Sausage Pricks (4197)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4197 of the Bugle.

I am Andy Zoltzmann.

I'm in the shed.

It is the 9th of June, and I'm joined from later on today in different places in the world, firstly, by very nearly the end of the day, as we record in Australia, Alice Fraser.

Hello, Andy.

How are you, buglers?

I think you meant to just say hello, buglers.

No, no, you can say, how are you?

And I can respond on, I have power of attorney to respond on their behalf, and they all say they are very well indeed, Alice.

Well, I'm glad that you've responded for them because otherwise that thing happens that I find incredibly confronting and confusing, which is where somebody listens to one of any one of my many hundreds of podcasts in the past and then replies to me on Twitter or email as though I were having the conversation with them now.

It's like the worst form of time travel.

And there are so many bad forms of time travel.

In particular, just going forwards at the required rate until you get old and decrepit.

That's a very bad form of time travel.

Also joining us from in between Australia and the UK in temporal terms, it's Anuvab Powell.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Alice.

Well,

as you can see, I'm in a closet.

In my grandmother's closet here in Calcutta.

That's that.

There we have.

I mean,

the Bugle podcast table is expanding.

I think in my grandmother's closet could be a show that will absolutely take over the podcasting universe.

I think it's necessary because it seems like this is a podcast that reaches out.

I figured it's time to reach in to get further and further deeper.

But the quick news from here is that the subcontinent has been hit by its first set of monsoon rains.

So if you remember the last time we chatted, we couldn't go out of our house because of COVID.

And now COVID is clearing up, but we can't go out because the roads have essentially turned to mud.

So as a nation, we've decided to stay indoors into perpetuity, regardless of what happens in the outside world.

So I figured my grandmother's closet is a good enough place.

I mean, that's a good idea.

If nothing else, COVID has given us all the opportunity to feel like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, just indoors for the rest of eternity, distanced from anyone else by a significant amount of

psychological pyramiding.

With all of your organs in jars.

The best place for them.

We are are recording on the 9th of June.

The 10th of June is World Ballpoint Pen Day.

So to mark World Ballpoint Pen Day,

the script for this episode has been scrawled illegibly in

very poor handering.

So I hope you still enjoyed the episode.

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

A Euros 2020 preview.

The Euro 2020 Football Championship, postponed from last year, I forget why, is starting this weekend and we take you through some of the stars to watch, including time wasting, tactical negativity, players pretending to be injured, players kicking other players, then pretending that hasn't injured them, racist fans, racist fans claiming they're not racist, but then admitting they are racist, flobbing, could the Euro's record of an 8.4 metre plob by Germany's Hans-Gieter Schlauchauser in 1968 be beaten, and TV pundits saying he's got to do better there.

All things to look out for over the next month of footballing excitement.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week, the world was given a chilling peek behind the wireless curtain of future chaos on Tuesday when a global internet outage, I never thought I'd say this, closed some websites for an hour.

It was truly harrowing for the planet's greatest species, the human race, with the loss of such sites as the Guardian website, Amazon, Reddit, and social media sites such as Twerp, Clank, Garbage, that's G-A-R-B-I-J, Twaddler, and Ephemera, where people post three-second videos of themselves suffering existential angst.

Humanity was brought to its quivering knees, and several major religions declared a full Armageddon during the outage.

The UK government website went down, which led to a 58-minute golden age of joy, hope, and productivity before normality was thankfully restored.

Now, Anivab, Alice, clearly this

is probably the most traumatic thing that's ever happened to the world.

How did you both cope with

the trauma?

I mean, I found it a real relief, Andy.

Just the prospect that this was the beginning of the end was quite a relief.

Most idiots spent their whole time trying to identify which sites were up and which sites were down.

I started two separate doomsday cults and set them against each other.

I don't know what you did with your internet outage, but

one of the fascinating things was that everyone had an opinion about what should be done or what was happening, even though nobody had any information about what was happening.

It revealed, if nothing else, that nobody knows how any of it works, especially the people who think they do, and definitely not the people whose job it was to make it work.

