Ethics, Olympics and Bombogenesis (4218)

The Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4218 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visually weeping world with me, Andy Zoltzmann, the city where if I open the door right now

on Tuesday, the 1st of February 2022, you can still hear the echo of British democracy saying, what the f was that?

And calling for its priest.

Joining me to discuss this and all other news in the known universe this week from Australia, Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

It's good to be back.

And by back, I mean, you've left, so we're at the correct distance from what we know.

Yes, it's good to have reclaimed your country from the uh

um

the invasion of a of a lapsed Jew.

Is that what you're saying, Alice?

That sounds like what you're saying.

It was not what I was saying, but take it as you like, Andy.

Uh, actually, I was thinking the other day,

it was sad that you weren't in this hemisphere anymore, so you have to do something to alienate yourself from my affections once more.

All right, okay, so I'm quite quite good at it.

I've got this.

That's a natural skill set of the privately educated British man.

Also, joining us from,

well, just north of me here in London, it's Tiffany Stevenson.

Hello.

Hi Tiffany.

I missed a solid two months of winter

as I went to watch England get humiliated at cricket.

How's winter treated you?

It's been alright.

I mean

there was a little bit of

There's a little bit of chilly weather over the last couple of days, but it hasn't been too bad.

I haven't yet.

What I like to do is go down to Kenwood House and do some kind of

trying to skid down hills.

I'm very ineffective at it, but

yeah, and when it snows, it's kind of at that in-between thing now where I sort of like wish it would snow so that we could have the proper snow weather rather than just absolutely freezing.

So yeah, hopefully some snow will come soon.

But it is rude that you've actually gone and enjoyed some heat.

I'm very, very jealous.

Yes, but me and heat don't really get on particularly well.

And Alice, you are.

A wilted English man.

Yes.

You are using a fan in, you know, an impressively 18th century style.

You said it's 80% humidity.

Now, I've never quite understood percent humidity, because presumably 100% is just water.

Yes.

That's just liquid water, isn't it?

Yes, yeah, yeah.

So basically,

this kind of level of humidity is where it's hot, and that's fine.

It's fine.

It's fine to be hot.

Hot is nice.

You can do things in the heat.

But humidity is where you walk out and you're immediately just wet, just 100% wet all over.

You're just moist.

There's no dignity.

What you're describing is there's no dignity.

It's all just a range of other people's armpit.

stains.

Everyone wilts immediately.

There's nothing that you can do except lie in the shade flaccidly and wait for something to take root.

We are recording on the 1st of February 2022.

It's February Quits Day, a new and much needed addition to our calendar to add to April Fool's Day here in the UK.

As always,

section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week we have practice exam questions as we build up towards the school exams later in the summer.

This is for any children growing up in the world as it is today.

Practice maths question is this.

If Vladimir has amassed 120,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, and in response, Joe has placed one 14th of that number on alert, and quite a moderately serious alert as well.

Whilst Boris can't be asked to have a conversation with Vladimir about it because he's busy trying to persuade his friends that lying is fine, and Olaf has promised to send some special hats and brave boy plasters to help out the Ukraine, but Zhi is keen not to disturb his special sports day.

How concerned as a percentage should Andy be that a massive war is about to break out?

Please show you're working.

Philosophy question for you kids to practice.

Ethics, schmethics, discuss.

Geography now.

How far away is too far away to give a shit?

A Ukraine.

B Myanmar.

C, Afghanistan.

D, Xinjiang or E, all of the above.

And finally, a politics question.

Explain the current situation in British politics without using the phrases nothing but a withered husk, sad parody of a functioning democracy, and is unfortunately governed by a bunch of incompetent and shameless.

Also in the bin this week, we have a commemorative football transfer window section.

The English Premier League has announced that despite an increase in the number of transfers during this January transfer window, it has still broken its existing record for fewest actual transfers per 1,000 transfer rumours.

The FA's cheap hypothetician Kevin Xenophon Snudgy

explained the previous record was 0.93 transfers per 1,000 rumours, set in the unforgettable 2017 window.

But with an increased investment in groundless pifflage, we managed to bring that down to just 0.68

per thousand this year.

We remain on course for having an entirely imagined transfer window by the 2033-34 season.

That section also in the bin.

top story this week, and well, as I said at the start, if you are listening to this week's bugle in the United Kingdom and you can hear some strange sounds in the background, it could be one of a number of things.

