Checkmate

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4237 of The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world with me, Andy Zaltzman, coming to you from a hotel room in Manchester.

And as we record, Britain is slowly recongealing after melting in record temperatures earlier this week.

The Mercury getting its funk well and truly on, topping 40 degrees Celsius for the first time since we started measuring these things on a scale more complicated than the simple old kill something and wear its pelt, brackets cold, sit around in a hut thinking about flint, brackets medium, and build a henge, f ⁇ ing hot.

So

So, regrettably, following medical advice this week, I did have to postpone my experiment to see how many layers of ski clothing you can wear whilst still being able to break dance for four hours unbroken.

But amazingly, and despite all the cynicism, our transport network was completely unaffected.

Everything ground to hold, just like on a normal day.

So we managed to muddle our way through.

Joining me today from London, it's Alice Fraser.

Hi, Alice.

Hi, Andy.

I did my back, so I had to have a hot water bottle tucked down the back of my undies and a sweaty baby on my front.

Truly a nightmare time.

But I have lots of tips if anyone wants them for dealing with the heat.

And joining us from a place where I believe it's never hot at all,

but it's currently quite wet from Mumbai.

It's Aditi Mittal.

Hi, Aditi.

It is such an honor and pleasure to be on a Zoom call talking to people where I'm the one saying actually the weather is quite nice here.

It has never happened before.

The smugness, I feel, honestly,

will last me for the rest of this episode.

It is the weather's quite nice, actually.

We are in the middle of our monsoons.

If anyone wants any tips on how to deal with heat,

get in touch with Alice.

I know nothing about it.

We are recording on the 22nd of July 2022.

It is National Sleep Awareness Week in America, apparently.

And to mark the occasion, we're going to ask you buglers two simple questions.

One, are you asleep?

And two,

are you still asleep?

And Sunday the 24th of July is National Tell an Old Joke Day.

And to mark it on this week's bugle, we will be talking about the world's abject failure to come to terms with climate change and the Conservative Party imposing a new Prime Minister on the UK whilst using the nation as a plaything in its own internecine power games.

The old ones are always the most depressing.

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

And this week, a special psychometric test.

Could you be leader of the Conservative Party in the UK?

Well, I'm going to put to you various questions.

Your answers will tell you if you have the right psychological make-up to be the Tory leader.

Question one, who is your favourite tennis player?

A.

Roger Federer.

B.

Serena Williams.

C.

Fred Perry from the 1930s before the EU banned us all from playing tennis.

D.

Whichever of Andy Murray or Emma Radukani you remember first.

Or E.

Margaret Thatcher.

Question two.

You find an injured bird on the ground outside a school.

What do you do?

A.

Call a local bird welfare charity and nurse the stricken creature until specialist help arrives.

B.

Swiftly break the bird's neck to end its suffering as humanely as possible.

C.

Bite the bird's head off, then hurl its corpse into the school playground while saying, I won't give in to the woke lobby who say you shouldn't throw dead birds at children.

Or D, promise the bird that you will cut its taxes and everything will be magically okay again, before feeding the bird to a passing Russian billionaire's feral dog while saying, hi Sergei, could you bang us another mill?

We're out of branded stationery.

And question three, you see an interestingly shaped cloud.

What does it make you think of?

A.

Margaret Thatcher.

B, the Falklands War.

C, nothing, it's just a cloud.

D, the class struggle, or E, cricket.

Question four, arrange the following into a priority list with the thing that is most important to you at the top.

A, yourself.

B, rich people who give money to the Conservative Party.

C, rich people who might give money to the Conservative Party in future.

D, beating the Labour Party.

E, the Conservative Party, or F, the United Kingdom.

Oh, sorry, that was already arranged in Conservative Party priority order.

Ignore question four.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, it's hot.

The world is officially hot and not in a saucy way.

It's been really hot in lots of places.

Climate change, love it or hate it, it's here to stay and it's not responding to our threats that we are really definitely going to do something about it within the next three decades or so.

In fact, this week, old Colonel Clymer has been shitting on everyone's picnics yet again.