My problem is that none of the good stuff that you want the internet to go down down with ever goes down.

Like my online mortgage payment went through in the middle of 40,

which is really, really painful.

And, you know, I've had no internet for a couple of days because of the monsoon situation.

And we don't have any aeroplanes coming and going to India, as you know.

Which leads me to the question: maybe you guys know this now: the world,

you know, with all its essential elements, McDonald's, greed, tick-tock, cold press juice.

Is that still around, Alice?

And?

Well,

we don't really know.

I mean, that's the thing with internet outages, is

it does lead to people questioning whether anything exists if it's not being live blogged in some way.

So for an hour, no one knew if anyone existed anymore.

It was deeply, deeply harrowing.

As somebody who was brought up Buddhist Andy, the answer is no.

They never did.

It's all an illusion, a temporary co-alignment of mind and matter.

The tech news website, The Verge, did start publishing news on a shared Google document just to prove that they really existed, in the words of the kinks, until one of their reporters accidentally shared a link on Twitter that allowed their audience to then edit the news on this Google document.

But

should this not be the future of all news?

That it's just, you know, it's out there and people can edit it to make the news that they want.

I mean, it's essentially just streamlining the process we already have, but taking a bit more personal responsibility rather than letting the editors of our chosen newspapers do it for us.

Well, what I feel was really newsworthy about the edits that the general public made to The Verge was that they were deeply unoriginal.

It's like when you get a new pen and you want to write something with your new pen and you always write, this is a new pen.

I think this is really the future we should go towards.

The other day I saw a thing on Instagram that said, write a blog without writing a single word.

I thought that was an excellent tool.

Apparently, it's got blocks of words.

And if you type in, you know, a feeling, like misery, it's just like there's a paragraph that's pre-written that just shows up.

So you can get this blog without having to write a blog.

And I think that's really where journalism needs to go.

That was how Shakespeare wrote most of his plays, isn't it?

So, what happened was that Fastly,

who are a major content delivery.

Yes, exactly.

There are apparently a major content delivery network, whatever that is.

They reported a widespread failure.

And look, without knowing or wanting to know how all this mystical shit actually works, after all, when it comes to such things, as Tennyson wrote, ours not to reason why, ours but to surf and buy, surely the obvious answer was that it was a distraction to enable the aliens to land whilst everyone else was distracted by not having their usual distractions to distract them.

So how long is it going to take for this to become truly apparent, do we think?

I mean a good thousand years, Andy.

Okay, just the standards.

Because it doesn't, I mean, aliens usually take a thousand years if the Vikings are anything to go by.

Sorry, that's supposed to be that's still subdue to say.

I mean, could this internet outage be proof that last year's US election was indeed stolen from the former blogger Donald Trump?

I mean, if large parts of the internet can be down for an hour, surely they can easily forge miscounts or hide by ingesting a few million votes get all there.

Surely.

Look, I'm not saying that correlation equals causation, but from the desk of Donald Trump was taken down not so very long before this happened.

Right.

I mean, those dots are joining themselves, Alice, and they're making the shape of a great big middle finger.

Real sloppy dots just oozing into each other.

Can I just say, all these doomsday scenarios of the internet have brought back back a long-lost English language word, the cabal.

And I'm just glad that the word cabal has made a comeback.

Because everything apparently to do with the sort of destruction of the internet has to do with a secret cabal.

There's never like an open, friendly cabal doing things.

It's never a transparent cabal.

It's always a secret cabal.

So you're all about where you put.

It's all about where you put the L.

If it's secret, it's cabal.

If it's not secret, it's club.

I mean, it didn't affect everywhere in the world, so users in some locations experienced no problems.

For example, Berlin.

Oh, why did we fing bother?

Outright scientists, meanwhile, blamed the woke conspiracy, pointing out that in the 1950s, before an increased social awareness of issues surrounding race, gender, and sexuality, and an effort to be a more tolerant species, the internet never failed.

So take that the woke.

COVID news now.