If you hear a whirring sound, that's probably millions and millions of people spinning in their graves at what this country has become.

If you hear a scraping sound, that could be the ghosts of the war dead scrubbing Boris Johnson and Jacob Reese Mogg's metaphorical urine off the cenotaph.

If you hear a coughing, ironically a new and persistent cough, that is everyone in the country with a functioning memory who endured the privations of COVID, whether or not they thought they were right, who maybe saw loved ones die on a Zoom call or have seen their children's love of learning drain away through the drab functionality of remote learning, or who sat alone contemplating the bleakness of solitude, trying to at least draw.

a blush of shame from the cheeks of the Prime Minister.

And if you hear the popping of champagne corks, that's everyone in the country snapping out of that cough, thinking, great, we can run the, yeah, I made a bit of a mistake defense, let's get stuck into whatever the f ⁇ we want to do.

These truly are strange times.

Tiff, we finally had the Sue Gray report, the much awaited Sue Gray report, after a prolonged investigation into all the parties held in Downing Street and Westminster and whether or not they broke the law.

And it came up with nine pages of vagueness because the Metropolitan Police had told Sue Gray not to include anything about all the things they're

So we're in this strange situation where we have a report that explicitly found a lack of leadership in Downing Street, which is now viewed to have shored up Boris Johnson's leadership.

We have criminal investigations into actions at the heart of government that are viewed to have saved the Prime Minister's bacon.

It's very hard to get your head around

exactly

what has been going on.

I mean, you are the Bugles

cake and ethics correspondent.

I don't know if that's news to you or not.

Just explain what the f is going on.

Listen, you said the Sue Gray report, Andy, but it's actually the Sue Gray teaser report.

You know, like when someone drops a track before releasing the whole album and you're like, mate, Sue Gray's on Spotify with a couple of bangers.

Can't wait for the full album to be released.

I mean, she's carried out interviews with over 70 individuals.

It says some more than once, examined relevant documentary and digital, documentary and digital information, emails, WhatsApp messages, text messages, photographs, building entry and exit logs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So shortly after the report, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, firstly, I want to say sorry.

And I'm sorry for the things we simply didn't get right.

Also, sorry for the way this matter has been handled.

He's that guy you really wanted to date in your 20s, weeing all over the place.

He's we, we didn't get it right, we made mistakes.

There's no personal accountability whatsoever about the fact that, you know, you set the rules in the highest position, the highest office in the land, you set the rules and repeatedly broke them whilst expecting us to follow them.

And then

for some reason yesterday, he brought Jimmy Saville in.

And no one knows why, presumably waiting for Reese Mog to say now then, now then,

which is a phrase they share in the Commons and Jimmy Saville.

But the kind of water about we were all hoping for, weren't we?

You know, he said that Stalmer failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile, which is incorrect, but who cares about facts when you can base policies and debate of memes?

And

Reese Mogg, so here's what's happened here, right?

I believe this strategy is what they call the dead cat debate, which is,

I'm going to blame Australia for this, Alice, because it was Boris's political strategist, Linton Crosby,

who brought this technique to Boris.

Now, you can't, the problem with this is the tactics don't work when you've been gloating about them for years.

Like, so he's basically on record of saying about Crosby, his advice was: there's one thing that's absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table.

I don't mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, and disgusted.

That's true, but irrelevant.

The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, geez, mate, there's a dead cat on the table.

In other words, they'll be talking about the dead cat, the thing you want them to talk about, and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.

So he's thrown a dead cat.

It's an expired feline in a gold tracksuit.

And he's getting Reese Mog to point and laugh at it.

And he's hoping that that means we'll all just look at this dead cat in the middle of the commons and completely ignore the fact that he repeatedly broke the rules.

Sue Grey's report, as you mentioned, after all the people she spoke to, it ended up with a nine-page report.

Well, it was a 12-page report, but three of the pages were blank.

And she's handed over 300 photographs and 500 documents to the police.

And so we've end up with nine pages of splodged out, redacted, despecificated, forcibly dissembled generalities.

But reading between the lines, there is a simple message, and that message is: a country which keeps this man as prime minister is an idiot, and a party which keeps him as its leader is a stone-cold, irretrievable shithead.

I don't think they call themselves a party anymore.

They just call themselves a workplace function.

The police have said this investigation will take, brace yourselves, listeners, less than a year.

This is the same police who were ignoring these things for over a year.

