Animals, Bananas and The Pope (4216)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, I am Andy Zoltzmann.

This is issue 4216 of The Bugle and welcome for the first time in Bugle history to the 26th biggest island in the world, Tasmania, the sparsely populated blob that dangles happily in the ocean off the southeastern corner of the Australiac landmass, like a backup emergency New Zealand.

It's my first time in Tasmania.

I'm here, as you probably know Buglers by now.

I came out to Australia to cover the Ashes cricket series.

The final match was supposed to be in Perth, but Perth decided that England would have been thrashed by then, so what was the point?

I think that was the reasoning.

So they've dumped us all in Tasmania, and it seems lovely um uh if you can uh make yourself forget about the history of ethnic cleansing slavery abductions and disease spreading that wiped out the local population which as a british person i've been trained to do from my earliest schooling it helped us get out of bed in the morning uh it other than that it seems lovely it's famous for its devils of course i've not seen one yet and some doubt has been raised in recent weeks over whether or not the tasmanian devil the famously stroppy and scrophulous marsupial sort of like a cross between a kangaroo and a trump supporting anti-vaxa um is actually an an agent of BLZ Bubb himself or not the evidence well it's not compelling I mean if the devil has indeed chosen Tasmania as a launch pad for conquering the world he's not exactly giving himself the biggest possible audience this place is around around about 0.3 percent full i reckon um but you know it it looks lovely and there's cricket afoot uh which uh which is which is always good perhaps the devil isn't as fussed about market share as the media would have you believe or just can't be asked anymore given how humanity seems to be doing a perfectly decent job of destroying the shit out of itself without him even having to put in a regular nine-to-five.

I am looking out of my hotel window now at the 1200 meter chunk that is Mount Wellington which is like a regular mountain but coated in mushrooms ham and pastry.

Anyway, there's a little joke for any food fans out there.

Joining me to assess the state of the planet and its people this week, we've got the old band back together from the Sydney live bugle.

Albeit there's a band that never played together because the gig was cancelled.

But what a reunion show this would have been a week on from what would surely have been one of the landmark moments in modern culture.

Firstly, joining me from Sydney, it's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Alice.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

It's a delightful thing to know that you are in Tasmania, the one part of Australia, the map of which changes depending on how much Australia wants to look after itself and whether it's got a hot date coming up.

Family show, Alice.

Family show.

Those unfamiliar with the Australian term may wish to do some internet research.

Anyway, welcome, Alice.

I'll just write here dragons across my pubes.

Still, you've recently had a baby, so

contraceptive methods go.

Obviously, not very effective.

Yeah, joining us on the bugle for the very first time.

Also, from Sydney, it's James Colley.

James, welcome.

Welcome to the bugle.

It's lovely to have you on the show.

You also have recently given birth

yourself.

Yes, well, not personally, not myself.

I have more of a map of Gondwana land, but it is still very much intact.

But it is an honor to be here, and I hope to make this one the top 4,217 episodes.

So

your baby is seven weeks old.

Well, congratulations.

How's Parenthood

treating you?

It's an absolute breeze so far.

Other than all of the things you have to do in keeping the child alive, everything else has been hunky-dory.

So, Alice, this means that you have the third least young child of Bugle co-hosts, having been usurped by both Lloyd Langford and now

James.

Because it used to be,

I was the f ⁇ ing king of having young children on the Bugle podcast for eight f ⁇ ing years.

I had

the youngest f ⁇ ing kids on this show.

I wasn't gonna let you take that title for too long.

Well Andy, no, I I prefer to think that I'm a thought leader, that people think, oh, if I want to be like Alice Fraser, I too need to have a child and of course

they can't do it personally, so they have to go back eight or nine months and impregnate their partners.

Yeah, look, I don't know.

I I just think what you need is to actually do the birth giving.

I think I might be the only I tried my best.

I might be the only one who squeezed one out.

I might be the only one who had to go to a pelvic floor physio where a lady asks you for too much consent.

Like, it's fine, it's fine, but don't ask me for consent every step of the way because then it starts to get sexy.

You know,

like, it's fine to just be like, Can I put my fingers in you?

And then I'll say yes.

But if it's like parting the outer labia, are you all right with that?

That process, it's very stressful, Andy.

It's standard year 10 disco rules.

You're not.

Felicity's had Felicity's had baby.

Felicity's

Felicity.

There you go.

Is Grace the current youngest?

Yes.

So congratulations.

Oh,

that's huge for me.

She is one of the youngest people I've ever met.

She is growing out of it, but it was one of her defining qualities early on.

