Tendulkar Made India Horny

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, I'm Andy Zaltzmann, as you should know by now, if you've listened either to any of our previous episodes or the first six words of this one.

Welcome to issue 4250 of the Bugle.

That's right, 250 episodes since we relaunched in episode 4001.

So we are just one short of a quarter of a percent through this 100,000 episode season, which is a start.

But we are in this for the long haul.

The estimated season end date, if we get through all 100,000 episodes, let me just work this out, is the year 4250.

If we do slightly more episodes per year than we've averaged so far, or start counting some episodes as full episodes.

So bit of a coincidence there, and something worth keeping keeping an eye on during the next two and a bit from Pak Millenniums.

Joining me today for our 250th episode since relaunched, two very special guests, legends of their art form.

Such a privilege to have them on the show.

Firstly, from Spain, Titan of the Baroque art scene, it's painter Diego Velázquez, and from France, the posthumously influential 17th-century moral philosopher Gabriel Souchon.

Welcome, both of you, to the show.

Hang on, Fandy.

What's the problem?

Both phones are dead.

Dead?

In fact, I think I've known the story, but I've been for at least 300 years now.

Right.

Could you not have broken that news a little more sympathetically, Chris?

Their agents both said they were not busy doing anything else.

That was true.

Can we get anyone else in at this late notice?

I'll rustle around quickly.

Alright, just try and make it fast.

Right, well, that's all sorted now.

So, stepping in at the last minute to replace Diego and Gabrielle, who will try and get on if we can sort out what appears to be a contractual issue more than anything else.

Please welcome from India, Anuvab Pal, and from further north in London, Tiffany Stevenson.

Hello, both of you.

Hello.

Ah, it's so nice to be considered for booking after a dead man.

Anivab,

how are things?

You were just telling us before we started recording about some exciting developments in Mumbai.

I was, Andy.

I was.

I don't know if you can hear it, but I'm sure we will through the podcast.

There's a giant construction project going on across all Indian cities.

And right outside my house, there is a massive JCB digger digging up a perfectly normal road

to make it an even better road I suppose but our prime minister recently made an announcement that nothing of any value was built in the last 800 years so he's decided to build it all in six weeks

by the way the sound is going he's decided to build all of it outside my house

so

but just just to let you guys know I had a pretty good winter holiday I I went to the mountains where I met a spiritualist who was standing on his head and he told me that my previous life I was a very noted French philosopher.

So I have showed up in a different incarnation on this podcast.

Well that's good.

That's good to hear.

Tiff, do you know what you were doing in your previous incarnations?

Oh, I would like to have been a French philosopher as well.

I think probably Sartre

because I do agree that hell is other people.

So,

and that we are condemned to be free and all of my choices are somehow a condemnation.

Also, Sartre should have gone to Specsavers.

Didn't have great glasses.

But yeah,

if I was going to pick a dead French philosopher to be, then I think it would be him.

Right.

Well, there you go.

I think this could become a recurrent segment on the bugle, actually, is finding out what our guest co-hosts either actually did or would like to have done in their previous lives.

So, well, do email us in, listeners,

with your experiences.

I could answer a couple of the questions.

You might ask me a question, and I would say, What is the point of even beginning to answer when existence is pointless in and of itself?

Well, that's an impressively nihilistic start to this week's show.

But, you know, I guess that's just probably the appropriate way to deal with the world as we see it today.

We are recording on the 23rd of January, 2023.

And on this day, in the year 393, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I proclaimed his eight-year-old son, Honorius, as co-emperor.

Which, I mean, that is, I don't know, tiger parenting?

I mean, that is

really putting pressure on your kids.

Maybe we're too indulgent these days, but there's got to be some kind of middle ground between, you know, the modern day style of parenting and making your eight-year-old child co-emperor.

Presumably there was a conversation between Theodosius and his kid.

Kid, you're eight years old now.

It's time you started taking on a bit of extra responsibility.

No, I don't mean captaining the school football team.

No, I don't mean doing your homework unsupervised.

And no, I don't mean tidying a room without having to be asked and learning to make your own packed lunches.

I mean running the fracturing political behemoth that is late fourth century Roman Empire.