It is such a bafflingly

unsatisfactory state of affairs and the Conservatives have sort of rallied round Johnson.

I mean, he said he will publish the full Sougre report after the police have finished their less than a year-long investigation, by which time on the current moral trajectory of the government will probably look back on this as an ethical golden age compared to whatever depths they're plumbing.

I don't know if they'll just be drowning children in barrels

in the House of Commons.

So, they're now relying on the law of democratic amnesia, by which voters gradually forget betrayals, incompetences, and political delinquencies perpetrated on them.

And sort of working out that complicated electoral equation, the radioactive half-life of Boris Johnson's failings and fumblings, and currently apparently deciding it's okay.

This is what we are as a nation now.

This is all we have.

So, there's been a lot of argument from Johnson's, I don't know what the term is, enablers

and supporters saying, oh, it's just cake.

You need to get it in perspective.

Connor Burns, the government minister, said he was ambushed with a cake.

I don't know, kind of Julius Caesar, et tu fruite.

Colleagues have sprung to Johnson's defence, claiming he'd had bad advice.

But that's slightly

the thing with being prime minister is you get advice and you have to act on it

and make your decisions.

He said he had bad advice.

Also, he was feeling a bit tired because he hadn't had his nap and he just watched the film Purge, where crime is legal for one day a year and was a bit confused.

So we need to cut in some stuff.

I mean, this is not so much one rule for some and another rule for another.

There's no rules for us, and a mother load of deeply restrictive and often baffling laws for everyone else.

And yet, there's still,

I cannot understand

how he's still in his job.

It seems, I mean, it's trying to explain this to my children

and, you know, who sort of told to

learn about British values and the you know, the wonders of democracy.

And there's just, there's just no way.

All I can say is there's, can we watch the sport instead?

That's the only possible.

How many votes of no confidence does it take?

To change a light bulb.

Yeah.

Is it like 57 or something?

I think they need 54 letters.

to the 1922 committee.

Right.

Which, yeah, I mean, look,

if you're listening to this and you're wondering what we're talking about, in order to unseat a Prime Minister, there needs to be 54 written letters to a committee called,

named after the year that its members want to return Britain to.

That sort of tells you everything you need to know

about our democracy.

54 letters for no confidence.

And for me, it's just wearing my hair up.

That will immediately reduce my confidence.

A Tory MP Edward Lee said last week, when Europe stands on the brink of war and there's a cost of living crisis, can we please have a sense of proportion over the Prime Minister being given a piece of cake in his own office by his own staff, which won him the Jacob Rees-Mogg Memorial Gold Award for willfully misrepresenting the issue at hand.

I mean, the yeah, but Ukraine defence just does not stand up for a start.

Also, the cost of living crisis is in large part due to the government's own actions over not one, not two, but almost 12 years now.

So asking people to concentrate on that rather than the cake is rather like Al Capone's lawyer saying, saying forget about the tax thing let's focus in on the gangland slayings please because this is about cake in the same way that the criticism of neville chamberlain was about his liking for scrappy little pieces of paper as his preferred form of stationery it is insane

remember andy cake is not a real drug

i mean do you know what constitutes a party i i don't tiff but i i'm hoping you might have known someone who can explain that to me.

Well, I've asked around and

it turns out that Scottish boyfriend can explain a hang and that hang is going to be parties.

Here's how to ken if you're at a party or two.

Like if there's two of you it's no a party.

If there's six of you it could be a party unless you're related to them in which case it's no a party.

If you're at a pub and there's loads of you but you're all at separate tables it's no a party.

If there's loads of you but it's during the day it's no a party.

If there's loads of you and it's during the day and you're at work but you're all drunk, then it's a party.

Unless none of you care that anybody else is drunk, because that's just a coping.

That's just a coping strategy.

If there's a clown, it's definitely a party.

Unless it's at number 10.

Unless it's at number 10, in which case it's just a day at the office.

If a party happens in the woods and Sue Gray is near there to write a report on it, did it really happen?

Likewise, if the only party you could go to was in the cabinet office, would you probably know still have mere fun sitting next to the queen at a funeral?

Well, that's made it all clear.

I think that's quite succinct.

That's good.

We all know where we stand legally and ethically now.

Thank you very much.

Last week, to sort of highlight the nature of the government,

Theodore Agnew, who's the Minister for Anti-Corruption, stepped down live while speaking in the House of Lords.

and he said

that a combination of arrogance, indolence and ignorance was freezing the government machine and stopping it from dealing with multi-billion pound fraud losses resulting from COVID and

alliteration.