Yes.

Or have you done that thing where you touch the back of her knees and go, No one's touched this bit yet?

That's fun.

No one's done that to me yet, and I'm

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

The world's most pointless books.

We have a rundown of the least useful books currently available on the market, including How to Bake Socks by Leviticus Grind, El Spinia Gins's Badminton for the Dead, 101 best granite recipes by Ken Rocky McLavacle, What If Hitler Had Been an Orange?

That's the new one from Simon Sharma.

A new travel book, What to Do with a Spare Second in Madrid, by Norberto Warmillion, and How to Count to a Trillion in Under 20,000 Years by Sir Freston de la Brick, the official state mathematician of the United Kingdom.

That section in the bin we are recording on the 11th of January 2022, meaning it is exactly to the minute, 2001 years since Jesus Christ's slightly belated 21st birthday party.

Him and his mates went water skating, and it's fair to say he enjoyed it a lot more than they did.

Percussions from that whole thing.

Judas promising that he'd pay next time they went out together.

Some terrible reasons.

Bonds of trust were never fully, fully restored.

Top story this week: 2022 has begun.

The decade is having another go.

We're trying to have a year that isn't totally shit.

And we are now 11 days in to 2022.

Alice, James, how would you say the year is going so far in the context of this decade?

You know, when you get like three tracks into an album and then you're all a sudden like, what is this doing on the album?

Well, I really like 2022 so far because it has been consistently as bad as everything else.

We are about a week in and we are grinding into it.

We already have our yearly Australian international crisis that seems to happen every January now is somewhat of a tradition.

So

it's a return to form.

Sorry, are you counting as crises like bushfires and Novak Djokovic?

Yes, yes.

Two things that equally garner sympathy from overseas while being partly our own fault.

Alice, 2022 for you, where's it stand in the pantheon of greatest years of the decade so far?

I mean, so far it has been a sludgy mess of sort of temporal incoherence.

So that's about standard for me, just not knowing what day of the week it is, but now I have an excuse.

Yes, I guess so.

And that excuse being that life has become entirely pointless over the last two years.

But it's nothing to do with having a child.

It's also to do with the fact that it was my birthday last week, so I have to face the fact that I am not a young lady anymore.

I'm not an old lady.

I'm just a lady.

Just some lady doing shit.

That's a lot to come to terms with.

So at what point do you become an I mean is it a specific age that you become an old lady or is it a state of mind or is it the type of shopping trolley you use?

I think it's when it stops being impressive that you're just doing normal stuff.

You know what I mean?

No one's like, oh, well that's good for how young she is.

It's like, oh, that's mediocre for any age.

I sympathise with you, Alice, because I'm not quite middle age, but I'm certainly not bronze age.

I'm definitely iron, iron alloy age.

Well, I'm 47, and there's really no way of tarting that up.

On the plus side,

five of the world's most powerful nations have pledged to avoid nuclear war.

I found this a very interesting story because this was a declaration of five of the permanent members of the Security Council known as the P5 or the N5, and that they can't even agree on that shows how monumental a decision this is.

For a moment there, they went

with

they would have gone with the PN5, but it looked a little bit rude when written down.

This had a wording that had to be hammered out over several months.

That wording, a nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought, which is true.

A nuclear war cannot be won, but you can grind out a hard-fought draw, which you'd settle for in the face of annihilation.

Sorry, I'm thinking about the ashes again.

But speaking of...

Yes,

James, James, James, come on.

Too soon.

Look,

the idea of a contest that can't be won and must never be fought, I mean, if everyone just didn't bother with that, then this

England would never come to Australia to play cricket.

It's more important that you turn up and take the Armageddon that is coming your way.

And I think the English cricket team is showing the world that we've got these nukes and we have a duty to use them.

And I think there is a very good chance that you'll end up not out at the end, despite all the horror around you.

I think this is a real treat for us that the United Nations has agreed that the world will not end due to the actions of any one member, but due to the collective inaction of every member.

We're going to make this world uninhabitable and we're going to do it together.

Well, this is the thing, Alice.

I mean, it might sound like good news, but I mean, it's bad news for those of us who advocate a speed apocalypse rather than the current sort of tedious drip, drip, drip, multi-source Armageddon creep that we're going through.

I mean,

is this good news or do we just want to try and end it as soon as possible?

I mean, this is bad news in the meta sense of the word, which is always the way that I like to approach the news.

This is badly done news.

They've missed the lead.

The lead is, holy shit, they didn't agree on this before.

It took them this long to agree.

Like, it's such a 90s pledge.

