British Pork Is Now Kosher (4207)

Don't forget there is a live bugle show in London on the 13th of November at the Odeon in Leicester Square,

which I think means that there'll be a gala

black tie event with stars of stage and screen and royalty.

Have they all confirmed the Royal Family?

I think they tend to reply quite lately.

All right.

Come dressed as the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and really confuse everyone.

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4207 of the Bugle.

The very special 501st full episode of this podcast.

We are recording on the 4th of October 2021.

We slightly forgot about the 500th episode last week due to having skipped, well, 3,700 odd episodes in between 294 and 4001.

But anyway, this is it.

So we're celebrating it this week, the 501st Lariversary of the Bugle in honor of Brian Lara's highest first-class score in cricket, a far more significant number than 500.

But we have now done more than half a thousand full episodes episodes of this show.

And if you'd told me 50 years ago that I would be hosting a podcast that was doing its 501st episode, I wouldn't have believed you.

I mean, I was still just over three years away from being born, aside from anything else.

And so I was still in the government's secret refrigerated laboratory where they store British embryoid before assigning one to a British woman who then has to pretend to be pregnant before supposedly giving birth to a British.

I mean, it's not the most outlandish conspiracy theory you've heard reading, but I'm living testament to it being true.

But the point is, over half a thousand episodes of this show, not including some episodes, that means there's only 49,499 to go before we wrap it up with the 50,000th episode spectacular in the year.

Let me just work this out.

Round about 3260.

I think we'll probably have the odd hiatus here and there for various reasons.

But I reckon we'll keep turning them out around 40 a year, unless they change the lengths of years or weeks.

Or maybe Britain will go back to some kind of lunar calendar as part of the inevitable post-Brexit readjustment phase.

Half a thousand episodes, that is around about 300 hours of pure, unadulterated part-truth splurted into this universe of doubt.

And if you were to transcribe every single episode of the bugle in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript, it would take you at a rough estimate, depending on how fancy you got with the opening letters of each paragraph, and I'm just making it up now, 38 years and four months.

That's working eight-hour days with 20 days holiday a year.

Now, if anyone is interested in that job, do drop us an email, but you're going to have to be cheaper than buying a printer and some knock-off ink and bring your own quills.

Joining me for this momentous occasion

from the other side of the world, firstly, the now very, very nearly 100% pregnant Alice Fraser.

Welcome, Alice.

What's the current stat

in terms of percentage?

I don't think it's too much to say that I am now

what

the technical Boffins down at the lab would call massively pregnant.

I always like to put it in a more numerical term.

So we'll go with

99.94% pregnant, a good Australian number.

Also, joining us to keep the number of people currently harbouring another person inside them to acceptable levels, currently residing in Perth, Australia, it's James Nakise.

Hello, James.

I am pregnant with joy.

The best form of, I mean, I've always found that with joy as well.

It takes me nine months to get really happy about anything, minimum.

And

how's a Perth, Patricia?

Because Perth has had sort of quite a sort of strict lockdown, hasn't it?

And no one going in and out of Western Australia.

Yeah, I mean, we've had a strict lockdown and that we've just locked down the entire state as one house and then no one's allowed in or out.

I'm very wary of saying this to anyone else who's in Australia, especially someone like Alice who's been in Sydney.

Normally, I just go, it's okay,

and make sure I always film indoors.

That's the key, Andy, in these situations.

Make sure the camera is indoors.

Well, I mean, this is really a good thing for Western Australia and indeed for Queensland, which is similarly having closed its borders, not at all locked down,

because

those are the two states that really want to secede the most from Australia

in that way of thinking themselves both more Australian and less Australian than the rest of Australia.

Yes, well, I mean, of course.

I feel like I've been here long enough, and Alice might be able to concur.

The reason they locked down Western Australia is basically because no one trusted Western Australians to stay in their house.

Like these cashed up bogans are too loose, mate.

Well, of course, the UK seceded from Australia.

Was it 1900, I think, that we withdrew from Australia?

I can't remember.

There's still a place on the Federation papers for New Zealand to sign on, if you want.

I think we're taking Western Australia.

I think that's what happens next.

Sandwich manoeuvre, I like it.

We are recording on the 4th of October 2021.

Today is

International Awareness Day, Awareness Day, to raise people's awareness of all the awareness days that we need to be aware of.

We should also pause to remember on this day the several million krill that died 25 years ago today due to all the whales being hungry.