Yes, you can have an extra ice cream if you're emperor.

Yes, you can have an extra half an hour a day on your tablet.

tablet.

Now, do we have a deal?

So, yeah, big didn't go entirely well, I believe,

under the watch of Honorius.

Rome was sacked in the year 14.

So,

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

This week, a rock music questions section.

The great questions of rock music answered factually for you in our special pull-out section, including questions such as, should I stay or should I go?

The answer depends, but err on the side of going.

But do bear in mind a change of scene isn't always what's required.

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

Zero, it's not relevant.

Is there life on Mars?

No, mate, look at the place.

Would you want to live there?

Isn't she lovely?

That's entirely subjective.

Define your terms.

In the immortal words of the who.

Who are you?

Do not answer that until your laura has arrived.

Can I kick it?

Yes, but you can't shoot directly yourself.

It's an indirect free kick.

And where did you sleep last night?

In a slightly disappointing Airbnb?

Could I add two to those, Andy?

Please do.

What's she going to look like with a chimney on her?

Big existential question of the time.

And what if you turned up at the jungle and Axel Rose was there to welcome you?

Right.

Well, I don't know.

I guess

questions would be asked.

Does he have the authority to act as gatekeeper to the entire jungle?

Why do fools fall in love?

Well, fools are still capable of romantic emotion.

I'm not saying they deserve to fall in love, but they do.

Will you still need me?

Will you still feed me when I'm 64?

Well, if you're asking this question politically, the answer is almost certainly no.

And

all the lonely people, where do they all come from?

Well, many of them come from war-torn regions or countries with oppressive governments or areas of economic failure.

And we need to take a grown-up approach to the entire political issue.

Anyway, that section is in the bin.

Top story this week, India is on the verge of becoming the most populous country in the world.

Now, Anuvab,

speaking as just one person out of the approximately 1.4 billion in India now, how exciting is this for you?

Because it is estimated that this...

2023 will be the year that India takes over from China as the country with the most people in it, not just on the planet, but in the as-yet-discovered universe.

How is India dealing with this?

I don't know if it's an upgrade or a trauma or something between the two.

Well, we've got 1.4 billion people, Andy.

And once I knew we were going to discuss this, I just thought I'd give you three very specific individual examples of just how many people we have.

Okay.

So if you want to know how many people we have in this country, Andy, I once sat in a train carriage in rural India meant for three people.

A sign said, any more than three people is unlawful.

When we started the journey, there were three people.

When we ended, there were 14 people and a small goat.

On the way out, one person scratched out three people and wrote 14 in its place.

And

that is how you accommodate a lot of people.

This country is so crowded, Andy, that if you see a road sign that says dead end, nothing to see here, 14 people will be staring at it.

And this is just a fact.

There's a town called Joshimath in North India where last week the entire town was sinking because of too much construction and too many people.

In fact, this week the most Google phrase in India was, what other Indian towns will sink and by when?

Right, so I can see that's a that's a bit of a logistical issue if you live in an Indian town.

Um, so uh, I mean, I guess, you know,

there's a deal of prestige that comes with it, and you know, barring a surprise outbreak of speed breeding in China or a sudden alien kidnapping of hundreds of millions of Indians, or a late surge from log islands outside of Sweden, or Saudi Arabia, or Saudi Arabia, or Qatar just buying a billion people from both China and India just to win the competition.

India is going to be not just the country with the most number of not just the country with the largest number of inhabitants, but winner of various other awards, most elbows, most lungs.

The right to be used in sentences such as, if everyone in X stood on each other's shoulders, stroke heads, they would stretch to the moon and back Y times.

And assuming, you know, we're doing this with India, if everyone in India stood on each other's heads and shoulders would stretch the moon and back five times if they're standing on each other's heads, more like six and a half to seven if on the shoulders, which seems

more likely to succeed.

I might have done the maths wrong on that, actually.

But anyway, the point is, there's a lot of people in India.

And also, I mean, it would be a logistical nightmare, would it not?

getting everyone to stand on each other.

I think it's more like three and a half times if they're on each other's shoulders.

But anyway,

it would be a logistical logistical nightmare, Anivab, an act of economic self-sabotage,

probably the kind of humanitarian disaster that in former times you'd have needed an occupying imperial force to perpetrate.

