Nora Barnacle's Lost Letters

Speaker 1 I will be in Australia for the next few weeks, hoping that the cricket can provide the distraction for everyone that it has so successfully provided for me since I was six years old.

Speaker 1 If you want to come to my shows, there is a Bugle Live in Melbourne on the 22nd of December, where I'll be joined by Sammy Shar and Lloyd Langford.

Speaker 1 And I'm doing the Zoltgeist, my stand-up show in Melbourne on the 23rd of December. And we've just added a possibly optimistic extra show in Sydney on the 3rd of January.

Speaker 1 The 2nd of January show is sold out, but please, please, please come on the 3rd. My UK tour extension begins begins at the end of january all details and ticket links at andy'saltzman.co.uk

Speaker 2 the bugle audio newspaper for a visual world please welcome to the stage andy's altsman

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 I mean, some would have gone with a stylish fade out there, but you've just gone...

Speaker 2 Get on with it. Just get on with it.
Thanks.

Speaker 2 So, welcome to the Bugle 15th Anniversary Live Bugle Live Tour Show here in Dublin.

Speaker 2 This is is the last show of our 15th anniversary tour celebrating the birth of the world's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world.

Speaker 2 And well it's lovely to be here back at the Sugar Club in Dublin. We did a show here, was it four years ago?

Speaker 2 Four years and one month. And one month ago.
Who came to that show?

Speaker 2 Yes, quite a lot. We had David O'Doherty and Alice Fraser with us

Speaker 2 for that show. And it's lovely for Chris and I to be in

Speaker 2 this lovely venue here because we currently live in a failed state run by a tinpomp, crank, puppet, rogue regime.

Speaker 2 So it's lovely to come to a country that still has facilities like this where everything hasn't gone to shit. So

Speaker 2 there have now been as many episodes of the bugle as the sum of, and you can shout out if you know each of these, total plays written by Shakespeare?

Speaker 2 37 is closer. It's actually officially 38.
Some say 39, but of course the authorship of some of his works is now disputed. He is generally not credited for Richard III, the sequel,

Speaker 2 Revenge of the Zombie, Horse-Eating Yorkshireman.

Speaker 2 People now think he didn't exclusively write Plague the Musical

Speaker 2 or Jack and the Beanstalk or 101 Sex Tips for Monks.

Speaker 2 So, you've got to add plays by Shakespeare to novels by Joyce. How many?

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 Not cool.

Speaker 2 Three, three, four. Ricky, you can ballpark it, it's fine.

Speaker 2 I mean, no one reads them, do they? They're kind of long and complicated, aren't they?

Speaker 2 Symphonies by Beethoven.

Speaker 2 Nine, if you said ten, you're wrong. He did not write Spice World, and it doesn't technically count as a symphony.
Hip-hop albums released by the former world number one ranked golfer Nick Faldo.

Speaker 2 Just the one.

Speaker 2 No fans of f De Birdie in tonight, obviously.

Speaker 2 Volumes of erotic poetry by war hero and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Speaker 2 Two.

Speaker 2 The rising thrum of unspoken tides. And the rather less subtle Ike's pike.

Speaker 2 This is going to take a while, Chris. You've got quite a long way to go.
Keep going.

Speaker 2 Actual pigs that have been to space. Zero.
Never trust a fing Muppet.

Speaker 2 Number of Football World Cups Irelanders qualified for in the last.

Speaker 2 Let's not talk about that. Let's not talk about that.
Let's not talk about that.

Speaker 2 Number of children fathered by

Speaker 2 former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Speaker 2 X. It is X.
X.

Speaker 2 So we're on about 140 plus X. We're gonna need a number of people in this room who think this bit has gone on too long.
And we're there. So we've done

Speaker 2 them.

Speaker 2 as always uh those of you listening to the show a section of the bugle is going where

Speaker 2 it's going where dublin

Speaker 2 right and for this 15th anniversary tour everything from the united kingdom yes

Speaker 2 since we are in dublin we do not have to cover any news from the UK because it's been an unending deluge of shit in recent weeks and I am finging sick of it.

Speaker 2 So amongst the things we won't be covering on this week's bugle is the UK entering a two-year recession. Woohoo!

Speaker 2 Us treating asylum seekers like shit.

Speaker 2 Most people in the country are reported, the Home Secretary is ticking it off as one of her key performance indexes successfully achieved.

Speaker 2 Basically, everything in the UK grinding to a halt, our democratic system crumbling to shitty dust, and Brexit not being so much the elephant in the room as the elephant corpse that has gradually rotted into the carpets and furniture,

Speaker 2 and yet still haunts the room as an active but flatulent ghost. So, that's

Speaker 2 that's

Speaker 2 that is in the bin. Nothing, nothing from the UK this week.
And of course,

Speaker 2 you've been celebrating 100 years of independence,

Speaker 2 which I think is coming to the end of the initial trial period. How's it?

