Two horses, dead horses (4195)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4195 of The Bugle, audio newspaper for a tired, tetchy, troubled, turbulent, but still to visual world for five T's with me, Andy Zaltzman.

I am here in London, the UK, and and this week's podcast comes with a free bonus extra millisecond which if you play it backwards slowed down 100 000 times contains the secret to eternal life and happiness we can't tell you which millisecond it is and it is embargoed and password locked until the year 3021 for public safety and global economic purposes apologies for that but do please keep this episode safe for your descendants uh joining me this week two people who both ironically had antecedents who lived a thousand years ago would you believe it um to tell us all about them please welcome from opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, 8,400 miles apart as the crow would fly if it could fly much, much further than crows can actually fly.

About a 1,740-mile flight range was what I discovered on the internet, albeit from one uncorroborated internet page that was the only one that came up with a number about how far crows can fly.

So 8,400 miles apart as 4.8 crows fly in a relay crossing the Pacific, if indeed the 0.8 of a crow could in fact complete the anyway.

The point is, in San Francisco and Mumbai, respectively, it's NATO Green and Anuvab Powell.

Welcome to both of you.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

Which one of us is in Mumbai?

I can't remember now.

That bit got out of control.

That was a lot of words without a full stop, as I look now at the script.

Apologies.

There's a time portal between the two.

How are you, Nato?

I'm good, Andy.

This past weekend, I returned to live stand-up for the first time in 14 months.

I had three spots.

It makes the blood pulse to be back on stage in a comedy club again.

I don't have an act.

So what I'm doing is as a political comic, most of my material is torched.

So I'm like...

panning through

older material and bugle jokes to figure out what's still irrelevant.

It turns out, this may come as a shock to you, but the San Francisco audience in late May 2021 is not very enthusiastic about my Irish backstop jokes.

So back to the drawing board it is.

Right.

Well, I mean, I can only think, you know, when I get back to stand-up, which will hopefully be at some point later, later this year.

I mean, really, all I'm going to have is cricket statistics and that that is going to be it.

And I'm not sure I can, that's not, maybe not, it's not going to fly in San Francisco

if I ever end up back there.

Anuvab, how are you?

How's things in India?

Fantastic as usual.

Great, excellent.

Fantastic here.

I've just flown from Mumbai to Calcutta to be with my parents.

And as I landed, I found out we're about to get a super cyclone.

Oh.

And that's what we really needed after the world's worst COVID outbreak.

But if it feels you know, it makes builders feel better.

The name of the cyclone, it was given by the Meteorological Association of Oman.

Apparently, there is such a thing.

And they call the cyclone YAS.

Y A A S.

Yes.

So

there's something morbidly brilliant about that name.

That sounds kind of celebratory, doesn't it?

Yes.

Something your child would say to you after they've beaten you at Uno or something.

Yes.

Yeah.

The Telegraph newspaper in Calcutta had the headline today, Yas, it's coming.

So I don't know what I'm supposed to take from that.

But the fun never stops in india it is indeed

endless um oh yeah

well i guess a super cyclone it's probably it's probably more fun than than a than a than a viral pandemic i don't know how you grade these things in terms of uh you know funness i mean they're not scoring very high but you know everything's relative isn't it uh we are recording on the 24th of may uh obviously that's the 32nd birthday of my former dog emeril i can't believe she's gone also on this day in 1626 peter miniwit bought manhattan the uh dutch Chancellor bought the renowned island for a box of random shit worth about 25 bucks, according to legend.

Now the price of the average Manhattan sandwich.

Although I think it's fair to say that Manhattan has changed somewhat over the past 395 years.

In those days, for example, the city did in fact often sleep.

And although the metro system wasn't up to much and there weren't so many major league baseball teams, it was less polluted and better for dog walking.

So all in all, ups and downs and probably a fair price.

On this day in 1844, Samuel Morse,

the star of the Morse code invention, sent the message, What hath God wrought?

from a committee room in the US Capitol to his assistant in Baltimore to inaugurate a commercial telegraph line between Baltimore and DC.