And also it's unlikely to succeed.

The record levels, the record number of levels for a human pyramid is nine.

And that's with a large base consisting of several people.

You're looking at needing a quarter of a billion people or so on each other's shoulders just for one leg to the moon.

So why is India trying to do this?

That's what I want to know.

Why?

I mean, what's even if you used 182 statues of people, like the Sarda Patel mega statue that we talked about in our radio 4 show a couple of years ago, you'd still need two million giant statues standing on each other's heads.

And it's not going to happen.

So, so, why is India concentrating so have I misunderstood this story?

Why can India not just build a rocket?

Well, I mean, again, this is something we've discussed on this podcast.

You know, we are obsessed with cheap space travel.

And one thing cheaper than a rocket is just putting a person on top of a person.

If you've seen some of our bus and train travel, you know, we're far better traveling on top of the bus than inside it.

So if we can get loads of people to go to space, you know, I mean, we don't need Elon Musk.

You know, we just need people.

So we went the procreation way instead of the science way, which is a sort of science.

It's terrifying to me because you're going to overtake, but it says the fertility rate has fallen substantially.

So I just want to, from a female perspective, take a moment to to say the fertility rate has fallen in recent decades from 5.7 births per woman in 1950 to two births per woman today.

Can I just say to 5.7, can we have a moment of what the f

right?

And this is why I hate when idiots say, like, women, you know, we could put them in more positions, but they just haven't achieved anything historically compared to men.

Yes, we never had the pill dickheads.

We just spent so many years being relentlessly pregnant.

I cannot imagine having five children or the 0.7 either.

Like, and also, saying 5.7 per woman, and I do think this is how it's all being reported, rather than per family, suggests like they're doing it on their own.

These women just like knocking up the population by getting pregnant.

How are these women getting pregnant?

You know, like, is it magic?

And so, that's like six years of being constantly pregnant, these women went through in like the 50s.

And so, I just think like that just back that blows my mind and obviously China has like reduced its growth comparatively by only allowing one male child I mean they didn't specify one male child but they didn't have to did they so we're in this climate crisis now where we've got too many people and I've said this before on the podcast but plan B needs to start thinking of itself as plan a

and and I do also think that you know if if anywhere wants to slow their population boom down we need to it's time for a properly marketed and distributed male contraceptive pill.

I think it's your turn, guys.

Enjoy the mood swings.

You know, and it's because it's so funny, isn't it?

Because we've got this like kind of population explosion in some places and then reproductive rights in America that have just like gone backwards again.

And I believe soon, because I just feel like the burden of this is often on women.

So it's women having the pregnancies.

It's women giving birth to like many, many children when they maybe already have children and risking themselves and then risking, you you know, the family risking losing the mother.

And I think what we're going to see soon, this is my thought, is that we're going to see on dating sites,

especially in America and places like this, women aren't going to give a shit about photos of men's faces anymore.

They'll just need to see a picture of a vasectomy scar.

And it'll be like, because I'm not traveling three states to get an abortion, you better show me that sweet little nut scar.

Otherwise, I am not DTF.

So, so I just, it feels mad.

It feels mad to just think like how, you know, China has something like a third is it China or is it the Asian the Asian continent?

Yeah India and China have between them about a third of the global population

yeah and so over 65s are growing more rapidly than birth rates so I think they were saying in 2050 we will have twice the amount of people over 65 than under five and this math is now making my head hurt I can't I can't work it out well well you know I was doing a little research in family history and my great-grandmother had nine children.

And according to the old British census, she was born in 1890, they were the smallest family in the neighborhood.

So, you know, and it's funny you mention this because in the 1970s,

India had Indira Gandhi as its prime minister, and her son, who was

groomed to be prime minister, died in a plane crash.

He started a forced sterilization program.

And, you know, he forced people to have vasectomies because he sort of, I guess, thought that this day would come.

And unlike China, we're quite terrible at organizing things in the 70s.

So instead of a lot of successful vasectomies, what we had was even more babies in the 1980s.

So I don't know what was going on in those clinics, but

we failed.

I think it's not forcing anyone, is it?

I think it's like kind of showing the options that you have available.