Also, they're focusing on the wrong people.

Like, who what about the countries that didn't agree to this?

What is Canada up to?

Why is Belgium being so quiet?

Personal pledges.

I pledged to avoid nuclear war years ago, and I have upheld that pledge, but it never goes reported.

Well, I've actually got rid of all my nucleuses.

None of my cells now have nucleuses.

That might be the aging process.

I liked for this part of the reason this was apparently taking so long to nut out was because France, France, France was worried that the wording would, quote, undermine the deterrent effect of its arsenal, to which I would argue is the very point of this kind of agreement.

It's almost as if we want to undermine the deterrent effect of a nuclear arsenal.

I think France's main problem with the wording would be that there just weren't enough words.

Because, I mean, the French, they love to elongate a sentence.

And, you know, it's far too concise.

You can understand that after months of haggling, they'd have wanted for it to have about 15 subclauses and a meal halfway through.

But anyway, so here it is.

The five powerful nations, five of the world's most powerful nations, the USA, Russia, China, France, and and the UK, sorry, three of the world's most powerful nations, as well as France and the UK for old time's sake, have pledged.

Pledged.

They've fing pledged.

It's a fing pledge, people.

Why are you not more excited?

If the history of humanity tells you one thing, it's that a pledge leads to absolutely guaranteed certain fulfillment and a warm feeling of trust.

A pledge.

But this subject that our children.

A vow.

A vow, you don't actually mean a vow.

A vow is sounding like you mean something.

A pledge is meaning something that doesn't actually mean anything, like we're not going to do something that hasn't been happening anyway.

And a promise is a lie.

I think those are the three differences between

those words.

The way you remember it is a vow is IOU, and sometimes why?

Very good.

So, I mean, why do we think this is happening now?

I mean, maybe that these five countries remember that the looming threats of nuclear war is actually a very useful political tool.

Otherwise, you know, people might...

So just kind of sowing that idea back in people's minds.

Oh, yeah, nuclear Armageddon is a possibility.

Otherwise, people might start to question why we spend so much money on, for example, in Britain, our trident nuclear subs.

Or, as well as questioning it, we might just demand a go in a nuclear sub because we pay our taxes.

We should be allowed to benefit from that.

I think that's how taxes work, isn't it?

Is that the way they work in Australia?

That's why we used to keep fighting world wars to give taxpayers a chance to see what the defense budget was being spent on by

going to war.

I personally am going to sleep well at night knowing that every nation that has nuclear weapons has agreed to not use them, except for North Korea and India and Pakistan and Israel, and maybe South Africa if they've still got one abound.

And Australia, oh, sorry, said too much.

Do not look inside the big banana.

Do not look inside the big banana.

So, just James, can you just explain the big banana?

Because I think, I mean, this is essentially Australia's leading tourist attraction.

Absolutely.

So the good people of Coffs Harbour in Australia were tired of looking at regular sized bananas and they thought it was an intractable problem.

But luckily, some plucky counselor came together and said, you know what?

We're going to build an incredibly large banana, which I say incredibly large, moderately big.

We are overselling it by saying

compared to a regular banana, very, very big indeed.

But compared to any other thing that you would consider big, quite a small banana.

Compared to the image you have in your head when someone says tourist attraction, the big banana, it's not as big as you'd think.

It's like a small bus-sized banana.

My biggest problem with...

So there are a lot of big thing attractions in Australia, but the problem is they're not to scale.

So the big prawn and big banana are moderately about the same size.

They don't scale these things up or down.

The big ant, again, is the same size as the banana, whereas really the banana should be thousands of times bigger, surely.

Also, interestingly, interesting Australia geography fact: Coffs Harbour isn't what it was going to be called, but someone had an itch in their throat when they were naming it.

What was it going to be called?

Just harbour?

It's just a rude name.

It was a rude name, and they were very polite back in those days, the English.

They were actually trying to say big banana, but the problem with their throat was so bad it just got called Coffs Harbour.

Maybe they named it on a Zoom call.

I don't know.

Yeah, so I mean,

this is a problem, James, you mentioned that the five states who signed this agreement declaration are the five states recognized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968.

Now,

I mean, is this not an important enough thing that you update your contacts book at some point in the intervening 54 years?

I mean,

so as you said, they missed out India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and Belgium.

That's That's breaking news.

On the bugle.

I mean, surely that's a what's the thing?

Belgium's not really a threat.

They'll plan on doing a nuclear strike, but then they'll waffle about it.

Boom.

There we go.

That's just one for the old timers.

