Ketchup! (4190)

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The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4190 of the bugle audio newspaper for a world which isn't really sure if it's allowed to be visual anymore because no one is sure of anything anymore i mean are you actually allowed to listen to this not if you're doing it whilst in a crowded warehouse with 15 000 randomly selected mask skeptics and conspiracy theorists from the world's most covert addled countries you're not sorry rules are rules on this show uh the point is please listen safe uh with a mask over each ear and your head at least six feet away from the rest of your body i'm andy zoltzmann it's the 9th of april 2021 a day that sadly,

amongst others, science whiz Mari Curie, Spanish painting celeb Francisco Goya, Greek poet Sappho, and the renowned corpse Otzie the Iceman did not live to see.

Makes you appreciate every second, every sensation, every sausage that life allows us.

Joining me today from San Francisco, USA, it's NATO Green.

Hello, Nato.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

Andy,

I told my 12-year-old that I was going to be be doing the bugle today,

and they said, is that the one with your friend with the clown hair?

So that's how my kids know you.

Right, okay.

That's how my kids know me as well, to be honest.

And also joining us from here in London is Felicity Wards.

Hello, Andy and NATO and buglers on the theme of clown hair.

I have been running from a gig before.

This is a couple of years ago.

And a group of youths yelled, run, sideshow, Bob, run.

I had my hair out and so I would have been upset except it was very funny.

I mean when I think back to my early years on the stand-up circuit most of it was just being heckled about my ridiculous hair.

So it's good that I mean this is you know this is passed down the generations now.

It's your legacy.

That's what it is.

We are recording on the 9th of April 2021 on this day in 1860.

Edouard Léon Scott de Martinville made the oldest known recording of an audible human voice on his phone autograph machine.

He recorded himself, they think, singing Eau Claire de la Luna, a French folk song meaning Eau Claire, you absolute lunatic.

But if you play it backwards, it contains coded warnings for the world about the dangers of militaristic imperialism leading to two global conflicts within the next hundred years.

And also a prediction that that year's Eurovision song contest would be won by Sweden's opera singing sensation Jenny Lind with a catchy ditty entitled Ooh Yeah Touch Me There written by Hector Berlios.

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

Well, in fact, the section in the bin this week is the rest of the show because all news has ended temporarily because Prince Philip has died.

Well, not so much died.

because he's royal.

He is to all intents and purposes an immortal being, but he has ceased to be alive in the traditional sense.

Uh, this news broke earlier today.

The 99-year-old Duke of Edinburgh snicked off to the Reaper just two months short of his 100th birthday, missing out on the much-treasured letter from the Queen that is sent to all centenarians.

Also, slavishly mimicking my own grandmother, who also pegged out one short of the 100 mark, although my late grandmother edged out the Duke when it comes to fluency in reading Hebrew and tendency to keep kosher.

So, an overall win for Pearl's ultimate there.

Now, he departs the scene as the longest-serving royal spouse in history.

And it has to be said that some of his predecessors from the distant past really did not put up much of a challenge there, mentioning those 16th-century wives of Henry VIII, for example.

And I mean, you have to say that the media coverage of his death here in the UK stands in stark contrast to, for example, Anne Boleyn, who received a far less positive and gushing media response when she sadly passed away in 1536.

I mean,

it is totally dominated the news here today.

I mean when a major royal event such as this happens basically life completely stops in Britain for between

I don't know 10 and 40 years and the Duke of Edinburgh was best known of course for being a cricket fan.

He was a lifelong patron of the Lords Taverner's charity, although it remains unclear to this day if he had any involvement in the pelting of Bugle co-host Nish Kumar with a single bread roll at the Lord's Taverner's Christmas fundraising lunch a couple of years ago.

The Duke, as far as we're aware, never explicitly denied roll-trolling Nish, although he was not on the guest list for that particular lunch, nor has Nish received.

Nor was Nish.

Well, Nish has not received any form of knighthood or other sundry gong in the Queen's honours list, so you can draw your own conclusions from that.

You mentioned his work ethic, NATO.

