Flippin' Tech

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4249 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world with me, Andy Zoltziman, currently still one of the United Kingdom's leading exponents of meaningless, unnecessary and slightly overlong silences.

There, still got it.

I'm in the shed and the shed is cold today.

But joining me today from hopefully

slightly less chilly than my shed.

Well, we have someone old and someone new.

Not old as in tumbling into the inescapable more of senescence and decrepitude.

I just mean she's been on the bugle for quite a long time now.

And not new as in literally born yesterday or fresh off the factory production where most comedians come from these years.

I mean new to the bugle.

Firstly from Australia once again luckily not competing in the Australian Open Tennis so she is able to join us from Sydney is Alice Fraser.

Hello Alice.

Hello Andy yes I it's 10 days since my last birthday I am beginning crone life right now.

It's pretty exciting.

I feel like I could poke people with a stick on public transport and no one can

question it.

Yeah.

That's you know that's I guess one of the privileges of

seniority.

Can I just say,

I would like to make a statement at this point.

It's come to my attention that a joke that I did on the Gargle also appeared on The Bugle.

And I would like to address this scandal, this joke-stealing scandal, me stealing a joke from me.

First of all, I don't know which joke it was.

My policy on podcasts is the same as my policy on Zoom calls.

I just put a post-it note over my bit so I don't get distracted by my own beauty.

Secondly,

we will never know which one was recorded first and for which show I originally wrote the joke.

So is it Gargle Alice stealing from Bugle Alice or Bugle Alice doing a tribute to Gargle Alice?

I could tell you obviously, but I won't because I refuse to respect linear time or artificial boundaries between work personas and selves.

Right.

Hello, this is Last Post Alice, and can I say that this is true of Alice's across all podcast dimensions?

Call five.

Well, you know, I mean, joke stealing is a curse in comedy, Alice, and I'm afraid you're just going to have to sort sort it out between yourselves.

Well, it sort of depends on which of me is the most famous.

Well, I mean, this is a controversy that could run and run.

And into this

world of tumult, for the first time in A, his life, B, the history of all humanity, and C, this podcast's 15 and a bit years of existence.

I'm delighted to welcome, after several outstanding appearances on the news quiz, coming to you in a minimum of five dimensions, from South London.

It's Ian Smith.

Hello, Ian.

Welcome to the bugle.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I guess this is the point where I need to make a statement and say

last night I did quite a long routine about garlic bread.

It was very similar to Peter Kaye's.

So yeah, I guess I'll take that up with him as well.

So Ian, you live in Peckham.

Am I right saying that?

So not too far from me in

London's glamorous glamorous South London area.

Originally from Ghoul, one of the greatest named towns

in England.

Yeah, apparently the rumour is it comes from a word that means cesspit.

Like an old sort of word that means cesspit.

And there's a local historian trying to disprove that at the minute.

But they don't have much evidence.

They're just desperate to not live in a place that's called cesspit, basically.

I should clarify for our listeners, Ian, before we get criticised for booking you, that you are not the late former leader of Rhodesia.

Just to clarify that, nor are you the former New Zealand wicketkeeper Ian Smith, nor the Australian actor best known for playing Harold Bishop in the Neo-Shakespearean rom tragic com soap opera Neighbours, nor the film producer whose credits include Mad Max Fury Road, nor the legendary Scottish rugby union player who scored a record 24 international tries in the 1920s and 30s, a record which stood for over 50 years, who remains sadly as dead as he has been now for 50 years, Nor Ian Smith, the pseudonym used by Colonel Gaddafi when he entered the World Darts Championship qualifying in 1993.

Nor Ian Smith, the original name for the crime-busting cartoon dog Scooby-Doo, nor even Ian Duncan Smith, the former leader of the Conservative Party, and hopefully inadvertent quota of the motto from the Gates of Auschwitz.

You are none of those Ian Smiths.

Yeah, I mean, I think I'd like a more creative name.

It's difficult with Smith as your surname, because you'd have to put so much creativity into the first name that it would just sound ridiculous,

like Razma Taz Smith or something.

Yeah, that's...

I mean, that could have given you a very different career.

I mean, it would be very hard to be called that and not become a professional jazz saxophonist, I think.

Yeah.