I think it's just a very difficult thing.

Like, you have to understand here, they are working at breakneck speed.

In 1945, the first nuclear weapon is tested.

Then they use them a couple of times.

And ever since then, they've been working as quickly as they can to put a stop to this.

And just, let's say 80 brief years later, they really have agreed to let's think twice before we ever do this again.

It's why I'm looking forward to knowing that one day, if I'm ever staring down a mushroom cloud launched by Vladimir Putin as a retaliatory act against the nation of Georgia's obstinate refusal to become the nation of Russia, I could say to him, President Putin, do you not remember your agreement?

And he'll say, Oh, sorry about that, and pop the mushroom cloud back in the bomb and offer me a coffee.

That is that is reassuring, James.

Reassuring in these troubled troubled times.

In other global military news, Alice, you are the Bugle's military space expenditure correspondent.

And a huge scoop you found for us this week via an article online that governments worldwide spent $123 billion on space programs in 2021.

And the proportion that is spent on m militarizing space has gone up.

And if it keeps going up at the current rate, then, and I'm making this up, within 15 years,

civilian space programs will have to pay to be blown up by special rockets.

Yes, Andy, one small debt for man, one massive debt for mankind.

Now we can all look towards the stars and think that's where the education budget went.

I wonder what those sparkly things in the sky are.

And they'll be bombs, Andy, they will be bombs.

This is sort of an incredible thing because all of the news has been about individuals um going to space you know wealthy billionaires and so on and so forth and their private investments but it turns out a lot of those private investments were built on public infrastructure and it's coming out of the to the taxpayer's pocket which is all too full of

three week-old masks that you haven't washed yet

the

I mean the US it's sort of all balanced out right the Australia spent $450 million

on the space program which is pretty good given that we don't have one.

So that's a little confusing.

I'm not sure exactly what goes in civilian space programmes.

I think it's I imagine it's putting things like satellites and pigs in space.

And they currently receive more funding than military space programmes.

But the US is spending more and more on its military space programmes.

And I think the reason for this is that we now have a generation of politicians who have seen all the alien disaster movies and they do not want to be the ones who are the complacent advisors or politicians in the opening scenes before the aliens arrive.

That makes sense.

That explains why every political operative now is listening to the craziest person they can find, because that's always the problem in the disaster film.

You need to listen to the craziest person out there.

The Australian committee Space Connect is chaired by a man called Pat Conahan, who said that Australia must, quote, position itself to capitalize on the growing space sector,

which is good to know that he knows that space is growing.

That's a good start.

It's not so much a small slice of a big pie, it's more like a small slice of an infinite pie.

If we're doing this and billionaires are already shooting themselves into space, I say once they get up there, mug them, hand over the bucksby, so we'll prime ship you into the core of the sun.

In other nuclear news, the European Commission has proposed labeling some nuclear power, as well as gas, as green in an effort to make the planet think that we're doing something about it and to therefore cure itself.

Critics of the move have claimed that labeling nuclear and gas power as green is akin to describing an ostrich that is aggressively pecking you in the face with a sharpened beak as friendly because by comparison a shark would have bitten your head off by now.

Or even describing a cricket team as having done well because for once they didn't get absolutely f ⁇ ing Vesuvius in a test match.

Now, nuclear power technically sits in a special environmental category of its own of gala, which is green as long as dot dot dot.

And

a

spoke someone or other for the EU Advisory Subcommittee on Delaying the Onset of Armageddon Brackett's Working Party D said that gas can't be that bad, you can't even fing see it, and it's better than burning penguins or shoving baby rhinos into your petrol tank.

So, I mean, is this the way that we are going to save the world by just pretending that we're saving the world and hoping for the best?

I think it is.

I think nuclear energy is green.

It's undeniably the color that it glows.

And the hope here is that we use nuclear energy to reduce our carbon footprint, and it's a clever move.

Think of it this way: say you're feeling, it's after Christmas, we're all feeling a little bit on the heavy side, and you're worried that that could have negative health effects in the future.

One possible solution will be to take out a gun and blow off your foot.

Now, not only do you not worry about your stomach anymore, you will have technically reduced your weight in general, therefore making you healthier.

And environmentalism at its core, its fusion core, is about what kind of a world we are leaving for our children.

And if we embrace nuclear energy, we know exactly what we're leaving for our children and their children and their children with the six fingers and their children.

Well, I say children, technically it's three heads on one body, so maybe just child.

But this move is being opposed by the German environment minister and surely that is cause for pause when the Germans are saying, well, think about what you're doing to the world.