Arrogant, indolent and ignorant.

Also

three characters in the controversial new Disney adaptation of the Snow White story.

And also a review I once received from an Edinburgh Festival show.

But the extent of Covid fraud

is quite spectacular.

Again, it sort of shows, again, what we've become as a nation under the ethical leadership that we have.

Essentially, I mean, they've just written off 4.3 billion pounds of missing money from COVID grants, which is money that is essentially stealing the pencils from our children's hands and the oxygen tanks from our our wheezing grannies.

A thousand companies received bounce back COVID loans, despite the fact that they were not even trading at the time.

And Agnew described this as a schoolboy error, which I think is under, well, A, it's giving schoolboys maybe slightly more credit for their fraudulent skills.

uh than they deserve um but also schoolboy error is coincidentally boris johnson's secret service code name

Oh, I was just thinking that probably sounds like what he says when he climaxes.

Winter Olympics news now, and well, we are just days away from the starts of the 2022 Beijing Olympics.

The Olympics actually have already been a success on one measure in that there are rumors that Vladimir Putin was at least

decelerated in his

militarism and his urge to invade Ukraine by Xi Jinping asking him not to do it while the Winter Olympics was on.

So it's ironic, is it not, that the Winter Olympics have stopped things in the Ukraine going downhill very fast.

There.

It's already been a success.

What are you most looking forward to in this

Beijing Winter Olympics sports washing twice as white as most Olympics?

Well, Andy, I mean, the Winter Olympics is my favorite Olympics, otherwise known as the less good Olympics, the most lying down Olympics, and the one thing holding off the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

My favorite bit of this is that China has accused the United States of paying athletes to create disturbances during the Beijing Winter Olympics.

So this is Chinese state media.

This isn't just some conspiracy theory online.

This is

an incredible claim that they're going to sabotage the Olympics by playing, quote unquote, playing passively or refusing to take parts in competitions, which hasn't happened yet, let me be clear, or also expressing discontent toward China, either subtly or overtly.

So if any athlete is coming out onto the field, I don't know, it's the Winter Olympics, onto the cold bit,

looking less than entirely satisfied.

It's going to be taken as an attack on China by America, which I think is pretty wild.

On the subject of political protests by athletes, athletes are under pressure not to rock the extremely expensive propaganda boats.

No political statements are allowed.

IOC Olympic guidance says no form of advertising or other publicity is allowed.

in Olympic sites and also their guidelines directly prohibit demonstration of political, religious or racial propaganda in Olympic venues.

Now these, it should be said that

political, religious and racial propaganda are allowable at certain times of the Olympic cycle, for example when appointing the host cities and then when flatly ignoring the actions of the host nation in the years before, during and after the Olympics that are held.

And you can sort of understand it from the IEC's point of view because the costs of hosting these events and not just the Olympics, but World Cups, things like that, are rising and fewer and fewer cities and countries are willing to host them.

So there's a a great concern that if athletes' dissent is tolerated, then the kind of regimes that are still prepared to pile billions of dollars into hosting events to massage their international reputations might then decide that having a load of unusable stadiums slowly rotting as a general approach to political short-termism is not the best way to spend their ethics laundering budget.

So, the very future of the Olympics is at stake.

Don't complain about that.

They're talking about purifying the internet as well, the purification of the internet in China before like that is a big job i think even hercules at his peak might have said no no i'm out i'm out on that one

have you seen how much porn there is on there

how much time do you have we will have full exclusive coverage on the winter olympics uh over the next uh next couple of weeks we are the only media outlets um allowed to report on them apparently um in other uh winter news the u.s east coast has been um hammered by a bombogenesis snowstorm,

which is one of those things that sounds a lot more fun than it is.

Like E-bowling.

It sounds like a youth pastor trying to bring people in on the

coolness of this.

It does sound like a reggae album.

The bombogenesis.

I was laughing at the name rather than the effects, but it's a bomb cyclone, isn't it?

It's just quite American to give them such blockbuster names because there was like the polar vortex at one point, wasn't there?

But I do like the bombogenesis, one man against the storm that wouldn't quit.

Bomb cyclone, starring the rock, and also a rock.

The word treacherous is being thrown about with abandon, which is always fun, isn't it?

Well, when it comes to weather, treacherous weather is weather that looks like it's fine and then stabs you in the back.