And

his assistant, Alfred Vail, responded, God be like, oops, I've wrought something again.

And hence, memes were born.

Morse in Morse code is, oh, it's a very exciting one, actually.

It's dash, dash, dash, dash, dash, dot, dash, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

Six all between dashes and dots after dashes took a seemingly impregnable 5-0 lead after two letters of a five-word surname.

But a great fight back from dots for a thrilling draw, and it's going to overtime.

We'll report back next week.

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

This week, week.

And are you a billionaire psychometric test?

It's been a great pandemic for billionaires.

We may touch upon this later on.

But many people aren't actually aware that being a billionaire is not a question of money.

It's a state of mind.

And so many of you buglers might actually be unwitting billionaires without having the bank balances to prove it.

So to help you find out whether or not you are a billionaire, we have a psychometric test.

Simply answer these three questions as accurately as possible and we'll tell you whether or not you are a billionaire.

So scenario one, you have a large yacht.

Someone gives you $200 million, no questions asked.

Do you A, call the police?

B say, thank you, Mr.

Hancock, of course I can get you 10 billion nurses outfits by Wednesday.

Or do you C, buy another yacht, obviously?

That is scenario one.

Scenario two is a prince from a small but oil-rich nation emails you.

Do you A, immediately delete the email and warn your friends and family that you think your email has been hacked?

Do you B, email the prince back with a meme of of david attenborough telling him he's been a very naughty boy or do you c say hi buddy what is it this time you're on a football club a fighter jet or an alibi so do make your choice for scenario two there and finally scenario three your child is interested in outer space so do you a go on youtube to watch some videos about it do you b buy your child a telescope and a book about planets but say realistically we are stuck here for good and there's no point deluding ourselves otherwise by which i mean no you can't watch star wars again the cricket's on or do you see, send your child into outer space in their own private rocket?

So do answer those.

And if you've got mostly C's, then you are a billionaire.

Congratulations.

Top story this week, the Middle East.

And, well, whatever you think about it, it looks increasingly like the Middle East is heading for yet another choppy millennium.

That will make it a world-leading seven from seven, full house of choppy millennia for the world-famous famous regions since this planet came into existence.

There is currently a tentative ceasefire after the recent violence when the world looked on nervously and hoped that all hell would not break loose.

As it is, some hell broke loose, but not all hell currently.

So let's hope that we stay with some hell rather than all hell.

More than 250 people have been killed, including around 70 children, most of them in Gaza.

It's a humanitarian catastrophe on numerous levels.

And I mean, let's be honest, this is a tricky topic for comedy.

And

whatever you say about it, people are going to be pissed off on one or more sides.

NATO, you are our Middle East Ructions correspondent, being as you are one of God's chosen people, like my good self.

Just bring us up to date with the latest and whether, in fact, God has come out of retirement to clarify any of the

squabbles about

the land.

Andy, you're not kidding about how easy it is to offend everyone on all sides.

I spent a lot of people spent the 11 days of violence in Palestine sort of feverishly watching the news.

I spent 11 days trying to decide if I should play a game and get myself immediately canceled by the entire political spectrum simply by tweeting Zionists are.

So, which would have done the trick.

Right.

So,

I did not.

All right.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

I exercise

for holding that to get this entire podcast canceled instead.

Yeah, I returned to the story.

So,

the news media quaintly calls it a conflict in which extremists on quote both sides are responsible for violence.

And it is a conflict with both sides in the same sense that I had a conflict with my snooze button for 40 minutes after the alarm went off.

One side controlled the result and electricity itself, and the other side could at most make a vaguely annoying sound for every eight minutes.

So those are the sort of the sides.

And like as a Jew, it's hard to, because whenever Israel does something shitty, people want me to have an opinion about it.

And I can tolerate a basic level of answering for annoying shit that Jews do, like every Adam Sandler movie.

But this is dog shit.

Kick them out of the tribe.

Give them their foreskins back.

These motherfuckers make me look bad.

And you're like, you can't criticize Israel without a lot of hemming and hawing.

Like you have to, yes, Israel has the right to defend themselves.