Much of Europe, including the former part of Europe, the UK, has been baked like an extremely varied selection of regional pastries by temperatures well over 40 degrees Celsius, sparking lethal wildfires, a health emergency, and in Britain, people complaining about the government warning people to be careful.

Around 100 million people in America are living under heat alerts.

The whole of Oklahoma tops 103 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday.

Meteorologists have warned people to look out for symptoms including headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and fatigue, which could be signs of heat-induced illness or of having watched one of the Conservative Party leadership debates.

We don't know.

How do you both see the current state of the world in terms of our heroic progress towards self-inflicted Armageddon?

But I'm fascinated by this Biden announcement where he's announced $2.3 billion American dollars worth of infrastructure help, building infrastructure help.

Let's be specific.

Also, £2.3 billion American dollars is 1.9 billion British pounds.

But I'm not sure if it's the difference between the dollar and the pound or the difference between British billions and American billions.

I think we've all agreed on American billions, mainly because they have more of them.

But anyway, building infrastructure to withstand extreme weather is simultaneously like obviously a clever move for a country wallowing in deeply decrepit public systems and a weird fear of paying taxes that might ever help anyone else.

You know, oh no, what if we pave this road that's made out of lava and spikes and then one day a pedophile drives down it?

I don't want a pedo driving down my hard-earned tax dollars.

I don't know.

To be fair, I would be pissed if I were to be paying tax in America as well.

It's sort of a chicken and the egg situation.

People very reasonably are like, why would I pay my taxes to a country that's never done anything nice for me when I'm already $100,000 in debt for my college degree in Excel spreadsheet management?

It's like a chicken and egg situation, but both the chicken and the egg are trying to kill each other.

Returning to the point,

Joe Biden stopped short of formally declaring a climate emergency, though he did say it was a climate emergency, but he didn't declare it a climate emergency.

He just said it was a climate emergency.

Because if he declared that it was a climate emergency, it would grant him more power to deal with the climate emergency.

And the last thing he wants is the capacity to enact real change.

I mean, Biden did not want to declare it a climate emergency,

which is okay, but does the climate know?

Because

at this point, you cannot gaslight the climate into thinking that it's not an emergency because both gas and light are you know gifts given to us by the environment.

So

it's a little bit worrying that

he doesn't want to declare it a climate emergency.

And I just want to say I resent the bugle for multiple reasons.

But the one that I do the most is that this is probably the third time that I have had to look up Joe Manchin,

which

who is some dude who apparently, you know, in the States, he owns a bunch of coal plants, coal mines,

coal, and

coal plants if you leave them for long enough under enough pressure.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, honestly, is he an environmentalist, really, if you think about it?

He, you know, and so he owns a bunch of coal things, and he is sort of one of the major reasons why the Democrats and the Republicans are having a problem coming to any sort of combined consensus on what they want to do about the climate.

And

here's my thing.

Like, he will probably be on Mars by the time the planet explodes.

I think that, you know,

I do think they say that, you know,

it's better to know when to arrive somewhere, but it's even better to know when to leave.

And I think that at this point, humanity should just pack up.

I think that instead of these petty arguments with each other, you know, getting offended when someone gives you heat tips, fk it.

You know, because you are the crab in the pot of boiling water, I say you just take in a margarita and enjoy the end of the world while Joe Manchin flies off to Mars.

So, fundamentally, it seems that America, which, you know, is one of the more important nations when it comes to dealing with climate change in terms of both the vast scale of its emissions and the influence it has around the world, is kind of

stuck.

But the greater problem, surely,

Alice Aditi, is that one of the great failings of Charles Darwin when he invented evolution to try and move our species on a bit in the 19th century was not including a facility to enable us to adapt to increasing temperatures.

I mean, it was easy for him because he could just shave off his beard or take off his extremely 19th-century hat and the eight layers of clothing that were diriguer at the time in case anyone even contemplated the existence of human flesh and made God very cross indeed.

He was particularly rascible in the 1800s, God.

So we're stuck.

