Dylan or Cummings (4196)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers, and welcome to issue 4196 of The Bugle, the universe's leading and only source of independently verifiable fact.

Sorry, I'm just hearing that that has not in fact been independently verified, so I'm afraid there are zero sources of independently verifiable facts.

Sorry about that.

I am Andy Zaltzmann, and I'm reporting to you live from the Shed of Incorruptible Veracity.

Joining me this week on Tuesday, the 1st of June, no less of the year 2021, to bring in yet another new month.

When will it end?

In an all-South London line-up.

It's Nish Kumar and Chris Addison.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Nish.

Hello, Buglers.

I'm very excited, and because it's beautiful here, Andy, and in the 26 years of my career, this is the first time I've ever turned up to a professional engagement wearing shorts shorts since I stopped playing fullback for London Irish in 2003.

Yes, I've forgotten about your illustrious betting career.

I played right, right, right back.

I'm very delighted to be here, and in the grandest tradition of this podcast, in terms of sharing terrible gig stories, I believe we have finally found the Trump card because Chris Addison was actually present at the gig where someone threw a bread roll at me.

Yes!

Chris Addison was right in the hot seat at the epicenter of the chaos.

I saw the parabola described by the bread as it made its way nichewards.

Yeah, the pelting.

It was a notorious pelting

with the one roll.

Yeah, with one roll.

One roll.

I didn't think that was the worst thing that happened to you on that stage.

The worst thing was when that prick of an MC came on and just basically forced you to shake his hand

as the most passive aggressive,

like, it's the least passive, passive-aggressive thing I've ever seen anybody do.

It's incredible.

We are recording on the 1st of June on this day in 1812, for U.S.

President James Madison asked Congress to declare war on the United Kingdom.

I mean, they could have just said sorry, we'd have welcomed them back.

The war lasted until 1815 and ended in a draw.

We're still waiting for the second leg, and we have home advantage.

Come on, GB.

On the 2nd of June in the year 455, the Vandals sacked Rome.

They plundered the city for two weeks beginning on the 2nd of June.

They apparently didn't destroy many buildings or kill that many people by Rome sacking standards, according to historians.

People are already getting soft by the mid-fifth century AD.

It's not a modern thing, but they did steal a load of furniture and probably stuffed their faces with ice cream and gelities and got hammered in a wine bar on the Campe de Fiori, which I've heard is what some people do when they go to Rome.

The Visigoths got it done in three days in the year 410.

And the Vandals stretched it out to two weeks, just 45 years later.

Again, typical of the declining efficiency of humanity as they realise that when you're on a day rate, you might as well drag it out.

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

This week, a lifestyle section.

The bugle is always at the absolute cutting edge of lifestyle, and we have various items for you to help guide you to have a more stylish life, including you and your socks, are you wearing your socks on the wrong feet, and how the right pair of socks can make the difference between life and death in space.

Plus, are socks legal?

While your toothpaste could cause an earthquake, and are your mirrors magically recording everything you do in the eternal mind of a snooping deity.

We tell you how to train your toaster, and also my spoon hell.

Celebrities share all about their worst moments with spoons, from Susan Sarindon's most harrowing salad serving nightmares to Tom Hanks catapulting a canel of chicken liver parfait off a teaspoon into the Mona Lisa's face when clumsily trying to mime painting whilst eating a canopé during a gala function at the Louvre in Paris and also in our lifestyle section a review of the latest lifestyle products including the ego castle personal safety moat

an inflatable 1.5 meter moat that not only keeps your personal space but is also COVID safe and the thermotics fire shoe a charcoal fueled thermal thermal footwear with inbuilt hypercaust in the platform to keep your feet both warm and trendy in winter.

That section is in the bin.

Top story this week, and well, we're recording on Tuesday.

This is really top story from last week.

And last week was yet another week in which passers-by reported seeing a single salt tear slowly dripping down the withering, haggard, guilt-ridden face of British democracy.

Dominic Cummings, the former special advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, sat before the House of Commons Health, Science and Technology Committees, swore the hypocritic oath and let it rip into the Johnson government and his part in it.

Now, I know you are both huge fans of the Machiavellian goings-on of Westminster.

What did you both make of it?

Well, I mean, I think I speak for everybody in our industry, Andy, when I say it was just great to see live performance back.