And well, naming COVID variants after their country of origin, which sparks, of course, pride and racism in equal measure in this country, certainly as the great British variant and the highly suspicious Indian variant, battle for global supremacy.

Well, that's to be a thing of the past.

After the World Health Organization decided to name the COVID variants after letters of the Greek alphabet, which is itself, ironically, named after letters of the Greek alphabet.

They did consider naming the variants after Greek gods, but it was decided that the Aphrodite variant sounded too like a very, very, very, very questionable 1970s film.

And of course, if they get far enough, having a variant with the syllables oopsie in it might be too withering an assessment of global failures.

Anuvab,

we talked about the India variants before.

On the bugle, has this news gone down well?

Well, I think the issue here is that

they're a little upset with Britain, Andy, because you went with a specific county, Kent.

And I think India wants more specificity to its variant.

So, you know,

Alibagh is a wealthy neighborhood.

Kent is a wealthy neighborhood.

So India says, why can't we have an Alibagh variant?

Why can't we have a South Bangalore variant?

So in the India variety, too broad.

There are many parts of India that have nothing to do with COVID who are getting upset with this.

But just to go back to the Greek gods thing, Andy,

I think that if they did go back to the Greek gods, there's a few things we could do.

Like, for example, if you did have the Aphrodite variant, you know, you could focus on the infection if it infected only lovers and beautiful people.

And it did not infect sailors, very much like Aphrodite.

If you had the Zeus variant, he'd be the king of the variants.

He would live on Mount Olympus, which we all know is the name of the cafe at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And then my favorite would be the Hestia variant.

And Hestia is the nicest of the Olympian gods.

It doesn't infect you if you are polite and say, please, thank you.

And may I have another?

So I think there's a lot more you can do with gods than you could do with just the alphabets.

Because like Alice said, you know, the alphabet, you're stuck.

Alpha males, you know, beta testing.

You know, there's only gamma rays.

There's always so much you can do.

Yes.

And also.

I mean, is it racist to say that I've always wanted to hear an Indian person say there's a lot you can do with gods?

Because I feel like that is, that might be your culture's approach to theology as a general rule.

Yeah, I mean, the Ganesh variant, you know, that could infect men and elephants.

I mean, there's a lot you can do.

Vishnu variant,

most of the time not available up in the mountains somewhere.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, if we went to pantheism,

I could come up with quite a few things for you, Alice.

They also,

there was a scheme to name the variants using swear words from the countries of origin.

The Kent variant was almost a trial scheme, and it seemed to work okay.

But to to choose an alphabet with only 24 letters in it, isn't this just ridiculously optimistic?

I mean,

Hindi has considerably more letters.

How many in the Hindi alphabet, Aniba?

What do we have?

36.

I think Bengali has 41.

But also, I mean, if you throw it open to India at large, you're dealing with 330 million gods.

You're also dealing with...

462 languages.

So let's just hope the virus doesn't spread.

Andy, Alice, you will appreciate this.

In India, there is even a god dedicated to the cricketer Sachin Tendulka.

There's a temple in his honor in the state of Bihar.

So, you know, there's a chance of, you know, pantheism mixing with cricket, which I think is a world you'd like to see, Andy.

Absolutely.

Let's just hope the virus doesn't get that much of a foothold.

I mean, the Greek gods reportedly are very disappointed that their efforts to have the virus variants named after themselves instead of letters of the Greek alphabet were turned down.

It turned out their efforts were alpha-nothing as the letters beat off stiff competition from the gods who gamma cropper at the final hurdle.

Now this dealt a serious blow to Zeus' hopes of making a comeback to but to be fair to the former King of Olympus it's a decision he accepts along with his former accepts along accepts along

with his former colleagues

and says he will see to it that

it doesn't eat away at them.

He has booked them a team bonding outing in a 16-thetre limousine.

I ought to check that.

And of course there's only 12 of them.

But to cap a bad week for Zeus, he failed to land a new job as the deputy deity in charge of the Catholic Church after being marked down for

his low-quality cat impression.

His mew wasn't great.

He knew that to be fair.

It was a tough exercise, he admitted.

