Arm all the drag queens (4232)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4232 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world.

I am Andy Zoltzmann here in the shed of immutable veracity as the United Kingdom tentatively emerges into the second half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the unquenchably jubileicious.

And to mark the beginning of the new interjubilisiotic phase in this country's life as we wait for the 71st anniversary celebrations next year, I've had my scalp surgically treated so my hair and hairline match the glorious bonsia of the queen herself.

My larynx has also been fully Elizabeth so I sound exactly like the greatest British monarch of my life.

Oh hang on, nope.

I'm sounding just like I normally do.

That's not let me check my mirror.

Oh my hair also looks the same as on

oh no there's there's been a terrible mix up in the ordering process

I've got to make a call but it's gonna be very awkward it'll have to wait till after the show on we go welcome to the bugle it's Wednesday the 8th of June 2022 and I'm just a few thousand short but wet miles from the United States of America from where both of our bugle co-hosts this week joined me from New York City Specifically Brooklyn, it's Hari Kondabolu and from San Francisco, NATO Green.

Welcome both of you from your distant hosts.

Hello, Andy.

Hi.

Hello, Andy.

Yeah, I realized that by welcoming you both at the same time, that made that simultaneous response inevitable, which,

you know, I'm quite new at this podcasting and I haven't quite cracked it yet.

You know, Andy, Hari is one of my oldest friends in comedy.

And so over those many years, we developed the kind of like just intuitive comic timing as to answer a question

interrupting each other at the same time

in a way that only friends could.

Well, as long as you have you both on the show on the show together, which is

a bugle first

to have you both on at the same time.

So

yeah, don't f it up.

That's what I'm saying.

Noted.

How are you, Ari?

Why do you ask me that question every time I'm on?

First of all, you know the answer to it.

You read the news.

Secondly, like you have a phrase in the UK

that stands in for how are you?

It's are you all right?

And honestly, that is the appropriate question you should be asking every American whenever you talk to them.

Are you all right?

No, not really.

Pandemic, nuclear threat still in the background.

Everyone's shooting each other.

People can't decide whether we should be allowed to shoot each other or not.

It's not good.

And I have a kid.

I brought a kid into this.

But the Mets are doing well, Ari.

So there's, you know, that's good, isn't it?

It's too early, Andy.

You know how that game is played.

Oh, they're doing so.

Oh, what happened?

Everybody got injured.

All the free agents that they signed got injured all at once.

Yeah, yeah.

This is this is

the setup.

The Mets know how to rope a dope.

We are recording on the the 8th of June.

On this day in 1954, Joseph Welch, the special counsel for the United States Army, had a pop at Senator Joseph McCarthy and gave McCarthy the famous rebuke, you have done enough.

Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

Have you left no sense of decency?

That was on this day in 1954.

And it's good to know that the world of politics has moved on with such maturity that no leader could possibly hear such words ever said again.

As always, our section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week.

Alternative modes of travel.

People are increasingly looking to different means of getting around.

It's concerns, for example, that, well, people are losing faith in air travel due to administrative chaos, staffing troubles, delays, hidden costs, the queues, because, frankly, what's the point of going anywhere?

And also, because the physics just simply doesn't hang together.

Also, because of the rising cost of fuel on the back of war, the free markets not always having humanity's best interests at heart, and oil being a slippery little bastard all round, that's making people slightly more reluctant to drive cars around.

Trains in some countries I've researched are a mixture of expensive, unreliable and shit.

So people are looking increasingly to different forms of transport.

We give you the pros and cons of some of these alternatives.

Donkey, pro, you feel like a messiah.

Con takes a long time to fill up when it runs out of fuel.

Catapult, pro, it's environmentally friendly.

Con vulnerable to sudden changes in wind, which can blow you off course from your landing mattress with fatal results.

Piggyback, pro, it's fun, con, socially frowned upon for adults.

Zorbing Ball, pro, excellent 360-degree visibility, con, slopes and physics are a disharmonious combination.

Space rocket, pro, it's glamorous, fast, and funky, cons, tends to return you back to where you took off from, cramped conditions, and very poor in-flight service.

And pterodactyl, pro, exciting, con, extinct.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week: America still at war with itself.

We're in a fairly introspective phase here in Britain, really over, I don't know, the last hundred years or so.

Maybe even probably since I don't know, things started going wrong in the 1770s.

But America, it seems, is in just a permanent state of attempting to rend itself to pieces from within.