This was a hell of a way to do it.

This was very much the Beyoncé at Glastonbury of select committee hearings.

this is the one the fans wanted to see.

Obviously, last year there was that outdoor promenade show in the Rose Garden at number 10 and the brief regional tour of the Northeast.

But like the rest of us, Don was clearly itching to get back into a proper performance space.

Sure, as with many of the other great comedy characters of our time, there will always be a section of the audience asking, why does it have to be so sweary?

But that's just the truth of that character.

And boy, did he spend quite a long time telling us his truth.

Sporting his traditional look of one of the aliens from close encounters has scored a sponsorship deal with UniCloak, He sat and gesticulated like Jürgen Klopp with a wasting disease as he spent seven hours detailing governmental failures over COVID.

Seven hours, Andrew, which begs the question: why did he leave so much out?

And also,

a seven-hour chat slagging off the government.

That to me, he could easily have done that whilst watching a day of cricket.

And I don't know why that wasn't factored in to make it more palatable.

Every so often just wandered off to queue for beer,

come back, had another moan.

I was absolutely outraged that he, because he did swear at one point, he was uh relaying an anecdote about relating to Helen McNamara, who was the then deputy cabinet secretary, who, according to Cummings, came into the Prime Minister's office to tell us that we were all absolutely fed, and he was allowed to say the F word on television at 10:30am.

But when I pitched the character of Derek,

it was unsuitable for broadcast at any time.

This is an outrage, and don't even start with the fact that that has almost certainly been bleeped by finging Chris Skinner.

This is censorship.

Well, actually,

Chris himself has been censored this week.

We have Ross producing

this week.

Don't you dare censor Derek.

And for clarity, that is the worst swear word that I've just been dropping

after Derek.

I mean, this question of whether you believe this was all truth.

I mean, I would say it was gospel truth for me from what Dominic Cummings said, in that some people won't believe a word of it.

Some people will believe it is 100% literal fact, and others will believe it's got a few vague facts in it, but is mostly spin just to make the main character look good.

And I do come with that from an atheist, second-generation, lapsed Jewish angle.

But

people said, oh, this is just another Westminster bubble thing.

But surely in this case, the Westminster bubble burst like a festering sore and splattered strangely coloured pus over the entire nation.

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to view it as a Westminster bubble thing when the Prime Minister's former chief advisor was asked directly if the Prime Minister was a fit and proper person to lead the country through the pandemic.

And said advisor simply replied, no.

And he then went on to apologise to the public and say that they fell disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect of its government in a crisis like this.

And then Cummings tried to push the line that somehow this was all our fault in an oblique way because he said, in any sensible, rational government, it is completely crazy that I should have been in such a senior position, in my personal opinion.

And I guess the obvious conclusion would be that everything in our politics is rotten from top to bottom.

But that doesn't mean just because it's such an obvious conclusion doesn't necessarily mean that it's correct.

However, on this occasion, it is correct.

So well done to the obvious conclusion for having the courage once and for all to stand up for itself.

It's not a cop drama after all.

The basic summation of what Cummings said is everything we all thought was true was actually true.

Boris Johnson didn't take the pandemic seriously enough initially.

And then even after the first wave, even after he caught it and seemingly in an incredibly serious way, didn't take it seriously enough again when the second wave hit in September, October and didn't give in to scientific advice that he should call a circuit breaker lockdown in October.

And that really fits in with everything that we know about Boris Johnson, a man whose personality is basically what would have happened if the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future had turned up to Scrooge's bedroom, but he was out shagging.

Cummins also said that in terms of the reaction to the early stages of

the pandemic, he said that lots of key people were literally skiing, which I didn't have a problem with that.

Sure, that's good practice to be literally skiing for when things then metaphorically went downhill very fast.

And he added that Johnson was distracted at the start of the pandemic by, hang on, I've got the full list here.

His divorce, his engagement by Carrie Simmons's pregnancy, his new dog by Donald Trump, what the papers had written about him, what the papers were going to write about him, his own finances, writing a book about William Shakespeare earning the macarena, a box set of classic episodes of the TV detective show Burge.