It was either nerves that got to me or my chronic or my chronic fear of cats.

Oh.

And

that isn't me.

Zeus accepted blame for the long-standing hostility to people who like starting fires.

It goes back to the Prometheus thing, the pyro stigma.

As you said, he wouldn't give up though.

I'm not throwing in the towel.

I know it's been tough for me these last couple of millennia, but I've had some ups along with some downs.

So I'm going to fight on.

I'm a tough guy.

Unlike my old mate Poseidon.

Oh my god, what a loser.

The end.

The end is sometimes the only thing we have left in this troubled world.

Andy, if you were in sixth grade in my school in Calcutta, I would have learned my Greek elements a lot better.

I recognised four out of the ones you did.

A spokesperson said, we've had to put the 21st of June back.

It will now take place between the 15th and 16th of December, whilst the 18th of December will now fill the gap between the 20th and 22nd of June in an effort to help the retail sector with an unexpected day of Christmas shopping.

An agreement has also been reached to swap the Portuguese Algarve coastline with Skegenes in Lincolnshire for the summer holiday season.

Whilst following a recategorisation of the green, amber, and redlist countries, Albania has gone missing entirely, whilst Bolivia is now a nightclub.

We think an algorithm went rogue, admitted the government spokesperson.

India news now, and Anivab, what do you say?

You've got an early onset monsoon, which has come a few days

ahead of schedule.

Some exciting news from Ahmedabad.

Narendra Modi of course under increasing pressure and criticism for his handling of the Covid crisis as well as issues of human rights and religious freedom.

Well there's only one thing for it in a situation like that Olympic bid and Ahmedabad could be gearing up for an Olympic bid the city where as discussed on recent bugles a 130,000 capacity cricket stadium was named after a serving prime minister rather than for example a cricketer because well just because is India excited at the prospect of chucking a ridiculous amount of money down the drain for an elaborate school sports day?

If I may just lay aside London 2012 for one minute?

Well, as you know, Prime Minister Modi is a very ambitious person.

And, you know, his economics has been called Modi Nomics by many because he's transformed so many economic things in the country.

So

for a long time, he's been really hopeful for the Olympics just so that the world could combine the word Modi and Olympics and come up with something.

However, one of the people involved in the bid said, we've got only this one stadium, which tends to be a problem if you're going to have a range of events.

And

another person who works with the Gusharad government did say, we're hopeful, but fortunately for us, the next four Olympics are taken.

I think that there is optimism, but the optimism comes from the fact that the people that have been given the responsibility to get us the Olympics will be long dead when we are ready to bid.

So

they're hoping this goes away before the responsibility comes on them.

But, you know, Ahmedabad is Prime Minister of Modi's city and he's already built himself a cricket stadium there, which is the world's largest.

So I wouldn't be surprised if we did our own Olympics with a set of games that were entirely invented by the Prime Minister.

You know, you could have

you know, the Modi Olympics, which features some sort of a cross-section between triathlon and the short butt and Gujarati poetry reading.

And we'll invite some countries.

They can come, they cannot come, it doesn't matter.

But like we said, everyone responsible organizing and now will be dead.

I read that they were looking at the 2036 Games as a possibility.

Now, Olympics is in years ending in the numbers three and six do have a bit of a checkered past when it comes to not being used as vehicles for political propaganda.

But I'm sure Mr.

Modi will be looking to correct correct that tradition rather than to emphatically confirm it.

Do you think,

Alice, Australia's had

two Olympics,

1956 and 2000?

Do you think it's time for the IOC to award Olympics to cities regardless of whether they want them or not?

Just, you know, it should be almost like jury service where a city just has to step up to the plate and provide sport for the world.

Well, certainly, I think as with all power, power corrupts and the only way to counteract this sort of terrible corruption in the Olympic econosphere is rather than letting countries bribe their way into ownership of Olympics, as you say, just attribute the Olympics to wherever the shot put falls.

Just get a big world map and throw a rock at it and then wherever that lands, if it's in the middle of the ocean, people are going to have to learn how to swim on water.