Speaker 2 Any regrets?

Speaker 2 All that could have been yours.

Speaker 2 Also in the bin this week, a Dublin quiz.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you can all participate in this. It's a multiple choice quiz, and you can imagine you've got answer forms and

Speaker 2 fill out your answers. Do you think you know a lot about your home city?

Speaker 2 Yeah?

Speaker 2 Would you say it's a romantic place?

Speaker 2 No, not at all.

Speaker 2 Because it's kind of known as a bit of a romantic city, isn't it?

Speaker 2 And you have physical relics from St. Valentine.
Do you not? So, I mean, what could be more romantic than bits of an 800-year-old corpse? I I mean, what?

Speaker 2 Sorry? It's in a box. It's just in a box.

Speaker 2 So you're saying, is it in a box because it's, you know, a rude bit?

Speaker 2 You've got some Valentine's and Adjers, basically, here in Dublin.

Speaker 2 Right. So question one.
Why did the Vikings found Dublin? Was it A?

Speaker 2 Seems silly not to.

Speaker 2 Was it B? Because of the lovely weather.

Speaker 2 Was it C? tack breaks mostly.

Speaker 2 Was it D, because they absolutely love destroying places?

Speaker 2 According to the legendary stereotype, there's nothing here, so they thought if they founded it, they'd have somewhere new to destroy.

Speaker 2 Or was it E, because they needed a venue for Eric Bloodsnout Stagdew?

Speaker 2 Question two, which of the following bands comes from Dublin? Is it A, K-pop sensations BTS?

Speaker 2 Is it B, the Buenos Aires Symphony Orchestra? Is it C, reigning Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich?

Speaker 2 Is it D, Ken Doherty and the Bielzebubbles, the snooker diabolism crossover responsible for such hits as The Devil's Pink Spot,

Speaker 2 Back to Bulk Brackets Burn in Hell,

Speaker 2 and Eternal Damnation Safety Exchange?

Speaker 2 Or was it E, the Dubliners?

Speaker 2 E, correct, well done.

Speaker 2 And finally, question three: who Who or what is a Nora barnacle?

Speaker 2 A, a Nora barnacle is a local Dublin delicacy considered the chewiest and least digestible seafood in the world. It has to be hacked off the rocks at Clodogin Island with a tungsten-coated mallet.

Speaker 2 The Nora takes on average 15 minutes to chew and swallow and up to 12 days to pass through the digestive system. The most any one person has eaten in one sitting is three and a half.

Speaker 2 B, a nora barnacle is a medical condition in which a fungal infection of the skin leads to a hard, knobbly callus that looks like an old woman called Nora.

Speaker 2 C, the Nora Barnacle was Ireland's biggest-selling car of the 1970s.

Speaker 2 Favourably compared to the top-selling Soviet model, the Lada Lenin, it had a top speed of 38 miles an hour and could manage to ascend most moderate slopes and was voted car I'd least like to crash in for six years in a row.

Speaker 2 Or was it was it Nora Barnacle D, the wife and muse of complicated novel celeb James Joyce?

Speaker 2 Joyce and Barnacle famously exchanged some of the fruitiest letters ever sent from one human being to another. But sadly only Joyce's side of the correspondence has survived.

Speaker 2 Or so we thought, because as an investigative newspaper, we've uncovered Nora Barnacle's responses to Joyce.

Speaker 2 Are you all aware of these letters?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 We've discovered Nora Barnacle's responses. The first of which was, Dear James, thank you for your letter.
It was really weird.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 each of their own and all that, but

Speaker 2 any chance you could just send me a normal letter next time?

Speaker 2 Love, Noza. And

Speaker 2 the second letter was, James, I thought you'd like to know that the kids took your last letter into school for show and tell.

Speaker 2 They have now been expelled, regards Nora. Nora.

Speaker 2 That section in the pin! There we go.

Speaker 2 Right,

Speaker 2 and now, 20 minutes into the show, it's time to meet our guests.

Speaker 2 Last time we were here,

Speaker 2 last time we were here, as I mentioned, we had Alice and David O'Doherty. Chris, your journey here,

Speaker 2 I mean, just talk us through that, because it was very much a metaphor for life, wasn't it?

Speaker 4 So, you, me, and Alice had come from a show in Manchester, and we got all the way to the gate at Manchester Airport. It's a simple journey, that's the map on the screen.

Speaker 4 And we were just about to get on the flight when it turned out I had my daughter's passport.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 so I then decided, look, there's only one thing for it. I've got to make the show.
It's very important that I come here.

Speaker 4 And so I took two trains. Let's see if this works.
It's not going to work now typically. There we go.
I took two trains. I got on the northern line in London.
I got on the central line.