We are recording on the 17th of January 2023.

On this day in 1961, the departing US President Dwight D.

Eisenhower, three days before hanging up his presidential socks and passing the ceremonial sausage of office to youngster John F.

Kennedy, gave a farewell address to the American nation in which he said, bye, bye everyone, see ya.

But he also said some words that even today clatter us in the face like a frying pan of first grade forewarnery and foresightfulness.

The man known by his nickname of icicle, sorry, Ike, I'm always getting mixed up with Ike's and bikes.

Did you know that the full term for a tricycle is actually a Treisenhauer?

But anyway, Eisenhower said some extraordinarily prescient things, including, As we peer into society's future, we, you and I, and our government, must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow.

And it's good to know that the human race took those words on board and then threw them overboard into the ocean of

practicality.

I mean he it was an extraordinary speech in which he talks about you know not he said we cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.

We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow and I don't know if he listens to this show from beyond the grave Eisenhower I know most former US presidents do they just like like to keep up on what what's what's going on but he must be fucking pissed off at how thoroughly those words have been ignored

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

And, well,

today we have an Antarctica special section in the bin commemorating another anniversary on this day 111 years ago in 1912 British polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott was approaching the South Pole and we've dug into the archives and we can pick up commentary now with Scott very close to the pole on the call 111 years ago expert summariser Fritjof Nansen and with him the BBC's Brian Strapplegreen

And here comes Scott.

Has he left it too late?

He's just yards away from the pole now.

Looking tired and it must be said, really very cold.

He's seen off Oates.

Out comes the Fend.

Down goes Evans.

It's Scott.

Scott's going to lead this team home.

Here he comes.

The 43-year-old former naval officer in his trademark reindeer fur gloves.

The crowd are going noisily berserk.

It's Scott for Team GP.

He's into the red zone.

He's at the pole.

And seconds.

Seconds.

Just five weeks behind the Norwegians.

And you can see how disappointed he is, could have only had.

But it's gold for Abundant of Norway.

Silver for Scott of Great Britain and well nans, a super effort from Scott, but you've got to say, not quite good enough on the day.

Yes, Brian, you'll be freezing his bollocks off out there.

If you get to a poll first, it looks like he's complaining to the referee.

Maybe suggesting Amundsen got a false start.

I didn't see it myself, but terrific component exploring from both teams.

Yes, dads, and well, we won't be seeing the Bobby Scott swooping falcon celebration today, nor the Larry Oaks Penguin Waddle.

It's second for Team Terra Nova.

More analysis on where it went wrong coming soon on the Poles Apart podcast with Fritz

with Fritschoff and Ernest Shackleton.

But to sorry, let me do that again.

More analysis of where it all went wrong.

Coming soon on the Poles Apart podcast with Fritschoff and Ernest Shackleton.

But thanks for joining us today.

There's more live polar exploration right now as we cross over to our colleagues at the ABC for live commentary on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, Dougie Mawson and the Chillaroos getting stuck into the coldest continent on Earth.

Your commentary team for this one, Nimrod Expedition veteran Edgeworth Davids, and leading the call, Jim Maxwell.

There's so much audio magic happening there, Andy.

You, multiple accents, background noise, and Ian Smith,

don't think I didn't notice the absolute professionalism.

Took a bite of a banana, the most radio fruit.

The most radio fruit.

None of this apple, chips, like he goes, soft, squishy, silent.

Before you compliment me too much, I'll just show you the other thing I ambitiously put near the recording which is a punnet of strawberries

an absolute mad decision from me there

top story this news humanity is being taken over by technology we this is a story Ian and Alice that we've we've touched on at various points over the

Bugles history and do you think we've now reached a point in history where the robot takeover, which is obviously now totally inevitable, increasingly inevitable if inevitability can indeed increase, but it's not something to be feared, but something to be wholeheartedly welcomed as potentially a vast improvement on the flounderings, witterings, and befuddlements of the human race?

I mean, is this now, you know, should we every time we hear about a story about you know, robots dehumanizing humanity, we think we're good.

We're looking at the CES roundup, right?

Andy, the efforts of tech companies to go viral by creating technology that's either groundbreakingly new and cool or so weird you're going to tweet about it whether you want to or not.