Yes, there have been excesses on both sides.

Yes, Hamas is horrible.

Yes, Ekud Barak made a generous offer in 2001, but at least we can all agree that killing 70 children is bad.

Like it's loaded.

uh with conditions like a baked potato is loaded with chives olives and cheese it is as if zionism is paid by the word uh Zionists win arguments the way that my little brother did through sheer staying power.

Yeah, it may look like you won the debate, but you just kept talking until everyone else got sleepy and had to pee.

So

last weekend, there were marches all over the world, which was unprecedented to see that level of mobilization and solidarity with the people of Palestine.

And I took one of my 12-year-old twins down to the Free Palestine March in San Francisco.

And the neighborhood, like usually the marches in San Francisco are downtown, but this was in a neighborhood that's a bit of more of like a hipster shopping neighborhood.

And so the intersection was completely clogged.

There were 10,000 people protesting for a pre-Palestine, but then there were some people who

happened to be there

who were just like trying to get to brunch.

And, you know, and so they were like, excuse me, Mr.

Palestine will be free.

I'm trying to get to the brioche French toast.

Is it that over there?

So that was fun.

And I, it was like a big learning experience for my kid,

you know, answering their questions about the signs.

Like people were chanting, we don't want two states, we want 48.

And they were referring to they want to return to the 1948 borders.

But my kid was like, they don't want two states, they want 48.

Why would they want 48 states?

One state sounds like plenty of states.

So

you're going to get rid of two from the USA.

Yeah, right.

So, well, I mean, it is, and I've it's uh, well, I mean, I guess when we think of the

Israeli military action, it's, I mean, I guess it's a perennially fine line between self-defense and slaughtering defenceless children in their homes.

That's always a tricky one to

stay balanced on.

And, um, and you know, I guess, you know, both sides, as NATO was saying, both sides have, have been doing bad things.

I guess it's like, you know, you have the Grand National horse race

you've got two trainers cheating.

One is cheating by giving its horse steroids and the other is using a supersonic jet fighter in a pantomime horses outfit and wins the race in a record 15.3 seconds.

Both are wrong, but one definitely has a strategic advantage in terms of in terms of hardware.

And looking at the history of it, and maybe you can shed some light on this, Anna, a lot of it

goes back to the early 20th century and the British carve-up of the region.

I mean, obviously, you know, Britain learned from any mistakes that were made in that.

And future carve-ups of regions went absolutely seamlessly for the rest of that century.

Is that correct?

Yeah, I mean, I can't think of any other countries that Britain divided up in the 1940s.

It was a very quiet time when it came to borders in Britain.

But, you know, one thing that's been interesting me a lot, Dato, Andy, maybe you guys know something about this, has been this iron dome that Israel has.

And it's been all over the papers, some sort of a shield to cover an entire country.

And I was trying to look at the map of West Bank, and I guess it's a good thing or a bad thing.

I live in a very large country, and I figured what it would look like if, you know, the size of West Bank,

a sort of similar violent protest broke out in India.

And I realized that the place is so close.

that I'd have to fight with my local Biryani shop, which is four streets away.

That's how tight it seemed like the place was.

Well, it's certainly not the most equal of contests.

um when one's that has the finest military hardware that money money can possibly buy and um

uh i guess that always helps in any argument doesn't it having you know high quality military hardware uh nato i mean i've lost uh lost track of the number of arguments i've won purely by by relying on american uh military products that have been uh been sold to me over the years

Yeah,

why have the best argument when you have Tomahawk missiles?

and if you're going to be doing colonialism, at least name your colonial weaponry after the genocide of Native Americans: Tomahawk missiles, Apache helicopters.

The UN

passed a resolution during the fighting resolution 2574 as things looked on particularly sharp knife edge.

And that resolution simply said,

Since the truce went into force on Friday, the Israeli Prime Minister, desperate clinger onto power and A-list corruption scandal Benjamin Netanyahu, said the degrading of Hamas's military power by air bombardment was, quote, an exceptional success and pledged a new level of force to deal with future rocket attacks.