Speaker 4 I got on the DLR. I then took a flight from London.
I then took a cab, I got here 250 pounds later, and I made the show.

Speaker 2 And in many ways, it was a salutary lesson, right?

Speaker 2 It was a positive metaphor for life, wasn't it, Chris? Because you know, it shows that if you make a mistake, you don't need to just give up and accept that.

Speaker 2 You can really try, you can fight through it, and you could end up where you were supposed to be, several hundred quid down, and with everyone thinking you're an idiot.

Speaker 2 So, you know, just don't give up.

Speaker 2 The lesson for our children,

Speaker 2 do give up.

Speaker 2 Well, this time,

Speaker 2 well, we were supposed to have with us live on stage one human being. But what we do have is something that would have been absolutely unthinkable just 200 years ago.

Speaker 2 Two people joining us via the internet on a big screen. Chris Addison!

Speaker 2 Hello. Hello, Andy.
Oh, and Alice. They're both coming.
And Alice Fraser. I can't separate them.
In Brisbane. Hi.
Hello. Hello.

Speaker 5 Can I just say, Chris Skinner, the lesson that you learned is to update your profile picture.

Speaker 5 Because if you do not update your profile picture, then you show up with a passport and the people look at the passport and they go, you are not that baby.

Speaker 2 Well, welcome both of you. I should say you're both quite small on a massive screen and

Speaker 2 a logo of my face is much bigger than either of you. So

Speaker 2 nowhere you fing stand. My show, all right?

Speaker 2 Alice, you are in

Speaker 2 Brisbane.

Speaker 5 I am, Andy, and I sit here during your increasingly long introductions and I think, why did I set my alarm for 5 a.m.?

Speaker 2 I don't know how to lie in.

Speaker 5 The sun's risen while you were chatting.

Speaker 2 It's been great.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so you are in the future. You are in tomorrow.
What have we got to look forward to

Speaker 2 as a planet?

Speaker 5 I mean, so far from my perspective,

Speaker 5 there's a quite a nice magpie.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 just one

Speaker 2 shit just just one

Speaker 2 all that talk of nuclear war is evidently true

Speaker 5 nice magpie uh and some effective breastfeeding that's that's what you have to look forward to

Speaker 3 andy i just want to to clarify my reasons for not being with you in in dublin yeah um

Speaker 3 i obviously you know the uh originally i was supposed to be with you um but the thing is andy brexit means brexit and uh i I don't hold with this lily-livered soft Brexit that Boris Johnson and his cronies went, but I am a true hard Brexiteer.

Speaker 3 Not only do I feel that Britain should, as we have, quite rightly, withdraw from the EU, but I believe we should absolutely refuse to recognise its existence at all.

Speaker 3 So I can't go to Dublin, Andy, because as far as I'm concerned, there's no such place as...

Speaker 3 Dublin unless, and these are the only points on which my Brexit is prepared to concede, unless I am able to use it either as a tax haven or somewhere to store asylum seekers.

Speaker 2 I'll make some calls.

Speaker 2 You'd never be a tax haven, would you, Walter?

Speaker 2 I think we are ready for top story this week.

Speaker 2 Well, top story this week, Ireland rocked to its very core to its leg waggling soul by a dancing scandal

Speaker 2 I mean

Speaker 2 having

Speaker 2 having

Speaker 2 here we go having having come

Speaker 2 from

Speaker 2 all the shit that has been unfolding

Speaker 2 back home in recent months, you come to Ireland think oh what's the big story in Ireland? It's

Speaker 2 some people cheating at f ⁇ ing dancing. For f sake.

Speaker 2 Alice, as our

Speaker 2 Irish dancing cheating correspondent,

Speaker 2 looking at this from an objective range of 10,000 miles, this has got to be arguably

Speaker 2 the biggest story in the history of Ireland, would you not say?

Speaker 5 I would say, Andy, yes, the world's biggest Irish dancing body, which I imagine looks something like Stephen Seagal, has sent a legal letter out to try and stop these explosive allegations of fush fixing, which have come out, that people have been match fixing these Irish dancing,

Speaker 5 I mean, these allegations of cheating. They've prompted Irish dancing teachers all around the world to organise, and they called for sweeping reforms.
I just...

Speaker 5 I sort of have an issue with the central premise of this story.

Speaker 5 How can you throw an Irish dancing match? You're barely using your arms.

Speaker 5 I also, for one, I cannot believe that there are true Irish persons betraying the fine legacy of Irish dance, which, as far as I know, was about tricking the English who might be peeping into the windows into thinking that you weren't dancing, you were all just harmlessly bouncing up and down in place,

Speaker 5 instead of doing sneaky cultural pride, which we all know involves expansive arm gestures.

Speaker 5 But if you're, I just don't understand how you can be pretending to be less good at pretending you're not good at dancing. And if you do that, surely you're letting the English win.