What happened to Amelia Earth by finishing a 1986 World Cup panini sticker album and by why Michael Gove still had that strange glint in his eye also distracted by the cold-hearted verdict of history one slice of watermelon and one green leaf and then he felt much much better so it appears that he wasn't entirely focused on the task in hand and in many ways maybe that's a good thing but do you actually want a boris johnson who is focused on the job it wouldn't that not be worse it's it's much the best thing that they were all skiing the the bad part was when they they all came back from skiing, that was that was when it all

started to unravel for us.

He really went for Matt Hancock, uh,

didn't he?

I was, um, I was in WH Smith this week, uh, looking for a copy.

All right, big shot, don't flash it about it.

Yeah, oh, yeah, I've got the cash, I got a voucher, I've got a voucher for a big, big bar of dairy milk, free with my daily mail.

I was in uh, I was in Smith this week.

No, I wasn't looking for that, I was looking for a socially distanced version of Hello magazine called Hello magazine, uh, when I uh happened to notice a a maze issue of entitled Thicky Monthly, and just under a picture of cover star Nadine Durries holding a book upside down were the words, this month's quiz, are you Matt Hancock?

So just a check, I bought it.

Let me read it to you.

Question one.

You find yourself in Boris Johnson's office in number 10 Downing Street.

Opposite you is a talking haystack in an ill-fitting suit with gizz stains by the half-open flies.

It asks you if you want to be Secretary of State for the Department of Health.

Do you, A, politely decline on the grounds that there may be others better suited to the position since you yourself have the intellectual chops of a turnip with a face drawn on, or B, jump at the chance in the deluded hope that the power you will wield might in some way fill the insatiable black hole in your soul that you first noticed when Emma Swinton, who you'd fancied since year seven, laughed at the fresh prince haircut you just got because she once said she thought Will Smith was hot.

Question two: There is a global pandemic.

You, a man no one in their right mind would trust to be able to spell PPE, let alone arrange billions of items of it, have to arrange billions of items of PPE.

Who do you contact?

A, a company which has made surgical items for the past seven decades and supplies many of the largest hospitals in the West, or B, some guy called Marco you met on Hugo Stagne, who's really hilarious and provided the nurse's costume you made the groom go on a pub crawl in, who will respond to your WhatsApp offer of a contract with a dick pic captioned get it up, you bun boy, three lorry loads of Sainsbury's handletie bin bags, and an invoice for £180 million.

And question three: 127,000 people are dead.

Do you resign?

A, yes, or B, of course not.

Shame is for Catholics and pussies.

If you answered mainly A, congratulations, you're not Matt Hancock.

If you answered mainly B, commiserations, you are Matt Hancock.

Please ask the person who helped you read this to explain to you that eventually the shit is going to hit the fan, bounce off the fan, and get stuck between two pieces of bread.

And when that happens, someone is going to have to choke down that foot-long turd sob and smile.

Stack up on condiments, Matt, because that someone is you.

It's time for another quiz now relating to this.

We can never have too many quizzes in the day.

You've really got a taste for hosting quizzes, Alts.

Well, you know, born to do it.

Bob Dylan, the pop star, 2018.

That's the best description of Bob Dylan I've ever heard.

The renowned songsmith was greeted with a wave of goodwill from his many admirers around the world, but let's see how long that lasts.

He's in his 80s now.

Just wait until he swaps his acoustic walking frame for an electric mobility scooter.

It'll be Judas all over again.

Scooting fast.

So Dylan turned 80 and Dominic Cummings outlined at least 80 ways in which the British political system is deeply inadequate.

So to commemorate these two historic moments, we have a special free bonus complimentary bugle quiz, Dylan or Cummings.

One is the title of a Bob Dylan song and the other is something Dominic Cummings said or suggested in his select committee evidence.

This is an extended version of a thing that was edited to the bones for last week's news quiz.

So

Andy, I will not have you turn this podcast into a dumping ground for stuff from other shows.

Yeah.

You're basically Lenny Bruce reading out a charge sheet at this point.

I mean, you wouldn't believe it, but I'd written too much stuff with radio stuff.

Unbelievable.

So tell me, which of these, he can do this at home, write down on a bit of paper.

One is a Dylan song.

The other is something to do with Dominic Cummings' Select Committee testimony.

You ain't going nowhere or you ain't supposed to be going anywhere, you f ⁇ ing idiot.

Question two, just like a woman.

Or just like a shopping trolley smashing from one side of the aisle to the other, which I'll give you a clue.