I think that's the only way of making the Olympics truly fair.

They did try that,

getting the world, throwing a big rock at it with the first dinosaur Olympics, and it went tragically, tragically wrong.

Well, it's also the problem of, you know, the richer countries get to prepare their athletes more, and people are working towards this thing for four years, or eight years, or 12 years, and they know what the target is.

I think we should just call Snap Olympics in random locations.

Absolutely.

I mean, should it be also that maybe rather than the Olympics being something that is once every four years, it's just an ongoing process where people just post up their athletic achievements.

And, you know I mean obviously it'd be a bit tricky to check if if El Ced 83 has really run the 108.4 seconds but

I think it would make it more democratic and sort of more you know it it would present sport in a way that young people are more familiar with of just you know posting shit online Yep, I agree.

I still hold with my drop someone out of the sky, point at two people and go, you two run.

And whoever wins is the champion.

Yeah, I mean, it brings a certain fluidity to the Olympics rather than, you know, every number of years.

And we've done that a little bit.

You know, if you remember, we had the Commonwealth Games in India, which were very corrupt, etc.

It was in the news for that.

But now it's all done.

And if you go to Delhi, there's a big sign that says,

We are welcoming large marriage parties to the Commonwealth swimming pool.

Again, it's fluid, right?

It keeps it going.

So the pool is still there.

If you're a large Punjabi family, you want to get married, you've got an Olympic size swimming pool there, which was used for Commonwealth Games and does it have water in it currently

currently not and hopefully it won't if you choose to get married there

but again you know it didn't end with the Olympics you know there are there are two families currently marrying post-COVID in a zoom

UK news now and sausage wars have broken out.

Sausages from Great Britain could soon be banned from entering entering Northern Ireland which is part of Great Britain despite what many of our politicians seem to think.

There are loggerheads between the UK government and the European Union over a proposed ban on the export of sausages and indeed mints under the terms of the Brexit deal between Great Britain and

the UK government is reportedly at loggerheads,

one of the best type of heads with Brussels over a proposed ban on the export of sausages and mints from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

That is under the terms of the Brexit deal.

Now, there are of course many aspects of British life that are claimed as fundamental parts of our national identity, not to be tinkered with, not to be sullied, not to be stolen at any costs, unless it's convenient or financially advantageous.

But one thing stands proudly inviolable as an icon of British freedom, of national unity, of eternal God-given identity, and that is the sausage.

So, when Brexit starts interfering with the sausage, shit is getting real, people.

I mean, I don't know if

either of your countries has ever been involved in a sausage-based

war, and it hasn't yet become a military war, but I think we can only assume that it definitely will.

But, you know,

we are, life is teetering on the edge of absolute chaos here with the sausage under threat.

Well, I mean, Andy, no one wants to know how politics or sausages are made, but a number 10 spokesman was approached about why the Prime Minister signed up to the terms, which are considered so damaging that

you can't transport cool meat anymore.

It has to be frozen meat, essentially, is the core of this.

But the spokesman said the protocol was a compromise.

We didn't expect the EU to take a purist approach when implementing it.

We are working very hard to try to resolve these issues consensually.

There is so much about that quote that is upsetting, ending with the choice of the word consensually and working backwards from there.

Though I have just put a ban on meat imports, is my new response to dick pics.

As somebody who's never felt very strongly about sausage one way or another, it's difficult for this story to really salami on its newsworthiness without being either the worst or the boar worst.

The problem with paying attention to stuff that I don't care about is it really makes me Kransky.

I'm going to stop now.

Well, carry on if you want.

Anuvab, where do you stand on the sausage issue?

Look,

on this podcast, I've done Greek element puns and sausage puns.

This has been the best half an hour of my entire life.

I love that spokesperson who said this would be resolved following strict protocol.

Now, Andy, I don't know very many British things, but what is sausage protocol?

I think it's something that generally boys are not taught enough about in school.

But it was rather fascinating.

Brigade with a fork.

Let's go back to what this spokesperson for the Prime Minister said.