So, for example, I would call today

in Sydney treacherous because you look out the window and you think, what a fine looking day.

And then you walk out and you are immediately wet.

I cannot emphasise how wet I am right now.

My knees are sweating, Andy.

My knees.

At the other end of the cold, hot weather scale, global toastying, which is the new more palatable phrase for global warming or end-time acceleration, could result in coffee avocados and other celebrity comestibles being evicted from their current preferred growth regions.

Coffee groves could soon be a common sight in the Arctic steppes, whilst penguins will soon be living on a diet of cashew nut and avocado sandwiches if current projections are to be believed and then wildly exaggerated.

I mean,

this is a very concerning story,

Alice.

I know you're a massive avocado fan.

I have a sort of relationship of extreme dependency with coffee.

I mean,

this is very worrying for the world.

I mean, this is the sort of effect of global warming that I think will finally get people's attention.

I mean, it's deeply worrying because what's going to happen is the places that are friendly for these crops will shift.

So currently

there's these places that are good for farming, cashews, good for farming coffee, and those are becoming increasingly

inhospitable.

And the crops will move up or down, depending on which way the weather that they like is going.

But the problem with crops doing their own rotating is that all of a sudden, coffee or cashews or avocados might arrive in your gentrified suburb, and then blam, all of a sudden you're a cash guy.

Well, Monsanto arrives and does a deal with you for the use of your backyard, offering you pennies on the dollar for economies of scale.

And within a few seasons, you've been chomped up and drained and exploited so hard that ambitious teenagers are vying to come build schools at you to pad out their resume.

Like, this is

the danger that I see before us all.

What we need to do is salt the earth

around where we are.

Yes, that's a slightly extreme solution.

I mean, aside from the social and economic chaos caused by changes in the ecosystem undermining the livelihoods of millions of agricultural workers, the more important question is, how the f will I get out of bed in the morning if the coffee crop fails?

I mean, unless there is a test match on every day at 9 a.m., I will effectively be bedbound for the rest of my life if coffee fails because of global warming.

I'm very worried about this yeah i like my men like i like my coffee burnt and in a service station

spotify news now and uh well uh wars uh are much talked about these days and there's been a full-on war between um podcaster uh joe rogan and legends of music neil young and joni mitchell and others who've asked for their uh music to be de-spotified uh in protest at some of the uh not entirely uh 100 verifiable covid claims made by rogan

on uh on his podcast um

now uh

it shows i guess you know the the the the power of

music legends spotify have said that they will jump into action and have pledged to be seen to be vaguely doing something whilst not really taking responsibility for the material that they publish.

Sorry, not publish, just kind of hang out with.

So, I mean, some change has been made.

I mean, this has inspired other musical acts to try and create social change.

The remaining members of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beeky, Mick, and Titch said that they will no longer allow their 1968 UK number one hit, The Legend of Xanadu, to be played anywhere until all polar bears are provided with a non-meltable artificial resin iceberg each.

The 1980s Australian mullet rock legend John Farnum has pledged that his You're the Voice anthem will only be available to listen to raised two octaves until the full restoration of democracy in both Myanmar and the United Kingdom.

So it's inspiring musicians to realize the power they have.

Alice, I'm not sure that you've ever been a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast.

I'm sure it's merely a matter of time, which brings up the date with this story.

Well, this is, I mean, this is an interesting story.

Joe Rogan,

I find it hard to condemn Joe Rogan because the problem with Joe Rogan isn't really Joe Rogan.

Can I call him Joe, Mr.

Rogan?

I don't know.

He seems like a nice enough comedy meathead who just happens to have lost 80 to 90% of his critical faculties in a tragic, toxic spill at the masculinity factory.

The problem...

isn't Joseph, who's he's just a five foot seven bald comedian come fight commentator looking for the secrets of the universe in a series of hail fellow well-met open-minded to the point of borderline fawning interviews with experts self-proclaimed experts and quote-unquote experts the problem with joe rogan is not joe Rogan.

The problem is the nature of modern platforms by which everyone is an unregulated publisher and there are no industry standards that would fine you for being a gullible tweet with small man syndrome.

Like, I don't

know what the solution is.

Spotify has to put up content warnings.

Do they put content warnings on Joe Rogan?

Because

I'm going to be honest here, you have no idea how rock and roll a content warning for dangerous misinformation is to the kind of person who goes to Joe Rogan to curate their expert opinions.