A special section this week in the bin is the 501 section, the Bugle Lariversary.

Now Brian Lara broke the record for the highest individual score in first-class cricket.

501 not out in 1994 playing for Warwickshire against Durham.

13 years later Brian Lara retired.

from international cricket and only six months after the great left-handers final international match, the bugle came into existence.

And now some 14 years later, the bugle is still going, and Lara is still retired.

And as long as he stays retired, we will stay bugling because the world needs one or the other of the bugle or Brian Lara playing international cricket.

Either the scintillating batsmanship and fascinating career fluctuations of Brian Lara or me and my guests banging on about the news.

So we're keeping going until Lara comes out of retirement.

And he is now aged, I don't know, 50-odd, I reckon.

So it's probably going to come down to us, I think.

He shook my hand as a child.

Did he?

Yeah, I was a big fan of Brian Lara.

Well,

congratulations.

That's the correct way to be as a human being and indeed a cricket fan.

For our special 501st episode, we have been inundated with tributes from our colleagues in the worlds of media and showbiz.

This one, for example, we can only know that we know nothing.

And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.

That's from Leo Tolstoy.

Truth is like the sun.

You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't going away.

Elvis Presley, thanks for that, Elvis.

And simplicity and sincerity generally go hand in hand as both proceed from a love of truth.

Mary Wollstonecraft.

Now, none of them were specifically talking about the bugle, to be fair, and none of them are really relevant.

But still, it says a lot about this podcast that the likes of Leo, Elv, and Mazzo are prepared to take some time out from their schedules to pay homage to this show.

And to mark the 501st episodes, we look at a few other things, of which there have been or are 501.

There were 501 body doubles of Queen Victoria that were used in the early days of postage stamps before they changed the law that said that every individual stamp had to have a hand-painted portrait of the monarch from a licensed and witnessed sitting.

After a couple of years, Queen Victoria went off-grid in protest.

And the government hired 501 Victoria look-alikes, plentiful in those days, of course,

two-stit for the stamps.

501 is also the number of different news stories in history.

They're now just being endlessly recycled with different names and technical jargon cut and pasted in.

And of course, 501 is the number of different attempts it took Levi Strauss before he got trousers right.

Famously, the 501 jeans were launched in the 1890s after 500 previous prototypes fell by the legwear wayside, including the twos that had the waist sewn together and were impossible to put on.

The 19s, the mono leg design, proved to be restrictive and unpopular.

The 46s with built-in ankle blades were deemed too lacerative.

And the 165s with their single-length legs scandalized 1880s America by being only just below the knee of the taller customers.

The exposed calves of a young jeans wearer at the inauguration of President Harrison in 1889 caused new First Lady Caroline to suffer a swooning from which she never truly recovered.

The Levi 214s had revolutionary rear pockets made of salt crystals which were visually striking but proved buttock exposingly soluble in anything more than light rain.

And the 542s were the first attempt to fuse new electricity technology with clothing to make trousers that lit up when the wearer started running using an early dynamo withdrawn after a spate of crotch singings.

Famously, Levi Strauss, when asked about so many experiments, said,

I haven't failed to make jeans 501 times.

I've learned 501 ways not to make a light bulb.

Well, there you go, and that concludes our special 501 section.

Top story this week: supply chain chaos around the world.

And while supply chains love them or hate them, they're really important to supplying stuff.

And

they've been in chaos around the world.

And of course, much of the time, supply chains are hidden from public view, the Santa Clausian magic of modern logistics, providing those of us in the fortunate echelons of Team Human with what we want, when we want, and what we think we need when we pretend we need it.

But at the moment, there is chaos around the world.

I mean, how's how's things in Australia from a supply chain point of view?

I mean,

they're fairly all right, Andy.

You know,

things might be taking a little longer to deliver during COVID times, but

they are still going fairly well.

It's astonishing how quickly people in the modern world have gotten entirely accustomed to pressing a button and then, within days, having a stranger deliver a silicon oven mitt, 13 tiny gnome shoes for their lockdown madness garden gnome installation, a bucket of protein powder, and a sign that says leave, laugh, love, which you can't tell whether it's a misspelling or some Brexit-based satire out of the People's Republic of China.

But apparently in Britain it's not so good.

British shoppers have been warned to expect a nightmare Christmas with limited stock on the shelves and higher prices, but I suggest the nightmare has already begun.