That's the problem, isn't it?

You've got like forced, like in places like Romania, you have

forced pregnancies and period police and stuff like that with the Ceaușescus.

And then you've got forced sterilization, which is also a horrific human rights abuse.

So, you know, like just making contraception and

family planning an option in places seems like it could be a good middle ground.

Then the people who want kids can have them and then and maybe not have more than they wanted to.

And people that don't want them don't have to have them.

Yeah.

Somehow, though, having the largest population in the world in one of the most polluted polluted countries, you know, at a time where climate change is a crisis, doesn't seem like the best option for the planet.

But you saying nine there, I think, I think about my family.

So my dad was one of five.

My mum was one of three.

But like on my mum's side, the grandmother, I think she had like 13 children,

my mum's grandmother, of which 11.

you know, survived.

So it's not like that was unique, I guess, 5.7 births per per woman it just sort of blows my mind as a modern woman to be pregnant for that long

a time it just sounds like utterly exhausting people have been discussing the

the limit of possible population for hundreds of years I mean population essentially has long been the pair of elephants quietly humping in the corner of the room

because how do you look at it I mean it's possible the world could logistically cope with a 10 billion plus population but then the question is wouldn't it be better for everyone if it didn't have to and all of it is pointlessly moot anyway because we are where we are with eight billion people and a collapsing uh environment and resources uh and the social implications to all possible versions of our future are somewhere on a four-dimensional graphic between awkward harrowing tedious and utterly catastrophic so it is a it's a it's a very awkward political issue that is barely talked about and completely insoluble it seems to me so i have one stepson and a cat so does that mean

a net positive environmentally?

I'm just trying to work out if I'm a good person, guys.

Yeah, no, you're saving the world, essentially.

I don't know if there's emissions trading, like you have your carbon offsets.

Yeah, do you get cat credits?

The Japanese prime minister this week, addressing Japan's falling birth rate, says that if Japan is to be able to continue to function as a society,

it is, quote, now or never to address this issue of birth rate 28 of japan's population is over 65.

so are we now heading towards a world where essentially half of the global population are extremely old and the other half are looking after extremely old people and

you know it is this the utopia we've always dreamed of i'm not entirely sure it is

we're all living longer which you know which is why the french are right to protest like not getting a pension till 64 and they're and they're protesting Yeah, there's a there's a difficulty there, isn't there?

That you can understand why people don't want to work longer.

But at the same time, if we don't want to work longer, we're going to have to live less long as well, and that's a hard sell politically.

I wonder what you guys think of this.

I mean, sixty-five percent, I think, of the one point four billion in India are under the age of thirty-five, so and I think if you drive anywhere in India, about ninety-five percent of them are making Instagram reels.

So I don't

I mean, should they have a thing for older Indians, like to go to Japan?

Or like, we'd be very happy to leave.

We need space.

Sort of

a granny and granddad trading scheme

across the world.

Oh, like a French exchange.

That's what we did at school.

We did the French

exchange trips.

Just at the point where you think people are set in their ways, you know, like

according to sort of thinking that as you get older, you get slightly more set in your ways.

If you get sent somewhere that's so culturally different to where you're from, that could be quite cool, a cultural exchange.

I like that, Andy.

Yes.

Wasn't there a big movie in the UK where a bunch of retirees came to Rajasthan?

I think it was called Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

And then I think they made a TV show out of it where they tried to get a bunch of people to retire

in India.

I'm not sure what in exchange we would send.

We would send six influencers.

I don't know.

Well, as long as you're one of them, Anivab, then that's fine with me.

The birth rate in Britain, yeah, down at 1.6

per woman.

But I think, I mean,

there's a lot of evidence, I think, that suggests that birth rates come down with increasing education of girls and freedom of choice for women in terms of how they live their lives and how they conduct their careers.

But I think in Britain, the birth rate has come down because, as a country, we try to avoid awkward conversations.

And conversations don't get much more awkward than your child coming up to you and saying, Hey guys, did you not look at the state of A, the world, B, the country, and see everything else before imposing on me a planet which I had at no point expressed a willingness to be born in?

That is an awkward conversation starter.