He retired from public life in 2017, having completed a personal best, 22,219 public engagements.

Well, that's that's uh oh man, that is a hello.

He's heroically overcame repetitive strain injury in his waving and ribbon-cutting muscles, as so many royals uh have to.

Think of the air miles he had to do, Andy.

Don't downplay it.

That's a lot of time on a plane.

It is a lot of human beings, probably a boat many years ago.

He must have been a Delta Platinum member.

Oh, yeah, yeah,

he had a lot of points.

Well, obviously, there's no other news in the universe right now, but let's pretend there is for the sake of our non-British, or more correctly, our non-currently British listeners, because surely in tribute to the Duke's life and works, all countries will volunteer to join or rejoin the United Kingdom within minutes.

But it's been a time of great upheaval in the United States, also NATO, following just three months after the trauma of the Capitol riots, 160 short years since the Civil War began, and a mere mere few tens of thousands of years since the first human migration to the American continent.

There have been further ruptions for your star-spangling nation because you're running out of tomato ketchup.

I mean,

this is a complete catastrophe, isn't it?

Well,

Andy, you're almost right.

It is a national emergency and it's wall-to-wall news coverage,

but it's not actually, we're not running out of ketchup.

We're running out of ketchup packets.

Right.

The little sachets, specifically, rather than the ketchup itself.

Yeah, we have plenty of ketchup delivery.

But it's the ketchup vector that we're, it's the great ketchup package shortage of 2021 because of the pivot to takeout orders.

We ate all of the packets of ketchup

while we've been sitting at home.

And

meanwhile,

if you're following along, there are 690 million people in the world going hungry.

And so some restaurants have resorted to in in

recognizing the depth of the crisis have resorted to buying ketchup in bulk and dispensing it in individual cups instead of packets uh

and so i mean well

that shows the scale of the catastrophe doesn't it nato that's right yeah yeah serving generic non-branded ketchup with no bra I mean do we fight the Cold War for nothing?

I mean, you might as well just cut to the chase and call it squirty Starlin sauce, Mind you.

That's right.

So, and I would say that when it's international news that you have changed the tiny container for a condiment, we have run out of news.

So it makes me miss the early days of the pandemic when we were talking about yeast and like how meth labs were retooling to convert to make hand sanitizer out of expired sour cream.

But during the ketchup,

as a result of the ketchup crisis, I learned that the Heinz Corporation has a monopoly 70% of the ketchup market.

And they say the United States is a polarized country.

But when Obama said there's no blue America, no red America, he was clearly wrong.

There is a red America and it's ketchup.

And so to meet the surging demand for ketchup, Heinz is cutting back on other products in production in order to...

churn out more uh ketchup packets so it's just going to shift the problem obviously uh so instead of the shortage in ketchup, we're going to soon have shortages of

tartar sauce, a product that Heinz offers called Mayo Chup

and

Pickle Relish.

I think it's a blended mayonnaise ketchup in one thing.

If you are too lazy, because you're an American and it's your God-given right to have two containers of mayonnaise and ketchup and then put them both on your thing and blend them if you want them in the same container.

Because sometimes you want ketchup, and sometimes you want mayonnaise, and sometimes you want both.

So, you need to have three containers instead of two.

So, then you need to have mayo chop.

I mean, I don't know if anything like this has ever struck Australia, Felicity,

a tragedy of this magnitude.

I may have spoken about this, I'm not sure.

I've spoken about it at length on many podcasts, I can barely keep up.

Genuinely, in 2011, there was huge floods in the state of Queensland and there was a great banana shortage where bunches of bananas were $17 a kilo and I'm surprised we don't have a minute silence for those prices every year because that was that was look I you're making light of this I think this is a very serious very serious problem

And I don't know if this is any different to you know the pasta shortage or the or the toilet paper shortage.

I just think I've got a

the World Health Organization are just now urging Americans to keep a small bottle of hand sanitizer and ketchup on their person in case of COVID emergency at all times.

Well, that's good advice.

It is good advice.

And

what I love is, you know, they're already making a movie about this.