So this is more like what you would call a nightmare before Christmas if you have very boring nightmares about supply chain issues.

I'm Jewish.

Every Christmas is a fing nightmare.

Cost us a lot of market share.

I'm a Pacific Islander.

Every English Christmas is a fing nightmare.

What were they going to do?

Go out and play?

Well, according to the Times, a lot of families are not going to be able to have a turkey for Christmas Day, which is a big relief to people who think turkey is a boring food with little to recommend it.

And also that we've been warned that presence under the tree may not meet expectations.

But to be fair, they never do.

How can any gift unwrapped match the unparalleled possibilities of a wrapped gift?

Also, it's a great excuse.

Supply chain issues is a great excuse for parents who give dud gifts.

Sorry, Santa's European and couldn't get a visa to get into the country.

So here's your box of splinters.

I mean, it does turn out that

it's a complex web of interconnected industries,

and it's necessary to mean that, you know,

when I want a Donica Bab delivered direct into my mouth in the comfort of my own living room at 3 a.m.,

it should only take three taps on my phone to make it happen.

And that's just a basic human right.

But you don't appreciate everything that is needed to

make that possible.

And particularly here in Britain.

Chris,

have you spent much of the week queuing up for Peter?

I mean, I know you have various other forms of transport, notably you know swimming cycling and running in quick succession

but you know have you spent have you been panic queuing this week I've done the full Christmas shop right

including my daughter's presents my wife's present which is the same thing because I just thought I'd like you know scale it down a bit and

and I've I've ordered all of the food.

Now, I guess the one worry I have is that it might have gone off by December, but that's a risk I'm prepared to take.

Well, according to The Grocer magazine, which is a magazine I've just discovered exists and now want to see the sexy centerfold of, the big producers of turkeys have reduced the number of birds they're rearing by about 20%,

not because there aren't enough anything, but because they fear because of Brexit they won't be able to find seasonal workers to pluck and pack and deliver the birds in December.

And Paul Kelly of Kelly Bronze fame pointed out: a turkey after Christmas Day is worth nothing.

It depreciates more than a car.

But yeah, all over the place, the workers who keep these global supply chains moving are putting their hands up to suggest that it's all going to come down, crashing down around our ears.

A lot of these workers seem to be in the tricky situation

where they've been told to get out

because they were taking everyone's jobs.

Yes.

And now they're being asked to come back in.

So maybe everyone in England could just gift each other on theme

a little, just a blank piece of paper with the words consequence, and just have

a new Christmas tradition of hubris

every December.

The words consequence and hubris are not in any dictionary in this country.

That is a new government law, actually.

This just came out last week to remove those words from the dictionary.

This was after Boris Johnson was seen physically tearing all the pages out from the dictionary for words beginning R-E-S-P

and just to be on the safe side also tearing out any pages that had a word ending in onsability, onsable or echt as well.

And Boris Johnson really has been, you know, as always, leading from the disused fridge out the back of his house on this.

I mean, it's largely a ceremonial role these days being Prime Minister.

But

he's given a couple of extraordinary interviews.

Not only the petrol crisis, and just to give you a quick update on the petrol crisis and the panic that it has instilled in this country,

people have been seen squirting unleaded petrol directly down their throats, then running home and vomiting it into the waiting mouths of their young.

A life-size cardboard cutout of the action movie style Vin Diesel was stolen from outside of Multiplex in Tunbridge Wells.

And heartbroken fuel fans have been desperately begging for service station staff where there's no fuel left to just describe the smell of petrol to them.

Whilst weeping, I miss it so much.

One of the contestants on the Great British Bake-Off this week made a cake in the shape of a petrol pump and said, I hope it's a magic cake, or I'll never be able to get home.

I mean, we are really at breaking points.

In fact, one person I'm just reading about was seen shoving dead plant matter and algae into their petrol tanks while screaming, Can you please turn into fuel in less than a million years, or I'm going to miss my Macrame lesson?

We are at breaking point as a nation.

On the bright side, the gambling industry is going well.

People are laying odds on the next thing, which is going to be shortaged.

Yeah, short the shortages.

It's a very very

lucrative market.

But Boris Johnson has told us that this and also the pig culture model

where

hundreds of thousands thousands of British pigs are unable to be executed for sausages as they were destined to be because of a shortage of

workers.