We're stuck with

these bodies that just

aren't really adapted to live in what will presumably soon be 80-degree heat.

I mean, Alice,

you've lived in Australia for most of your life.

And it's quite hot there.

I've been reliably informed by myself, remembering myself melting in the streets of Adelaide a few months ago.

Any tips for the world

from there?

Okay, I will tell you.

I will tell you first how I have dealt with it, and then I'll give you some tips from our sister podcast, The Gargle.

First of all, I mistered my baby with a spray bottle like the perfect fat little succulent that she is.

I drank a metric ton of bubble tea.

I cursed the architecture of the British, which seems to be mainly geared towards feeling slightly cramped and reassuringly trapped like you're inside the hull of a ship.

And I fielded a dozen smug, weird jokes about, like, well, aren't you Australian?

Surely 40 degrees is fine for you.

And you know what?

No, 40 degrees is fine, maybe, when you're inside a building with even a fragment of ventilation, or proper insulation, or air conditioning, or high ceilings, or shade.

It is not fine when you're living in a literal pizza oven.

40 degrees is fine when you can go sit in the shade or near a beach where people will be using, you know, responsible levels of sun protection, not ripping the shells off their fluorescently pale underbellies and charging directly into the heart of the sun at midday.

I remember reading an article

in The Guardian about Britain's total, not just failure, but refusal to build buildings that even contemplate the concept of temperature.

So we have to say,

you know, our housing stock is generally rooms that are pretty small and pokey, often damp, that are unbelievably cold in the winter and unbelievably hot in the summer, despite the fact that neither our winters nor our summers are particularly cold or hot, respectively on a global scale.

It's almost like to say, you know, we will just

design life.

Maybe it's so that we can understand what it's like in other parts of the world, where you do have these extreme temperatures more often.

Maybe it was part of our training for when we took temporary charge of some of these places that

we're used to living in

these strange climes through having inflicted them on ourselves through shit planning.

The number one solution to

dealing with hot weather is to be rich.

You just

go into a place.

You're welcome.

You know, honestly, just get into an air-conditioned room.

And again, like, I mean, I was talking about the smugness, you know, from the time that I said hello.

And that is carrying on right now because it's so cute when you're like, oh my god, there's a heat wave.

It's 27 degrees.

I was like, that's the temperature our air conditioners are set at.

Speaking of tips.

Yes, what are your heat tips for buglers?

Here are my heat tips brought to you by regular gargle sponsor, Half a Glass of Water.

Give a half a glass of water to a limp stranger.

Make ice, put it in your bum crack, dip your bits into it, use it to inflate one of those squinched-up novelty sponge toys and then put it on your head like a little hat.

Saturate a cloth and place it in front of a fan to blow wet air through the room.

Use it to sabotage the computers of the largest oil companies in the world.

not immediately effective, but long term it's good, dress as a waiter, put poison in it and give it to someone at the beginning of a murder mystery to start yourself sweating, or fire it into space so one day an indentured servant working on Elon Musk's Mars mining satellite will have enough to trade for his freedom.

And those are your half a glass of water tips for dealing with a heat wave.

So, I mean, so you can, you know, understand perhaps Britain not legislating for the fact that we'd have temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius.

But also, let's not forget we have a great national tradition of doing our infrastructurals to absolute bare minimum standards.

Exhibit one, Stonehenge, which set a very bad precedent for today's railways, buildings, and other things that have been struggling in the heat this week.

So, you know, they put it up, and people said, Are you sure that's that's done?

And you know, the builder said, Oh, I don't give a shit if it only works once a year, it doesn't have a roof, and it gets in the way of the A303.

It's up, isn't it?

We have got it done.

The British way, even a broken henge is right once a year, Andy.

India news now, and well, more excitement in the world of Indian press freedom or lack of it, DT, this week.

Perhaps you can bring us up to date.

I am so absolutely thrilled to be one of the last voices that has not been in jail yet for

speaking my mind.

You know, they say that truth is the first casualty to war, but that sentence was written after everyone who told the truth was either murdered or jailed.