There's no win here.

Reading an article on the BBC websites, one of their journalists, Marianna Spring,

said, people trust their favourite podcasts and their hosts.

They are often

a potentially effective vector for promoting disinformation.

I mean, I'm not going to argue with those words.

I've won many Oscars.

I've won many, many Oscars.

Sorry.

I'm not sure I'm in entirely a position as a having been promoting disinformation for 15 years.

But I like to think, you know, a good kind of disinformation, the kind of disinformation that makes the world a better, happier place.

I prefer misinformation, which was also my beauty pageant entry.

It looks great on me in a sash.

Spotify's going with the, oh, we don't know, we just host this stuff in that kind of YouTube and Facebook way that content moderation is an impossible challenge.

But in in fact, they are, you know, they literally bought and paid for and distribute the media properties that they are now disclaiming all knowledge of.

So it's

a little bit less believable.

I'm reluctant to take on any kind of joke.

Like I made like it, like the lightest little jab about hurricanes on here.

I don't know if you remember.

They've got a storm of kind of, they ran out of names for hurricanes and we were talking about the fact that we're going to have to go alpha, beta.

And I said, hurricane alpha was taking testosterone and listening to Joe Rogan.

And Hurricane Beta was drinking a soya latte and listening to NPR.

So I think that's a both sides, like kind of little jab, the type, an archetype of a listener, you know, and I just like, it was like days of it, of like comments on these, you're like, how dare you go for Joe?

So like, I agree with, with you, Alice, as it's not, it's not necessarily Joe.

It's, you know, sometimes the guest, but I do think banning stuff is a bad move.

I think if you want free speech, then it must be able to flow.

Stick some fact checking on it.

I don't know.

I don't know what the best answer is, but I do think it's also quite easy for musicians to pull their music from the platform.

Cause let's be honest, none of them make any money from Spotify.

So that's quite an easy moral stance to take against someone.

I can do that against someone who doesn't pay me either.

It's like me saying, guys, I'm pulling all of my movies from the View Cinemas.

Like, I'm fed up of this.

And I love Neil Young, but he was one of the people I googled when I was researching how to come down from a massive high.

So I don't know how much of his own drug misinformation he's out there peddling himself.

There's also two, like, there's two major problems with this.

First of all,

deplatforming Joe Rogan off Spotify will massively increase his audience again.

Like going to Spotify, they had to pay him $100 million because he was going to take a cut in audience numbers.

So in fact, we should keep him on Spotify and everyone else should leave.

And secondly, why are people going up to Spotify?

Like there's so many people leaving Spotify that their whole site shut down and you can no longer unregister from Spotify.

Their site has frozen over this, not over the fact that they have massively exploited artists for the entirety of their existence.

And in this sort of weird, like, oh, it's exposure.

Exposure is good.

They can make up the money on touring.

And then a massive pandemic happens and they forget to mention that no one can tour anymore.

I just,

why is this the thing?

Joe Rogan being Joe Rogan isn't news.

This is Dog bites man and both dog and man and Joe Rogan on a mushroom trip.

Divorce news now.

Alice, as the Bugles

divorce correspondent.

There's

an exciting development in

the world of relationship breakups.

Yes, Andy, this is the heartwarmingly American story of a woman who has monetized the last frontier of human emotion by launching a divorce registry.

So you know how you have baby registries and wedding registries.

This is that, this is that way.

You write all the things that you need post-divorce and then your friends and family make up for your lack of foresight in marrying the wrong person.

As somebody who avoided like a baby shower and a baby registry mainly by not announcing my pregnancy until about about three weeks before I was due to give birth.

I am torn.

I'm torn on the very idea of a registry.

How does your partner feel about that?

To clarify, I'm not torn on registries in general, in general, like providing they do a central point to maintain records of useful things.

Like that's that's what an actual registry, the original blockchain, if you will.

And I probably will because every second startup is now like shoes, but on the blockchain.

The point is,

this woman has decided that divorce is a good thing.

It's a positive thing.

And we should celebrate it

by asking our friends who probably bought us wedding presents to continue to buy us maybe a replica of the very same wedding present that you didn't have the courage to keep hold of in the messy disintegration of your previously existing spousal relationship.

Right.

So you can sort of buy the other half of a CD, for example.

I love,

we can see when the last time you thought about getting divorced was, Auntie.

We're going to share a CD.