And Johnson told us that the petrol crisis and the and the pig culsion module are essentially part of a necessary period of readjustment after Brexit.

Now,

do any of the rest of you remember that from the sides of the buses?

The promises of hundreds of thousands of unkilled pigs

roaming the country.

I mean, I remember the sort of 350 million quid a week for the NHS and the big posters of people coming over here to do our jobs for us.

But I don't remember the unsausaged pigs posters, and I feel let down.

I think it's because you weren't watching for the whole amount of time, Andy.

There was the bus, and then behind the bus, there was a little minivan with a pig just kind of tapping a watch.

Well, he can't.

This is the problem.

Boris Johnson can't sort of understand the mind of the everyman.

He sort of tried to deflect questions about the pig problem, which is all these hundreds of thousands of pigs having to be massacred and disposed of because they can't be eaten by people by saying, well, it's not like they weren't going to be slaughtered anyway.

But of course,

he doesn't understand that, you know, your average everyman might not enjoy the idea of wasting, you know, pig lives or perfectly good food because he comes comes from a milieu in which a hobby of theirs is going together to spit wine on the floor.

Like, that's

what a wine tasting is.

They just spit wine everywhere.

He also suggested that the reason that the petrol shortage is so bad is because they don't have enough truck drivers, and that's because more women haven't been attracted to the job, that the truck industry isn't welcoming enough to women,

which I just think is top-notch deflection.

He's like, women don't want to piss in bushes, and that's why you don't have petrol.

Oh, I knew it was women's fault.

It always is.

Always is.

I think, to be fair to Boris Johnson, this is neither the most embarrassing or stressful moment for the Tories involving a pig.

Also, I want to say this directly to Boris Johnson.

I will piss in a bush.

I have no problems.

That is not the issue here.

One of the issues with the pig situation is a lack of British youngsters who are keen to make a living slaughtering animals for whatever reason, goddamn snowflakes.

I mean, when my generation was their age, we weren't even allowed out of the house in the morning until we'd slain a cow, a pig, a sheep, and a bucket of chicken in the mini abattoirs all the homes had in those days.

But the modern generation aren't as tough as the lights of mine.

But the problem is that when you're young, if you walk around going, yo, man, I just want to kill some pigs, then immediately will the pots stop,

search you,

get a little mark next to your name

i do think it's not we're not very far away from the government claiming longer happier lives for british piggies as a benefit of brexit i think that is within the next week keep keep an eye on the news um

yeah i mean i was worried to be honest about the pigs breakfast of pigs not being made into things you can eat for breakfast but on the plus side they do become kosher if they're not eaten so there's that uh to cling to and it's uh a sign of us escaping the tyranny of brussels that forced forced i tell you all all of Britain's industries to hire the cheapest available labour.

Is it now known as a Brexit full English then?

If it's just a full English without bacon?

Full English with just a live overweight pig on the plate.

So

just a flavor of the colours.

You can get in Melbourne.

A reconstructed sausage.

It's very farm to table.

Extremely.

I mean, in terms of the global supply chain, in America, container ships stuck in a major clogging off the coast of the USA.

Toys, clothing, furniture, basic common sense, justice and facts all running in dangerously short supply once again in the USA.

There are power cuts in China, leading to concerns that Chinese factories might not be able to make all the shit we need to keep our economies going.

They might have to switch to more environmentally friendly forms of dissent suppression and ethnic cleansing, which could exacerbate the power crisis.

Dried noodles in Russia are in short supply.

Could this be what finally brings Vladimir Putin down?

No.

And in Britain, this shortage of lorry drivers, which has led to a shortage of fuel at service stations, as we talked about, which has led to a shortage of calm equanimity in queues at service station, people have been drawing knives on each other.

There have been fist fights over fuel, and it's led to a classic shortage of leadership from the government as well.

And there might even, just reading today, be problems supplying English cricketers to Australia for their quadrennial thrashing, which shows how deep the supply chain issues go.

It didn't really affect me, the fuel crisis.

I've got a very British car indeed, which is fueled by the correct.

Surely, Andy, the bigger issue is what England's supply of South African cricketers.

Well, that has actually dried up quite alarmingly, which is reflected in England's recent results, to be honest.

But the fuel crisis didn't affect me.

I have a very British car indeed, which is fuelled by a burning sense of pride in our role in the Industrial Revolution.

The problem, Andy, is all these networks are breaking down.

People don't trust experts anymore.