This is unspeakably evil.

Then I would say you are in a tight spot.

I'm in agreement, Andy, here.

If a goal is difficult to meet, redefine the terms.

I did this just last week.

I looked in the mirror, I said, New Year, new me, and now a week later, I'm looking in the same old mirror at the same old me, but I've renamed that me, new me.

I've also confronted the reality that the inevitable process of aging means that the new you is always the older you.

Oh, curse you, language.

But I think in terms of the most efficient means of greenifying the world, I think we might have accidentally stumbled on it over the last couple of years, which is simply to make everyone give up all hope and just sit at home waiting for the end times.

So, you know, there is, you know, it could be that this will prove to be the turning point in our.

It's nice to know that my keep cup will outlive me now.

It's something I'm leaving down to future generations.

I mean, why don't they go the whole hog?

They should redefine coal power stations as green as well, because coal, we know, is not green, and these power stations, getting rid of coal.

Yes.

Good point.

I mean, there was our local petrol station at the end of our road, they had a rebrand a few years ago, and they came back and they were called Apple Green and had a lovely green logo of an apple.

And I thought that was a really great way of saving the environment.

So that, you know, because, you know, environmental destruction is 98% psychological.

And if you go to fill up your car and there's a lovely picture of an apple and it's called Apple Green, then I mean, how much damage can that be doing?

Sure.

I mean,

it's good.

Apples are good for you.

It goes to show, like, the term carbon footprint was invented by BP as a marketing tool.

And I think that's very telling because if you are looking down to check your feet print, it makes it much easier for someone to kick you right in the ass without you noticing.

That's never a true word spoken on this podcast, albeit that is not a particularly hotly contested title.

Animals signaling the coming of the apocalypse news now.

And, well, I mean, barely a day goes by now without the animal kingdom in some way hinting that humanity is doomed.

And in a small town in Texas, 250 miles from the sea, fish have rained down from the sky.

The little town of Texarkana in Texas

suffered the shower of fish, either because of some weird storm-related stuff whisking them up from the ocean and dumping them in land, as sometimes happens, or because the Almighty Lord is very, very cross with us because we've been so naughty for the last three to four thousand years.

What's your interpretation of

the shower of fish?

Is this a sign that we are genuinely doomed?

I think it is a

real referendum on how weak God's powers have become.

Seeing as all of the things we are doing, the Almighty's response is, oh yeah, have a couple of fish.

I do think we're too people-centric in this news.

Of course, it is a bizarre day for the many Texans in Texarkana, but it's an even stranger day in the lives of these fish who never thought they would be in Texarkana, always saw themselves as more of a Houston fish, if not one day moving to New York to chase their dream of being served on a cream cheese bagel.

At first reports of the fish falling from the sky, Texas Governor Ted Cruz, who famously fears being around in in any natural disaster in case he's asked to help took his family on an immediate emergency caribbean holiday only to unfortunately terrifyingly find himself surrounded by even more fish so our thoughts are with him at this time

uh harbing justicians uh who specialize in working out exactly what is portended by weird natural events have suggested that the fish reign could augur anything from more traffic on the outskirts of Texarkana next Wednesday to a full alien invasion to America gradually tearing itself apart as a nation under the centrifugal forces of its own political twattery.

Any one of those, I would say, is entirely plausible.

But could it not be, Alice, that we've been getting this wrong throughout history?

When you look at all the bad things that have happened in the world through human history, that surely would have been harbinged by something if God does indeed warn us of bad things to come through sending us signs.

Then maybe rain is supposed to be made of fish, and it's when water falls out of the sky, that's when God is trying to tell us that shit's about to go go down.

No, Andy, people are talking about fish falling from the sky as though that were the terrifying omen.

I would be more scared if they just stayed there.

Just some fish, some fish hanging out in the sky.

That'd be much more worrying.

I think this is a great way to test the thought experiment of what happens if you give a man a fish.

Because people talk about when you give a man a fish all the time, but this doesn't feel like it's been properly scientifically researched.

Is it a thought experiment or is it a real experiment?

Are there placebo fish?

What's your control?

Are there men who think they're being given a fish but aren't?

I don't know.

I mean,

if you give a man a fish in Texacana in Texas and it lands on his head at a bus stop, then

he'll probably be slightly confused and

claim that his country's being taken from him by the liberal media.

Probably.

I mean, if you give a man a fish these days, he'll look at you pretty weird.

It's not a customary gift.

Is it his birthday?

Is he a fishmonger?

Are you a fishmonger?

What's the situation?

Yeah.

You do need context for these things.