That's one thing that modern technology has done.

It's just made that.

I'll just, I'll send you a copy.

I'll download it.

The divorce registry, get fed.

I'm not buying you stuff twice.

If I already bought you stuff for the wedding, I'm not buying it again.

That's insane.

My cousin, one of my cousins, got married four times,

twice to the same woman.

But by the time you turn up for the fourth wedding, there's only so many times you can buy, like you're turning up, handing over a gravy boat through gritted teeth.

Like, are you taking the piss?

The person who's running this divorce registry is a maniac.

She got divorced at the age of 36, and the first thing she thought was, why isn't there a place?

This is a quote, why isn't there a place that people can go and get product recommendations?

Oh, well, that's kind of the logical end point of America, I think.

Legs news now, and well, a couple of very exciting developments in leg technology in recent,

well, over the last week or so.

Ankle bracelets have been developed that tell you how drunk you are.

I mean, legs have always been quite useful in telling you how how drunk you are based on whether you've just walked into something

or whether

your shoes are covered in sick.

But now they have a bracelet that can do that job for you.

Your legs are

apart.

This is, yes, this is an ankle bracelet that can detect alcohol concentrations from imperceptible amounts of sweat.

So at least you'll know if your ankles are drunk.

This is one of those studies that I don't know how useful it is unless you are somebody who has a worrying problem, sufficiently worrying a problem and enough self-awareness to provide yourself with equipment, which is a very small Venn diagram overlap.

But it's also, I wonder who these scientists are, as with all of these stories.

In this instance, there's Robert Taurisi, who's a professor of bio-behavioral health at Penn State,

who said, alcohol misuse causes problems ranging from the annoyance of a mild hangover to the tragedy of premature death, which is

that's a big scale.

Yeah, that sentence, much like an evening out, went downhill extremely fast.

So, isn't it just an ankle tag?

Don't these already exist if you're on like house arrest.

I'm interested if it's Americans, Alice, because I do think they're obsessed with this.

Because I work this out, like everyone that I meet in America is sober that you meet them and they're like, Oh, like, I've been sober for three years.

And then you find out they're 24 and you're like, Okay, like, as soon as you're allowed to drink, and I worked out it's because they don't have healthcare.

So, like, all the times I went to AE in my 20s were drink-related.

Like, things I'd have because of drink, you know, like waking up on my bathroom floor, having snap ligaments in my ankle, going, oh, that was a harsh Tuesday.

And then getting it seen for free, just going into AE.

So, I think the Americans have this like level of obsession.

And it makes sense, right?

Because if you, you know, you can't,

it's just too risky.

Drinking is just too much of a risky business in America.

Like the outcomes, you know, they're obsessed with suing for everything.

So I think people are, people are like more

and and maybe American listeners can tell me whether or not I'm correct in my assumption that just drinking is a, you know, is more of a thing, is more of a studied phenomenon.

Sadly, the only people for whom this alcohol measuring ankle bracelet will not work are the people who are already legless.

So

in other legs news, scientists have regrown frogs' amputated legs after giving these frogs a cocktail of drugs.

Now,

I mean, we talk a lot on the bugle about

scientific experiments that maybe didn't entirely need to happen and wondering how they came, you know, how did this bizarre experiment in which a cocktail of drugs resulted in legs regrowing come about?

We may never know.

I mean, it's good news on a number of levels.

It's good news for psychopathic frog owners who have a conscience, who might feel guilty at some point in the process.

Good news for French sustainable agriculture,

basically

makes it vegan.

And it is good news for medical science with the potential to regrow legs and, I guess, eventually other bits and bobs of the body.

It's

well, Andy, well.

I mean, they say that African clawed frogs, which are the frogs on which this experiment was done, are like humans in this one important way in that they cannot regrow lost limbs.

So I'm not sure that the crossover is going to be as seamless as we would like to hope.

Well, as a second-generation lapsed Jew, I mean, I'm quite interested in

this story in terms of being able to grow back missing bits of the body.

But

it's

sorry why did it take me so long to get that joke

it it yeah i mean it's

it doesn't i just can't quite understand how

how how they thought they thought of you know oh well let's chop some frogs legs off and then see if we can make them

mate mate i mean is that is that is that science what what kind of science

I mean, that's like a cross between, I don't know, 15th century witchcraft and 21st century science, which i think makes it 18th century religion

um salamanders can do this can't they regrow which is good news actually because you know this bombogenesis that we were talking about earlier um it's hit florida so the temperatures are now getting so cold that lizards are freezing in trees and falling out yeah frozen gecko great cocktail um but yes so it could be it could be you know it could be that they're kind of going the natural world is changing.