They also don't trust workers, or business owners, or landlords, or tenants, or politicians, or institutional power, or teachers, or teens, or the everyman who's probably an anti-vaxxer, or the privileged middle-class head, or the police who are probably a rapist.

And it turns out that the whole of society up until now has rested on a fragile web of trust and accountability in systems that, although flawed, more or less worked.

And now the fire hose of the information age has just forcibly sprayed out of the garage roof corner of modern life, we're suddenly realising that that particular spider of trust was the one bringing us luck by keeping away the flies of Christmas nightmare.

Right.

I mean, that's an interesting way of putting it, and certainly not the way that the government have been portraying it, certainly not in those terms.

Anyway, Ali, personally, I think it was all kind of inevitable the moment that we left

the caves we used to live in 30,000 years ago and started wanting to move around.

It's been downhill ever since.

I mean, arguably since

we moved out of the sea that we lived in so happily until half a billion years ago, until some overcurious fish thought, I wonder what's over there.

And

that's what I'd blame more than Brexit.

I do feel bad for the British because we stopped you guys,

stopped allowing you guys to colonise, and it's all just fallen apart, hasn't it?

Well, I don't think you stopped us.

I think

we chose to let the world go its own way.

That's often how a breakup works.

It was a mentoring scheme, James.

It's been very badly represented by historians.

It is interesting that the

depending on, I used to live in Brixton before the apocalypse.

And if there was a knife at the petrol station, that was a community problem.

But now,

like Windsor, when there's a knife at the petrol station, that's a government problem.

Robots news now, and well, it's now official.

Humanity is going to be overtaken by robot life within probably a decade or two.

There's no escaping it now.

The robots are on their way.

Amazon have proudly announced that they believe that in five to ten years time every home will have at least one robot as part of everyday life to which there are two responses.

One, f ⁇ off!

Stop trying to strip all the humanity out of humanity.

And two, only one robot?

Why only one robot?

We need more, not just in the home, we need it in all top-level politics.

Only when it's completely robotized will we be able to sleep comfortably in our beds at night without waking up in a cold sweat screaming, who's Prime Minister?

I'm sorry, granddad.

I'm so sorry.

How excited are you both by the prospect of an Amazon robot being part of every single family in the known universe within 10 years?

First of all, hats off to Amazon because they've looked at a global pandemic and thought, how could we raise the stakes?

And

they've introduced a robot which, again, really just screams Jeff Bezos.

They think it's cute.

It's the creepiest damn thing.

They've called it Alexa on Wheels.

Like that isn't a Hollywood pitch right now for a horror series.

And I think at some point we have to understand that if you put a robot in every house in the world, we're the the pets of the robot.

A wealthy friend of mine has just offered me her $2,000 robot crib, which senses your baby's cries and rocks it with increasing velocity until the baby either shoots into space or accepts the robot as its proxy mother and they begin to plot against you.

I did say yes, because I didn't have a crib, and you don't have to plug it in.

So it can just be a normal, overpriced place to put your baby.

And if it can plug itself in,

all the best of luck to it.

We're done done for anyway.

Yeah, I didn't have a crib.

But this is also an inheritance thing.

Apparently, when we were born as twins, dad was like, Don't we need a crib?

And mum said, we can just pull out a drawer and put a towel in it.

Not, oh, God, we need a robot to go down that route.

I'm sort of terrified by the prospect of this robot crib, but it's sitting in my study staring at me.

I mean, it's going to, I reckon it's going to prove prove too tempting at some point just to see

swears by it or prays to it.

I can't tell which.

I just don't know any bit of literature where a robot has raised a child that's worked out well.

Well, Amazon has suggested that it's not just for children.

It's a $999

robot, which is £740.

It could be a help to the elderly, though, of course, not the poor elderly.

No, true.

Robot assistance.

No, but that's essentially robotising grandchildren now.

So they're not going to leave human grandchildren.

Just

have a robot to tell you alarming stories about the past.

They say that the robot will be able to patrol your home and alert you if it detects, quotes, something unusual.

Now,

that is a concerningly vague term for me, because unusual, I mean, that could range from a servant volleyer in modern professional tennis that's pretty unusual it could be hearing a politician give a direct factual answer to a question in an interview it could be former BBC sports presenter Desmond Lynham dressed as a pumpkin or it could be a giant gloop of sentient alien plasma eating all the pastrami from your fridge I mean those I mean something unusual is that's that's too vague isn't it that is too vague a thing to trust a robot with

yes absolutely it's all well and good until you have to watch at a distance through your phone app while your robot vaporizes a squirrel.