Well, words used by Cummings to describe Johnson's indecisive leadership in the early weeks of the crisis, which slightly raises the question:

who was pushing the trolley and what aisle are we talking about?

Are we talking about an aisle in the supermarket or the aisle in a church as Boris Johnson tries to find his latest wife?

Also, the idea that the shopping trolley was moving suggests that at any point in this process, the wheels have been on.

yes if only for once the wheels had come off absolutely sweet marie or absolutely sweet fa uh it ain't me babe or it ain't me who should have been allowed to be involved in the highest levels of government one too many mornings or way too many warnings the lonesome death of hattie carroll or the lonesome death of 40 000 care home residents due to catastrophically flawed government strategy um babe

you're going to like make me lonesome when you go or you're going to make me vengeful when you sack me

Don't think twice, it's all right, or don't think at all.

It will only upset you to realise the parody of our supposed democratic ideal that we've become idiot wind or idiot secretary of state health,

stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again, or stuck inside immobile with the kids and booze again.

If you see her, say hello, or if you see her, tell her I'm terribly sorry about the avoidable death of her grandparents.

I threw it all away, or I kept written and photographic records of everything.

Or sooner or later, one of us must know or actually we both know and we're going to tell vastly different versions of the same story so there is your

Dylan or Cummings

quiz do send your answers on a postcard to anyone who gives a shit

in other Boris Johnson news

he's got married

again

I don't know what you put on a

a wedding card to to someone on was it number three

better luck this time or

third time lucky uh it was a low-key um private stripped back wedding that got rid of many of the traditional features of wedding such as uh even trying to mean what you say in your vows and um of course there was a lot of catholics who expressed confusion about about how boris johnson

the the famously twice divorced boris johnson was allowed to get married in westminster cathedral the number one ranked catholic church in in the country.

Is there any argument for this other than the fact that obviously God doesn't exist?

I mean, if he has re-embraced his Catholicism,

God help the priest that takes his first confession, because that is going to be one long mother.

That's going to be way longer than seven hours.

Oh my God.

Well, I think the Catholic Church have got previous on

changing their mind about heads of state of Great Britain getting married or not.

It didn't work out so brilliantly for them last time around.

So maybe they're just trying to, you know, be a

bit cannier this time, don't you think?

You know, only 30 people were able to be present at the wedding, which is very sad because it means a number of his kids had to miss out.

Some of his children who were there included his 13-year-old son, His Honor Justice Saddleworth, his eight-year-old son, His Honor Justice Bentley, and his five-year-old daughter, His Honor Justice Wolfe.

They aren't actually members of the legal profession, but it's Johnson family tradition to name each child after the judge who gave Boris the the super injunction to prevent reporting off the pregnancy.

Did you hear the

BBC coverage of it of this wedding?

I've avoided it.

Okay, let me record it on the phone.

Hello, welcome to Spring Watch.

Let's go straight to our Westminster Cathedral camera now because the Boris Johnson we've been watching there looks like it's about ready to go into its mating ritual.

There it is, standing with its mate.

Interestingly, the Boris Johnson does not mate for life.

It says that it's going to, that's how it gets the mates, but it doesn't.

Oh, look, it's all starting.

Look, look.

Do you, Alexander Boris Defeffel Johnson, take this woman, Carrie Alexandra de Feffle Simmons,

to be your lawful wedded third wife?

Well, Mr.

Speaker, this is exactly the kind of

peremptory question we have come to expect from the Leader of the Opposition.

But do you take her to to be your wife?

Well, as I have stated repeatedly in the past,

I fully fully intend to

this woman just as soon as the data says that

it is safe to do so.

Could I have the next slide, please?

I now pronounce you man

and wife.

So here we go.

Look, look.

Look at that.

You can see that.

Look, you see, his mating partner has just got him for the kiss and

he's pulled down his flies and he's chasing the bridesmaid all round the cathedral.

Isn't that beautiful?

It's so rare that you get to witness something like that.

We'll be keeping an eye on that mating ritual and we'll go straight back to that camel just as soon as one of the runners has wiped the giz off.

He's had a busy, busy couple of weeks, John, because it wasn't just getting married and having his entire government trashed by his former ally.

It was also a report into into Islamophobia in the Tory party.

The report either did or did not show there was institutionalized Islamophobia in the Conservative Party, depending on whether or not you're in the Conservative Party.