Like the Withings U-Scan P-Sensor, which is a device that sits at the front of your toilet and when you do a Wii, apparently it's best to sit down when you do it so you can get an accurate reading.

It it collects the urine, analyzes it and then sends you the results to your phone via Wi-Fi, which is great.

I think this is all a very positive piece of technology.

It'll weed out the toxically masculine people who believe that sitting for wit to wee is only for girls.

It also replaces the old P-analysis tool where you just get a medieval doctor to rinse some round his mouth and then prescribe bleaches or bloodletting.

Which, of course, I never understood why people are like, oh, what terrible doctoring.

Of course, you're going to prescribe awful courses of treatment.

You've got a mouthful of piss.

You're only human.

The only option before this urine analysis, other than the medieval doctor, of course, was that guy who used to lie at the urinals at gay clubs and he can't be everywhere Andy

I mean it's this it's I mean it's an extraordinary piece of technology the

the WAS scanner

I mean Ian can you see this becoming a you know a big big part of your your home home technology setup I think so yeah but uh largely because of like the um the gossip potential because if if it's in your toilet when and you have guests around and then they go to the toilet and then you'll get a notification on your phone

so when they come back down, you can go, Oh, Steve, you've got chlamydia.

I hope

that doesn't put a dampener on the slow-cooked ox cheek that I've done tonight.

You've come in with a lot of foodie stuffy and a punnet of strawberries and a slow-cooked ox cheek.

That's my go-to trying to impress people meal.

Slow-cooked ox cheek and a chlamydia diagnosis.

Yeah, it does feel like a lot of these are sort of so like I saw solving problems that I'm not really concerned about.

There's a big thing about a wireless TV, and it was saying, like, gone are the days of like desperately trying to hide your cables.

But I don't feel ashamed of the cables from a TV.

Like, someone's looking at them going,

you use electricity for that.

Like, yeah, that's how it, that's how it's going.

I don't feel like, just put the TV.

My rule is put it as close to a plug as possible, and then you're not creating like a sort of

high-tech laser protecting a museum piece style cables going across your living room.

It doesn't feel like a big issue for me.

Well, I enjoyed the citizen smartwatch.

It can gauge fatigue.

So it's a smartwatch that can tell you when you're tired, because that is my favourite kind of tech innovation, which is to say something that we have already got a really good way of doing, but the tech is attempting to render this human function obsolete and it might just succeed.

Like, I promise you don't need to look at your watch to realize you're exhausted.

No, you just need to remember whether or not you have children.

I think that's basically the

technology that we have.

It'd be amazing to be so stupid you don't realize you're tired.

Just how productive you'd be if you were too thick to realize.

But then you wouldn't be able to do many jobs.

I mean, I've got to say, you've either got to be thick or a baby, literally, a baby, because I have an argument with my daughter literally every day that goes something like this: You're tired, that's why you're being so awful.

Trust me, if you sleep, things will feel better.

And she goes, No, you're trying to trick me.

That's very much the same conversation that Margaret Thatcher's advisors had with her when she was Prime Minister and took legendarily four hours' sleep a night.

So, with disastrous consequences, it must be said.

Just

a couple of other things

that struck me from the Consumer Electronic Show.

A mood fridge.

This is a fridge that apparently changes colour depending on your mood.

I don't know.

Actually, I just read the headline mood fridge.

I don't know if it's your mood or the mood of the sausages within.

If

the sausage feels impending fate closing in on it, I'm not sure.

Is this like those mood rings from the 90s where they'd just sort of go with your body heat and tell you that you were horny all the time?

Which is obvious because only teenagers bought them.

That's like a sure bet.

You don't have to be psychic to realize that that's what the ring needs to read 90% of the time.

There's a lot of colour-changing tech.

A car that can change colour, which was one of the big innovations.

Everyone was very impressed by the car that can change colour, which is another one of those things that sounds good in concept, but you will realize it very quickly if you've ever lost your car in a car park.

A terrible idea.

It's a terrible idea.

Or you're going to be like, oh, I was definitely on level two, and it's a red car or possibly a blue sedan?

I think if it's Tuesday, I made up a rhyme to remember what colour my car is today.

If it's parked on F2, the colour is blue.