You know it.

The grant is like, it's called catch up question mark, catch down.

And it stars Julia Roberts is a single mum working at a fast food chain store.

And then when Heinz can't keep up with demand, she makes her own recipe and her own sauce.

And it has that special ingredient, an Oscar-winning performance.

In other American news, Joe Biden has announced a $2.3 trillion infrastructure program.

I mean, this is

a lot of money, isn't it?

I mean, that's

$650 billion is going towards domestic infrastructure, according to the plans, such as broadband internet, drinking water, housing, and higher education.

Nature, this looks dangerously like things ordinary people might benefit from.

Is this an act of great political self-harm by Joe Biden in the context of American politics?

Yeah, Andy, so

there is a panic on the right about whether the infrastructure bill is,

they're calling it a Trojan horse for things that are not infrastructure.

So

it's provoked provoked a raging debate about what is and is not infrastructure.

So

former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said, oh, now the care economy is infrastructure.

I don't even know what the care economy is, which is sort of a self-owned because

no one cares about him.

Republican rep Tom Emmer of Minnesota called the plan to fix bridges and send people to college a radical left socialist agenda.

uh

and you know

i wish uh but

i mean if there hadn't been bridges in st petersburg in 1917 uh lenin would have just been stuck by a canal wouldn't he

that's right yeah right i mean lenin actually uh crept into into st petersburg by rail so uh

you need bridges for trains Yeah, so that's that's true, you know, but notably missing from my perspective from the infrastructure infrastructure bill is

a massive expansion in American guillotine production,

which

I'm as part of the radical left socialist agenda.

But

clearly what they mean is that infrastructure, like when they talk about infrastructure,

the Republicans are, they like the idea of infrastructure, but they're horny for cars is the technical term.

They want stuff that like the infrastructure means man stuff.

They want burly men all greased up, you know, with tight shirts on and hard hats, moving rebar around and welding.

Is there a video of this that I can watch?

Or

yes, they want infrastructure to slip into something more comfortable.

They want the Republican idea is that infrastructure is like the first minute and a half of every porno.

So

that's the idea.

And

that,

but it could be, it could be anything like infrastructure, you know, that they're, they're talking about funding.

The fact is that most of the job loss in the last year in the United States was

jobs was women

that

few.

Few.

Yeah.

And so

where the economic stimulus needs to be is

to

address towards restoring gender equality or moving towards gender equality, not restoring it.

But so investing in college, investing in housing, investing in elder care and child care

to deal with the gender division of labor seems like a useful thing.

And it will stimulate the economy.

It might even tickle the economy's balls and push the pressure on the economy's taint.

That's technical terms.

Yeah,

but I mean, how likely is it for this,

you know, for much of this project to actually get through?

Because as they say, there's many a slip between cup and lip, and there's also many a destructive partisan squabble between initial bill and final watered-down,

neutered actual legislation.

I mean, are we going to be looking at anything much more than a new park bench somewhere in rural Pennsylvania?

Well, I think

there's probably going to be a bill in some form, and

Mitch McConnell has vowed to fight it every step of the way.

The Republicans are worried about

having

a pandemic outbreak of a functioning government that is meeting people's needs might unrealistically raise expectations.

And then you can't have that.

So,

but it's, you know, it's going to be

a dogfight through the legislative process, through the Senate specifically.

And so

where, you know, the institution that was designed basically in order to protect slavery.

And that's the gift that keeps on giving.

So

here we are.

In other American news,

well, the Georgia voting law is causing further ructions in American politics.

The Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, said in a statement after the signing of the bill, President Biden, The left and the national media are determined to destroy the sanctity and security of the ballot box.

Which, coming from the Republican governor of Georgia, that's a bit like Ronald McDonnell telling you off for playing your music a bit too loudly near a sleeping cow whilst you have your headphones on and whilst he was holding a revolver to the cow's head that he had just fired.

I mean, it is,

there's a stench of hypocrisy about Republican

concern, Republican arguments around this, aren't there?

There is.

I would say that that is a disservice to the word stench.