So you can understand why people are reluctant to put themselves in a position where they might have to answer that question from a from a cup of tea and a biscuit just doesn't quite cut it.

You know, there was a study

across India to see what were our most popular states.

And Andy, you're absolutely right, the more educated the state is, the more scientifically progressive and less religious, like Kerala or Tamil Nadu, less of the population.

And our most populous state is Uttar Pradesh, which is in the northeast, which is about as large as Brazil.

I think it's bigger than Brazil, just the state itself.

And they went around Uttar Pradesh asking people why they have so many children.

And most of that place is just wide open space and farmland.

And most of the people said there's nothing else to do in the evenings.

Well, I'd assume that.

Because because if you look at

the comparative birth rates between India and China, and China's has come down and India's as well, it's come down, but less.

So India's overtaking China.

And what's the difference?

The main difference between these two countries is that India has cricket and China just barely played there.

And obviously cricket is such an unstoppably sexy game that people simply can't help f just ferociously breeding with each other.

Yeah.

After a test match, you just gotta you've gotta go smash.

Well, your words are not mine, Tiff.

That should be on a t-shirt.

That should be a new

watch.

Watch Test go smash.

I'll see if I can get that into a commentary at some point.

I'm voting for the Board of Cricket of Control in India to hire Tiff Stevenson as their marketing person.

I do know that the population of India,

I think, more than doubled over the course of the international career of the great batsman Sachin Tendulka.

So you can draw your own conclusions from

that.

Winning makes people horny.

That's what we're saying.

That little second there is for all the Indian listeners of the bugle to have that fact sink in.

Think about when they were born.

And you're probably absolutely right.

In other world news, the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has surprised not just her own hemisphere, but all the other ones as well by resigning unexpectedly.

She quacked because she said she had nothing in the tank.

Now, resigning because you no longer feel up to it is a completely alien concept here in the United Kingdom.

When generally, if you don't feel up to it, that's when you start standing for office.

Tiff, can you possibly explain

why why she's resigned now?

As the female correspondent on today's edition, yes.

She said Jacinda Arden has quit as Prime Minister, stating she had no more in the tank.

And fair enough, because fuel prices are very high at the moment, and I wouldn't want to fill that up.

Yeah, she basically said over the summer she had time to think about it, you know, and if she was going to run again and what she would need to do, and

she just couldn't do it.

And so the legacy is a lot of people have been talking about misogyny and she was saying it's not misogyny you know i want young girls to aim for this i just think the next pm has a lot to live up to like can he be totally chill when in the middle of a broadcast an earthquake happens like she might as well have been smoking a fag and having a covercure that's how calm she was she was just like oh we're just having a little bit of an earthquake here well that's quite a big one

so you need someone who's got that level of like you know and her legacy she was like apparently the first world leader i read this, apparently, the first female world leader to bring an infant to the UN meeting in New York, which I would argue is not true because Trump was at those meetings.

So, yeah, but

Chris Hipkins, who is replacing her, I've seen an interview with him.

He seems very nice.

He's super Kiwi, the most Kiwi man I've ever seen, I think.

But if Labour lose the next election, they're saying he will only have spent eight months as leader, which, to be fair, is still six trusses.

Which I think is the official measurement of a short-term

is now a unit of time.

So, there's an election due late this year, and Ardern's Labour Party is trailing by four points in the opinion polls.

And some have suggested that this might have prompted her to resign, being four points down in the opinion.

Four

points down.

If we operated the same logic, we would have five prime ministers resigning every day at the moment.

We did get quite close to it at one point last year, but we never quite reached five a day.

And there's this element that she has been the recipient of huge amounts of personal abuse and vitriol online.

I mean, partly because of her, the

people disagreeing with her approach to COVID and the anti-vaxes laying into into her.

But it does seem that female leaders are bombarded with so much more

abuse and insults online than

men.

I mean, are we ever going to move, are we ever going to grow up as a species, Tiff?

I mean, have we peaked?

Are we just on the downward slide to

back to kind of pre-Neanderthal levels?

Yeah, I think, well,

Sam Neal came out and said it's disgusting, the misogyny towards her, the actor Sam Neal.

But she was, yeah, she was insistent.

I think she didn't want to put off future women, but it is a thing that you bear in mind.