Oh, no, wait, was it if it's on F2, it's parked, the colour is

red?

I don't, sorry, sorry, wait.

If on F2, it's parked, the colour is red.

It feels like it was designed for like getaway drivers only.

Like

the end sequence of the Italian job would be so much less impressive if they would just change the car to green.

And then the police were like, well,

they've gone.

It'd be slightly more useful if, rather than just changing colour, it changed vehicle.

So, you know, it would go from a car to a you know a motorbike to a donkey

to

you could just go gradually back in time.

I mean, it's not a self-driving PRA, though, is it?

I mean, that's the real...

I mean, this was

the absolute killer product to emerge from this year's CES.

I mean, have you, Alice,

your

daughter is

15, 16 months old?

Yep.

Have you ever thought, I wish this Pram could

drive itself?

First of all, it isn't a self-driving PRAM.

Speaking of it not being a self-driving pram, it isn't.

It's an electrically assisted pram, which is great for people with mobility issues or lots of hills near where they live or remarkably fat babies.

But

it's not more self-driving than like an e-bike.

It won't drive unless it senses that your hands are on the handles.

And sure,

I guarantee tired parents everywhere have already thought of six ways to bypass that rule from filling washing up gloves with meat scrap and strapping them to the bar to becoming the vizier just so that you can take the hand of a thief in punishment in order to send baby for a solo roll.

But

I think what you want is a remote control pram, actually.

Right.

You don't want one that's got a mind of its own, is all I'm saying.

Yeah, I mean this does feel like scene one in some extremely low-budget dystopian horror film in which prams

take over the world.

I don't trust my baby with autonomous technology.

She's really smart.

If I send her off in a solo pram, she'll come back on top of it controlling the thing somehow.

That's step one in Mad Max future.

Mad Max Jr.

I mean this is this is a movie franchise waiting to achieve.

You should be strapping safety scissors to the wheels like Booty Car.

Oh that would be quite good to make these self-driving prams into a sort of robot war style TV show and get the babies battling against each other.

Something that I believe we've lost as a civilization, Ian, is the simple joy of watching infants fight to the death.

There's PC gone mad, as far as I'm concerned.

Today I was trying to put her down for a nap, and she evaded my nap, got up and did a little victory dance tier near my head, and then leant over and gave me a benevolent kiss on the forehead, which I felt was the most contemptuous touch.

I know, I'm not going to name their name, but I know someone who told their daughter to go on the naughty step, and then their daughter wet themselves and basically said, This is what's going to happen if you put me on the naughty step.

Evil genius.

So she's never been on the naughty step since.

It's a fantastic way to avoid punishment.

I think we'll probably still work as an adult for certain situations.

That's what I'm going to try.

You've got to be careful where you wet yourself now.

You might get a diagnosis.

Yeah.

Well,

exactly.

It does sound like this small child has a lucrative career in corporate finance.

Well, just back to the WAS scanner, which, as you said, you

put it on the front of your Crapstone International, you expulse your Pedlagio, and the device scans your expertise and tells you pretty much everything you could possibly need or want to know, but not just about your health.

It apparently,

in the high-tech edition,

tells you about your priorities in life, your deep-seated fears, your musical tastes, your views on post-Renaissance art, and the historical figure you'd most like to play snooker against.

I got a

beta version to test out, and it turns out that my answers to those in order are the pursuit of the groove, the death of Tess Cricket, Blues Madrigal, Unnecessary, and Charlemagne the Great.

So there's a laser scanner that reads the lumps on the head of your penis and diagnoses your personality.

It's

frenulumology.

Family show, Alice.

Is that the first phrenology joke that's been made on the bugle?

It's definitely not the first phrenulum joke.

Almost certainly not.

I mean, we are, what, 550-plus episodes in, or no, coming up to 550 episodes.

Next week is the 250th episode since relaunch.

There must have been a phrenology joke in there.

Just by the law of probability,

even an inadvertent, if you play it backwards

all 550-odd episodes, there will be a phrenology reference somewhere.

Moving on to,

well, the world of robot ethics and

films.

Ian, you are our robot

ethics correspondent.

Oh, good.

Congratulations on

highly prestigious posting.

You've been keeping an eye on the films that

are basically telling us what our future relationship with robots is.