Speaker 2 Chris, I know you used to be a professional Irish dancer

Speaker 2 back in the day.

Speaker 3 Well, interestingly, Andy, actually, I'll be honest with you. I know I have that reputation.

Speaker 3 And while I do consider myself a man of the world,

Speaker 3 as much as I've always rather liked Irish dancing, and by always, I obviously mean since halfway through Eurovision in 1994, saying as everyone else

Speaker 3 Irish dancing is perhaps surprisingly not actually one of my specialist subjects. So, this afternoon I started to do some research into it, and it really is the most fascinating art form.

Speaker 3 I put together a little primer for fellow noobs of did you know facts on Irish dancing.

Speaker 3 Did you know, for example, Irish dancing is the only form of dancing which is safe to do whilst crossing a busy road?

Speaker 2 Because built into it is look left, look right, look left, left, look right, proceed if it's safe to do so, continue to look left and right.

Speaker 3 Also, did you know, on a steps per minute basis, Irish dancing is the most dangerous form of dancing to do in a minefield.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 3 did you know, Irish dancing was originally invented in 1957 by a man trying to signal to his wife downstairs that he'd got his arms stuck in his jumper.

Speaker 3 You know, in Boston, Massachusetts, Irish dancers are considered sacred and may only be slaughtered and eaten by priests and Red Sox players.

Speaker 3 And did you also know that if you go on stage to headline a comedy night at Paisley University, just outside of Glasgow in 1998, and you make a joke about the fact that the organizers somewhat bizarrely booked a solo Irish dancer as your support actor, you will get absolutely destroyed by the audience.

Speaker 2 That was my first paid gig.

Speaker 3 Paisley, I can remember doing a gig in Paisley University with you where we had to get a flight home the next day from the airport, Glasgow Airport, which is at Paisley.

Speaker 3 And the form of ID that you used, do you remember, was a snooker haul membership card in which your photograph was stapled onto a typed piece of paper.

Speaker 3 And that worked.

Speaker 2 And it's been downhill ever since, really. It really has.

Speaker 3 I think that might have been, I'm just guessing, I think that might have been pre-2001.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, it was, I mean, it's an extraordinary story.

Speaker 2 These fixing allegations go back quite a long time. Some say hundreds, if not thousands of

Speaker 2 years.

Speaker 2 And I mean, it makes

Speaker 2 it, can we trust that if we can't even trust the humble pleasures of Irish dancing,

Speaker 2 what can we trust in the world, Alice? I mean, you have a young child, one year old. How, after reading about this story, can you look that child in the eye and say, this planet is worth living on?

Speaker 5 Well, this is the thing, Andy. I was hoping to hand her down some pride in her Irish heritage, as my mum,

Speaker 5 taught herself Gaelic and all sorts of exciting things.

Speaker 5 And now what I'm going to do is erase that from history and tell her she was born in Australia like a koala and will never go anywhere else.

Speaker 2 I mean that was

Speaker 2 there have been previous scandals of course in Irish dancing. There was the the great 1932 shoelaces scandal

Speaker 2 where Betty Snoot had her shoes tied together by her great rival, so it's a complicated Irish name. Mura.

Speaker 2 Chris, you've got Irish hair. Isn't you tell me it's Muru

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 Ich Ich?

Speaker 2 Mary. All right, okay.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 surname

Speaker 2 Isa Laka

Speaker 2 Klakanan.

Speaker 2 Alan. Alan.
Okay, Mary Alan.

Speaker 5 I hate it. I hate this.

Speaker 2 Then of course there was the margarine on the dance floor incident of 1973 when the

Speaker 2 controversially bony-kneed cockle cocketty dripped marge down his trousers during his performance

Speaker 2 leading to the reigning champion Herbert Jellylegs O'Flocklin falling on his arse.

Speaker 2 Is it arse? Is it pronounced like that? Falling on his orsha.

Speaker 2 And then spinning on his back on the buttery floor and

Speaker 2 inventing break dancing. There's a fact.

Speaker 2 In other Irish news,

Speaker 2 there's been an uproar

Speaker 2 after an Irish priest told.

Speaker 5 I mean. This is the best possible outcome to the beginning of that sentence.
I just want to respond and don't worry, audience.

Speaker 5 It's quite an okay story. I mean, it's a horrible story, but it's not as horrible as you could be imagining.

Speaker 2 Yes, uproar after an Irish priest, really good start.

Speaker 2 Many history books and news stories.

Speaker 2 Toll said that Leo Varadkar and other gay politicians will go to hell.

Speaker 2 Now, this priest,

Speaker 5 not for being politicians,

Speaker 5 was being homophobic.

Speaker 2 For being gay.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 I'm not a priest.

Speaker 2 I'm objective on this. I'm a second-generation lapsed Jew.

Speaker 2 Have you got any other lapsed Jews in tonight?