It's always in the back of your mind if you put yourself into any public sphere.

Obviously, I can't say as the leader of a country, but you know, as anyone who puts themselves in the public eye, you go, Well, you're going to get the usual amount that anyone gets, and then you're going to get that very special amount where they say they hope you would die.

And also, can you send feet pics?

So, often in the same emails, like looking at it, when we were looking at New Zealand from the UK, we were like, oh, this is how a grown-up deals with a crisis.

And we've got people flinging cake at the walls at number 10.

So, for us, we're like, oh, you know, if she was our Prime Minister, I think from outside New Zealand, she's viewed as a very grown-up and successful Prime Minister.

And I think within that, within New Zealand, sentiment might be slightly different.

But

yeah, I mean, wouldn't it be great if we'd have had her in number 10?

Well, yeah, I mean, grown-up and

Prime Minister, words, I haven't always sat harmoniously in this country in recent times.

My concerns are that, well, I mean, are we ever going to have a wake-up call, that the dehumanising impact of modern media, social, anti-social, and otherwise, means that a career in politics is increasingly unsustainable if you are or wish to remain human.

And also,

you know, if

you know,

I look at New Zealand as a country, and I think if New Zealand cannot succeed as a country, there is absolutely no hope for the entire world because, you know, but by comparison, they've got space, they've got resources, they've got wealth.

Yeah, if you if you get up New Zealand, you're taking the entire planet down with you.

So butt your ideas up.

It's a big deal to see, you know,

she gave birth while in office, didn't she, and took the baby with her.

And that's, it's quite, I think that's, that's a legacy that is on the positive side that is there for everyone to see.

Well, obviously she was inspired by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I making his eight-year-old son co-emporal.

Yes, she gave her daughter Niamh a couple of jobs to do on the trip.

Oysters news now, and I don't think we've ever had a specific oyster section on the bugle

previously, but some sensational oyster news has been been breaking uh Tiff you are

the the bugle saltwater bivalve mollusk correspondent

apparently

scientists have claimed that eating oysters could save the world or at least protect certain areas of coastline

how how have they come to this conclusion um i should i should be the oysters correspondent because i'm cockney And well that and the jelly deal are the two, apparently they used to be not considered a delicacy in London, oysters,

and just used to be eaten by everyone.

Yes, in Louisiana, this story came out of Louisiana that coastal wetlands are being washed away, leaving the region more vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding.

So restaurants in New Orleans are encouraging people to eat oysters and then they're recycling the oyster shells so they can be used to

build sea walls.

So, this is actually quite a positive, like, recycling story.

Um, but I can't help in this, unfortunately, because I'm actually allergic to oysters, which is annoying.

You know, I'm allergic to like oysters, clams, basically, if it's been clinging to a rock in the Mediterranean, Ronaldo, don't put it in my mouth.

Um, but uh, oysters are a bit like dicks, one bad one, and you're done forever.

So,

um,

so yeah, we we have a,

you know, we have a solution here.

We have a let's rebuild the walls

and rebuild seawalls with oyster shells.

So I think that's quite that's quite an exciting bit of,

you know, if we have a problem with the Thames overflowing, we could use oyster cards.

That's probably what we could do here.

That would be my solution because I have about 30 of them in the house because I just use Apple Pay now.

So I'd like somewhere to actually recycle my oyster cards.

So yeah, so that's that's the that's the positive bit about using oyster shells.

However, there has also been another news story you may know about, Andy, which is that baby oysters apparently hear sounds that are related to desirable habitat related reefs.

So when you start thinking about baby oysters, you may feel a bit bad about eating oysters, but apparently they seek out places via sound, via sonar, and then actively, or not via sonar, via sensitive hairs that they have on them.

So So they feel the vibrations in the water, and then they actively swim horizontally for as much as four miles towards the source, then drop down to plant themselves.

And I can't, for the life of me, work out what a horizontal swim is because I thought all swimming was horizontal.

So,

yeah, so there's so there's good news about recycling oyster shells, but bad news about eating oysters because baby oysters are looking for each other and you might feel bad.

Right.

Well, so, so, but oysters can hear.