Because

about 21 days ago we had Muhammad Zubayer one of the co-founders of the news portal Alt News which has been fact-checking Indian news

who was arrested for under completely spurious charges he was taken into custody for a tweet where he posted a clip of a Hindi movie from 1973

the report that was filed against him for a hurting Hindu sentiments was filed by an anonymous Twitter account that tweeted that one tweet about being offended and now does not exist.

To argue the semantics of his tweet, you know, like it was like this, it was like that, is pointless because it does not matter.

Is it calling out the government?

And is the person's name Muslim or even Muslim sounding?

You know, like I, for example, as Adati Mital, have been referred to as Adil Muhammad whenever I tweet anything against the government, irrespective of my gender.

And Muhammad Zubair is lucky.

He has been released because he is a high-profile critic of the government, which means that the only way to criticize the government right now is loudly.

So, if anyone has any problems, go for it.

In the meantime, in the meantime, we have, and I would like to mention their names: Umar Khalid, who's been in jail for 671 days, Siddique Kappan, 635 days, Asif Sultana, 1427 days, Fahad Shah, 168 days, Khalid Sefi 743 days, Gulfesha Fatima, 832 days, Sharjil Isman,

931 days, and Sajid Gul for 191 days.

And, you know, the international press covered Zubair's case

extensively because it was concerned about the chilling effect it might have on press freedom.

And let me reassure you, at this point, while Europe goes through a heat wave, we are frozen.

It has chilled us enough that we are now just every time that the government, that the Supreme Court does something that's normal, we celebrate.

So, yeah, as you say, he was the founder of this fact-checking website, Alt News.

And I mean, there's no type of website politicians like less than a fact-checking website, because life would be so much simpler for them if what they said were facts were simply accepted as facts, like in the good old days.

And, you know, I mean, press freedom comes in many forms.

I mean, here in Britain,

our take on press freedom is the freedom for our press not to hold the government to account if it doesn't want to, and the freedom to lie, propagandise, and share pictures of famous women walking out of a place whilst wearing a thing, whilst also being entirely free from responsibility or consequence for what they publish.

So there's just different ways of looking at the concept of press freedom, really.

Look, I just think that we're all missing the reality of the situation, which is that the principle of the importance of press freedom was established at a time when mostly only rich people could read.

So let's be realistic here about what they were agreeing to when they agreed to this whole idea in the first place.

Also, Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Opposition Congress Party, is under investigation by the Enforcement Directorate, which sounds like something from a film, but isn't.

Over a decade-old and unproven allegation of money laundering, opposition party leaders have issued a joint statement condemning the investigation and said that Modi's government had, quote, unleashed a relentless campaign against its opponents and critics through the mischievous misuse of investigative agencies.

Mischievous.

Now, amongst our many and varied legacies to India, Aditi, it is a source of great delight and pride here in Britain to see that classic British understatement and euphemism is still going very, very strong indeed.

In other exciting news in India,

India will soon, once again, be home to wild cheaters.

The self-proclaimed fastest land mammals on earth are imminently to arrive in India and the Kuno National Park.

Now, amongst all the things on India's shopping list as a nation, Aditi, maybe a bit more space, a bit less honking of horns every now and again, maybe, a bit less of a despotty government, a medical cure for corruption, a few more Olympic gold medals, and a magic spell to resurrect Virak Koli's batting.

You might not have thought someone will be thinking, we need more carnivorous big cats that can run at 70 miles an hour.

But that is what India is getting.

You must be very excited.

I am absolutely thrilled because, I mean, this coincides with India's 75th year as an independent nation.

We sort of murdered all the local cheetahs and now we sort of,

but in 1952, we were kind of done with them.

And then now we we Indians are known for many things, you know,

our diversity, our

love for spices, and of course, our inherent inbuilt racism.

So, one of the things that I am very excited about is to see how these Namibian cheetahs will be treated by the local cheetah population.

Will there be

inter-cheetah racism?

I think that's something that we have to watch out for at this point.