Hamas itself has spoken of the euphoria of victory and it proudly said the conflict had opened the door to new phases that will witness many victories.

Now, one other aspect of the situation was a number of footballers waving Palestine flags in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

This happened off the FA Cup final won by Leicester City.

And the players were heavily criticised by people saying sport and politics should not mix.

I mean, politics gets into every aspect of life, but

would you be more into sport if there was more overt politics in it?

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Like, I mean,

I would love it if during a basketball game, one of the maneuvers was the filibuster.

That would be fascinating to me.

If during

a soccer match, what you would call football,

there was a discussion, they paused the game to have a discussion of preemption.

So,

yeah,

that sounds great to me.

Yeah, but they never talk about getting politics fans more into sport.

And I think that is

a commercial demographic that sport is missing out on.

Lawrence Fox, the failed London mayoral candidate and full-time gobshite provocateur, called for these footballers to be hounded out of of the game.

Now, Lawrence Fox has spent much of the last, however long he's been inserting himself into British public discourse, banging on about how important free speech is.

And now he's complaining about footballers expressing freedom of this is a classic maneuver of the right-wing dick.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, well, good news for democracy fans.

Syria, which has had what can only be described as a disappointing last 10 years in terms of not descending into an intractable spiral of chaos and destruction under the murderous snout of Bashar al-Assad.

It's going to the polls this week.

It's election fever time in Syria.

Bad news for democracy fans.

We already know the result.

Bashar al-Assad is going to win.

Big Bash, as he's known, who oddly sponsors a cricket league in Australia.

I don't want to go over the sport and politics arguments again, but that seems wrong.

It looks like he's going to stick two rocket launcher-shaped fingers up at those who claim you don't win elections if you slaughter, displace, and violate your own people.

Andy, Bashar al-Assad needs to stay out of sports and stick to humanitarian abuses.

Niche.

He's a classic example.

You know, people say, you know, keep politics.

But if Bashar al-Assad had, you know, not become president of Syria, but had become president of the World Croquet Association, I think the world would be a happier place.

Anuvab, how excited are you by the Syrian elections this week?

Very much.

I just read a Guardian article that I think really summed up Bashar al-Assad.

It said, he's come a long way from where he started out, which was as a mild-mannered ophthalmologist.

And I always found those to be the most dangerous.

They start out,

start out like that, and they end out as lunatic dictators.

Living in a chaotic democracy, I always feel for other chaotic democracies.

But in this particular election, I feel particularly for those who will run against Assad, because it takes a lot of optimism.

I'm imagining the best case scenario for the opposition leader is that you win and you disappear into a state prison for a little while.

But this is turning into a isn't the world f ⁇ ed up section.

And let's move to another despotic government, Belarus.

And its suspiciously mustachioed leader, Lukashenko, has made a play for a bit more international scrutiny of its frankly abhorrent leadership by hijacking a Ryan air flight.

It wasn't just your average commoner garden hijacking.

It was a gambit that were it not so politically motivated with such worrying implications would be regarded as just a bit of a prank, fake bomb threat to this Ryan air flight, causing a plane that was en route between Athens in Greece and Vilnius in Lithuania to make an emergency landing in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, then cheekily arresting the 26-year-old journalist Roman Protasevich, an activist and writer who is not always 100% complimentary towards Mr.

Lukashenko.

It's, I mean, let's be honest, Lukashenko is a leader who wears his leadership style under his nose with a moustache that says, I've looked at history and I'm going to lay my cards firmly and hairily on my upper lip.

And he's basically just stolen an aeroplane to arrest.

a political opponent.

And there seems to be absolutely fall that anyone could have done about it

yeah i mean look if this became standard which is you know hijacking commercial planes and turning them around i mean i've fled many cities after dubious gigs and they and if this became standard they'll make the plane turn around and make me face my audience for my sins uh lukashenko has been described as europe's last dictator a tag that is looking increasingly like hopeless optimism and the european union is well the european union is not happy it was a flight between two of its member states states on an airline that is based in another of its member states, and it was hijacked and taken to another country.