In the aftermath of the latest mass shootings, there has been talk of bipartisan congressional congressional cooperation to try to find something that slightly looks like a solution.

I mean,

is this

actually going to bring about any possible results?

Or will, you know, the end to America slaughtering itself really rid it of any...

you know, of its kind of USP as a nation that, you know, it is more willing than any other country in the world to act against its own self-interest.

Oh, yeah.

We're number one at that.

We're very good at acting against our own self-interest.

First of all, the big news this week is that Republicans and Democrats are willing to talk to each other about creating a proposal for gun control.

It's not that they've agreed to anything.

It's simply that they're talking to each other as they're supposed to do as legislators.

And has has been the case for a couple of hundred years.

But they just started talking about it and going back and forth.

And there seems to be a lot of disagreements.

For example, the GOP is still a little wary

about passing any kind of federal legislation or anything that would prevent people, potentially with mental health issues, from purchasing guns.

Now,

the left is worried because that seems to be a lot of the gun violence we see in these mass shootings.

A lot of the mass shootings seem to be by people that shouldn't be owning guns.

But the right's problem is that is a big part of their base, right?

People who would not be allowed to buy guns if there were mental health checks.

And that is such a sizable proportion that to actually bend on that particular issue would be the downfall of the Republican Party.

It's quite a competitive title, Harry, but that is one of the most depressing jokes in the entire history of the bugle.

Hey, I knew NATO was here.

I knew NATO was here.

I had to come up with something.

The gauntlet's been dropped, NATO.

America, and particularly whiteness, I would say, is a murder-suicide pact with the planet.

Texas Senator John Corden said that we all agree that deranged, dangerously mentally ill people shouldn't have firearms.

They call this a red flag law.

Now, the average gun owner owns five guns.

If you want five automatic rifles, that is a red flag to me.

I'm just going to start there.

Is that number because when you have more rifles than limbs, that's going to require you to be using your teeth to fire the fifth of those rifles.

So

that's the limit for you, Nato?

That's the limit.

That

if you have

more guns than books in your house, I'm going to go ahead and call that a red flag.

This bipartisan push now

from the Senate to pass gun control.

There was a school shooting in Texas recently.

It was incredibly tragic.

School shootings are the only form of abortion that Republicans Republicans support.

What I've been reflecting on as I think about how our commitment to mass murder in the United States is that mass murder is actually a form of privilege.

And hear me out.

I've spent a fair amount of time in the third world.

I've traveled pretty extensively in Latin America.

There's a lot of violence.

People get killed for a lot, but not for such stupid reasons.

Like, in Latin America, if you're a sociopath with an assault rifle, you're given a job.

Like, you're a colonel in the secret police.

You have a purpose.

It might be to exterminate some villagers or fight narcos while being a narco.

You know what I mean?

But you have a mission.

You don't go murder children because you're a virgin.

That's a waste of bullets.

According to a new poll from CBS, 72% of Americans think mass shootings could be stopped if U.S.

politicians would only try, but 69% thought it was not likely that they would try.

No wonder people are cynical about politics.

We don't think politicians will even try to solve problems.

It feels like we're peasants in the 14th century France just trying to harvest some carrots and hope the Hundred Years' War doesn't raise our hamlet on its way through so we can die of bubonic plague and peace.

Almost half of Republicans think that mass shootings are the price of living in a free society.

And I have a different idea of free, I realize.

That's what I realized is that like, for example, just recently in San Francisco, we had Carnival.

It's one of my favorite events.

It's a parade and street fair celebrating the diversity and endurance of Latino culture in my neighborhood.

And as I stood on the street watching vintage lowriders bounce down the street to a Portuguese version of Daft Punk's Get Lucky while I ate an empanada and cumbia dancers on stilts walked by while lesbian roller skaters gave candy to children i did not think this is feels free and it really needs a mass shooting uh to just complete the complete the weekend so the the republicans and the Democrats and the Senate are negotiating,

and they're far apart on a few points.

Democrats want a bill to do things, and Republicans want to act like they're doing things without doing things.

And so, I've gotten, I was leaked the notes of things that the Republican senators are adding to the gun control bill to reduce the risk of mass shootings without upsetting the gun lobby.

One is a new initiative to teach babies how to use a gun at the same time that they learn to latch onto the nipple,

because the best defense against a bad man with a gun is a good baby with a gun

requiring children to wear school uniforms of bullet-riddled and bloody clothes so they look like they've already been shot

making every third gun out of avocado so that it will go bad suddenly three days after purchase and stick up the house

and training veterans with PTSD and arming them to be school security.