And as I said, this is a gift on India's 75th independent

year and I mean this is like giving a cat to your grandparents and

and and hoping that they're going to take care of it so I think we are very excited and we've seen that introducing an apex predator into an environment where it has not been for several decades, where the ecosystem has possibly adjusted itself in order to accommodate other predators has never ended badly.

It has never ended badly.

We've all seen the Jurassic Park movies and those are just feel-good family films where everything goes well.

So a deal has been struck to sign these cheaters from Namibia.

A big money, a big money deal, I assume agents were involved.

Namibia home to one of the world's largest cheater population, but there are just 7,000 of the spotty speedsters left in the wild, making them only slightly less populous than Conservative Party members, whilst also having evolved about as much in the last 10,000 years.

Bhupenda Yadav, the Environment Minister for India,

heralded the return of cheetahs with these words: Completing 75 glorious years of independence with restoring the fastest terrestrial flagship species, the cheetah, in India, will rekindle the ecological dynamics of the landscape.

What is a flagship?

What is a flagship?

anime?

I mean, a flagship shop is where they put a shop in somewhere that it's too expensive, it doesn't make any money, but it looks good.

So I think that they're suggesting cheetahs.

I just got that.

I just got that.

See, even, you know what, that's what?

Self-awareness.

Five points for self-awareness to our environment minister.

He's like, you know what, they're not dying enough and fast enough in Namibia.

Come over.

We'll kill you here.

Experts said that the national park is, quote, not the best cheetah landscape at a piddling 1400 square kilometers, as cheetahs not only like to eat Carpachio as often as possible, but also to have a solid 3,000 square kilometers to prance around in their knock-off leopard skin playsuits.

So, um,

but then, you know, you know, there's not enough space around the world.

You know, the world doesn't have the space it used to, so maybe it's old Stevie Spottylegs who needs to change.

Britain's new Prime Minister news now and well, the shortlist shitfest to impose a new Prime Minister on the UK is down to the final two.

And the Tories have whittled down their

not entirely impressive list of candidates to Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, a sub-standard bearer for those who parade their inadequacies proudly, a shape-shifting former Liberal Democrat, former Remain supporter now of Brexitatius Thatcher Tribute Act.

And Rishi Sunak, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, former hedge fund casinoist with a penchant for nauseating videos of himself, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who presided over some of the most spectacularly wasteful spending in British government history.

And amidst a bumbling growth-resistant economy, he exuded as much empathy for the less fortunate as Boris Johnson exudes respect for the Ten Commandments.

So that's what we've got.

Those are the two choices.

As neutral external observers, what do you make of the fact that one of these two will soon be in charge in Britain?

I mean, I think think it's wonderful.

I think that it's such a represent like such a win for representation.

Representation matters, Andy.

And the fact that, you know, the Tory leadership is now absolutely certain to be held by either a woman or a man of colour, depending on who vomits on themselves first.

Like,

I think it's a really beautiful thing that the Tories are willing to be in the front lines of the culture war about who's allowed to have a cut, but they're pretty equal opportunity about who's allowed to be a cut.

And,

you know, the thing about minorities in like oppressive institutions that generally discriminate against them is that you have to be better.

Like, you have to be better.

If you're a female comedian, you have to be better than your colleagues.

You have to be, and if you're a female Tory, you've got to be, I mean, you've got to be Thatcher.

Like, you've got to be worse than everyone else at the politics side of things.

So I think it's a really exciting time for the Tories.

You know,

this might be a controversial opinion, but,

and Indian men are going to hate me more than they already do for this.

But is Rishi Sunak a bit of a gold digger?

Like,

he just married into wealth, this guy.

And, like, if you look at him, in fact, you know, I at Rishi Sunak's face, which is like this, you know, it looks like a late season mango.

It's because it's like

unrealistically long.

The space sort of between his eyes and his lips is like two small early season mangoes.

That's how long his face is.

And he,

he looks like the classic prototype Punjabi guy who sort of like marries up and then keeps failing up.

And that's why, you know, Alice made that point about representation because it's so important.