So I think if the EU is not happy, I think this means in Brexit, Britain, we have to support Lukashenko and Belarus and say that this is absolutely, absolutely fine.

And this 26-year-old dissident journalist Pradasevich was probably asking, he probably hadn't, you know, he was on a Ryan airflight.

It's quite possible that he simply had not paid the 29 Euros 99 surcharge not to be kidnapped by the Belarusian regime and you know that he could have still paid it in flight at the high cost of 59.99 but the card reader wasn't working so there was nothing they could do to stop him being pilfered uh in into custody uh there's claims that the uh belarusian kgb were on the flight um but there's no law that says you're not allowed to do your job on a flight is there i mean that you you know Every flight I'm on, I do a tight 45 minutes of prime observational stuff about the snacks and stuff, as is my right.

And then I tip my work hats and I do some stats, all relevant and I think mostly reassuring for airline passengers.

Of course, some people who don't understand probability get a bit cranky when I use the phrase, it's not quite 100% certain.

A few people have survived from this altitude, but you know, we're allowed to do work on flights.

And if the pilot and the navigator and the flight attendants are allowed to work, why not KGB officers?

I don't see any difference.

We've got to be morally consistent.

India news now, and well, Anuvab, as you mentioned, things are not completely fine in

India right now.

The Indian government however has started to get things back under control by just trying to stop people saying that it's not under control.

An example of this has been that social media platforms have been ordered to take down content that refers to the Indian variant of the coronavirus.

And I mean, how successful is this

being?

If you just stop people from mentioning it, does that make it go away?

Well, yeah, you know, it's a good strategy.

You know, it's tautology.

True, false, false, false, true.

You know, I think you can build a mathematical model around it.

So what's happened here is that the Indian government is dealing with two variants, which are known as the Indian variants, the B1617.1 and the B1617.2.

Well, I mean, obviously, we've had the British variant.

And we're quite proud that it was a British variant.

We proudly sent it off into the world to cause merry havoc.

And now we don't want other variants coming back into Britain, winning Britain a special award for most obviously metaphorical national COVID response.

So that's been quite exciting.

But I mean, for Modi,

it's kind of classic: if I close my eyes, you can't see me.

It sounds like Modi is a head of state with the cognitive development of a two-year-old who's still struggling with object permanence.

There are so many of those heads of state.

That

if mom goes behind the piece of paper, she's gone away.

Correct.

Look, I mean, you guys know an object to be a thing, right?

Like you are looking at your laptop and saying this is a laptop.

Now, for Prime Minister Modi, it's a range of options.

He's a Hindu mystic.

Anything is possible.

The laptop could be a monkey.

The laptop could be a spirit.

The laptop could not be there.

You know, it really depends.

And Andy, from this vivid description, has clearly spent some time with the Prime Minister at Four West Coast Road,

watching him do what he does with his crocodiles.

So, you know, you realize that he works in a sort of mysticism.

Yesterday, he gave a televised address in which he started crying.

He was in tears.

And a lot of comedians were putting out memes with actual crocodiles and Prime Minister Moli at the same time.

And in terms of treatments,

the vaccine rollout is slightly problematic because there are, well, let's

over a billion, well, 1.4 billion people.

in India.

That's quite a lot of vaccines that are needed.

So I understand some people are turning to other possible medical solutions.

Yes, it's been quite interesting for us, Andy, because we found out that apparently

the government announced that everyone can be vaccinated.

18 upwards, you can get a vaccine.

But apparently, one of the small problems tends to be that you can't get a vaccine if you haven't ordered any.

There seems to be some sort of correlation between having to order it and then pay for it and then receive it.

I think it's a very Western notion.

It's very new to us.

Just very quickly, something just happened today in India that, Andy, NATO, I want to ask you guys what you thought of this.

Now, obviously, we're in lockdown, you know, our deaths are still going up.

And yet, hundreds of people in the state of Karnataka's Belgavi district violated COVID-19 restrictions to attend the funeral of a horse.

The horse belonged to a local religious organization, and upon its passing, a lot of people gathered to participate in the funeral.

I just want to know morally where you stand on on horse funerals during COVID, just as a policy, and how many of those you may have attended.