We're bringing back waterboarding in school.

So during the negotiations, Biden gave a speech about his agenda for gun control, and a Republican senator involved in the negotiations described Biden's remarks as, quote, unhelpful but irrelevant.

Unhelpful but irrelevant sounds like a Yelp review of Christianity.

There's three heathens on this, and we're all enjoying that joke.

We're all enjoying that joke.

We're all going to hell.

So we can laugh about it there as well.

Well, Harry, I think your depressing joke's not even top 10 now after that.

If you did enjoy the joke, please email jews at thebugle.co.uk.

One of Biden's proposals that people are not interested in is to raise the gun age to 21, right?

And there's a lot of people when, you know, several polls show that people actually seem to prefer raising the gun age to 25, which makes sense because that's when the brain like solidifies a bit more.

And I prefer 25 to 18

because if we do that, there will be fewer school shootings, though there will be more shootings in colleges and at the workplace.

And that is progress.

This is like bleak tennis.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that was a lob.

There are a couple of proposals the Republicans have put out that are a bit

fringy, but I see what they're doing.

One is that they're offering a tax credit for everyone who does not shoot somebody.

And you might think, well, couldn't they just use that tax credit to buy a gun?

No,

because of the honor system.

There you go.

Honor systems work really well in politics.

That's good to

rely on that.

I mean, there was another suggestion that all triggers on guns should have a one-hour delay.

So you've got a cooling off period where you can really think about what you're doing.

I think that might.

I like that.

I like that.

Well, the other thing is, you know, the thing is, all these, even the

tax credit for not shooting someone, you know, clearly the Republicans aren't going to like the idea of the tax credit.

So another proposal from further right was that

under the law, shooters must yell for before firing.

So you have been given fair warning.

Right.

So learning from golf, essentially, which is not necessarily a sport at the moment that the world should be learning a lot from.

Which would explain why Republicans immediately thought that was the best approach.

That's good.

We could learn from sport.

Another question in the

poll said: for states where buying a semi-automatic weapon, such as an AR-15, is legal, what should be the minimum legal age to buy one?

And 5%

of people said any age.

Oh, my God.

Any age whatsoever.

So, again,

this idea of arming babies, I think, might, you know, actually has a surprising amount of public support.

I mean, that's that's a kind of five percent of, I mean, I think some of those five percent presumably want to arm the babies in the womb as well, uh, logically, being pro-life as they are.

So, we can build a better planet.

Republicans would like that because they're

you know, pro-fetus and anti-woman, and an AR-15 in the womb would handle that situation.

Yeah, you've got to let the fetus defend itself.

But of course, it's not the guns that kill people.

It's pictures of people's private parts that kill people.

And don't take this from me.

J.D.

Vance, a Republican nominee for the Senate election in Ohio, does not want to ban guns, but he does want to ban pornography.

There's been this sort of incredible moment where, faced with a great concern about gun violence, Republicans are falling all over themselves to find other things to ban that are not guns.

And that lists things that are harder to get than guns.

And one of them is

pornography.

J.D.

Vance, Ohio Senate candidate,

wants to ban pornography

because

I guess the money shot will remind people of mass shootings and

plant the seed in a very literal way.

And so then people will be so hopped up that they'll go out and shoot people.

It's easier to get an assault rifle in Texas than a vibrator.

That story came out.

And now there's a new, also a new initiative.

Texas Republican

state legislator, Texas Representative Brian Slayton, is introducing a bill to ban children attending drag shows.

That that's the major threat facing the children of Texas.

He thinks drag is sexualizing children, which is kind of a self-owned,

not children doing drag, but children witnessing drag performances

because it tells us that he doesn't know the difference between children being sexualized and children enjoying themselves in any way at all.

So, you know, as someone who grew up in San Francisco, like, I love drag.

My children love drag.

They've been around drag queens their whole lives.

Drag queens are amazing.

They're like, they're like,

you know, you learn about glitter and dancing

and, you know, how to put on makeup.

This is,

drag queens are the answer to gun violence.

Arm all the drag queens and mass shootings go away.

So

the stuff that Republicans are trying to ban instead of guns,

they're really going for some deep cuts.

It's quite remarkable.

Nada, you said one thing I do want to comment on.

You said that it's easier to get assault weapons in Texas than a vibrator.

In Texas, assault weapons are used as vibrators.

So

don't need to worry about it.

Family show.