So bring us up to date.

Yeah, well, there's a film out called, well, I guess it's called Megan, but they've they've replaced the E with a three, so I don't know how you pronounce that now.

Mathrigan, I guess.

Yes, I mean, generally in this country, I mean, depending on what newspaper you read, you pronounce Megan as witch who is destroying the country and everything we hold dear.

So I don't know if that's...

I've got to stop reading the Daily Mail.

But anyway, let's go with Mathrigan or Megan.

Yeah.

Well, I guess it's a similar sort of vibe, really, because the plot of this film is there's a girl.

She doesn't have many friends.

Luckily, her mum is developing an AI little girl.

It's just one of those lucky situations.

Hold up, her mum dies.

Her aunt.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, okay.

Well, fair enough.

She hasn't had a lucky coincidence here, actually.

She's either deaf in the family,

almost the opposite of good luck.

But luckily, her aunt is developing an AI child.

So

she kind of becomes

the primary user of this AI child, and the AI is told that she has to protect the kid

from physical and emotional harm.

And then basically, this AI goes absolutely batshit and

starts killing people, pushing people in front of cars, occasionally doing TikTok dances while murdering people.

Yeah, and it all just goes, it goes wrong.

And the Guardian did an article debating how close we are to this sort of thing happening.

And the answer is not very.

But they've spun an article out of it, which is quite fun.

But it's, I mean, surely they might say it's not very far away, but surely that's what the robots want us to think, Ian.

And really, it is just probably weeks away from becoming cold, hard reality.

I mean, you know, is this the future?

And if it isn't the future, I want to know why not.

But also, I mean,

the whole area of these sort of programmable robots, I mean, I guess the question I would ask is, does Gary Kasparov's sleepless, haunted, defeat-stricken face mean nothing to these people?

We can't risk it.

But then, logically, I guess, if we're going to leave robots and computers in charge of our economy, as we essentially do, is it not logical also to leave them in charge of our children who are

units of productivity in the future economy?

Alan, I know that's how you look at your own child as a potential future functioning economic unit.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

People keep talking about how unrealistic this is, that this AI robot goes mad and starts murdering people, and they talk about how far away we are from that.

But of course, of course, the AI childcare robot goes crazy.

Children are terrifying.

You've never had a child stand at the foot of your bed and say, I can't sleep, there's a man behind you.

Like,

you haven't lived.

I mean, I've got two human children, decent quality ones,

but we've not yet left them in charge of robots.

But I don't really have a leg to stand on saying people shouldn't do this because we have left them in charge of an education system run by successive

conservative governments for

a decade each now.

So I'm not really in a position to judge or lecture anyone.

An interesting thing from this article

in Katie Darling, who is a

tech ethicistician, I think is the term.

Tech ethicsian at MIT, which is the Massachusetts Institute for the Taker of All Humanity by the Uncontrollable Robot Advancement.

She said, people have completely skewed expectations of what robotics can do at this point, thanks to movies like this.

But is that not the whole point of movies like, about anything, to give us skewed expectations?

about you know about life about i mean the you know skewed expectations for example about the power of love conquering all about aliens being covered in green slime, about the ease of robbing banks, and about the likelihood of an Italy-based political leader being slain by a vengeful, mortally wounded gladiator.

I mean, that's what films are for, to raise unrealistic expectations.

My favourite sort of expert opinion in the article was:

there's a guy called Ronnie Bogani, who's an artificial intelligence ethicist and attorney for children's rights, which is a mad pair of professions.

And he said, I don't know why we need a robot to have a head.

Look at humans, we're a piss-paw design of a product, why are we copying it with robots?

And I think that's right, it does feel very arrogant of us when we design robots to think, to look at ourselves in the mirror and think, yeah, that's got to be the best.

That's got to be the best we can do.

Just like when economists

talk about developing countries, like, oh no, they have to go through child labor, you know, and be paying people below minimum wage in unsafe conditions, because that's what we did.

it's like the economics version of my parents hit me and i turned out fine like it's you're just perpetuating horrible mistakes i think well all robots should just be a a ball yes because ball ball as a sports fan i know that the ball is um you know a a a conduit to peace and happiness so yeah you're quite right um but i mean the humans i i would agree Humans are a terrible design, albeit I have lived in my own body for 48 years now, which is maybe not the best possible example of the human form.