We need to do some research.

It says that they can't naturally regrow, but with this drug cocktail, they can.

I don't know whether they had to put a

given them a cocktail of drugs, encased it in this silicon stump.

So the drugs actually go on to the pu it's quite it's quite fascinating, guys.

I don't know what it means for me that I spent a good few hours reading through.

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

There will shortly follow some lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers.

To join them, to make a one-off or recurring contribution to the Bugle Voluntary Subscription Scheme, let's go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Don't forget to book your tickets to my UK stand-up tour, which begins now on the 25th of February.

Details on my very soon to be updated website, which will also include details of some gigs at the Soho Theatre in London in May.

I will be doing satirist for Hire on the tour and at Soho.

So do submit your satirical requests if you're coming to the show to satirise this at satiristforhire.com.

Anything to plug?

I will be in Adelaide from doing Kronos from the 1st of March to the 5th of March.

At the Rhino Room, I'll be in Melbourne at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from the 31st of March to the 24th of April.

I will be in Sydney from the 5th of May to the 8th of May and in Perth from the 13th of May to the 14th 14th of May.

That's just two days.

And then I'll be probably in London and then definitely in Edinburgh.

So come see me somewhere in the world.

Find me at patreon.com/slash Alice Fraser.

I'll plug old rope at the comedy store 14th of February, where we have some gargle peeps like Finn Taylor

on the bill.

I will be doing new jokes at that.

I have some previews coming up for my new show, As a Woman Overthinketh,

which will be

so.

If you want to check that out, go onto my Twitter at Tiff Stevenson or my Instagram and I'll be posting about dates there.

And yeah, you can get all the information from those.

You can also listen to the current series of the news because we're about halfway through via the BBC Sounds app.

Until next week, Buglers, goodbye.

Here are your lies.

Graham Ray thinks olden days people were really very strange.

What's up with wanting to be buried with a load of toys, trinkets and weaponry?

They're like little children insisting on having their favourite teddy bear before they go to bed.

But these people aren't four or five years old.

They're like 1300 years old or 4,000 or whatever.

They ought to have grown out of it.

I reckon maximum two souvenirs in case the afterlife is really boring.

And no swords.

You're just not going to need them, concludes Graham.

On the subject of the afterlife, Kevin Smith does not like the idea of becoming a ghost.

I reckon it would get pretty annoying pretty quickly, says Kevin.

I mean, you might have the odd score to settle with a bit of haunting, but most of the people you're going to want to see after death are okay.

But because of the bad rep that ghosts have, they're going to crack themselves if you so much as waft through an open door or make the cutlery rattle in the kitchen.

It's likely to have an adverse impact on how fondly they remember you, so count me out of the optional ghost face please.

I'm just not interested.

Seb Rose regrets that the internet was not invented several thousand years before it actually was.

When you think back to things like witch trials, the Spanish Inquisition and the like says Seb, really it was just the kind of stuff that people spout off in dodgy chat forums, vituperative social media accounts and below-the-line comments on newspaper articles these days.

I mean we all complain about them, but personally I'd rather some anonymous loser call me something rude than be burned at the stake.

Ed Alvin likes to think that the whizzing noise that sausages make when being cooked is them confessing to a series of sins committed whilst they were still a pig, or whatever animal they used to be.

Humans have always loved a bit of a deathbed confession, says Ed, so I don't see why sausages shouldn't be the same.

Albeit there is a school of thought that suggests that sausages are already dead, of course.

I don't know exactly what a sausage would confess to, continues Ed, but it would probably be something about oinking inappropriate comments to other pigs or betraying communist ideals for their own self-interest.

And finally, Sarah Buchelman thinks cathedrals suffer from being geographically restricted to being in one place.

You would think, says Sarah, with modern technology, you could have mobile cathedrals that zip around to where people need the most.

I appreciate that.

Back in the day when it took 200 odd years to build the bloody things, that wasn't practical.

But now, I reckon you could have a medium-sized, collapsible, twin-spired Gothic cathedral up and down in 24 hours.

I don't know if it would help, but it has to be worth a go.

Concludes Sarah.

Here endeth this week's lies.

Goodbye.

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.