The protocol was a compromise.

We didn't expect the European Union to take a purist approach when influencing.

And that is a real look into the mind of Boris Johnson and his government, which basically says, well, I mean, words are not something that are supposed to be meant.

Words don't mean what they mean.

I mean, why are they taking these words to mean what they seem to and do in fact mean?

Words are simply a tool of misinformation, entertainment or buying time until someone else is around to clean up your fing mess.

So you can understand the confusion.

The only words that mean what they mean are words that we don't know what they mean, like Brexit means Brexit.

I mean, Brexit, which you mentioned, is the root of this.

Of course, it was a heroic break for freedom from the oppressive chains of freedom and cooperation that was EU membership and it's had various predictably unpredicted consequences unforeseen if you ignore the people who foresaw them and many of these relate to the inconvenient fact that Northern Ireland is part of England sorry sorry part of Great Britain and that many English sorry British politicians had unfortunately forgotten about this this aspect and so whilst England Scotland and Wales no longer have to follow EU rules and can once again call carrots carrots instead of having to call them orangenstick and vegetable as Brussels insisted.

But Northern Ireland does still have to follow the EU rules because it shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland, which, as we record, is still an EU member, pending its inevitable application to rejoin England.

Sorry, the United Kingdom.

It's very confusing for people like me.

And we're at the end of a six-month grace period where sausages were still legal, after which the fing rules we agree to live by come into effect, which to be fair, no one could have predicted happening.

The result is fing chaos.

Sausages are affected by EU food safety rules, which don't allow chilled meat products to enter its market from non-EU members.

And there might be a loophole in that sausages don't contain a lot of what is discernibly meat, particularly not the Great British sausage.

But fundamentally, it's very hard to see how this can be resolved.

George Eustace, the UK Environment Secretary, said that Britain would lobby Joe Biden over the issue at the...

Joe Biden is here for the G7 summit, which is taking place.

We'll report exclusively on that in next week's Bugle.

Eustace said, I suspect that any U.S.

administration would be amazed if you were to say, for instance, that a sausage from Texas couldn't be sold in California and there would be an outright ban.

Well, apart from the fact that this comparison is completely invalid on an almost infinite number of levels, it would also depend on whether the government of Texas had fing agreed to a protocol that prevented sausages being sold in California or not.

Anyway,

it's all just a barrel of happy laughs.

I mean, given protocol has been broken, Andy, is there any way in which you guys could get a very large cannon, move it up to the northernmost part of England, and just shoot sausages into Northern Ireland?

Well, I mean, it's possible the government is putting more money into defence projects.

So,

yeah, the sausage cannon.

It could be, I mean, sometimes it needs an outside eye to see the obvious solution, Anuvavan.

You've

definitely provided that.

I mean, look, again, I have to go back to the Empire.

You guys had left behind a bunch of cannons.

We didn't always use them for firing sausages, though.

We used them for firing people.

Yes, we used to shoot some rebels out of it.

But we've kept them, and we sometimes use it in circuses

when really small people shoot themselves out of circuses for a fee.

And that's what's giving me the sausage idea.

So again, all good ideas are British.

It's just that maybe you left it behind a lot of them.

Well, as I always say, you can't fire me out of a cannon.

I quit out of a cannon.

Britain's top negotiator, David Frost, urged the EU to use common sense.

F you, Frost, do not betray the will of the people.

This was explicitly a vote against common sense.

You can't suddenly start finging asking for it to be used now when we were promised, promised, it would play no part in things.

Disgrace.

Further proof that Brexit is working, despite what the nay say is nay, and a return to the glory days of Britain when we had an empire in which the sun never set, because we now have a lorry park in Kent, which is basically an empire made of lorries, where the sun might as well not bother setting because there is 24-hour day lighting on this massive great lorry park where lorries wait for extra custom checks

post-Brexit, which has, according to locals, destroyed the night sky.

I mean, this was another side effect of Brexit, not just the end of the sausage, but the destruction of nighttime.

Again, we were not told, we were not told this would be part of Brexit.