But you've got to say, I mean, look at human biology.

It is a terrorist.

Has anyone who's ever owned testicles or a womb, or has had to fight manaw-mana with a crocodile in a pond, or run away from a cheetah, or take on a condor in a who can stay afloat longest after jumping off this high rocky outcrop contest.

We are shitly designed by comparison with a lot of other creatures on this earth.

Yes, but in compensation, God gave us smugness.

That sets that smugness and opposable thumbs are really what has set us us apart in the evolutionary race.

Of course, technology wasn't just invented yesterday, not all of it anyway, although an increasing amount of technology on a daily basis was invented yesterday, but it goes back to many yesterdays ago and scientists have discovered that apparently it was not humans that made the first tools, but monkeys,

our ape cousins.

Alice, you are our

prehistoric technology advancement correspondent.

Tell us

what were the monkeys doing and why have they been sitting on their laurels ever since and not really inventing

anything like

a chatbot or

a

robot child.

Andy, this news makes me think monkeys are even smarter than I did before.

Faced with the option of choosing to develop their tool use and become sophisticated, they threw that away.

I've seen TikTok.

I know where tool use leads.

Take me back to that monkey magic moment where we decided to copy that monkey and develop tools and make the other call.

You want me to choose tool use, the same thing that killed Julius Caesar?

No, thank you.

I'll take the other fork and put the fork down and go back to hand life.

Simpler times.

If I can't cut it with my teeth, I'm not interested.

Actually, as a woman,

I am very pro tool use, but I can understand why your sort of Andrew Tate types would be against anything that would remove the natural advantage men have over everyone else and having testosterone and aggression so that they can die trying to bore an antelope to death.

I'm not joking there.

That's actually, did you know that's the evolutionary genesis of podcasts?

Because when you're chasing down prey, humans' advantage in hunting is persistence.

So basically, you just pick a deer and Joe Rogan it until it falls down dead.

Yeah, well, that's interesting.

Again, that's along with opposable thumbs and

what's the other one?

The

R evolutionary advantages?

Smugness.

Smugness, that's it.

There.

Smugness tedium.

In other technology news, a big breakthrough for Europe, the renowned continent, and with the discovery of rare metals that are crucial in

the manufacture of things like smartphones and all the other shit that's taken over the world.

And a huge stash of it apparently has been found in the Arctic region of Sweden which could potentially reduce the dependence on Chinese and Russian products.

This is something we don't often think about I think when it comes to technology is the

where all this stuff comes from because it sort of arrives magic magically in a very neat box and there's no sense that anything happens to create it other than the wonders of technology itself.

But I mean, this

I guess, you know, in terms of the kind of human history,

you know,

is a thing really important unless we've fought a massive war for it.

And if you know, if we have this stuff in Europe, does that not reduce the potential for

global conflict?

And is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Um, bad.

Bad, right?

I've just gone with it.

It was a 50-50 question.

That's the correct answer.

I've hedged my bets there.

I do think,

yeah, it it's weird that something that, like with phones, something that we've become so reliant on is made out of something so rare.

It's like sort of making life support machines out of dodo meat or something.

But also, I think so they found one million tons of rare resources, which feels sort of like

I don't think you can call them rare now.

One one million tons feels like

like they say,

I don't know, like pandas are rare.

But if there's one million tons

of worth of panda, you'd probably be thinking about culling some of them.

Well, not if it was just one giant panda that weighed a million tons.

Yeah.

I'd love to see it.

The zoo that gets that one would be over the moon.

And probably visible from the moon.

Yep.

I mean, it's so exciting, Andy.

Rare earth minerals in Europe at last.

I cannot wait for the Tories to start pitching, sending refugees to the salt mines to earn their Union Jack brand.

I just feel like...

Alice, you should have pointed out not to say things like that out loud.

You just can't be too...

You never know.

To quote the World War II poster, you never know who's listening.

And it was probably some 23-year-old PPE graduate who's

working at a high level in the government behind the scenes.

Italy news now, and I want a couple of huge stories coming out of Italy this week.