I have a feeling that J.D.

Vance is firing blanks.

He's not enjoying pornography because he's firing blanks, so he wants to ban it.

But I mean, the logic of, you know, why would he want to ban pornography?

Is it because of the misogyny it engenders?

It's not that.

Is it because it's an exploitative industry in numerous ways?

It's not that either.

Is it because of its damaging impact on the mental well-being and attitudes of young people?

It's not even that.

Is it because God,

God himself gets very, very cross when he sees people's naughty bits and assorted wobblages?

It's not even that.

He wants to ban pornography because he says it's stopping young people from getting married.

and having children.

It's quite hard to entirely follow the logic

of that.

I mean, I guess it does highlight one of the joys of multiple choice questions in today's political landscape.

You just wait for the most unbelievably stupid option and you won't go too far wrong.

But he, I mean, this is...

I'm trying to think, you know, what might make people stop wanting to have children?

It could be economic practicalities, a lack of financial and social support for new parents, changing life priorities and expectations generally.

These could all be factors.

But perhaps most importantly, I think the thing really stopping people from having children is not wanting to bring a child into a world in which J.D.

Vance could be an elected representative.

I think

that's the more pressing piece of logic you should be focusing on.

Well, I mean, Andy, have you ever read some of the Republican proposals for biology textbooks?

One of the key ideas around masturbation is if you keep masturbating, you will run out.

And then you can't have children.

You'll just run out of the sauce.

That's what happened to the dinosaurs.

That's exactly.

They just kept jerking off until there was just nothing left to

uh share with other dinosaurs.

So it's the it's the same.

Well, you see that.

I mean, the T- The T-Rex even evolved shorter arms to try to evolve away from its own inevitable demise, but it couldn't.

That's because the T-Rex were super good at jacking each other off.

JD Vance very much loves pornography.

You do realize this is what it's about.

He loves pornography very, very much to the point where it's affecting his work,

his marriage, really every his friendships.

So he's like, I can't stop.

What do we do?

Wait a second.

Let us ban pornography so I can stop touching myself.

That's what this is about.

Jim Justice,

governor from West Virginia, blamed pornography for gun violence, also blamed video games.

I mean, it's often the way that influential

cultural things are blamed for what happens.

And it was the same in Shakespeare's time.

Shakespeare was blamed for there being a huge spike in the number of people comparing things to Summer's Days.

So it's not just a

modern phenomenon.

And also, you know, it's not just a video game.

It's board games, for example.

Monopoly first sold in the USA in 1935.

And, you know, what,

87 years later, we're witnessing the fruits of unbridled capitalism caused by that board game.

Moving on within America, Nathan, pretty much every time you're on this show, you bring us up to date with some crazy bit of American democracy.

What's the latest?

Well,

yeah, Andy, every time I'm on the bugle, California is in the middle of another stupid, pointless reactionary recall campaign.

This time yesterday, the city of San Francisco, our district attorney, Chessa Boudin, was recalled.

Chessa was elected a couple years ago as a reformer.

And San Francisco is a city allegedly so progressive that the right wing across the country uses it as a shorthand for woke gay eco-communism, which, you know, don't threaten me with a good time.

So, but the voters of San Francisco will jettison our progressive reputation without hesitation if only some right-wing VC billionaire shithead dumps approximately $8 million into a fear-mongering campaign of lies to get a sense of how, which is about how much they spent on this recall, to get a sense of how much $8 million is,

that is enough to buy two houses in San Francisco.

So it's a lot of money.

We are only the 17th largest city in the United States, but the national discourse gives all about the affairs of bigger cities such as San Diego, San Jose, or Fort Worth, Texas.

But we are a metaphor.

And so, like, because our DA was recalled, there's a wave of lame San Francisco trend pieces,

like the Associated Press alert of the recall of the DA, quote, San Francisco voters recalled DA Chestaboudin, a rejection of one of the nation's most progressive prosecutors in one of its most liberal liberal cities, end quote, to which I say, eat my whole entire asshole, AP.

You don't even go here.

So

it is so irritating to live in a place where people elsewhere get paid enormous amounts of money to offer lazy and superficial opinions about your experience.

Imagine you turn on the television and you watch show after show that are biopics of yourself.

written by someone you had one class with in college, never talked to, but who sold a script about your life based only on them interpreting the stickers on your notebook.

It's like, I can't be reduced to motorhead, Genevieve.

Come on.

So, what was the recall about?