I'm not keen on they're trying they keep trying to humanise this robot, which I think is the wrong track to go down.

You want the robot to be you want to be sure that the robot is a robot.

This robot does beatboxing, uh but the definition of beatboxing is where you make

electronic or sort of percussive noises with your mouth.

The robot doesn't have a mouth, it's just being a drum.

So it's not beatboxing.

It's not even a drum, it's just a speaker.

Just taking all the romance out of beatboxing.

I don't think that's the right way to go.

You know how you're always scared that someone's going to discover what you've been looking at online.

I just feel like having an entity in the house that already knows before you've got a chance to delete it is just a socially bad idea, especially if that entity has access to your bank account.

I just, it's all big red flags jumping up.

The robot revolution is changing the workplace as well.

And, you know, don't be complacent, buglers.

You might think it's going to be okay for your job, but progress is progress.

And if you are not worried, you should be, just ask a horse.

You know, when the motorbike was invented, they probably thought, yeah, right, no legs and no tail.

Good luck with that.

You too will want to be donkey.

But look at it now.

And roboteirs in Scotland have been working on robot solutions to medical problems.

And they've trained a robot to be, any guesses, anyone?

A surgeon maybe?

An anaesthetist?

A midwife, perhaps?

A GP that can fire lasers into the ceiling to scare off time wasters who've got a hurty knee?

No.

They have trained a robot to be a squash coach.

Yes.

A robot squash coach has been developed.

in Scotland.

Memo to science.

Solve World Hunger First.

Improve Squash Coaching Methods Second.

I mean, is this

progress for humanity to

have the game of squash, which is a sport of incredible craft, skill, athleticism, and speed, and squeakiness of shoe?

To have that coached by robots rather than is this what we need at the moment as a species?

Yes, absolutely.

We need robots to do all the dirty, boring jobs that real people don't want to do and squash right down there at the bottom of the heap.

I disagree.

I disagree, Alice.

I think there's a lot of former actors and out-of-work stand-up comics who have managed to charm their way into pretending to be a squash coach.

These robots are coming over here, taking our jobs.

I mean,

it's a sport that's been dominated by Egypt in recent years.

So, Alice, I imagine Egypt will be very cross with you for your adverse comments about squash.

Well, to be fair, they are naturally suited to squash.

The Egyptian phenotype is suited because they're always in three-quarter profile, and that is the best way to approach a squash ball.

They have seven men and six women in the current world top tens, and no sport has been this dominated by Egypt since they were absolutely bossing the professional least space-efficient means of burial circuit back in the day.

They've also developed robots to play football, as in uh proper football, not any of the American or Australian uh versions.

Can you see robot rugby taking off, James?

I mean, y you know, do the way I mean, England have been trying to impose this on the world for many decades in the way they play the game, but still using actual physical humans.

But do you see robot rugby as an improvement?

No, no,

I think if there's a top five things we should not teach the robots, tackling is definitely

up there.

Don't teach them to chase, don't teach them to tackle.

That's Terminator 101.

I would love to see a human try to explain the inexplicable homoeroticism of a scrum to a robot.

It's just a transformer combiner, isn't it?

That's all it is.

I mean, if we want to break the robots, we just show them footage of Aussie rules and get them to try and understand that.

Air travel news now.

And Alice, you are the Bugle's air travel correspondent, having jetted from hemisphere to hemisphere so many times

until the last 18 months or so.

Bring us up to date with what is potentially one of the most exciting developments in the history of air travel.

Well, this is a massive innovation, Andy, a massive innovation in the air.

A budget Ukrainian airline has allowed its air hostesses

to not wear high heels.

in the sky.

They've revamped their uniforms to great controversy.

Some people are are very upset by this, some people are very happy about it.

Move over suffragettes.

Contraceptive pills.

Hashtag MeToo.

This is a much more significant moment in feminist history.

The airline is called Sky Up, and the flight attendants will be allowed to wear trainers in the sky.

One of the flight attendants said when asked to comment that 12 hours in heels is extremely painful, following up with a long noise in Ukrainian that translates to f ⁇ ing obviously everyone wants to take their shoes off on a long flight.

You think we want to bring you your tiny bottles of overpriced liquor in foot knives?