That's, I mean, that's the headline that that i took from that obviously you don't read the whole article but you just look at the headline and if oysters can hear does that mean they've heard everything we've been saying about how sexy they make us feel i mean that puts them in a position of incredible power um

but uh well it's i mean it's interesting this idea of migrating oysters i mean they are they are quite literally brainless they seldom venture out beyond their uh their house i mean you might think that makes them a key voter demographic it might make them a tasty snack it's it's a hard call to make uh these days

Anuvaba, I mean the oysters

I can't remember if I'm not sure I've ever eaten an oyster in India.

Is it is it much of a

well there is a there is a tradition in the state of Kerala to have raw oysters with chili sauce in it.

And and now that I know that oysters can hear,

I'm not so sure I want to eat oysters raw anymore.

I mean I wouldn't I wouldn't you know I can hear and I wouldn't like to be eaten you know whole with Tabasco sauce on my head.

I I just so I'm what is that oyster gonna hear on the way down

exactly yeah I mean there's there's always a lot of fetishizing of oysters in in TV shows isn't there like remember the scene in Mad Men the TV show where they win a big account in advertising and there's a the celebration with champagne and oysters to a point where I think one character throws up on the client

well they are they are they are they have to be fetishized because otherwise you wouldn't really eat them I feel like It just looks like someone sneezed in a soap dish.

And

how is that appetizing?

And as well, the other thing when I did eat oysters is that you're just trying to disguise the taste of the oyster by putting shallot vinegar or Tabasco or something else on it.

So you go, well, I can't recognise what I'm actually eating.

Yeah, the first oyster I ever had was from a van on Hastings Seafront.

And

I think it's fair to say that wasn't the greatest oyster in

have you have you have you had them since then?

I have, yeah, so my I was with my now wife who's a big fan of seafood and she said, Oh, you got it, you've got to try this.

Oysters are great, and then slightly forgot that we were on Hastings Seafront and it was coming out of a van.

But

oyster facts.

Now,

we have an oyster fact box for you.

Fact one, the oyster is one of the most popular saltwater bivalve mollusks of all time.

In fact, for most of its history it's been better known than football or pop music.

It was invented an estimated 200 million years ago when according to experts dinosaurs ruled the earth.

The dinosaurs of course did not entirely codify their rules into a set of laws such as we would understand today, but the broad thrust of it was every reptile for itself and if you have not got massive horns, an armour plated torso or teeth that can tear through sheet metal, you might want to consider extinction.

But the oysters took little notice of the dinosaurs.

They mostly kept themselves to themselves, finding themselves powerfully erotic and therefore breeding very successfully to the extent where, if you ignored all the other creatures in the world, oysters accounted for 100% of the creatures in the world.

In the year 1864,

700 million oysters were consumed in London, apparently.

That's according to the internet.

700 million oysters in London in 1864.

And yet they give us jip for our fancy foods and our avocados, the whinging 19th century hypocrites.

But in fact, oysters have not generally been the luxury food stuff that they are thought of today, as Tiff pointed out.

Similarly, ordinary people in 1864 would think nothing of eating pan-fried foie gras of endangered Californian condor, coated in an armour of gold leaf and Peruvian snoutfish caviar, served with a truffled lobster todger and a reductio ad absurdum of Antarctic penguin wine and a Madonna of resurrected purple finned turbot.

That's just the way people rolled in those days.

And our final oyster fact, to properly shock an oyster, you should not use either physical tools or heat.

You should coax it into the open with song or cross-examine it like a lawyer until it pops itself open.

Until it pops itself open and reveals everything like the criminal it almost certainly is.

Those are your oyster facts from the bugle today.

Just a quick sports story.

From the Australian Open, Andy Murray made it through two rounds in five set epics before losing in four sets in the third round.

But Tiff, I know what really struck you was something from his post-match interview,

which was not necessarily the kind of thing you expect to hear.

Yes, this was the match before he went out, and it was five hours long, wasn't it?

Or five hours.

Five hours, 45 minutes.