Speaker 2 Testify!

Speaker 2 Or don't testify, as the case may be.

Speaker 2 How lapsed are you? What a game show that would be.

Speaker 5 Also, a ward in the postpartum area.

Speaker 2 I think John's just signed a deal with HBO to do How Laps Do You as a game show. Five year deal.
Yeah. Pop it on the table.
Let's see if you've had its own back on.

Speaker 2 The priest, Sean Sheehy, was a priest in County Kerry. He was preaching off the bench

Speaker 2 after the regular priest popped off on holiday or something.

Speaker 2 So, I mean that's a bad substitution, isn't it? When

Speaker 2 he condemned homosexuality, trans rights and abortion rights and said Varadkar and other gay politicians will go to hell for being gay. Varadkar himself disagreed with this.

Speaker 2 But he did generously acknowledge the right of lunatic priests to say the kind of things that lunatic priests like to say, which I thought was admirably open-minded

Speaker 2 of him.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is,

Speaker 2 I mean, in in terms of, you know, I'm not a religious man. I'm not a God-fearing man, certainly, and that feeling is entirely mutual, I should say, as well.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 this is quite an extraordinary claim for a priest. I don't think the science entirely backs it up, does it? I mean, because God Himself has been eerily quiet on these things for about 2,000 years now.

Speaker 2 2,000 years ago, yada, yada, yada, full of it. But Chris is our leading bigotry correspondent on the bugle.

Speaker 2 What's your view of this? Whose side are you on?

Speaker 3 Well, I think I'm fundamentally on Ireland's side in this because I think this is a classic case of,

Speaker 3 and this happens to every country, it's definitely happens to us, where you as a country spend a lot of time and capital and effort making a new version of yourself and trying to get rid of stereotypes

Speaker 3 that are out there in the world internationally about your own country.

Speaker 3 Just have people see you as you really are. And then some idiot comes along like this, sheehee, and tears it all apart.

Speaker 3 Fundamentally, the same thing has happened to the UK over the last three years.

Speaker 3 You know, we're trying to make ourselves look like we're a sleek, new economy, a global Britain, but we've had three years of a guy who is our main representative going,

Speaker 3 it's just it's it's hopeless. And this stuff happens all the time.
My very favorite instance of this happening was in Dublin, in fact, in the early noughties.

Speaker 3 I did a gig in Dublin in the middle of the sort of Celtic tiger time, right?

Speaker 3 At that point where Ireland was really, you know, remaking itself and showing it, flexing economic muscles, new economic muscles, and showing itself as a young country at the forefront of cutting-edge technology.

Speaker 3 You know, gateway PCs and those cow boxes were everywhere. It was this huge thing, the Celtic tiger, rah, right? And I came and did a gig in Dublin.
I flew in.

Speaker 3 And you know, when you fly into any country, from the bit that where you walk from the plane to the arrivals, always there's adverts for the country that you've just landed in, showing you the way that that country wants to present itself to you.

Speaker 3 And it was just wall to wall, pictures of young Irish people with keyboards and laughing with a laptop and looking like they were, you know, crowding around the great new technology with all day, here's modern Ireland.

Speaker 3 And I got into the arrivals hall,

Speaker 3 and I swear to you, three lads, I reckon they would have been about seven, eight, and nine years old, wearing, all of them, wearing Wellington boots and wax jackets and flat caps,

Speaker 3 holding up a sign that they had made themselves. They'd drawn a picture.
They'd drawn a picture of a tractor in Sharpie and written on it, welcome home, Grand Pappy, world plowing champion.

Speaker 2 Hundreds of millions of euros worth of our marketing destroyed in a moment.

Speaker 3 And this is exactly what's happening to Ireland again now.

Speaker 5 Somebody said mildly, forgivingly, that this

Speaker 5 priest

Speaker 5 had spent time in the American culture wars, that his perspective was distorted by spending time in the American culture world, which I assume they mean sort of the equivalent of nam like he's come back not quite right your man you go over there you see some things he saw a grown man refusing to reply to a work email because someone had their pronouns in their bio you know he saw university professors riven with indecision about which of eight people calling each other a Nazi was actually a Nazi only to realize that academic peer review was the real Nazi all along

Speaker 5 Sheehi said that the the media and even the Catholic Church were responsible for misleading the the Irish people into approving of same-sex marriage and forgiving people for having abortions and so on and so forth.

Speaker 5 I think he's just stopped one step short of the media, the Catholic Church, and God Himself

Speaker 5 has

Speaker 5 tricked people into believing that compassion and kindness to your individual fellows is the goal of the Catholic Church rather than horrible beatings and fingering in the dark.

Speaker 2 Two of my favourite albums by Abba.

Speaker 2 God himself

Speaker 2 has just today been reported to be, quote, actually not that bothered about homosexuality these days.