Because in India, someone like Rishi Sunak would probably at max in life make it to like middle management, like suck in like Ambani's or Ardani's dick, right?

But, you know, in the UK, he's, you know, out there.

He is almost like sort of like at the topmost level and all he has to do is suck a couple of Conservative Party members' dicks.

Truss is an interesting one.

She was a Liberal Democrat member when younger.

She made a speech at the Liberal Democrat Conference, I think, when she was still a teenager.

But is now...

She hasn't learned to make speeches any better.

She is almost

every time she speaks in public, it could be used as an object lesson in anti-oratory.

You could just show it to children.

This is how not to communicate.

Chess news now and chess, a game that has fascinated humanity for what is it now, coming on to a thousand years, is boring.

Don't take it from me.

Take it from Magnus Carlson, one of the foremost geniuses of the 64 squares strategesium that is the game of chess.

He's announced that he quotes cannot be asked to defend his world championship title next year.

Not his words words out loud but certainly what he really meant when he said that he had no inclination to play he had been scheduled to uh for a showdown in 2023 with the russian grandmaster jan neponnyci um who's going to have to chess the shit out of it against someone else instead um and it we just he just that's it he's he's he said he's got no inclination to play.

So, I mean, what does this tell us about the state of humanity now that one of the greatest chess players ever can't be asked to play chess.

Well first of all Andy he's not it's not all of chess that he's giving up it's just these world championship bouts which are apparently extremely grueling and unpleasant and he's still going to play chess for fun he's not just woken up one day and gone I've forgotten which one the horse is

he's he's decided that he's you know he's going out on top he's like no I think this is a wonderful thing I think normalized quitting shit you don't enjoy You don't have to keep doing things just because you happen to be the best in the world at them, Andy.

Maybe you could stop doing puns one day.

Yeah.

I never thought of it like that, actually.

It's a curse as much as a gift.

I think it's a great thing.

I think you leave room for the young uns to come up, you know, and to keep doing the chessing that they love so much.

Which I, you know,

I think you need room for the game to evolve and become more interesting.

Apparently, the institution is taking the note and they've decided they're not going to make these world championship matches so grueling after all.

They're just going to make them, you know, psychologically stressful by having your mum whisper in your ear about how disappointed she is about the move you made.

No longer going to last days and days and days.

They're going to do it on a timer and if you go too long, they'll put an electric shock up you.

They've tried that in cricket.

It doesn't work.

It just doesn't work.

And they're going to sub out one of the games, one of the five games, just for a straight-up match of thumb wars.

So I think all of this is an exciting future for the game of chess.

And I, for one, look forward to paying too much money to watch it.

Well,

Carlson, of course, is best known for things like moving pawns, saying, No, Godboy, you can't go that way, my friend.

It's diagonals or nothing.

And also for not having any friends from Prague just because he can't face everyone making the same pun about it.

And

there's also talk that the Norwegian Chess Federation was rebuffed in its efforts to allow Carlson to have a single Viking berserker pawn that could charge out six squares in the first move of the game and take out three enemy pieces.

But I don't think it's, you know, I just think we should be clear that the King of Chess is only taking one one step away from the game.

I am so excited because

I don't play chess

and neither do I possess the intellect of someone who understands it.

And

I'll be honest, before this story, I thought Magnus Carlson was a type of beer.

But

it sounds like the name of

a 4.5%

alcohol level beer.

At this point, I am just thrilled because I finally have something in common with a chess grandmaster, and that is that I don't want to do shit.

I just could not be asked.

And I mean, like, yeah, the guy's like, oh, the last match that apparently they played, this championship was an eight-hour match.

I'm like, what is the point of following your passion if you're going to end up doing a nine-to-five anyway?

So I support the decision by Magnus Carlson

and I do believe Alice is very right in her analysis.

Exciting times for chess in India, Aditi.

The 44th Chess Olympiad is coming to India to Mamalapuram, south of the coastal metropolis of Chennai, next week.

But there have been complaints about the price of tickets.

