britain, will just be the nation physically folding up onto itself, wrapping a ribbon around itself with a little card on just saying irony.

And that'll be it.

That'll be the end

of this nation.

How come you two scabs aren't on strike right now?

Well, we don't have real jobs.

It's very difficult.

Yeah, it's very, very, very, very difficult to strike.

Nobody knows when you're actually working or being a comedian because it looks the same.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Glasweesian coffin manufacturers that are striking, I mean, it's obviously rough if you need a coffin, but it's a break the Glasgow cremation industry has needed for decades.

Yeah, yeah.

And indirectly, it's a real shot in the arm for Hinduism in the region.

I like how y'all have a calendar.

I like how the strikes are like organized by like, oh, we're not striking this day and that.

It just feels like it could lead to a mistake.

Like, it's a f ⁇ ing scab.

Hit him with a the brick.

No, Colin, it's Thursday.

It is, yeah, I just feel like we are just on the precipice of abject and total chaos.

To highlight

the teachers'

pay demands, last week, Enzo Fernandez, the young World Cup winning Argentina midfielder, joined Chelsea, the former football club, for a fee of £107 million

and a reported wage of around about £300,000 a week over an eight and a half year deal.

Now, for the same money over those eight and a half years, Chelsea could have paid for 700 teachers.

But the problem is, how do you fit 700 teachers into Chelsea's midfield?

Because you don't really want 700 teachers sitting in front of the back four because they might be good at breaking up opposition attacks just by getting in the way.

But it's going to be hard for Chelsea to build their own momentum going forward.

And you can't really, you know,

do you turn your 700 teachers into like an attacking wing back?

I'm not sure that's going to work either.

So you can understand why they signed Fernandes instead.

But I think.

I don't want to get too in the weeds of the specifics of Chelsea's squad composition, Andy, but I don't think if you suddenly added 700 teachers, it would make things any less confusing.

Given the current composition of the Chelsea squad, throwing in 700 qualified educators, I don't think makes Grandpa's job any less, any less, any more or less difficult than it currently is.

Sport now, and yes, it's that time of year where we look ahead to the Super Bowl, which is happening next Sunday between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs.

The Eagles, of course, named because in the early days of the franchise, the players were toughened up by being forced to spend pre-season training in the mountains, living off whatever food they could hunt and scavenge, using only a micro aircraft and a special beak.

Whilst the Kansas City Chiefs were originally named the Necker Chiefs in the early days of their franchises, as they always used to play with a bit of brightly coloured cloth around the neck, the first form of protective clothing allowed in pro football back in the days when the defensive team was allowed to use battering rams borrowed from the local police for trying to take out the opposition quarterback, hence the Rams team.

It's interesting the origin of these names, the Saints.

To play for the Saints when they were first formed, you had to have performed at least two alleged miracles to qualify for the squad.

And of course, the Cardinals were their feeder team.

The 49ers, I can't remember.

That was either in tribute to SF Barnes' record haul of 49 test wickets for England in South Africa in the 1913-14 test series, in which he refused to play the last test in a dispute over money, or because you could only play for the team if you'd proved yourself worthy by scoring a break of 49 at Snooker.

The Broncos, they were a team for bronchitis specialists at the now-defunct St Hethels General Hospital in Denver.

But anyway, who will prevail out of these two superb teams?

The Eagles or the Chiefs?

Hari, I know

you're a sports fan.

Well, first of all, you might have just ruined the Super Bowl with me with whatever blabberings come out of your mouth a minute ago.

Sorry.

I would have thought it was all the racism and what happened to Com Cavernic.

But no, that's what pushed me over.

And

I'll say two things.

The halftime show is Rihanna.

Yes.

Yes.

That is.

Now we're getting into something I'm interested in.

That the comeback of Rihanna is really the biggest story.

But then, if you're interested in this sport,

you know,

two great teams expect a matchup that's so intense that in a decade none of the players will remember they played football.

Well, on that

little blast of darkness there.

Thank you.

Well, I think it's time to bring this episode of The Bugle to a merciful halt.

Thank you for joining us.

Harold, have you got any shows imminently that our listeners might like to know about?

Sure, how imminent, but there's a few.

March 16th in Eugene, Oregon at the Holt Center.

April 13th to 15th in Milwaukee at the Laughing Tap.

And finally,

May 3rd through 5th at the Vermont Comedy Club in Burlington.

You can find all these on the internet, my website, Google, whatnot.

Nish,

what have you got coming up?

For Buglers in the UK, Hold the Front Page, a show that I do with Josh Whitticomb as part of my long-standing commitment to only do travel shows with white comedians with the letter J at the start of their name.

It's a show where we go and work at local newspapers, and it's the last episode of it airs this week, but it's all available on now TV or Sky on demand.

You can also listen to the current series of the news quiz via BBC Sounds.

That concludes this week's Bugle.

We will be back next week with Ria Lena and Nato Green.

And we will now play you out with the latest contributors to the Bugle Wall of Fame.

To join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme and to give a wonderful or occurring contribution to help keep this show show free, flourishing and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Although different to the 18th century explorer of the same name, James Cook was the first person to suggest that packs of cards had different numbers instead of just consisting of 52 threes, as was originally the case.

Claire Fletcher further enhanced the possibility of card games by advocating splitting those 52 cards into four different teams, hoping this would lead to the kind of profitable tribal fandom we see in other sports, whilst Derek Willis was the first to suggest naming those teams after a bodily organ, a garden utensil, a piece of golfing equipment and a precious stone.

After Derek's idea was picked up by the International Playing Card Association, Della Graham had to step in and stop the IPCA naming the suits Lung, Rake, Dimply Ball and Beryl.

Once the card suits had been agreed to be hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds, Phil D.T.

convinced the IPCA to go with simplified representations rather than, for example, a graphically realistic picture of an actual heart.

Kate Katigbach was the visionary who suggested replacing the top three ranked cards, then entitled President, Vice President and Chief of Staff, with the monarchy-based King, Queen and Prince.

I'm not advocating hereditary privilege, says Kate, but it did add stability.

Emily Howells helped see off a lawsuit from a collection of 30 princes from around the world who were demanding a 1 13th share of all proceeds from sales of playing cards by replacing the prince card as the third picture card with the Jack Russell Doggy card.

Brian Wiederman then helped hack out a compromise whereby both princes and Jack Russells accepted a picture of a prince called Jack who owns a little doggy.

hence the cards we're all familiar with today.

And Megan Killar or Megan Sillar or both even redesigned the playing card into its now familiar rectangular with smoothed corner shape from its less user-friendly original serrated edged dodecagon.

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.