Well, Chesa Boudin ran as a reformer who promised to spend less time prosecuting crimes of poverty, more energy on rehabilitation programs, and holding murderous police accountable.

And once elected, he did what he said he was going to do.

And other politicians said, we can't have that.

A A politician who keeps his promises that makes the rest of us look.

It's a slippery slope.

So, meanwhile, although violent crime has been down in San Francisco, the public narrative has been that crime is up.

Why does it seem like crime is up?

Well, the police don't like being held accountable for their murdering, so they basically went on strike and refused to arrest people committing crimes in front of them.

This is true.

Last month, the DA launched a bust of a bobo shop that was selling, that was a front for selling stolen goods, and the police refused to participate in the raid, so he had to call an Uber to confiscate the evidence.

What is our police department doing instead of

fighting crime?

Well, their top crime fighting priority is making sure that the mayor does not have to see homeless people while eating a Nisswaz salad for lunch at a sidewalk parklet.

They are 100% on that menace to society and about 3% on anything else.

So, no matter how much they fail,

the solution is always to give police more money.

They solve crimes, give them more money.

They don't solve crimes, give them more money.

They murder people, they need more training, more money.

That's always the solution.

It's like

the State Department of Justice is investigating SFPD right now because just a couple weeks ago, they responded to a 911 emergency call and killed the victim.

So, we have years of reports that that the SFPD is a racist, violent gang, and recalling the DA definitely means more black people get killed by cops in San Francisco.

So this is, it's a moment that really crystallizes the difference between the right and

the center.

There's just the right wing wants to kill black people and liberals will let black people be killed if a hobo shouts at them on their way to see Hamilton or someone breaks the window of their Subaru and steals their Wu-Tang clan CD.

They don't mind mind a little bit of fascism.

They're just going to feel bad about it as they go.

So that's how things are going in San Francisco.

But on the bright side, I got one of those Japanese toilet seats, so my butthole is cleaner than it's ever been.

So if you do want to eat NATO's ass, this would be the time.

Yeah,

this is peak time for eating my ass.

If anyone's interested,

please email eatingnato's ass at thebugle.couk.

uk.

Right.

Well, there's a few new email addresses flying around.

Well, lately, mentioned that the San Francisco recall vote.

We in Britain have had a sort of recall vote in which the Conservative Party considered recalling the Prime Minister that it has installed and enabled to wreak havoc upon this nation.

Boris Johnson, however, survived the vote of no confidence this week.

It came about after the required 54 Conservative MPs submitted letters, yes, letters, to the chairman of the 1922 committee, don't even ask, saying they no longer had confidence in the Prime Minister.

Why does this happen like that?

No one remembers, but we're Britain, so we don't give a shit.

Johnson won the votes 211 to 148.

Suspicious numbers, you might think.

211 being the score of the first ever double hundred in Test match cricket, and 148 being the score of the first test hundred made at Lords, the home of cricket.

Interpret that however you want.

So he's still Prime Minister after the Conservative Party, for whatever unfathomable reason, decided it still had a vague shred of confidence in him.

I mean, I guess it's a no-confidence vote, and that enough of them didn't have absolutely zero or indeed negative confidence in him, as the vast majority of the country has.

Maybe they thought the vote was whether Boris Johnson has confidence.

And if there's one thing Boris Johnson has, it's confidence.

That is a fair point.

I mean, so he's still there, he's clinging to power like a rat to its favourite turf, A shrivelling husk of a politician, a walking, talking, shambling travesty of the democracy people supposedly died to protect in two world wars.

But more than 40% of his own MPs voted against him.

That's more than 40% of the Toriest possible Tories.

More than 40% of the people literally paid to support him voted against him.

And he's come out and his supporters have come out saying this was a decisive victory.

It doesn't entirely stack up.

Imagine the situation he's in.

Imagine

playing football, real football, not your crazy American version, scoring a goal for your team, turning to celebrate, and finding that almost half of your teammates are arguing with the referee, saying the goal should be disallowed.

That is essentially where Johnson finds himself.

Now, apart from he's never come close to scoring a goal as prior.

If we wanted that analogy to sustain, it's more that he squatted 12 yards from the goal, shat on the penalty spot, and then told Jacob Reese Mogg to kick the shit into the goal then watched reese mogg fall on his arse while attempting to kick the shit and land face down in the still warm turd before johnson ran off celebrating shouting johnson what a goal but then if you do that the other part of the analogy doesn't really look the point is he's a pile of shit and his own team don't like him anymore boris johnson's ethics advisor uh said there was a legitimate question over whether he broke the ministerial code after getting fined over the downing street parties now breaking the ministerial code traditionally in the giving a shit shit about these kind of things era, a resignation offence.