Tickets to watch live have been priced at 3,000 rupees, which is around £30 or almost 40 US dollars for Indian men, 8,000 rupees for foreigners, that's about 100 US dollars, but only 300 rupees for women.

How come women around the world get all the breaks?

I mean, this is hugely unfair, isn't it?

Yes, I agree with you.

I agree with you, especially with the glut of women in chess.

You know, we should...

We should definitely be pricing it up.

In fact,

you know,

my attitude towards this was going to be more like, yeah, f it.

Pay the money.

If you have to go, like, if you, how, how much are you gonna see live anyway?

It, the whole board is about this thing, okay?

It's the size of my torso, and then you're gonna sit in a giant friggin' room and look at it.

You know what?

Go home, watch the streaming of the thing, okay?

No chess player wants you to be like, yeah, go for it.

Like, they don't even need that kind of harassment in the middle of a match.

I mean, it does seem quite a lot to watch a sport, which, as you say, is not entirely renowned for its high-octane, eye-boggling, thrill-a-minute physical explosivity that

doesn't translate through through the TV screen, so you've got to see it live, or for the epic scale of its movements, or for an elegance that needs to be seen in that crucial extra-third dimension rather than in a mere two, or the strategic nuance that you can only pick up if you see it live.

Oh, the cameras were focused on the D4 to F6 part of the board.

I absolutely know Black Queen was unmarked out wide and about to take the absolute hell out of White Bishop before checking the holy mate out of Kingy.

But I'm intrigued by this idea of a chess olympiad, which I assume is like a regular Olympics, but more chess-influenced and perhaps involves someone lobbing a chessboard off a 10-metre diving board into a pool, or playing chess whilst riding a horse strangely, or kayaking down some pretend rapids, or maybe you'll get to see a giant Latvian hurling an actual bishop 70 meters.

So we just

but maybe there'll be the addition of a new skateboarder piece instead of the old boring ones to attract a younger audience.

But

anyway, I mean, look, Andy, we are all skating over the real fact of the matter.

We're all avoiding the reality of this situation, which is the only thing you get from attending a chess tournament live that you do not get from watching a chess tournament on streaming or television or with binoculars is the smell.

That you're there for the smell of a thousand men sweating about chess.

And that

is something that you cannot replicate, though scientists have tried.

In other sport news, although chess is obviously not a sport,

a new Olympic champion for don't say that.

Someone in chess might

move a piece at you.

It's a sport.

It doesn't make it any less good.

It's an amazing game.

It is not a sport.

Other than for funding reasons.

New American champion in the Olympic Decathlon.

Now you might think, well, this is not an Olympic year.

Well, I'm not talking about this year's Olympics.

We're talking about the 1912 Olympics.

And Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes of all time, has been reinstated as the sole winner of the 1912 Olympic Tacathlan and Pentathlon by the international Olympic community.

He was originally stripped of his gold medals in 1913 for breaching the strict rules on amateurism by having played semi-professional baseball before he won his Olympic golds in athletics.

Now, sport was a bit silly in those days.

It's also a bit silly now, but in different ways.

He was reinstated as joint gold medalist in 1983, not because the IOC decided it was flagrantly ridiculous or due to suspicions that racism was involved due to Thorpe's Native American background.

They reinstated his medals because it turned out they hadn't applied their stupid rules correctly and had not stripped him of his medals quickly enough.

Technically in 1912 there was a 30-day limit for stripping people of medals for entirely spurious reasons.

But the story only emerged several months after the Stockholm Games when articles appeared in the US papers revealing that he'd played baseball for not very much money at all.

Still, better late than never.

They reinstated his gold medals in 83, although by that time, Thorpe was indeed late, as in dead.

So

it's a bizarre story, but they finally now said he is the sole gold medal winner.

Take that, Hugo Wieslander of Sweden, you dead silver medal winning loser.

And he did win by nearly 700 points, which is a pretty big margin in the Decathan.

So it's probably fair to say

he was a fair winner.

So

we have to reassess the Olympic medal tables now.

It's wonderful news.

I mean, I'm only going to accept this result if they then apply the better late than never rule to all of the sports that they put up and completely disintegrate the concept of winning.