Well, I guess it depends on the horse, really.

I mean, how good was this?

I mean, no doubt it was an absolutely terrific horse, as horses go,

the horse.

I mean, could do all manner of horsic tasks, but with extra religiosity to really horse it up to the horse max.

So you can understand why people want to...

want to pay tribute to the uh

to the horse but i mean it does suggest the covet messaging isn't entirely getting through to

dead horse mourners.

Look, I don't want to assume that a horse funeral follows the same ritual practices as a human funeral.

Like,

when you say horse funeral, I imagine like a coffin and a wake and people in suits and giving eulogies, that kind of thing.

But it could be, I mean, what do I know?

It could be that a

a horse funeral is a totally different kind of affair.

It could be that for the funeral of a horse, you just go to the water slides.

Like it, you know what I mean?

It could be something else entirely.

So, and if it's the water slides, then maybe I would think about it.

In other animal news now, well, this goes to the United States, NATO, in Americans being told not to get off with chickens news.

The CDC has urged America not to smooch its chickens.

I mean,

do Americans spend a lot of time kissing chickens?

And if so,

why?

Don't kink shame me, Zaltzman.

Don't knock until you try it.

Do you know?

I mean, it's a way of,

it's not just chickens, but it's other poultry as well.

And I don't know if you realize how much kissing chickens and other poultry improves the taste.

Right.

Like, you know how delicious foie gras is when the duck is restrained and force-fed acorns.

Now imagine how much better that would be if the duck got to make out a little verse.

Right.

But can we not preach abstinence here, NATO?

Can America in these difficult times not be, you know, just, you know, hold it in, you know, take your chicken out for a no-strings dinner, make it clear it's not going to lead to anything physical.

Just let it build up more gradually until the salmonella scare.

I mean, it's just, yeah, everyone's so desperate to get down to it with their chickens that you're not prepared to wait like in the old days.

I don't know if you realise how sexy American chickens are, Andy.

To be fair, no, I don't.

No, no.

It's a whole different level of sexiness than

the kind of ugly,

weak-chinned chickens that you have in the UK.

Right.

Here, there's a famous fairy story that if you kiss a frog, it might turn into a prince,

which has been around in this country for a long, believed to date back to the future

George IV having a skin infection and an enlarged thyroid after a particularly hard year on the booze.

But in America, I mean,

do people think, oh, if I kiss a chicken, it might become

a president or

a vote or a double down, the renowned chicken sandwich stroke, one-dish culinary crime spree?

Is that what people are going for when they kiss their chickens?

There's an old American myth that if you kiss kiss a chicken, it'll turn into a gun.

Man, there's a lot of people kissing chickens in America.

British COVID news, there's some confusion over where and whether people are allowed to go on holidays following the reopening.

of recent weeks and the introduction of a traffic light scheme that categorizes countries as green, amber or red.

And there's a lot of confusion.

The government base has gone about this with the clarity of a medieval pope trying to explain American football to a narwhal.

And no one quite knows whether...

So travel to foreign countries is now...

A classic cocktail of legal, not advised, safe, risky, allowed, discouraged, fun again, and a journey into the withering soul of dashed hopes.

The current government advice on whether you should go on holiday to the amberlist countries is no, you shouldn't.

The answer was yes, eight seconds ago when I began this sentence.

Then it flitted into maybe, but is now a definite no.

It's become maybe yes again.

And I'm just hearing it's now downgraded to maybe no.

Scratch.

It's definitely not unless you really want to or you're fing minted.

It's now no again, but it is yes, but only if you want to make up an excuse that makes it sound like a work trip.

So I hope that's clarified things.

The problem is the amber list of countries that we have here was wrongly assumed to refer to the amber of traffic lights, whereas in fact it means amber in the style of one of those pieces of amber containing a trapped insect that hasn't gone fing anywhere for 20 million fing years.

Thousands of holiday makers have ever took Amber to mean Amber, as in the Amber of a London traffic light, and zoomed off at high speed within 0.1 seconds of the new regulations.