I like the idea of him having an ethics advisor.

I mean, taking on a job as Boris Johnson's ethics advisor, that is as touching a display of naivety and optimism as taking a defibrillator to a natural history museum, taking it into one of the dinosaur galleries, cranking it up and shouting, Come on, Stuggy, I can't afford to lose another one.

An ethics advisor?

Wait a second.

You mean a conscience?

He got hired to be Boris Johnson's conscience?

Well, yes, you have to have a human to be his conscience.

Wow.

That's a job.

I'm guessing that person has a lot of time on their hands.

Yeah, I imagine it's about a three seconds a day job where basically you turn up and have the door slammed in your face and just go away and

do whatever you want.

Johnson's supporters have said he is the victim of a conspiracy to oust him.

And I guess he has been in a way, the victim of a kind of sinister Machiavellian plot

in which he's been undermined and assailed by all the things he's said and done ganging up against him.

So you can see that.

The official government anti-corruption champion, John Penrose, that's what's his official title, the anti-corruption champion.

No, I don't think that is...

a particularly impressive title.

I don't think the

competition is as good as would be ideal in today's political landscape.

He says it was pretty clear that Johnson broke the ministerial code.

But luckily for Johnson, more than 200 of his MPs couldn't give a f about woke shit like dishonesty in parliament, breaking the law or ranking competence.

His problem, though, is that he doesn't really have any support left apart from his, it seems, his kind of close coterie of political acolytes.

I mean, even the Tory press have turned against him quite strongly.

A lot of them think he's not conservative enough.

Other people think he's too conservative.

Some think he can't be trusted to do the right thing, or indeed trusted to do anything, or just can't be trusted full stop.

The evidence being, amongst other things, his entire life and career to date.

Some people will never like him because he helped concoct and then drive through Brexit.

Some people have turned against him because he drove through the wrong Brexit, or drove it through too hard, or insufficiently hard, or hard enough, but at the wrong angle.

Some people think that his charisma and novelty have worn off.

Others could never see what this mythical charisma was, since he seemed to be, and has proven to be ever since, a shambolicist charlatan shithead.

So it's hard to see how he can win enough of these sceptical groups over

to stay in power, but we shall see.

I saw

a quote that

it said, Johnson had embarked on a last-minute bid to win over colleagues, but a number of Tory MPs said that they were, quote,

surprised by the lack of effort put in.

And, you know, why change now, Johnson?

I also liked there was one

conservative source who in his defense asked regarding the Downing Street parties, is there anyone here who hasn't gotten pissed in their lives?

And that's a fair question.

Yes, of course we've all gotten pissed, but most of us have managed to get by not getting pissed while running the government.

So

I have many important life events or periods of intense responsibility in which I had the presence of mind to not violate rules that I made.

That's amazingly self-disciplined of you, Noto, but not everyone has that club in their bag, sadly.

Sir Charles Walker said, defenestrating a PM is a horrible, terrible thing.

Until he brought it up, no one was talking about defenestrating the PM, but now that you're mentioning it,

it's not the worst idea.

That could be the highest-grossing pay-per-view event in the history of British television.

Particularly, I mean, I think the original defenestrations in the 17th century, people were chucked out of the window into a pile of shit, weren't they?

Don't they land in like a pile of dung and hay and stuff?

I just had to look up defenestration.

I was worried it meant castration, and I just wanted to double-check.

I'm like, I really don't get your system at all, Andy.

Jeez, that is harsh.

Harsh, but, and in Johnson's case, way, way too late.

Oh, yeah.

However, fortunately for Britain, for four days, we didn't have to think about all this shit because since we last reported from this kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II has jubileed the living shit out of this place yet again.

Bessie Banknotes balconied yet again.

Can you use balcony as a verb?

I think you can verb anything these days.

Extending her British balconying record, huge celebrations across the land to celebrate the woman's insatiable patience, if nothing else.

I mean, not many people want to do a job unbroken for seven decades straight, 24, 7, 3, 6, 5 and a quarter, without even the notional possibility of promotion.

And she has stuck with that, even though there is no career progression with being queen.

That's it.

You know, she could have gone a different direction and tried to build something else up, but she stuck with it.

And

we have to respect that.

Was the Jubilee big news stateside?