The government has defended the lighting of the lorry park as, quotes, a physical metaphor for the nation to cling to in these benighted times of how Brexit is a beacon of light in the eternal nighttime of EU membership, an artificially sunlit escape from the enveloping blanket of darkness cast by the Freedoms, Cooperation, Progress, Harmony, and uniformly shaped bananas that were imposed on us, on our unquenchably British souls by our European overlords.

So, yeah, there's many ways of looking at this.

Have either of you ever lived on a permanently lit lorry park or not?

I mean, isn't the night time inherently a little bit suspiciously European anyway?

Well, it is very much, very much so.

Look, I just think that, you know, the loosh decadence of the evening darkness has hidden sins for too long, and Andy, and the sooner everyone is relentlessly spotlit at all times, the better.

Well, that's what the internet does, isn't it?

Also, also, you know, I don't know about you guys, but I get great comfort knowing that a large group of European truck drivers are near me at any given point in time.

It's a good way to get your drugs.

Yeah, exactly.

Prime Minister, who did not apologise for insulting Muslims, black people, and women when he was a newspaper editor and/or serving politician, wades in on not yet announced punishment of cricketer who did apologise for racist and sexist tweets posted as an idiotic teenager news now.

And, well, yes, that did,

well, that's basically, basically the story.

I mean, cricket and politics are, it's, you know, we talk about sport and politics not mixing.

It's kind of impossible to separate sport from politics.

But this week, they've been particularly unhealthily mixed.

England cricketer Ollie Robinson making his first appearance as an England cricketer.

His big day was ruined by a mixture of of his own idiocy as a teenager when he posted offensive tweets to his handful of followers and someone then posting those tweets on the day of his first game for England to make sure that millions more people saw them.

Robinson, who's now 27, apologised for the tweets he posted around nine years ago, which had been found by a Twitter copper archaeologist, who was so offended by them that they decided to keep quiet about them until the day of Robinson's first match for England.

He was then suspended following an excellent debut match whilst the cricketing authorities investigate the matter.

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, a politician for whom no issue is too great a challenge for him not to come up with the wrong response, tweeted, Ollie Robinson's tweets were offensive and wrong.

They are also a decade old and written by a teenager.

The teenager is now a man and has rightly apologised.

The ECB has gone over the top by suspending him and should think again.

Now, this was a suspension, not a punishment.

They are now investigating the matter.

This is essentially...

standard workplace procedure, albeit I'm not that familiar with workplace procedure, having not been in workplaces very much.

Boris Johnson supported Dowden, and I guess it is good that Robinson has apologised for writing these appalling things as a teenager, because being an England cricketer is a very important public position where standards of behaviour are to be expected.

This is cricket we're talking about.

Cricket.

This is far more serious to me than, for example, a newspaper columnist, magazine editor, and foreign secretary aged in his 30s, 40s, or 50s writing racist, sexist, and homophobic things in just a few large circulation national publications before going on to a casual work experience job as Prime Minister.

This is a cricketer.

We have to set some standards at some point in our society.

And Oliver Dowden, a very busy man, the Culture Secretary, also took some time out from his hectic schedule of misrepresenting stuff willfully that is none of his business to post a vaccination playlist of songs to get vaccinated to.

Now,

this is a minister in a government which has done in real terms absolutely fall to support music, whether it's rock venues or amateur choirs, and has undermined arts education generally.

And it shows once again that our culture secretary has his finger on the pulse of culture, albeit that pulse is in the neck area, and he is pressing those fingers down alarmingly hard.

Also, his playlist could be questioned.

He missed out some songs that should have been on it from Conservative Minister, Don't Fear the Reaper, brackets, as long as you get the vaccine rollout right, or the classic 60s bebop number, My Prime Minister is a Liar and a Charlatan by the Ethiquettes, and I Love You, brackets, despite the slightly embarrassing death doll by Timmy Torrey and the Shameless Hacks.

So you might want to put those on.

But I mean, mean, cricket has been rocked.

Rocked by this.

Now,

pretty much all players are having their social media pasts

dug up.