Speaker 2 Sources close to the Almighty claim that the fact that his son was, in essence, quotes, a bit woke,

Speaker 2 has made God more open-minded about things people should burn in hell for.

Speaker 2 And a close confidant of God claimed he can't really be asked with punishing people for stuff they do consensually in the privacy of their own homes. It causes a, quote, logistical nightmare

Speaker 2 and absolute mountains of paperwork

Speaker 2 and God is reportedly more concerned these days with sorting out VAR in football which why tinker

Speaker 2 needed.

Speaker 2 Chris Sting

Speaker 2 arts news now and

Speaker 2 are you art fans here?

Speaker 2 Yes, it's been well art has become

Speaker 2 a battleground around the world. There's been all kinds of art-based protests.
Last week a man wearing a just stop oil t-shirt glued his head to a Vermeer picture in The Hague.

Speaker 2 I don't know if it's a...

Speaker 2 I mean, what a world we live in.

Speaker 2 He glued his head to the girl with the pearl earring

Speaker 2 in a museum.

Speaker 3 What a sentence.

Speaker 2 He glued his head to the girl with the pearl earring.

Speaker 3 Sorry, what were we talking about?

Speaker 3 Is this a spy password? Am I supposed to know how to respond to that?

Speaker 2 I mean, what does that mean on an artistic level, Chris? You know, if you glue your head to a 17th century painting, what point are you trying to make?

Speaker 3 Look, obviously it's crucial to protest about what is, after all, a global emergency, but also it's crucial to protect some of our greatest artistic achievements as a species.

Speaker 3 Surely there must be some sort of compromise that we can reach that allows for both of those things. What if the protesters just picked slightly more appropriate artworks?

Speaker 3 If you're going to throw soup at something, throw it at a Jackson Pollock. At least that's in the spirit of the thing, isn't it?

Speaker 3 If you're going to glue yourself to something, glue yourself to a multimedia collage, then that makes it a sort of performance art piece don't just ruin the ones that everybody likes but these people from just stop oil i'm not completely sure what's going on here are they protesting about the fuel or the type of paint is this just the radical wing of the pro-pastel lobby are there and are there not enough arbitrary divisions in the world as it is without any of this bullshit maybe i'm just being a wet liberal Maybe art is about conflict.

Speaker 3 You can't say watercolour without saying war. You can't say painting without saying pain.

Speaker 3 You can't say, How did you make it look so lifelike without saying ow?

Speaker 2 You know.

Speaker 5 It's an age-old battle, Andy. Its origins lost in the mist of time.
The battle between performance art and art, which is what is actually taking place here.

Speaker 5 Let's put the oil aside, let's put the environmental protest aside. This is saying, what is more interesting? The Mona Lisa or me gluing my dick to the Mona Lisa?

Speaker 2 That's me.

Speaker 5 The question at the heart of all art.

Speaker 2 Well, at least we might have an explanation for that weird look in her eye.

Speaker 2 Listen,

Speaker 2 we know how to deal with this, this scourge.

Speaker 3 We know how to deal with this from the American gun lobby, don't we? The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a can of soup is a good guy with a can of soup.

Speaker 3 We need to be arming museum attendants with cans of soup. Not just cans of soup, Andy, but semi-automatic cans of soup.
I'm talking your Browning 22 cream of tomato repeater.

Speaker 3 I'm talking your Armalite AR-7 Gaspacho, the infamous hippie soaker. I'm talking your Bennington Model 4 New England clam chowder.
And sure, this is going to be an arms race.

Speaker 3 We need to be developing bigger and more destructive soup weapons before they do. Possibly even tactical nuclear built, even up to strengths of one megaton.

Speaker 2 It's not a bad call.

Speaker 3 That's where I'm putting my money.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's been a very, very tough time.

Speaker 2 Last week, we had climate activists throwing mashed potatoes at

Speaker 2 a Monet painting in Germany, a painting by Claude Monet, or as his paint mates called him, Show Mida,

Speaker 2 He was the grandfather of the singer Janelle, of course.

Speaker 2 And Monet is viewed as either one of the most influential painters of his day or as a pond-bothering pastel fetishist in Hop the Big Water Lily. You're cool, Dublin.
You're cool.

Speaker 2 The painting that was attacked was called Haystacks. It was one of Monet's few sorties into portraiture as he hammered out portraits of great British wrestlers of the 1970s to pay off

Speaker 2 a gambling debt.

Speaker 2 his

Speaker 2 daddy and Nagasaki are viewed as classic works of the Impressionist ITV wrestling crossover genre.

Speaker 3 One for the teenagers there, Andy.

Speaker 5 I feel like this protest movement, Andy, it is getting attention, so it is effective in that way, drawing attention to their cause.