As courtships go, giving someone a fish is, I think,

a risky move.

A risky move.

And

no one's going to trust a free fish.

You know, there are some things that you just don't want discounted.

Like, you don't want discount sushi, you don't want discount sex tickets, you don't want discount.

There's a beautiful undercurrent of friendship in this story that we might have missed here, because if I was working in Texas at a mechanics and my co-worker said, there's a fish on the ground and I saw it fall from the sky, I would say, go home, Larry, you've had a bit too much.

We'll reassess and talk about this on Tuesday.

But this friend went, no, not only do I believe you, let's take this to the media and make it international news.

I think that's the kind of trust we should all have for each other this year.

In further animals signaling the apocalypse coming, Alice, a badger has found coins from around about the time of Christ.

I mean, surely this has to be a sign that

the second coming, at the very least, is upon us.

Yes, these Roman coins have been discovered nearby the den of an animal.

Look, the BBC, I'm just reading this story.

Again, I'm going to go meta on this.

They've injected this story with a lot of colour.

What happened was some coins were found outside an animal den, and then nearby

a stash of Roman coins were found.

But the BBC has written this up as, in a desperate attempt to find some food, it is thought that the animal, which researchers believe could be a badger, inserted its legs into a small crack opening next to its refuge, but it found no use for the old coins and abandoned some of the pieces in front of its den.

That is a direct quote from the BBC, a news site.

I am impressed, but I think it needs more epic.

I think it should read like this: A lone, brave, possibly badger, plausibly called Mr.

Miblins, cast adrift in a cold world, has fulfilled what might have been his dream after what could have been a lifetime of amateur archaeology and grave-robbing.

Women badgers want him, men badgers want to be him.

Long is it possible that he has sought this treasure, which might or might not be the lost treasure of the third eagle.

Uh in in turn the third eagle may or may not have been a Roman platoon.

Who knows?

This is news.

This is what they pay me for.

End of article.

I think you're entirely right, Alice.

I think, if anything, they have been taking agency away from the badger here.

Their article says that the badger was probably searching for worms and berries.

I'm going to say the badger was searching for Roman society artifacts.

And I've read my Wind in the Willows.

I know badgers famously hate society.

So upon finding the coins, the Badger was disgusted with itself and retreated away.

The badger picked up these Roman artifacts and thought, Real money is worth nothing.

I'm invested in Bitcoin.

Then cast them aside.

Do you know what this story is?

This is a shot across the bow to every archaeologist.

A badger can do what you do.

A badger.

Have you ever seen a badger perform potent political satire?

Only once, and it was mostly badger-related.

Four stars, red like a three.

In other old stuff news, a huge scandal is brewing, Alice, amongst the fans of medieval war horses community.

After it's been claimed that medieval war horses, rather than being imposing heroic beasts, were in fact little more than modern-day beach ponies.

I mean, this is rocking the war horse

fan community to its core, isn't it?

Yeah, I'm absolutely absolutely gutted.

This discovery, of course, made by a roving weasel, but I cannot tell you how disappointing this fact is to my fantasies of being rescued from a set of improbable difficulties by some sort of lord or laird in a medieval-ish situation.

Despite my anachronistic modern taste for hand washing and individual rights, he would be swept away by my ineffable beauty.

And what is the point in that situation of a tiny horse?

What is the point of a tiny horse in that scenario?

There is no respectful but heated frottage going on in the smooth saddle of a basic pony.

I'm just

so disappointed.

I think it's an adorable image.

It makes what's often a brutal and bloody history seem quite quaint.

You know, you see Genghis Khan being led around a paddock by a stoned carnival worker.

Charge looks more like a

friendly trot.

And it explains why lances were so long, because the other horse riders were actually very far away and it took ages to shut down the distance, so it was easy to just poke them with a stick.

And I think this is all a matter of perspective.

Medieval knights were no bigger than your average cat, and the nation of France was no bigger than a standard cricket oval.

Everything was just smaller.

And you have to wonder at these sizes, just how many people could fit inside the Trojan horse.

It is by far history's most consequential piñata, but I just don't think it had leg room.

So, are you suggesting that the Trojan horse was the ancient world's equivalent of the clown car?

And

absolutely, right?

They actually crashed one on the way there, and it took out half the army.

Particularly when they had to get out and shoot the horse.

Odysseus could have gotten home with a determined hop.

The Pope has weighed into the animals issue and claimed that people choosing cats or dogs over children are being selfish.

Now, surely, this all depends on, again, on context and the situation.