The arrest of one of the leading Italian mafia bosses and some,

frankly, harrowing

alleged pigeon death news.

Should we start with the maybe we should start with the

pigeon death?

This is a truly extraordinary story

in which Michael Bay, the film director, has denied allegations that a pigeon was fatally injured on a film set in Italy.

whilst he was making the movie Six Underground, which are also words that I say when listing my top eight favourite ways of getting around London.

It comes just ahead of overground train, obviously ahead of bus, but behind jetpack, horse, dragon, motorize, unicycle, and submarine, which is a bit restricted, but it's a fun way of going east to west and west to east.

It's an extraordinary story, this.

I don't know what it tells us about the state of our species.

That this story, a film director denying that a pigeon may have been killed five years ago on a film set, has made the news.

I guess five years on,

the relatives of that pigeon won't forget.

You know, they won't let this story die and they're going to keep bringing it up.

But yeah, it does feel mad that Michael Bay, who is renowned for making films with so much destruction, is having to defend himself for killing a single pigeon.

It feels like the least Michael Bayer thing that could happen to Michael Bay.

His lawyer as well said that this story had tarnished Bay's reputation as someone who fiercely supports animals financially and otherwise.

What is it otherwise?

Emotionally.

I would love to see him doing whatever otherwise is to a pigeon.

Yeah, I don't know.

A little song.

Gonna write it a poem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great job.

That statue will never be the same.

I can barely tell that you've only got one toe on that foot.

Well, again, I mean, it's, you know, this story essentially is film director denies belated allegation that one brackets one of the world's estimated 400 million pigeons may, and I emphasise, may have been accidentally clonked to death, or at least clonked into a bit of a dizzy spell on his film set almost five years ago, although no evidence of pigeon death has yet been presented.

And this happened in 2018, a year in which humans ate over 70 billion of the allegedly dead pigeons' bird community colleagues.

It's what are we trying to distract ourselves from?

But this story is one of those distractions.

It's got to be big.

I think it's a sign that we've all become much more sensitive to animal rights.

I don't know if you know the famous children's movie Milo and Otis, but they just shot like a hundred dogs off a waterfall.

I don't know that film.

It sounds like an interesting family watch.

There's a lot of kittens.

It's a heartwarming story about a kitten and a puppy that go on an adventure together.

But let me just say the kitten and the puppy that start the adventure in real life are not the kitten and puppy that are there at the end of the film.

The

mafia, I know Ian, before you went into comedy, you did, you had, you worked for several years in the Sicilian mafia.

Tell us what that was like,

someone from

Humberson.

You put the silly in the Sicilian mafia.

Well, the worst part of um being in the mafia or uh just the most self-conscious part is when you're given your mafia a nickname because

it's sort of really quite a sort of reveal it's usually a physical thing.

Um so uh th this guy who um they've sort of captured was called the skinny one.

So you just feel horrible because they get you in a room and there's maybe like ten, twenty of the other mafia gang there and they basically brainstorm your nickname in front of you.

So

I had like a lot of people, like, as you can see, we call me eyebrows.

I got eyebrows straight away.

So, Ian Eyebrow Smith.

Someone shouted out low self-esteem.

I didn't really appreciate that.

So,

yeah, that's the tough part.

The sort of killing and the murders is okay, really.

Because once you've had your self-esteem battered like that, nothing really affects you anymore.

That was an interesting insight into into mafia life.

Thank you.

Well, I mean, this chap, his nickname was the diabolical or the skinny one, and

he's a Nepo baby.

His father was a powerful mafia boss, and

he just stepped into his father's shoes, presumably after killing his father.

I don't know the details.

But yeah,

how can he be proud of all of the murders that he achieved knowing that it was just through family influence?

Or wait, isn't that the whole mafia deal?

He once claimed, apparently, he said, I filled a cemetery all by myself, which is only terrifying if he means like bodies and not flowers.

He's a very generous man.

Or strawberries, maybe.

Yeah.

My favourite bit about this story is that they've tracked him down, but there were so few pictures of him, like from the past, that they basically had to guess what he would look like.

So they've basically been looking for for like a 70-year-old man with like an evil look or some

sort of vague.

It'd be like if you got a Where's Wally book and the only description you were given was you're looking for a man in his 30s.