Speaker 5 But I also think it's a real signal of the sad decline in modern manners. Did their parents not teach them that you're not meant to throw soup, you're meant to spoon soup gently over a canvas.

Speaker 2 Vincent Van Gogh, though, he's a fair target. He's been targeted a couple of times

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 he was obsessed with Formula One.

Speaker 2 That's just why he always painted as if he was going around corners in a really fast car. And

Speaker 2 also he chopped his own ear off so he couldn't hear people banging on about carbon emissions.

Speaker 2 So I've got

Speaker 2 no dispute with that.

Speaker 5 I mean, you want boomers to listen. This is the point.
They want boomers to listen to these anti-oil protests.

Speaker 5 I reckon that we can cut out the middleman and just pour soup and food and glue ourselves to celebrities that boomers find appropriate. Just glue yourself to Bono, pour some soup

Speaker 5 over the remaining Beatles. Like, just

Speaker 5 do it that way.

Speaker 2 Let's have a sting, Chris.

Speaker 2 Oh, shit, it's the same one again.

Speaker 2 Well, Twitter news now, and

Speaker 2 yes, Twitter, for those of you who've not heard of it, the 21st century equivalent of standing in the middle of a roundabout with your trousers round your ankles,

Speaker 2 screaming at traffic and rubbing radioactive paint on your crotch, has been

Speaker 2 bought by Elon Musk. Now, Alice, you for many years have kept Bugle listeners informed of all the comings and goings in Elon Musk's life and brain.
What the f is going on with him now?

Speaker 5 Andy, I, as you know, am mesmerised by Elon Musk. Elon Musk, a baby's idea of a grown-up.

Speaker 5 You know, all of the money and resources in the world and he's using it to send cars to space like the wank fantasy of nerds that wish they were brave enough to be assholes.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 5 he has now bought Twitter and he's throwing his weight around. He's brought in other programmers.

Speaker 5 He's decided that he wants to revolutionize Twitter by making it more Twitter than it's ever been and the problem here Andy is among many other things is he's suggesting that verified users need to pay to maintain their verified user status that in order to have a premium Twitter experience you're going to have to pay money and this is the core issue at the heart of this purchase of Twitter is the relentless urge to be a landlord

Speaker 5 If you want to make a premium Twitter, what you need to do is ruin the general experience of Twitter to such a degree that people will pay to be out of it.

Speaker 5 It's the same thing that leads to airport lounges. It's the same thing that leads to VIP clubs.
If the airport is fine, you have no need for a lounge.

Speaker 5 What counts as innovation for a billionaire is making the world like it is for them all the time, but only for people like them.

Speaker 5 He's bringing in coders from all his other programs to deal with the Twitter code. And the problem is that Twitter is not a tech product.
Twitter is a nightclub. Twitter is a people product.

Speaker 5 There is no innovative code in Twitter. Twitter is selling the addiction of Twitter of people like Stephen King and Elon Musk back to themselves.

Speaker 5 There's no innovative moderation algorithm, and if there were, Elon would already be deconstructing it in the name of this glowing ideal of absolute unregulated free speech, the equivalent in sophistication to a 19-year-old libertarian.

Speaker 5 This free speech idea has been ruthlessly proven to lead nowhere good by places that already exist on the internet, like 4chan.

Speaker 5 The moment he bought it, slurs went up on the platform, which you always know is a good sign. You know that's a good sign that you're doing the right thing.

Speaker 5 The moment you buy a platform, people start using the n-word more.

Speaker 2 It is kind of extraordinary.

Speaker 2 He bought it for a huge amount of money, said he wasn't going to buy it, then he was kind of trapped into buying it. Since he took it over,

Speaker 2 he told all the coders to print out their last 30 days of coding, then told them to shred their printouts, then sacked a load of them.

Speaker 2 He wandered through his office carrying a sink, and he's got rid of half of his senior executives.

Speaker 2 So basically, what we have with Elon Musk is someone who, had he been born 2,000 years before he was, would have ended his life with his penis in a horse being hacked to death by his bodyguard.

Speaker 2 Ancient Rome.

Speaker 2 Ancient Rome is missing an emperor. That is essentially...

Speaker 2 What

Speaker 2 has happened. He did say this, free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.

Speaker 2 And looking at the state of free speech around the world, it might be the bedrock of a functioning democracy, but that bedrock is radioactive and it is poisoning democracy from within.

Speaker 5 I feel like he was wandering around, well, he was wandering around the halls of Twitter with the sink so that he could just look over people's shoulders and say, I have a sinking feeling.

Speaker 5 And then they have to laugh because he's the boss.

Speaker 3 But he literally, didn't he post,

Speaker 3 let that sink in as he went into Twitter?

Speaker 3 Twitter is sort of now run by the least funny person on Twitter.

Speaker 2 That is a hotly

Speaker 2 nightmare. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. No matter what he does, I just, whenever I see him, I don't see the world's richest man.