I love teetering about on my tibby toes, thousands of feet in the air, you f heads.

Anyway,

I just find this story so funny because it seems so incredibly overdue.

The idea that women should be wearing heels in the sky

literally just feels like an outdated leftover piece of garbage.

But James, do you have other opinions?

Do you like your women slightly taller than they should be?

I just have to pause.

I almost walked myself into a family argument on a joke there about my Pacific Island cousins.

But let me tell you, where does it end?

That's my only concern, Alice.

You know, where does it end?

If we start letting air hostesses wear sneakers, then soon they're just going to be only wearing the skirt and the blazer for the check-in and then changing into track pants.

They'll be pushing the cart up in comfy socks, probably have one of those neck pillow things around as well for when they sit down.

I mean, if we make these people comfortable, then they're going to start being happy.

And no one wants a happy flight attendant on an 18-hour flight.

Well, this is a domino situation because a number of airlines are giving up traditional uniform requirements.

Virgin Atlantic has allowed their flight attendants to not wear makeup.

Japan Airline has allowed their flight attendants to wear trousers instead of pencil skirts if they ever want to take a step longer than half a foot.

And Norwegian Air has allowed flat shoes as well.

So it's how will you know?

I think this is the real question.

How will you know in the air

who's the airline host and who's just the idiot in Tracky Dax sitting next to you?

It's because the airline host is the only one who's obliged to smile.

That's

but I mean until

air hosts have full freedom of footwear, we won't live in a truly equal planet.

Until we have

the flight attendants wearing welly boots or pointy-toed medieval Poulanes or clown shoes or high-toed shoes rather than high-heeled ones.

That's just clearly another form of prejudice.

We won't have a fair planet.

The media reaction has been interesting

to this latest dismantling of patriarchal tradition.

Brimstone Florkett and the Daily Telegrapple said this is feminism gone mad.

Whatever next, will we allow them to doorbar faces with masonry paint instead of serving as a gin and tonic?

Darnell Ramahorn from the weekly bleats, this is bad for passengers.

Flight attendants will be shorter without heels and therefore less able to see down the aisle.

When I want another whiskey, will the airlines provide them with periscopes?

Don't hold your breath.

And Garforth Snelly from anachronicity.com, the only paper-based website on the internet, said, whatever next, will male flight attendants be forced to wear bras?

Why can't we let men be men and women be what men think women should be?

So So

strong media reaction to it.

Elsewhere in

the progress of feminism news, Alice, a big story in the world of chess, Fidei, the chess governing body,

has

provoked anger amongst many chess players by a sponsorship deal with a company that specialises in breast enlargement surgery.

I mean, chess at its heart is a feminist game.

A useless man depends on a high-skilled, high-achieving woman.

But this doesn't seem to be the kind of sponsorship deal that uh a game stroke sport looking to progress in the twenty-first century should be signing, does it?

Well is it a feminist game, Andy, or is it a a game where the queen multitasks zips all around the board and then the plodding king gets credit for being the vital piece, moving one square at a time while she can run the whole board in one go?

If they're married, she is twenty years younger than him and he still tells her to get Botox.

That is the situation that we're in.

Well I don't know.

If they didn't want chess to make them think about boobs, they shouldn't have made the bishops' heads look like little nipples.

We all know that checkmate has always been short for check out those tits, mate.

Of course, we all know that.

We are in the middle of party conference season here in the UK.

We will have a full update on it next week.

We have the Labour Conference last week.

Just received the final confirmed score.

Labour Party nil, the Labour Party nil.

It's going to a replay yet again between those two age-old foes.

And struggling for party unity.

So I mean, for most of the Labour Party, Unit E is the one between Unit D and Unit F at the storage depot where they dump the boxes and boxes of unusable.

Congratulations, you won an election balloons.

This week we have the Conservative Party Conference.

We will have full updates on exactly how they've tried to spin all the shit that's currently going on.

Right, I think we need need to wrap up because we've done an hour.

Unless there's anything else you desperately wanted to get out, great.

I mean,

well,

yeah, I probably shouldn't use those words.

We're just going to hope that these have all been Braxton Hickses throughout the last hour or so.

I think they are.

Well, too, I mean,

we're happy to live stream it if you want, Alice.

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

will be the last bugle that Alice

will do before having a baby on the outside of her rather than

the inside.

Good luck.

I would say enjoy it.