I mean, if you are collecting

your pets and children from an institution that is both a pet care centre and a children's preschool, and you choose cats or dogs over your children when told you can only take one or the other, then I would say yes, that that is potentially selfish.

If you're writing a will, and you choose cats or dogs over children,

I mean, it might be that you have a really amazing dog or really annoying children.

I would say that's selfish, perhaps, maybe not selfish, maybe questionable.

If you're casting for a nativity play and you choose cats or dogs over children, then you are, you know, it's a radical reworking of the Bible.

I applaud you for it.

If you're choosing which is to be sacrificed to Zeus to ensure a successful sea voyage on the way to war, well, that's a bit of a technical grey area.

You can go either way on that.

If you're a Soviet-era space exploration project director and you need something to fire into space to see if it will be feasible to send adult humans there, then I would say definitely go with a cat cat or dog.

It's just the optics of strapping a child into a rocket and firing it into space.

Not good even in 1950s Soviet Union.

So what do you think?

I mean, both of you recently

have gone down the child rather than cat or dog.

Was that a difficult choice to make?

Well, I

did both.

I have both a dog and a newborn baby, and if I was forced to choose between them, it would be easy enough to pick the...

I do have to clean up after them both.

The baby person bringing the newspaper, but she also doesn't chew my sandals.

No, it is the baby.

It's the baby by a cute little button nose.

I think you're right, Andy.

It is context.

The problem is context.

What are you choosing them for?

Is it who can pull your sled over the tundra?

In that case, it is selfish to choose children.

They simply cannot take that much time off school.

But personally, I am impressed by the Pope's moxie.

A lesser pontiff would have said, you know what?

Let's give it another year or two before we at the Catholic Church start lecturing people on the welfare of children, but not this Pope.

He gets right in there.

Well, I think it's nice to see Catholicism going back to its roots, which is guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt.

The motto of the religion might as well be, look what you made me do.

I knew you were coming round for dinner and you'd want your sins forgiven, so I killed my only son.

Don't tell me you're not hungry.

Holy Father, I didn't ask you to kill your only son.

I know I did it anyway.

I know it's your favorite.

You were always like, good take out with Abraham, but if we're playing son-killing chicken, I'd love to see what you've got.

or rather, begot, not made, one being with the father.

Of course, Jesus himself had a cat

called Ernie and a fish

called the End, which was a word play on the French word fa

or fin.

So, and that's actually he practiced the Lazarus move on the fish and then his cooking skills as well.

That fish actually lived to 22 before Peter ate it after a team bonding piss-up.

Read into that,

what you will.

Australia Covid tennis news now.

And it's been an extraordinary week here in Australia with the legal case surrounding Novak Djokovic, the 20-time Grand Slam tournament-winning tennis player,

and Joyless Efficiency Monthly magazine's

sportsman of the millennium so far.

It's been really quite hard to fathom this, but I mean the context of COVID in Australia at the moment.

When I arrived, what, two months ago now, and there were very few cases, and now there are, in scientific terms,

loads of cases everywhere.

It's been a kind of interesting and curious time to be here.

And there's even talk of people having pox parties in Queensland to try and

catch the virus.

But I mean,

as we record, Novak Djokovic has been released back into reality

from his incarceration

after a judge overturned the government, revoking his entry visa.

It's such a bizarre story, this,

because Djokovic is clearly, I mean, it's a great sport, a great tennis player, but at the same time, no one particularly likes him, or not many people, or maybe no one particularly likes him, but a lot of people particularly don't like him.

And he's not had a vaccine, but he has had COVID recently.

And the day after he tested positive for COVID, he was shaking hands with children and receiving an award.

It's a really weird story.

Can either of you make head or fing tail of it?

I mean, I can't make head or tail of it.

There's two events within it, within this series of events that delight me.

One, that there were violent protests in the streets of Melbourne, either for or against Novak Dokovich entering.

I'm not sure

why on whose side they were coming down.

It was just presumably fquits doing what fkwits do, which is f witting about.

But that his father compared him to Spartacus

and his family, during a press conference when they were asked about him attending these indoor events in the days after he tested positive,

tried to divert attention by singing a patriotic song.

Just singing a Serbian country folk song.

Fun times.

Right.

That's very Spartacus.

Just make a loud distraction until the guards move along.

I wish if he'd really liked Spartacus, he'd have waged war on the Australian government

on the slopes of a volcano.

But

he's not done that.

I mean, there are elements in which Djokovic and Spartacus are like peas in a pod, but both perform well in an arena.