No, they did these

generation like AI generated pictures of him aged up, which is all data that you provided by

playing that stuff on social media.

So everyone who did one of those silly aged aged up photos of themselves should feel proud rather than ashamed.

I like the little fact in this article that he was known for wearing expensive suits, a Rolex and Ray-Ban sunglasses, you know, unlike every other mafia guy.

It's not a quirky trait, you know.

They've apparently like arrested quite a few people in the past thinking it was him because of the kind of like having so little to go on.

But the best one, they said a liverpuddlian man was arrested in Amsterdam at one point, which just seems a liverpuddlian.

The idea that, as well as getting corrective plastic surgery, you'd be like, right, I'm going to learn a scouse accent.

There's no way I'm going to have a Liverpool third kit on and a scout accent.

To be fair, it is a very unconvincing accent.

Like, what's he trying to do?

What's this guy trying to do?

that brings us to the end of this week's bugle thank you very much uh for listening uh a quick plug there is uh we have a sale on bugle merch i've been reliably informed is reduced by 40 percent uh if you go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the merch button uh also if you want to join our voluntary subscription scheme and give a one-off or a current contribution to help keep this show free flourishing and independent that's also on the website uh click the the donate button for that.

Ian, it's been lovely to have you on the show.

Do you have any

live or other works you'd like to alert our listeners to?

I guess my career is in the sort of situation where when I do a podcast,

all I can really say at the end, I guess, is just wishing everyone all the best.

No, I guess I'm I'll be doing the Edinburgh Fringe this year, so maybe I don't know, keep an eye out on sort of my socials and stuff like that.

I'm doing work in progress and that sort of thing.

But yeah, I'd love to be able to announce a sort of bigger

bigger event.

Well, Ian, after that, for your first appearance on the bugle,

that has fitted right into our proud long tradition of totally failing to market ourselves.

So

you've slotted right in.

Ian was on the news quiz last week, which you can find on BBC Sounds, and did one of the finest, finest jokes that I've had the the pleasure of hearing in my time as host of The News Chris.

I do find that, and it'll be on again this week as well.

Alice, anything to plug aside from the Bugle's sister podcast, The Gargle?

The Bugle's sister, The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world is available weekly with me on it doing talking.

Also, I've just

launched season two of Tea with Alice.

Season one was 298 episodes long and then I took a year off and now it's back.

So that's exciting.

Patreon.com slash AliceFraser is the place to go for all of my stuff.

Also, if you want to come, I have weekly salons where we have a chat and weekly writers' meetings.

So

that's a thing that you can sign up for.

We will be back next week and we will now play you out with some more people on the Bugle Voluntary Subscribers Wall of Fame and their great contributions to human events.

Niall Jackson plotted out the course of eight of the ten largest tributaries of the Amazon River when it was designed, without which it would have run out of water by now.

Kirk Roberts designed the first ever space hopper.

At 20 meters in height, it would have enabled a family of four to bounce down a motorway at up to 65 miles an hour if they got into a rhythm.

Sadly, it was never produced.

Christian Kaiser suggested that Morse code use a combination of dots and dashes rather than a combination of the word Morse and the word Lewis, as originally planned by its inventors who absolutely loved the British TV show Morse.

Ken Samuels was the person who revolutionised basketball by suggesting the real basket on a high shelf be replaced with the bottomless pseudo-basket with which we are so familiar today.

Deborah Swain discovered what the function is of the famous shell part of the tortoise.

People always assumed it was defensive, explains Deborah, but in fact it was acoustic, so the tortoise could sound better when it sang to itself, a bit like Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar in the toilet.

Justin Livernois was the person who suggested using solid bats in baseball rather than frozen or fossilised snakes, a move which really paved the way for today's generation of power hitters.

Kieran Johnston discovered that the plots of most of Shakespeare's plays were essentially copied from a mid-to-late 16th century celebrity gossip magazine Scuttlebutt Today.

And finally, Lisa Pavlik disproved the widely believed historical theory that the 7th century didn't happen, a theory that gained traction because no one in a survey of 100 random members of the public for a TV game show could think offhand of anything particularly noteworthy that happened during it.

To join the Bugle Wall of Fame, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Hi Buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly 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.