Andy, can I just share with you that in California, Amber evokes something different, which is

that, so I read this story through that lens, which is the Amber alert refers to the police warning when a child has been abducted.

Right.

Okay.

So

that's what I associate British travel rules with.

Oh, right.

Okay.

Yes.

Right.

I mean, that's.

You shouldn't do that on holidays.

Let's not.

I'm not advising that.

I think when I had nothing to do last year, I looked up the green list of countries that the United Kingdom had.

And now the list is growing.

But back then, there were only four places, and one of them was Faroe Islands.

Yes.

And I looked up, what's fun to do in Faroe Islands?

And the answer was, you can go for long walks if you happen to be a debose.

That was one of the options of things to do at Faroe Islands.

So

now there are 12 countries, Andy.

I think Portugal is being added, Israel is being added.

The deputy chief medical officer here, Jonathan Van Tam, said a really extraordinary thing about travel and whether or not you should go.

He said, everything is relative.

And the other bit of relativity is whether you're, when you go abroad, jumping into a pond with one shark in it, or jumping into a pond with 100 sharks in it, it changes the likelihood that you're going to get bitten.

Now, there is, I mean, for a start,

this is a senior public official in the middle of a pandemic.

And it does suggest he has not been getting a lot of sleep in the last 15 months.

But also, for a start, I mean, if you're looking at a pond and it has any sharks in it, you're not going to get in the pond.

It's not like, I mean, this is more like making a choice between jumping into a pond that has between zero and one sharks in it.

Anything below half a shark, you might take your chances.

And this gentleman's view of relativism just seems to be like you'll be relatively dead or absolutely dead.

Although, I have to say, Andy Dato, I went to Dubai once and they had a shark in a mall.

Was it Hall of Emirates?

Yeah, they had a massive aquarium, and there was a shark staring at a Gucci store.

If we specified it for the shark, was it the general manager?

And what dating sites have been,

including vaccination status.

Now I'm a bit out of the loop on dating sites because I've been with

my now wife since

the last millennium.

So I'm not fully up to date with what's going on on dating.

But this seems, I mean,

is that what people look for in love now?

Just, you know, a basic vaccination status?

Is that rather than a shared taste in music?

Yeah,

well, what do I know?

I'm in the same boat as you are, Andy.

I've been with my wife since before online dating.

My wife and I have been together for so long that when we got together, our song was no dickity.

And

so I, like, I have no idea, but I listen to the kids and the young people today talking about the online dating.

And

I think

it came from the

criminally unhip Biden administration, the proposal to

the plan to tie it to dating sites.

But I think they're taking the wrong approach.

I think the way to use

these sites to get more vaccination participation is to use the hookup and kink sites and not the searching for a partner sites.

They should have been using Grinder, Field, and FetLife

and give out vaccines through the sites.

You know what I mean?

Like let people get jabbed while they're getting jabbed.

So, because the thing about kinks is that if you can imagine it, someone is into it.

And it is 100% certain that someone's fetish is getting a vaccine shot right in the Gooch at the moment they come.

Family show, NATO.

Right in the Gooch.

Gooch,

famous England cricketer, of course.

Not known for vaccinations.

No, no,

no, no.

And Grinder, of course, is, I mean, that was

initially an app that paired cricket selectors up with very defensive opening batsmen.

Uh, there's a joke for our cricket listening, uh, cricket fan listeners.

I have a feeling, you know, if vaccination became sort of a

thing for matrimony, at some point in India, we'll find a way to make arranged marriages based on vaccines.

So it's very unlikely that two Pfizer vaccine people,

you know, would be allowed to marry two Moderna people.

You know, we would come up with a coded society where AstraZeneca has to stay with AstraZeneca.

Well, that sounded like a nice jolly joke, but there was something so dark about that, Anna.

So

irretrievably dark.

I think we should close this episode of the bugle on that

before we start thinking about it too much.

It's been a pleasure having you both on.

Any shows or other works to tell our listeners about?

Well,

as part of the Return to Live stand-up, I have another show next weekend, but I'm told it's a secret show, so I can't tell you.