Boris Johnson issued a trademark apology or crapology, in which he didn't really apologise.

He said, I know that offence has been taken at the things I've said.

that people expect a person in my position to get things right, but in journalism, you need to use language freely.

No,

that is not what journalism is.

You need to do your research and use facts.

You need to use language precisely, you fing idiot.

He also said, Would I use some of the offending language from my past writings today?

Now that I'm Prime Minister, I would not.

Well, that sounds like it is due a comeback as soon as those particular shackles are off.

And he said, sorry for any offense taken, which is emphatically not saying sorry for calling people Piccaninnies or the letterboxes thing.

That's like being kind of sorry for you know upsetting you when you thought your granny had married Stalin, rather than saying sorry for drawing a Stalin moustache with an indelible marker pen on that picture of your granddad.

It's a homeopathic apology.

There is the memory of an apology somewhere in the sentence.

If you take the text of his apology and you look down the left side, you notice that the first letters of all the words spell f you.

It's that kind of apology.

Even back in March, when the sort of first stirrings of an Indian variant were starting to be of concern, the press was not focused on large sections of the press were focused on me losing my job on the BBC.

To them, you marched.

You are

concerned.

That's the only concern.

I am the Indian variant that large sections of the British media were worried about earlier in this year, when they should have been worried about the Indian variant that is now possibly going to drive us into lockdown three, the lockdown inning.

Yeah.

And the one that will be some sort of

new bowling technique that will hit us later in the summer.

Belarus updates.

Well, Belarus, once again, not to be confused with Bela R Us, the offshoot of the Poz R Us franchise and specializing in merchandise and memorabilia themed around the life and music of the great Hungarian composer Bela Bartok.

We report on this in a world-exclusive scoop.

We won't tell you how we got it.

A good journalist always protects their source.

Okay, well, since you asked, we heard about it from the telly and the internet.

By happy coincidence, for the obsessive aeroplane collector Lukashenko, whose latest acquisition contained dissident journalist Roman Protasevich and his partner Sophia

Sapaga, who have since been, well, paraded on television in a coercedly filmed confession, which is not a good look, really, is it?

When you're trying to project

democracy and rectitude to the world, which is emphatically what Lukashenko is not trying to do.

Well, do you know what?

I know this is not popular, but in many ways, I feel this is Roman Protosevic's own fault, right?

Sure, he's a heroic figure who spent all the years of his short life fighting bravely to free his fellow countrymen from the tyranny of Europe's last dictator, but he's 26.

I remember my 20s just about, and I can't believe he's got the energy.

I mean, you have a lot of energy when you're that young, but you spend most of it, if I recall correctly, judging bars on whether or not they sell cocktails by the jug, screaming in impotent fury at mortgage adverts on the telly, doing everything you can to get out of headlining the student union comedy night at Kingston University, spending 13% of your life drunk on a night boss and spending 78% of that time saying you're never getting a night boss again.

You save trying to overthrow dictators until your 30s when all your friends are having babies and you're at a loose end because no one wants to go to karaoke with you anymore.

He just walked into it.

The UN Civil Aviation Agency has said it's going to launch a fact-finding investigation into Lukashenko's actions, asking if there was a breach of international aviation law.

Let me save them a job here.

Yes.

I'm pretty sure if I call in a bomb threat on a plane because I have a beef with one of the passengers, I'm going straight to Guantanamo faster than you can say the phrase civil aviation authority.

He's not been without his apologists.

He has been defended by,

can you guess?

That's right.

Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Putin.

Holland one.

Holland one, Addison.

He

Putin was in talks in Sochi with Lukashenko this week and described the protests that have been happening across parts of Eastern Europe at what Lukashenko has been up to as an outpouring of emotion, which is that is not a correct way to characterize protests about a world leader forcing a plane to land so that they could grab a dissident.

That is describing the audience at the end of a Pixar movie.

Also, at this point,

Vladimir Putin is effectively the Johnny Cochrane of white people.

If he is defending you, there is a chance you are going to look guilty as f ⁇ .

Michael O'Leary, you know him?

Who runs Ryanair?

Indeed, I do.

Called it piracy.

How bad does something have to be before the head of Ryanair thinks it's a bit muddy?

It's like Henry VIII accusing someone of having commitment issues or George Galloway telling somebody they look ridiculous in that hat.