Both has been played by Kirk Douglas in film portrayals of their lives, the Djokovic

CGI Kirk Douglas movie, due out in five minutes' time.

They both led revolutions.

Spartacus led the third, I believe, the third servile war against the Roman Empire in the 70s BC and Novak Djokovic is trying to lead a revolution against medical science and good sense when it comes to COVID vaccination.

Both of them have hair like a Lego man.

I mean that's not proven with Spartacus, but it's definitely true of Djokovic, so let's assume it's also true of Spartacus.

And both have a marble statue in the Louvre of them with their penis out.

So

it is uncanny.

You can see why

that

Djokovic's father could mix him up with the famous slave revolt leader.

And standing with him is noble, but also ultimately bad for your health.

I think that this situation, so what we need to understand firstly is just how rampant COVID is ripping through Australia right now.

Like all trends, it takes a couple of extra years to get to Australia, but as soon as it gets here, we go for it.

And right now, three out of every four teths are coming back positive, with one of them inconclusive.

No, sorry, that's the ashes again.

But

I've spent nearly an hour not thinking about the cricket and you've just brought it all back.

Bam.

But what we're doing.

What we do know about this story, though, and all tennis fans know, is tennis has the greatest review system in modern sports.

And that is exactly what has happened to Djokovic here.

He's out.

No, he's in.

Okay, let's take it to Hawkeye.

Ooh, and he's in, only just.

This is a big win against the Australian government.

And it was the Australian government's mistake for holding the proceedings on a grass court.

If they had held it on clay or even perhaps synthetic, he probably wouldn't have triumphed.

But

you can be forgiven for thinking that the way into Australia was to break the law.

It used to be.

That was an old policy.

We changed that a short time ago.

And this has turned into a real the face moment for our government, who were hoping to use the story to distract on an egg on the face moment they were having with rapid testing, only for that story to backfire and draw attention to Australia's cruel immigration laws, which is somewhat of an entire factory farm applied directly to the face.

But I feel ultimately this story, like so many, is a terrible misunderstanding.

You see, Melbourne is the most locked down city in the world.

I myself have done multiple lockdowns in Melbourne.

This wasn't a punishment for Djokovic.

We were trying to show him a little bit of the local culture.

Welcome to Australia.

Here's a spoonful of Vegemite, two weeks dent in isolation, and when you get out, you can pat a koala that's almost as diseased as you.

Alice, can I ask?

Have you, have this, this feels like

a personal thing to ask on the show, have you contracted COVID?

Because honestly, enough of our friends in Australia have right now that I'm feeling a bit like a loser.

Like, was everyone hanging out without me?

Had you all caught this contagion?

Yes, yes, we are new parents.

We don't get to hang out with anyone anymore.

Downside, upside, you don't catch the plane.

Well, that concludes this week's Boogle.

I think we've covered pretty much everything that's happened in the world this year.

I do hope you've enjoyed it.

We'll be back next week with more from the planet.

Don't forget to book tickets for my UK tour shows, which begin sometime in late February.

A couple of them are having to be moved due to a clash with radio recordings, but the details are available.

Actually, I won't say that.

I'm not sure they have been moved yet.

Details are available on my website andesaltsom.co.uk, which is kind of sort of up to date, but I might have to

change a few things and move them around.

But basically, you know, it's all there if you look online.

Anything to plug, James?

You've got any shows coming up or anything else you'd like to tell our listeners about?

Live shows don't exist in Australia right now, but I would, if you would like to check out, I have a couple of podcasts.

One called The Collie Problem, which goes for five hours in case you're worried there just wasn't enough bullshit in your ears.

And the other one is called Vanity Project, where me and a friend go through A-list celebrities' D-list albums.

So, if you ever want to hear how Robert Downey Jr.

sounds on a grand piano, tune in.

Alice, as well as the Gargle, the Bugle's sister audio publication, what else have you got?

I have, presumably if all things go well, which they won't, I have a series of live shows coming up.

I'll be doing Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth in the festival run.

So if you're in any of those places,

look up my show, Kronos, a show that I began to write in 2019 and will finish writing

sometime indeterminate in the future.

I'm also going to be doing Edinburgh.

And

I'm just saying these things out loud as though they're going to to happen.

Yes, well, if you say it out loud, it's got now a 0.3% greater chance of happening than if you'd kept it under your bonnet.

Well, if you want to find out how and when they all get cancelled, look me up at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

Up to the minute updates.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

There will be the return of our premium voluntary subscriber Lies next week to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme or to make a one-off or recurring donation to help keep the Bugle free,

flourishing and independent, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click donate.

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.