So if you should be in the vicinity of the city of Alameda next Saturday, apparently I have a show, but you have to be in the know to find out about it.

I don't understand how these kids do things.

But otherwise,

I have two comedy albums out.

The Whiteness album was my last album, and the best way to get it to support the artist is to buy it on Bandcamp.

But, you know, do what you do.

You do you.

Nato Green at Twitter, Mr.

NATO Green on Instagram.

I'll see you next time.

And of anything to any forthcoming events?

Yes, I mean, I'm going to go from my bedroom to my living room.

So that is the plan for the next month.

But we continue doing our podcast, Our Last Week, which is on Spotify.

So if you are interested in knowing the cutting-edge science with which we're dealing with COVID, and other whimsical happenings in India, we're at Our Last Week on Spotify.

You can hear me hosting the news quiz for the next couple of weeks before this current series ends.

You can get the whole of the series via BBC's Sounds.

And, well, from the middle of next week, I will also be talking numbers on the BBC's cricket coverage.

So, if you're into that, do tune in.

We'll be back next week with Chris Addison and Nish Kumar.

In the meantime, I will play you out with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join them, go to the Bugle website, thebuglepodcast.com, where you can also buy our exciting new line of merch, the Cold and Wet Weaver pun t-shirt,

a limited edition that is proven to be the fashion icon of the year,

if a piece of clothing can be an icon rather than the person in it.

But by putting it on, you become the icon.

Do you want to be a fashion icon, Buglers?

Well, now you can.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the merch button, I think.

So, yeah, you can find those t-shirts at thebuglepodcast.com, where you can also, as I said, join our voluntary subscription scheme where I'll make a one-off or occurring donation to the Bugle to help keep the show free, flourishing and independent.

And here are some lies about our premium level voluntary subscribers.

Goodbye.

John Bingham is constantly disappointed that the supermarket trolley did not become the gold standard for urban personal transport, rather than the car or motorbike.

The trolley is space efficient, explains John.

It's manoeuvrable in tight spaces as long as the wheels don't go wonky, and and above all, it's fun.

It wouldn't need much of an engine to get people around at just about acceptable speeds, and it's cheap.

In Britain, for example, you can usually pick one up for as little as a single £1 coin.

Liang Yu has reluctantly stopped deliberately bumping into people as they help themselves to food from salad bars at restaurants or in hotel breakfast rooms and the like.

Liang dolefully explains, much as I stand by the humorous misreading of the word buffet as buffet, there is only so much antagonism you can take before it starts to spoil your day.

However, if I ever do see billionaire Warren Buffett, I am going to bump into him whilst wearing a rabbit costume and shouting, I'm home darling, I'm home.

Being in possession of the first name Zack, premium subscriber Zach M naturally gravitates towards words beginning with the letter Z, which is similar to the American letter Z but better, as well as to podcasts hosted by people whose surnames begin with the letter Z and whose fathers are called Zack.

In particular, Zack M loves the word Zero and has had numerous daydreams about being a crime-fighting intergalactic superhero superhero called Zack Zero who lets zero criminals get away with it but also does zero paperwork.

Janelle Rothenberg believes that many of the arts sector's problems and indeed unemployment issues around the world could be solved if there were orchestras stationed in all public spaces to provide the kind of background music you get in films and TV shows.

Janelle explains, as well as providing work for up to 1.3 billion musicians worldwide, it would make all our lives seem more dramatic, and if the music suddenly became tense and foreboding, it would provide warnings to people that something bad was about to happen, thus saving potentially millions of lives.

And finally, Daniel Rogers Pryor has never really understood why horseshoes are supposed to bring good luck.

If they're such an agent of benevolent fortune, rages Daniel, how come horses don't have better life outcomes?

They mostly get forced to race against each other for the enjoyment and or financial destruction of the baying human, or they're made to confront rioting ne'er-do-wells, or they get forced to run at top speed over ridiculous distances in historical films and TV shows where horses seem to be able to sprint for literally hundreds of miles.

If anything, concludes Daniel, the horseshoe is a sign of impending human exploitation.

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.