I've flown on Ryanair.

I've experienced what Michael O'Leary deems to be seen.

Yeah.

Unbelievable.

Can I sit down for an extra fiver?

Sure, sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Sure, man.

Middle East news now.

And, well, it's all going fine.

Yeah, I don't know what everyone's problem with it is.

Well, some interesting news breaking.

For a long time, the leader writers of the Bugle, this esteemed audio newspaper, have taken the view that the time when Benjamin Netanyahu was no longer Prime Minister of Israel could not come soon enough.

As the old saying goes, better a rancid ferret in your lunchbox than a feral warthog in your bed.

Because careful what you wish for.

It could be the end of Benjamin Netanyahu after his 12 years as Prime Minister and numerous court cases.

That might not be good good news.

Hold fire on your Benjamin Net and Wahoo headlines

because, well, let me put it this way.

Let me do this as an either-or question for you both.

What type of leader would you most like to see take over Israel at this hyper-delicate point in the perma-fragile history of the Middle East?

A, a moderate bridge-building reformer committed to a shared peace and progress, or B, a far-right religious nationalist?

Well, I mean,

my heart says A, but

due to bad genetics, my heart is quite literally full of shit.

Yes, well, it does look like

it is going to be

Naphtali Bennett.

Looks set to form a coalition.

As Mick Jagger said, you can't always get what you want, but if the wrong people try, you can get what you absolutely don't need.

Bennett

left the Liquid Party and joined the Jewish Home Party, a party that BBC News described as right-wing, nationalist, and religious, which is as bad a combination of words as Malcolm X biopic starring Scarlett Johansson.

More democracy going really well news now and the US Republican Party has officially resigned from politics and changed its official designation for tax purposes from political party to loony nut job pressure group after styming

efforts to set up an independent inquiry into the January 6th capital riot that marked the last days of the Trumpian empire in suitably shitheaded fashion.

I mean

the Republicans are a strange franchise.

They're a hard franchise to warm to as a neutral, increasingly,

I find.

And they're sort of clinging to Trump like a smoker sticking with his 60-a-day habit because someone's told him it's a cure for cancer.

It's been a terrific week, I think, Andy, for the party now officially to be known as the Republicans

under the leadership of Mitch McConnell.

What a guy that guy is.

Ambition, ambition, fed spite, and he was born.

Mitch McConnell is what happens when the clown in it takes his makeup off.

Mitch McConnell is what happens when a turtle has an evil twin.

Mitch McConnell is what happens when you put a Mr.

Potato head in the microwave and then it gets accidentally cursed by a witch.

The GOP or gaggle of pricks prevented a commission on the January 6th attack on the Capitol being convened, which would have been modeled on the commission which looked into the September the 11th attacks.

But quite rightly, the Republicans have pointed out that those were terrorist in nature.

And in present-day America, breaking into the seat of the nation's government, dressed in bulletproof vests, carrying guns and bagties, hell-bent on lynching the vice president and the speaker of the House of Representatives, doesn't quite qualify as terrorist activity.

So I thought it would be useful at this juncture to just have a look at what does qualify right now.

So here is a comprehensive list of everything considered legitimate terrorist act in contemporary America.

Not knowing the words to take me out to the ball game, suggesting Bradley Cooper was miscast in A Star is Born, shitting in the water of the splash mountain ride at Disneyland, serving a salad that comes in at under 1200 calories, designing a decent airport, pouring boiling water on tea rather than leaving a bag next to a mug of lukewarm water and just, I don't know, hoping, not liking Hamilton, putting day, month, and year in illogical order, being black within 200 yards of a police officer.

That is the lot.

Beyond that, go for your life.

It's a fairly incredible situation that America could be in.

A country that trumpets its democratic system as being full of checks and balances that I would say has now got to a point where there is an excess of checks and balances because there's so many checks and balances that a political party can check and balance itself against being investigated.

That is where the system of checks and balances has gone too far.

The Republican Senate has voted against the investigation into the January 6th Commission and won despite losing the vote 54 to 35 because of the arcane voting system in the Senate.

In further Trump news, two men were kicked out of the Yankee Stadium in New York after hanging from one of the upper tiers a massive banner saying Trump won.

And there was a photo on the article on the website that showed the pair dangling this impressively large and impressively factually incorrect banner.

