Bonus Bugle: Gargling with Nish and Josh

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, this is producer Chris's daughter Mabel.

I am great.

You are all okay, maybe six out of ten.

Andy has gone on holiday.

Daddy is doing press-ups at the garden whilst crying.

So it's up to me to put something out.

I don't know how to do this so here's the latest episode of The Gargle.

Alice Fraser is the host and she is joined by Josh Gondelman and Nish Kima.

Solid buglers.

What about that Donald Trump?

I don't think he washes his hands after doing a number two.

Here's the show.

This is a podcast from The Bugle.

Hello, I'm Alice Fraser and I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, I've watched sea beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhuizer Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time unless you're listening to The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for Visual World.

Welcome to the show.

Fresh, fancy, and full of opinions, our guest fashion editor this week is Nish Kumar.

Welcome.

Good to be here.

Remember, fashion is for everyone.

And our guest science, technology, and Dunkin' Donuts editor is Josh Gongerman.

Welcome Welcome back.

My three passions and I would say equally.

Welcome to the magazine gentlemen.

Before we dive in let's have a look at the front cover.

The front cover this week is Simone Biles posing provocatively in a white track suit going oh now you give a f about gymnastics Gary.

The sub-headline is is it time for a mental health Olympics?

Other words on the cover include culture section, jazz, is it and why not?

And top tips to the new body confidence.

Eight of them are surgical intervention, and the other two are just get over it.

Plus, Jesus and his homeopathic fish, how to feed a host with just a drop of fish sauce diluted in half a glass of water.

The satirical cartoon today is a movie poster of a J-Lo and Ben Affleck gritty reboot.

J-Lo and Ben Affleck, of course, known as Blopez.

In this gritty reboot, she's weaponized and rebuilt her iconic butt after burning it down for the insurance money when she was on the run from the mafia, and he's actually the grim Batman man from the DC movies, but one who isn't Bruce Wayne by day.

They're making out together on a yacht with a surprisingly visible amount of tongue, and it causes a rift in the space-time continuum that's making the robot who played Jaws in the movie Jaws achieve sentience and become an existential philosophy professor at Penn State.

It's a lot to carry for a one-panel satirical cartoon, but the artist has really carried it off.

I'm so worried that if they break up, Ben Affleck will get the worst tattoo in human history.

I think every day about what that tattoo would be, and the two that I've come up with are like:

it's like the green monster at Fenway Park, full chest and stomach piece.

The green monster at Fenway Park, and like the Yankees are storming it, and the Red Sox are pouring boiling Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee down upon them.

And then the other version is it's the Last Supper, right?

The famous The Last Supper, but with the dropkick Murphy's instead of Jesus and the Apostles.

I feel like the most telling thing about cultural pressures on appearance but even for Hollywood actors is the fact that she hasn't aged and he has I do think though if you I feel like since they've gotten back together he's de-aged like nine years like in the past month if you look at him I 100% agree there is some sort of aura around Jennifer Lopez yeah like if you put a baby near Jennifer Lopez it devolves back into sperm and an egg.

Yeah.

There's some kind of magic around that woman.

It's the curious case of Bennifer Button.

Let's dive into the magazine.

Our first section is our human brain section.

Now, this story: a man in Japan has stroked himself while stroking himself in the worst Olympic event nobody ever asked for.

This 51-year-old man is being reported as having masturbated himself into a stroke.

Josh Gonelman, have you been following this story?

I have been following this story.

This man

was masturbating around three times a day, and no judgment here, but who has the time?

And he had a stroke.

It's almost this like a very frequently fatal condition, and he survived.

And the French call the moment after an orgasm le petit mo, right?

The small death.

And this guy almost got the whole thing, which is

he's Japanese, but spiritually very French.

in many ways every orgasm is just the tip of death

he's described

in in the news reports as being an unnamed right-handed man and imagine how much masturbating you have to do for someone to look at you and go I don't know that your name but I'm sure you're right-handed that thing is enormous it looks like a giant foam finger you'd get at a basketball game well the thing about this is that he masturbated frequently enough he masturbated several times a day.