Very much here's what you could have had.

No.

No, we have the Kardashians.

And plus, we have the good one.

We have Megan and Harry's.

We got the good one, so we're good.

Wait, so does Charles have to fake a smile through the whole thing?

Yes.

Oh my god, she's still alive.

Oh my god, I'm so happy.

My mummy's still alive.

So yeah, every time he sees her, he just has to be like, this is exactly what I wanted.

Obviously, the monarchy is not everyone's cup of tea, as America proved by turning Boston Harbor into a cup of tea

back in the day.

But the Queen is personally very popular.

There's no real threat, I think, to the monarchy as a concept at the moment.

But whatever your views on the Queen, her role, her family, and her theme song,

wherever you stand, whether you're pro or against or couldn't really give a shit, what you cannot argue with is that if you offer the British people two extra days off work, we will celebrate the f out of anything.

And that four-day weekend, two extra bank holidays, I think that is, I mean, we've seen the turning points in British history caused by things like this.

There was a rumour that the turning point, the key moment of the Battle of Hastings in in 1066 was when William the Conqueror shouted, we'll give you next Wednesday off, and the battle just turned.

And

we've clung on to that.

So no pangs of regret that, you know, when you saw, you talked about

your parade in San Francisco, but we had a parade with giant mechanical corgi dogs.

I mean, surely you must have been a little bit little bit jealous of that.

I'm watching

the Carnival parade, I discovered that,

you know, they talk about sexuality as a spectrum, and I realized that my sexuality is

at the cusp of samba dancer and gay circus performer.

So,

yeah, we celebrated the Jubilee in America

by talking about Johnny Depp

being an abuser.

So, that was how we commemorated the Queen's reign.

So, the Jubilee means 70 years of service.

How are you defining service?

Oh, well,

that's a very complicated question, Pari.

Very complicated.

I think it's predominantly

being on our coins

and

never being allowed to say or do anything.

That's really the recipe for the Queen's popularity, is that she has skillfully avoided being allowed to say or do anything.

Because it's really when politicians start saying and doing things

that the magic fades, isn't it?

Okay.

Okay, so you're saying the way that in the US, house arrest is a form of, I suppose, prison, quote-unquote, for white-collar criminals, that's a form of service by staying in your house.

She kind of is doing the same thing by just

getting out of the way and just not being allowed to do anything.

Well, yeah, and also she has a lot of other jobs as well as Queen.

She's Commissioner-in-Chief of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Oh,

that's a fact.

When was the last time that she had an assignment?

I think she bust a drug during Montreal last weekend.

Okay, okay.

She's also a member first class of the Order of the Lion in Malawi.

I don't know exactly what that involves, but I imagine quite a lot of roaring.

Has she been to Malawi?

I think she goes every two or three weeks, I think.

She doesn't call it visiting, though.

She calls it plundering.

Old habits die hard in this country.

And it does mean legally, lions are not allowed to eat the queen.

She is also head and fountain of justice, order, and honor in Australia.

I mean, I don't know again what that involves.

She's the honorary connival of the order of the Grand Canyon and the Lady High Funkadelica of the Order of the Groove.

So many

testing jobs.

It's strange that she goes to other countries.

Like, do you know who else goes to the scene of crimes that they've committed?

Serial killers.

They like to scope out the places they did things and get the secondhand high of the murders they committed.

It's weird that she does the same thing.

Yes.

I mean, she didn't personally commit the murders or didn't steal most of the stuff herself, so I think it's

okay.

But, you know, as a representative, that's very much the role that the monarchy has.

I'd like to know if she swiped anything, though.

I have a feeling that she's visited embassies and things.

Like, oh, wait a second, the silverware.

She's not making any money, Andy.

She needs to, you know, she can't just buy stuff without having a bunch of paperwork, I'm sure.

So it's like,

I want all this China.

I'm going to take it now.

She also was given an honorary doctorate of music from the University of Wales.

Does she have a bachelor's?

I don't know.

I think they just bumped her straight up to.

She did a doctoral thesis on the super furry animals, I believe.

Influential.

90s rockers.

I would have gone with super chunk, but fair enough.

I love it when Andy works in pop culture references to jokes.

It's like watching an otter play the harpsichord.

Which I think did happen on one of the Super Fairy Animals later albums, actually.