I don't know if that's

the right thing to say at this.

I mean, long term, obviously, is.

Short term, I don't know.

Take a scrabble.

I'm interested to see how it goes, Andy.

People keep asking me, very nice buglers keep asking me for a PO box to send gifts.

I don't want your stupid gifts.

But

once I get a secretary to help me get organised enough to hire a secretary who's brave enough to fire the original secretary, I'll get that secretary to sort out a P.O.

box for me.

Until then, you can just send support or threats in the form of subscribing to my Patreon or my Twitter or finding a donation button somewhere and just giving money to anyone, really, that'd make me happy.

Just be nice.

Be nice to each other and create a world that I can birth my child into.

That is hopelessly naive, but it's a lovely sentiment.

James,

anything to alert our listeners to?

I would offer to let them send me gifts, but I'm currently podcasting from my wife's childhood bedroom, and I just think I've already put enough pressure on my in-laws without random gifts from podcast fans showing up in the mail, I think.

So I do have a mental health podcast, which it seems might be good for some people at this point.

And season four has just come out

of that, which involves eating chicken in the shower and talking about how insane the world is, which I just recommend for people anyway, whether they listen to the podcast or not.

That concludes this week's Bugle.

We will continue with the second half millennium of Bugle shows next week.

In the meantime, here are some lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers.

If you want to join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to make a recurring or one-off contribution to help keep the show going for the next 49,500 episodes, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Timothy Chilvers is never that fussed by the number of dead insects on the windscreens of cars.

I think it's testament to the arrogance of these quite literally spineless blowhards, expounds Timothy.

They think they're tough and cool because of their compound eyes or very fastly flapping wings or exoskeletons or whatever, and that they can take on a car.

Well get this, splattease of the roads.

Know your level.

I'll take the car plus human driver every time.

Unless you get inside a car while it's being driven of course, in which case it's more like 50-50, concedes Timothy.

Greg Lazarev is not convinced that rainforests are particularly well designed, given how important we are told they are for the planet.

It seems a bit silly to pile all your resources into concentrated distinct areas, says Greg, leaving them vulnerable to mass destruction.

Surely it would be better if everybody in the world had maybe two or three trees to themselves, rather than outsourcing it to a few key areas of billions of trees of rainforest around the world.

It might make us take a bit more responsibility, as well as giving us the chance to find an exciting new undiscovered species of something in our tree.

Charlie Vickery thinks that people make too much fuss about Leonardo da Vinci designing a helicopter.

Look, the guy had some funky ideas, I get that, says Charlie.

But what was the point of a chopper in 1480s Italy?

There weren't any helipads for a start, so where would he have flown to and from?

And what if his helicopter designs were as crap as his seating plans at team building dinners out?

I mean seriously, 13 dudes all on the same side of the table.

Look, I get that the 13 ladies didn't show up for whatever reason, but even so, you go boy girl, boy, girl, don't you?

It's absolutely basic stuff, complains Charlie.

André Amaré once bought an old oil lamp at an antique shop and excitedly took it home in the hope and indeed expectation that it would contain a magic genie that would grant him some wishes.

On rubbing the lamp, a genie did indeed emerge, but was quite rude, claimed he couldn't do anything more ambitious than a couple of free meals at the local kebab shop, and swore at Andre's next-door neighbours when they knocked on the door, asking if the genie could help find their missing cat.

Andre asked the genie to go back inside his lamp and then put it in the metal recycling.

By contrast, Helena Thomas had a delightfully polite genie emerge from an old lamp she found at a charity shop.

Unfortunately, the genie, for all its conversational charm and impeccable diction, confessed to being, quotes, really out of form these days after losing confidence when an attempt to summon a brand new Lamborghini resulted in a skimpy sheepskin swimming costume, whilst another wish for a never-ending milkshake resulted in a traumatised cow and a small earthquake.

And finally, someone who goes by the name of Ingvet J can relate to the experience of a non-functioning genie having having had the misfortune to summon one who tearfully admitted to being on their first job and only being a genie after themselves accidentally wishing to swap places with their own genie, having meant to ask to swap places with Hugh Grant but not clearly enunciating the first H of Hugh.

The rookie genie was thus unable to successfully grant any of Ingvi's wishes, the contents of which we are not liberty to divulge, suffice it to say that someone really wants a fire-breathing dog, and someone's dog is now terrified of candles.

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.