It is entirely possible that the stroke just happened, and when he went into emergency, he didn't need to mention the masturbation.

I'll go this far.

I think the masturbation might have been what shook it loose, the blood clot.

I think you could have saved his life.

He's just used to like expelling things.

I think his body was just in top flow form of all fluids.

I have to say, I had a very different reaction to the story to both of you because my reaction was, oh, so I guess we can't do anything anymore.

Don't have too much alcohol, it's not good for you.

Don't have too much coffee, don't have too much chocolate.

And now it's like the one pleasure I thought we had left as human beings has been compromised.

Is it going to turn out looking at pictures of Brianna and Channing Tatum gives you diabetes?

This is what happens when you expose yourself to the woke left.

Part of your brain watches you masturbate and goes, This is toxic masculinity.

I'm cutting it short.

I think, especially given the last sort of 18 months that we've all endured, I feel like part of the, when we all went into lockdown initially, the first thing they should have done is said, right, first of all, you've got to stay two meters apart from people, wash your hands, wear masks, and also, if you go to town in yourself three times a day, your brain might explode.

Because surely that has been one of the key health risks of the pandemic.

I do think you're right that globally, we've been in kind of a golden age of masturbation.

Right?

A real renaissance.

This really has been.

You know, when you study historic periods, you think, why is this particular time?

Why this particular place?

You just have to look at the cocktail of circumstances.

Forced to stay indoors and the proliferation of high-speed internet.

That is two ingredients for vintage, a vintage masturbatory epoch.

Absolutely.

I think that's what it's going to be known as in the future history books more than the pandemic.

Remember at the beginning of like early 2020, like March, April, when people are like, there's going to be so many pandemic babies.

But I think what we're really going to find is it's going to be like somehow sock companies became incredibly profitable.

And like, just dozens of new lotions were invented.

Sex toy companies have experienced that

their share value has gone through the roof.

Through the roof.

People who make dildos are the new disaster capitalists.

It does plug a hole in a dike.

The little Dutch boy.

In other brains exploding news on Twitter, it is often tempting to ask, what, do you have rocks for brains?

But it looks like that might be offensive to people whose heads exploded during the extreme heat event known as Pompeii getting volcanoed.

Nish Kumar, you love a volcano.

Have you been following this story?

Oh, listen.

I've been following this story very closely.

I love a volcano.

I love an exploded brain.

The one thing that I would say from this story is that I've never really understood why the phrase mind-blowing was ever meant to be a compliment.

Because having your mind blown apart, it sounds like one of the worst possible it's like having a dinner and going boy this is a real anus demolisher

and it's not a good idea that does it it's just heat

yeah it wasn't like someone dropped a real truth bomb on this guy it was nature dropped a real actual bomb on this dude

Yeah, so this is what has happened with a body from Pompeii.

They found a couple of bodies that have basically vitrified brains, which is a glassy rock-turned brains.

And they posit that the heat made these brains explode and turn into glass.

Josh, have you ever had an exploded glass brain?

I've felt like it for months.

I like, I feel like lately, when I've tried to think, I've had tried to have new ideas.

I'm like, probably just a big hunk of glass up there, just some kind of paperweight or something.

The brain was petrified at 950 degrees because of the proximity to a active volcanic eruption.

So, I don't know much about this person, but I do know they didn't have the smartest brain if they were just standing next to an active volcano.

But I will say, I did have a terrified reaction to this because, like, if organic matter, if a human brain can be discovered and have the kind of like acids within it analyzed 2,000 years after death, I am so scared about who finds my laptop hard drive after I die and when.

Because that thing is way sturdier than my head.

I think it's well past time for us to reintroduce like getting cremated with all of your valuables,

including particularly your most recent five laptops.

Like you can't take it with you, refers to your wealth, but it should not refer to your browser history.

You should be able to take that to the grave, literally.