Speaker 3 I can't help thinking, do you wash your face in a deep fat fryer?

Speaker 2 What's going on there?

Speaker 5 I mean, okay, let's not make fun of how he looks.

Speaker 5 He does look like the face of a man in a police sketch of a man, but I think the core issue is that he's selling himself as a representative of the war between engineers and the artistic class.

Speaker 5 The artistic class being people who have taste and good jokes, and the engineering class are the people who actually get things done. The problem being that he does not get things done.

Speaker 5 What he does is he goes around and he bloviates with lots of money until other people get things done for him.

Speaker 5 Apparently, he's a great engineer. I

Speaker 5 wait one of his pig, Neuralink pigs, to show me that he is.

Speaker 3 It's a spectacular fall from Grace, though, isn't it? Really?

Speaker 3 If you think about Elon Musk said three years ago, when all we really knew was that he likes the idea of making Tesla open source and he was going to build all these batteries that he would explain how he was doing it and anyone could do it and this would solve the energy crisis and so on.

Speaker 3 That was when he was at his absolute, to go from that level of cool. Just stop.
Somebody should have just said something at that point. Stop, stop.
Nothing you say from this point.

Speaker 3 Nothing is going to better the things that you've already said. And it has just been a phenomenal ride without breaks downhill ever since that point.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 5 he lost his traction somewhere between Tesla's going to solve the climate crisis and we can make it make fart noises instead of horn sounds when you press the beeping button.

Speaker 2 There have been some other new social media platforms launched to try and

Speaker 2 replace Twitter. Bark Void, where no one is allowed any followers, but they can just bark their bile into a vacuum of nothingness.
I think that might be

Speaker 2 the logical end point of social media, I think.

Speaker 2 Bile ducts, which automatically generates insults, but then shares them anonymously equally amongst all users. So everyone gets abused the same amount.
I think that's democracy in action.

Speaker 2 And spubicle, which is only insults that would in previous times have been scrawled over the walls of a toilet cubicle.

Speaker 2 In other science news now,

Speaker 2 well, this is very exciting news.

Speaker 2 Technology has allowed sperm to be frozen for longer than the 50-year limit and has raised the possibility that if we twist what this story actually means,

Speaker 2 we could choose people from history to be parents to our own children.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's not what this science does, but it might enable it in the distant future. But let's imagine it allows it now.

Speaker 2 And this takes us back to one of the early strands of the bugle in the early years, which some of you may remember. Hotties from history.
Big God, yeah.

Speaker 2 There we have my ex

Speaker 2 flown high. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Just got to to go with the flow.

Speaker 2 Chris, I don't believe you've ever shared with the Bugle listeners your own personal historical question.

Speaker 2 The qualification was the person had to be dead for at least 100 years.

Speaker 2 Got it, got it. Okay.

Speaker 3 So who's the one? So I can't, so hang on. So not the Queen.

Speaker 2 Not the Queen. Fine.

Speaker 3 I'll go with something else then.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 And you can't have Thatcher either.

Speaker 3 I can't have Thatcher. That is, if anything, a relief.

Speaker 3 If only you'd said that to the electorate during the 1987 general election, Andy.

Speaker 3 Well, I'm going to go all the way back to 1666 to nominate the Great Fire of London as my hottie policy.

Speaker 3 The Great Fire of London was literally smoking and it could go for days. You had to be careful making a booty call to the Great Fire because you just didn't know where it was going to lead.

Speaker 3 The The fun would start with a little bit of a spark around the pudding lane area, if you get my meaning, and just sort of go from there.

Speaker 3 And once that baby got in its groove, there were queues round the block of local fellas waiting for their turn to spill their load of water from buckets. all over it.

Speaker 3 This isn't just any hottie from history, Andy. This is the kind of hottie from history that'll make you rebuild your city.

Speaker 3 This is the kind of hottie from history that causes cathedrals to be designed. What other hottie from history can say that?

Speaker 3 Apart from obviously Jesus, I don't mean the real Jesus, don't mean the brown-eyed, olive-skinned, actual Jesus.

Speaker 3 I mean the pretend Jesus with the delicate, glowy skin that they have in Catholic churches. Hotty from history, the Great Fire of London, Bao Chica, and I cannot stress this enough: Bao Bow.

Speaker 2 Oh, Lordy, take me home.

Speaker 2 So, well, thank you very much for coming. Thanks to the Sugar Club for having us again.
Please show appreciate it. Chris Addison fighting through a global pandemic.

Speaker 3 See you probably next time.

Speaker 2 At what is now a relatively civilized time of morning because I've banged on for so long. Alice Fraser!

Speaker 5 Hey, if you're in Brisbane on the 12th, come see my my solo show.

Speaker 2 Thanks to producer Chris, who makes it all happen.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Dublin.