Whilst below them, a man flipped them a double bird whilst wearing a shirt with the word judge on the back.

I think if you had to summarize the history of the 2020 election in one single picture, I think that

this would be it.

This would be it.

I felt that

it seemed to me that the crowd at Yankee Stadium will pick and choose which big lie to boo, don't you think?

They're happy to jeer at a banner saying Trump won, and they're also happy to tell you that Alex Rodriguez could do all that stuff without performance-enhancing drugs.

Pick a lane, Yankees.

It's pretty weird to be in Yankee Stadium and be celebrating a man who basically was rooting for the other side of the civil war.

Yeah.

Humanity versus mice news now.

And I love the smell of napalm in the morning, especially when I've been up all night listening to the sound of mice scuttling around under the floorboards.

It's napalm the mice time in Australia.

A horrific plague of mice has struck parts of Australia.

And for those of you who've not seen the the footage, it basically looked like Beatrix Potter was let loose with some CGI special effects after five bottles of cheap schnapps.

Absolutely

horrific quantity of mice.

And it's amazing, isn't it?

That, you know, the traditional Australian natural terrors that you put in ascending order of dangerousness.

you know, the crocodile, the shark, the box jellyfish, the unnecessarily deadly snake.

I mean, what the f is the point of having enough felon to kill 100 people in one bite.

The Tyrannosaurus koala, the saber-toothed platypus, uh glenn mcgraw and that tiny little spider they've now all been overtaken by the mouse um

and i mean i guess you know in britain we like to root for the underdog root for the little guy so we should be cheering the mice on i guess but uh that yeah it doesn't sit well with me i'm not a mice fan No, well, you know,

as you refer there, once again, like we find that Australia has a very weirdly specific set of skills and failures when it comes to dealing with animals.

Great, big, terrifying things, no problem.

Crocodiles, easy.

They're just shoes I've not worn yet.

Box jellyfish, get your speed eyes, Mike.

We're going surfing.

Redback spider, see if you can find me another, then I can give them to me, Ma, as a pair of earrings.

But rabbits, build a fing fence.

Mice, truth, I'm losing my shit here.

Yet again, the people of Australia seem genuinely staggered by the idea that if you introduce a non-Indigenous animal which hasn't evolved to take a carefully balanced place in the local ecosystem, it is likely to run amok and take over in a fairly unhelpful way, like a Nazi party planner at a bar mitzvah.

And when I say the people of Australia, I mean the white people of Australia, the original inhabitants are very au fait with the idea that if you let in a bunch of things from Britain, it's not going to go terribly well for the ones that are already there.

The same thing happened to the Maoris of New Zealand, the tribes of South Africa, and the hosts of late-night talk shows in America.

I didn't realize that this is like something that happens semi-regularly in Australia.

Yeah.

Just sort of every

eight or nine years,

there's a plague of mice in some part of Australia.

I didn't realize it was part of one of the many grand traditions of Australia, like being good at sport or racism.

It's genuinely amazing.

And they were estimated to have caused $100 million

in damage to crops and grain stores.

And people setting traps are catching between 500 and 600 mice per night.

At what point

do we just have to declare Australia as being a mouse republic?

That brings us to the end of

this week's bugle.

A joyous week for all humanity, I'm sure you will agree.

Thanks very much for coming in.

Have you got any shows to plug?

I am touring next year from Wednesday, the 2nd of February, 2022,

for

a period of time that is Google-ableable.

So please buy tickets.

And I also have two albums of me doing stand-up comedy that are available on the internet.

Good.

That cuts out all white men over 40 from

being able to access any of that information.

Sure, that's the way you should be selling it.

My show, Breeders, is on the news series, is on Sky Now.

There's an episode out every Thursday at 10, I think, but you can watch the whole thing and the first season on Catch Upon Sky or on Now TV, which has changed its name to Now for reasons that entirely escape me.

You can hear this this current series of the news quiz uh on the bbc website at the last episode is coming up later this week and if you're a cricket fan i will be talking numbers from uh wednesday morning this week for a lot of the summer uh we'll be back uh next week with the bugle which is currently migrating day by day from the start of the week to the end we recorded monday last week tuesday this week we're going for a wednesday then a thursday then a friday record and what i believe may be a podcasting first

um but we will will be back next week.

Until then, 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.