Surely this is the new business idea.

like really destroying your laptop like there's no chance that anybody's going to be able to find your internet history yeah we'll turn the ashes of your beloved ex-spouse into a diamond and then use that diamond to scratch the shit out of the motherboard and then put it in a cannon shoot that cannon into the cloud

but then whatever whatever server hosts the cloud and just explode that well this is the other thing that there's all these uh projects underway to sort of recreate people's

people's conversations through AI after death.

It's like, which conversations are you including?

Are you feeding into this AI?

Because you might end up having some surprisingly suggestive chats with your ex-husband.

Or just petty ones.

I don't want like my loved ones being like, I miss Josh so bad.

And then

they bring me back and be like,

how are you?

Papa.

And I'm just like, can you believe the fing line at this brunch place?

It's eggs.

In other things that have glitched out my human brain news, Philip Morris, the moustache-twirling henchthug superdouches of the cigarette industry, have decided to move into the wellness space.

Josh Connelman, you live in New York, so I assume you're surrounded by people artistically smoking cigarettes at all times.

Have you followed this story?

Yes.

Well, as you know, my apartment is a large leather jacket, and

people frequently stop to smoke outside it because the building is shaped like the Ramones.

And it's, I just think that this is like,

it's infuriating to a degree that turns my brain to glass.

Like,

I mean, obviously they've been trying to diversify.

It feels like tobacco is kind of, it's like not in vogue.

And they've been trying to get into this kind of health space.

They're now

trying to buy an inhaler producing company called Vectora.

And they were working on this, but for years, science hadn't gotten far enough for Philip Morris to enter this because they hadn't invented balls big enough for a tobacco company to buy an inhaler maker.

It is a bit like Coca-Cola owning Coca-Cola and also Mount Franklin Water.

You just

feel a little bit surrounded on all sides.

Yeah.

If you appoint Jack the Ripper to be the chief of police, then you should not be surprised if the number of murder investigations drops spectacularly.

If one day it turns out McDonald's veggie burgers were all full of cow, I don't think anyone is going to be surprised.

Equally, if you start letting Philip Morris make inhalers, I think you better get ready for some smoking 12-year-olds.

And I do not want that cut and taken out of context, okay?

I mean, on one hand, who knows what you need in an inhaler better than the people that had and hid the data about how dangerous smoking is for decades.

So they do have the inside track on what people need in an inhaler.

Yeah, they've just held off telling us how bad the disease was for so long because they were looking for a cure the whole time.

Honestly, that's kind of sweet.

It's like the husband who comes home and goes, darling, I've decided to stop cheating on you.

Yeah.

You're like, thanks, Philip.

Apparently, the company is aiming to earn at least $1 billion in revenues by 2025 from its beyond nicotine products,

which, I mean, I don't even know what that means.

But apparently, one of them is respiratory drug delivery, and the other one just says self-care wellness.

And I don't know what that means, but I assume it's the practice that resulted in a man in Tokyo having a stroke.

Well, Beyond Nicotine is actually fully vegetarian nicotine, so that's exciting.

Just clouds of broccoli smoke from your EC.

They have a Beyond Nicotine whopper, which is...

It doesn't taste great, but I can't stop eating them.

I mean, into the wellness space, they already have, you know, cigarettes and vapes and patches.

I've just been waiting for a nicotine oil burner.

Aromatherapy.

What's so upsetting is the best wellness product they could offer is just no cigarettes.

Like, if they just stopped making cigarettes, they would be so good for health and wellness.

No cigarettes, plant the odd tree.

That's it.

Yeah, there you go.

That's your wellness campaign.

Yeah, Philip Morris, no tobacco, and some occasional other plants corporation would be better for public health than whatever they're doing now.

Because it's not like they're inventing an inhaler, they're just acquiring a company that I.

Well, this has been fun, but if you want to hear the rest of it, follow the gargle wherever you do that kind of thing now.

A link is possibly in the show notes.

What's the show notes?

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.