Five hours, 45 minutes, and some of the most incredible rallies you've ever seen, just as he was about to get

I think as he broke back actually in one of the games just like an astonishing match and afterwards

one of the journalists sort of was having a conversation with Andy and he Andy sort of said well I've got a big heart and then the journalist said well you've got a big everything

which I

which to be fair to Andy he sort of laughed and went I'm sure my wife would disagree but I'm pretty sure that was the journalist suggesting to all of us that Andy Murray has a big dick.

I mean, he certainly played with big dick energy or big hip, big hip energy after an operation.

But yes,

I was sort of like, oh, wow, this must be like how female tennis players feel a lot of the time when they get sexualized constantly in relation to sport.

But yeah, he handled it very well and made a joke of it.

But I was like, what else could they possibly mean?

You haven't eaten everything.

I always worry when interviews like this sort of end abruptly, it would have been good to ask a few other people what they thought, including perhaps his wife, to just get a more closed-ended thing to this problem.

Maybe he just meant he'd got enormous elbows or something.

We don't know.

I mean, as you said, he's had major surgery.

He has...

I don't know, is it too artificial?

Chris, you have,

you're basically a cyborg these days, aren't you?

You've had got

similar surgery to Adimar, haven't you?

Yeah, we have.

Mine was slightly more invasive, but we're not in a competition.

He's one of the underrates.

And

he's effectively had a hip replacement.

It's not quite significant.

He shouldn't be doing what he's doing.

It's remarkable.

Well, he is.

I mean, I've been looking at

all the various procedures he's had to keep him on court as a tennis player.

He's now an estimated 3% human flesh.

He's mostly bits of scrap metal, planks of wood washed up on the beach in Scotland and nailed onto the former World No.

One to back up the remnants of his original limbs.

Used chewing gum, holds everything together.

And there are some bits of dinosaur bone stolen from museums and put together to function using a complex system of gears, elastic bands, engine oil, and haggis.

So, I mean, it's really remarkable that he's still out there

competing at the level that

game against

Kokinakis.

It finished after 4 a.m.

local time as the Australian Open continues to try to find ways to make tennis less appealing for the spectator, aside from forcing players to carry on playing in

life-threatening heat.

And, yeah, 4am, that seems,

I mean, it's like a kind of Grateful Dead tennis match.

Do you guys think the next generation of tennis players with all these operations will play well into their 70s?

Well, you'd hope so, so, really.

I mean,

you know, within 100 years.

And also, look,

if we tie it back to the change in the global population, they will be

relatively young by the standards of

everyone who's alive in the world at the time.

That concludes this week's Bugle.

We will be back next week.

Don't forget you can listen to the current series of the News Quiz via BBC Sounds.

If you're listening to this before Wednesday evening of this week, the 25th that would be of January, my rearranged tour show in Worcester at the Huntingdon Hall is taking place.

There are still a few tickets available.

My Cardiff show on the 24th is sold out, but do

try and come to the Worcester Show if you can.

Anything to plug, Tiff?

Yes, I would like to plug Catharsis.

My podcast in the Bugle family.

The latest episode is out with Rosheen Connerty.

And we've got fantastic guests who I've just confirmed today coming up for new episodes.

So listen to that.

Give us a like and subscribe.

And you can hear other comedians talk about their pet peeves,

their old grudges, their minor irritations.

We also dip into some historical beefs as well, just for funsies.

So go have a listen to those if you haven't already.

We've had some Bugle regulars on.

We've had Josh Gondelman, we've had Alice Fraser.

um so so we've had a few of the bugle the bugle gang and there will be more so listen to that and i'm also on tour um from um well march in belfast but then mainly may all over the uk um so head to my any of my socials and you can get all the details for the tour there

Anivab, anything to plug?

Yeah, one quick thing.

I'm back in the UK in April and on the 22nd of April, I'm doing a show in Oxford.

The details will be on social media, but the show is about Lord Clive, and the show is titled

We Need to Talk About Clive.

And it's specifically for the city of Oxford that wants to

have, I guess, a laugh about Lord Clive's role in my hometown.

Yes, fascinating historical...

historical figure.

We talked about the sculpture of Clive outside the foreign office in London, which was put up about 120 years after he died in complete disgrace.

And

around about the time all their statues were being toppled,

you think the pigeons have a rather more nuanced understanding of what Clive did than the British education system.

Thank you for listening, buglers.

We'll be back next week.

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.