I mean, would you agree with me that being a 27-year-old cricketer is far more important you should apologise than if you're say a you know a prime minister in his 50s?

Well Andy, look, I haven't read the tweets and I don't really care about this particular young man's particular journey.

I'm sure he should apologise and if he has apologised, well done him.

But so much of this discourse is like reminds me of when my cousin tried a cup of soup the first time uh we were we were on holiday together and there was a packet soup and she tried it and she said hmm this is disgusting you try it I feel like the sharing of outrage about tweets that someone might not otherwise see seems to be exactly that impulse of just like let's boost this horrific thing as widely as possible.

Also, it would be interesting to study how much harder one would have to work being an old racist cricketer versus a present-day cricketer who might have the racist tendencies.

Well,

there was an England captain in the 20s who was an active member of a fascist organisation whilst he was England captain and, in fact, was investigated, I believe, on a tour of Australia for attempting to set up a fascist organisation in Australia as well.

And he was captain of England.

Well, at least you know he wouldn't bend his arm on the high end.

And look, there are lots of days between matches where you can set up a fascist organisation.

I mean, you don't have to lounge around by the pool, you can do things.

Cricket is one of the few sports that does give you a lot of time, even when the game is on, to set up fascist organisations.

We really need a sort of apology ranking scale.

In the way that we have bushfire danger warning scales in Australia, where it goes from green to sort of

into the reds and purples

as to whether you can light a match within 10 metres of anywhere or not.

I feel like there should be an adequacy of apology meter that is running totally.

And maybe if your apology doesn't really

hit a particular standard, you then don't get to judge anyone else ever again.

Is that enough, Chris?

I mean, obviously I was slightly distracted, Andy, given, like, in the first five minutes of the programme, you talked about that German player at Euro 68 yeah which is a bit of a joke really given for a start there was two Germanies then

and

secondly neither East Germany or West Germany qualified for Euro 68.

Well yeah both teams were knocked out in the qualifying rounds which finished in 1967.

And so so I'm not sure if I'm sure that our audience can trust any of what's happened since

usually my bullshit is very factually accurate.

deep apologies buglers for

and thanks Chris does he is our fact checker

yeah that's why it takes all explains why it takes all of our episodes a year to get a year to get out we actually record them a year in advance which is very good at guessing what the news is going to be and Chris's got it all fact checked by the time it's published that brings us to the end of this week's this week's bugle any shows or other available things to plug plug?

Yes, indeed.

Andy, I'm doing the Bondi Festival with two live shows of Kronos on the 9th and 10th of July.

Is that on the beach?

Yeah, Bondi Beach, yes.

Right.

In the sea or on the sand?

You are a trained lifesaver, aren't you?

Yes, I have

my bronze surf lifesaving.

And that could be one hell of a show, couldn't it?

Right, everybody in.

Oh, I'll fish you out if it goes badly.

Also, we have a weekly spin-off show of the bugle, which is called The Gargle.

It's all of the news, none of the politics.

And there's also a monthly show called The Last Post.

So, those are also things that you can listen to if you're not in Bondi.

Anevab, any forthcoming shows or other podcasts you want to tell us about?

We carry on with our Indian podcast, Our Last Week, which I do with Bollywood actor Kunadra Akapur.

And for that, I go into an even smaller closet than the one I'm in

as the monsoons beset on India.

Do tune in to all of those on your internet tuner.

You can also catch the series of the news quiz that's just finished on BBC Sounds.

We're back with another series in September.

September is also the month where Bugle Lives will return the 7th of September.

We'll give you further information on tickets as soon as they're available, which I don't think they are yet, but they will be, assuming the world hasn't completely stopped again.

That's all for this week.

Until next time, goodbye.

To make a one-off or occurring contribution to the Bugle, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

And you can also find our exciting range of Bugle merch there, including the Cold and Wet Weaver t-shirt.

How are they selling, Chris?

Almost sold out.

Sensational.

They said it couldn't be done.

They said it shouldn't be done.

They were right on the second of those, but not the first.

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.