You know, I mean, this is sort of like a lot.

This is a lot for something that happened

a long time.

I mean, was there the need?

You could have done it, but like, was there the need to put this out?

I'm like, you look like an idiot as a, whatever, as a committee of people.

And so was there the need to tell others?

Like you could have been like, you know what, let's fix this.

Let's like, you know, the guy should get it.

But the fact that they put it out there is like asking for it.

Yes.

I mean, you do seem to be suggesting, Adishi, that people who spend a lot of their lives obsessing over sport that happened way, way, way before they were born are in some way wasting their existence.

And I take that as personal, personal offense.

Thorpe is one of the most extraordinary figures in sporting history as well as his Olympic triumphs.

He then played and coached American football in the early years of the NFL and was inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame.

He played Major League Baseball for several years, a bit of professional basketball and was US intercollegiate ballroom dancing champion.

And he won the Olympic decathlon in 1912, which was his only ever decathlon wearing a shoe that he'd found in a bin, according to Wikipedia.

extraordinary.

I mean, it was a bit harsh to disqualify him for getting a small amount of money for playing an entirely different sport, especially when one of the men he beat in 1912, Avery Brundage, was subsequently not disqualified from being head of the IOC for 20 years from 1952 to 1972, despite being a full-on racist and anti-Semite.

But

such is sport.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

A pleasure, as always, having you both on.

Do you have any things to plug?

Alice, you are going to be in Edinburgh very soon.

Yes, I'm going to be in Edinburgh.

I will be doing my show Kronos at 9.15 at the Gilded Balloon every night except the 15th.

So come along and say hello.

Also, if you are in Edinburgh and happen to have a five-stream banjo you could lend me for a month, that would be super good

because I've tipped over the luggage limit with the baby and it was baby or banjo.

Apparently, you can't just borrow a baby for a month when you go to Edinburgh.

So I'm hoping someone will be kind enough to lend it to me.

The other

Bugle co-hosts are also performing in Edinburgh.

Tiff Stevenson is doing a show.

James Nakise is doing a show.

I don't know if Mark Steele is doing a show this year.

But anyway, do support all the

Bugle co-hosts who are performing in Edinburgh this year if you happen to be there at Buglers.

Adi, did you have anything to tell our listeners about?

You know, enjoy the end of the world.

But while you're at it, I am going to be performing in Amsterdam on 13th of August, in Paris on the 20th of August, and in Berlin on the 28th 28th of August, and in

Helsinki on the 5th of September.

And

if you are in any of those areas, run

because

I'm going to be taking over.

No,

please come.

I have a preview.

If you're not coming to Environment, I have a preview of Kronos on the Monday, which is the Monday after today, the coming Monday, the 25th.

The 25th.

5th

of this month.

And

you can come and see that, or also just follow me on Twitter at alliterative.

And also, I have a podcast called The Gargle, which is the glossy magazine to this bugle newspaper.

There are Bugle 15th anniversary live shows coming up later

this year in Birmingham, Dublin, Glasgow, and London.

Details on the internet, and if I have time to sort my website out on that specific part of the internet soon, along with some more Satris Baha dates in November.

Now, to play you out, this week we will launch the Bugle Wall of Fame with the names of our premium level voluntary subscribers and their great contributions to the history of civilization.

To join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to give a one-off or a current contribution, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Tuca Lehoyavi designed the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Baptiste Mispellon is the painter who inspired Caravaggio himself.

Nick Kane is a two-time world table tennis champion whilst Darren Warner Warner discovered Antarctica.

Chris Llewellyn is the real author of most of Walt Whitman's poetry and Dave Modissette invented the hairdryer.

Tim Wilkinson is the world record holder for the 231 metre hop whilst Adam Smout taught the queen to wave.

Parthenon architect Rob Weir

influenced the entire history of European architecture and Jesse Weyer was the first to accurately map the coastline of Manhattan Island.

Thanks to all of those.

Entrance onto the bugle.

Voluntary subscribers.

Hall of Fame.

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.