She

had to use the Gold State Coach, which is a sweet little set of wheels from 1762 that makes up in ludicrous ostentation what it lacks in speed, maneuverability, functionality, driver aids like satin avan, a rear bumper camera, undercar lighting, and a sound system with some serious bass.

and um she apparently used she used it in her coronation in 1953 and described it as being like the idea of boris johnson remaining as prime minister uh not in those words she described it as horrible and not at all comfortable um

william iv apparently described it as like tossing in a rough sea we can interpret that um however you want this coat this this illustrates the role the royal family has in our country.

This gold coach from 1762 that is deeply uncomfortable is staffed by nine walking grooms, one of whom has to walk behind the coach, six footmen, four yeomen of the guard, and four postillions.

Now, no one knows what the f ⁇ postillions are, but that is a total of 23 people needed to make a gold cart work.

That is what we do in this country.

That is the way we keep our unemployment figures down.

Man, would somebody just make her a statue and rent out the palace already?

Like, this just seems like

there's money to be made.

What is this?

Still holding on to this.

I mean, every time I get hard on the U.S.

and our stupid reality show culture and everything, I think about, oh, you all started it.

It wasn't even televised.

You just started writing stories about it.

And then, you know,

obviously it was no longer relevant.

And you're like, let's keep it going.

Let's spend millions upon millions of pounds to keep this fantasy going.

There haven't been dragons for years, Andy.

Why do you need kings and queens?

That's all we've got left.

And also,

I didn't actually see any of the jubilee because I was being

contractually obliged to watch four days of cricket.

So I missed the celebrations, but some of the coverage was the way they described the ceremonial garb, the tight-fitting gloves.

These are, of course, the gloves worn by the Northern Irish Snooker referee Len Ganley in the 1983 World Championship Final between Steve Davis from Romford, perhaps the Queen, trying to quash the burgeoning Essex independence movement, and representing the Queen's Commonwealth subjects, Cliff Thorben of Calendar.

Glorious day.

I have a breaking update.

So I just, out of curiosity, as you were talking, Andy, I decided to, because I also don't know what a postillion is.

So I...

And I like to learn.

Harry learned the word defenistrate.

So I want to know what a postillion is.

So I went on LinkedIn and I searched for postillion jobs.

And

what was returned was actually a position for a

mammographer in Wisconsin.

So I think it's interesting that the queen travels with an assortment of mammographers from Wisconsin.

They're specifically

Wisconsinian mammographers.

Yeah, to, I guess, keep an eye on her breast health while she's in the carriage.

Maybe that's why it's so uncomfortable.

It must be hard to press her breast into the plates for the mammogram while she's in the carriage.

See, I know you're not geographically in the United Kingdom, but this podcast is based here.

And I think you might have just earned yourself a 50-year spell in the Tower of London

talking about the Queen's whaps.

Well, that brings us to the end of

this week's bugle, which has been,

I'd like to say, uniquely depressing, but I don't think that's necessarily the case.

Anyway, thanks very much for listening, Buglers.

Nate O'Hari, have you got any shows or anything else you would like to alert our listeners to?

I do, Andy.

Thank you for asking.

Good.

I am recording an album and a special in Brooklyn, New York, on July 1st,

June 30th and July 1st.

Two of the shows are sold out, so we still have some tickets for the 9.30.

And I would love Bugle people there to see how a baby and Andy Zaltzman have ruined my stand-up comedy.

So

at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn, July 1st.

And if you're in other cities, I'll be in Houston on the 10th.

I'll be in Detroit on the 11th.

Minneapolis on the 18th.

Chicago from the 23rd to the 25th at the Den Theater and Baltimore on the 28th.

All of those dates can be found, along with ticket links, on hurrykundabolu.com.

That's Google Hurry Comedian.

Find a link that looks vaguely like my name and click it.

And that's where you'll find it.

After today's depressing bugle, I'm just going to focus on my new career path, which is becoming a full-blown swamp Maoist.

But

failing that,

I have two albums out: the NATO Green Party and the Whiteness album.

They are, because Spotify is fighting with the comedy business right now,

the best way to get them is on Bandcamp, where

if you purchase the albums on Bandcamp, the artist gets the most royalties.

So please go buy my albums on Bandcamp or at NATO Green on Twitter, Mr.NATO Green on Instagram.

Well, Buglers, you can still hear the news, current series of the news quiz via BBC Sounds.

The last episode is

this week.

And if you like cricket, I'll be be banging on about that for the rest of the summer

until next time buglers goodbye

you can listen to other programs from the bugle including the bugle the last post tiny revolutions and the gargle wherever you find your podcasts

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.