So,

you know,

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp stole the election from Stacey Abrams in 2018.

And then in 2020, she helped elect two Democratic senators from Georgia.

And the outbreak of Democratic participation is an outrage that needs to be stopped.

And, you know, and so they're introducing limitations like limiting early voting and Sunday voting.

And

they want to stop volunteering.

They want to close polling places so that people have to wait online for huge amounts of time in order to vote.

And then they want to prevent volunteers from giving water to people waiting in line to vote.

This is one of the weirdest details.

You could go to jail for a year for

giving someone a bottle of water.

What if they drown, Andy?

What if they drown?

God, you're thoughtless.

What if it was Moz?

So,

but it's like,

and so Republicans introduced more than 250 bills in 40 states to restrict voting rights

in the last three months.

It's pretty incredible.

And

what I appreciate about it is the degree of like just sort of mask off naked politics about it, you know, that

we are just ready to admit now as a nation that

when we said that we were a democracy, we didn't mean it like we wanted to say that we were a democracy and have just enough voting that the

you know that people could continue to do as people and by people i mean politicians and the ruling class could continue to plunder and and and uh murder their way across the globe uh

and uh and that and that if the actual public participated in the democracy and followed by following the rules, that

was not the intent.

And so

they're trying to make voting harder in order to discourage black people and young people specifically from voting.

I think Democrats should retaliate with things that will make it harder for Republicans to vote.

Like,

you can't vote unless you listen to an immigrant

or you can't vote in order to register to vote, you have to be able to list every Denzel Washington movie in order.

So

the

and so the arguments are, it's interesting to see like the right-wing intellectual apparatus like the National Review and these other you know like I've seen Twitter threads from right conservative think tanks arguing against voting and the arguments are like well obviously we all agree that we don't want everyone to vote I mean a lot of Americans are stupid and they shouldn't be in charge of stuff and we don't let five-year-olds vote if you want to make it easy for people to vote it's the same as you want to let five-year-olds vote uh we all agree that there should be some limits and that's a pretty fun slippery slope argument that uh

that's not that's not a slippery slope argument that is that is a greased bobsled run argument isn't it yeah

and you know i i'm i i think i think that this right-wing argument that you don't want to let stupid people vote uh could really backfire on them

um andy i'm sorry if i've talked about this before but i talk about it anytime the word election comes up right but australia do so few things well that i need to spread the word of our voting gospel.

We're very good at it.

Okay.

Let me, let me give you, let me paint our picture.

Number one, everyone has to vote.

Everyone.

If you're well read on politics, you have to vote.

If you're a stone-cold idiot, you have to vote.

That means anyone can then talk about politics because they have voted, they have contributed.

Number two, it's on a motherfucking Saturday.

Yeah?

Every year, every election, it's on a Saturday.

64% of Australians work weekdays, 82% of Americans, and I couldn't find the exact figure for the UK.

It's somewhere because mum's tired, but it's somewhere between 60 and 80% of British people.

So even if you didn't make it compulsory, 70% of your population could vote in person.

Number three, it's at schools, churches, public halls.

If you're blind or low vision, you can vote by telephone.

We've got mobile voting facilities that are set up in rural areas, hospitals and nursing homes, which actually seems pretty cruel to deny them a day out, but we won't go into that.

You can send in a postal vote from the day they announce the election.

If you can't make the day, you can send it from overseas.

You can't not vote.

They don't give you a physical option.

It is harder to eat breakfast than it is to vote in an Australian election.

Now, number four, this is the most important thing.

We have sausage sizzles at nearly every polling station.

What's a sausage sizzle?

It's the food truck of your motherfucking dreams.

That's what it is.

A sausage sizzle is a fundraising event whereby a mobile barbecue is set up by a local dad who volunteers at the local fire brigade and probably has a drinking problem.

But he loves to raise money for the kids, for the Country Women's Association, for his own beloved fire brigade, who are ironically and desperately underfunded by the government who the punters are voting for.

But now what he is selling.

is a very low-cost cooked sausage, which is placed on a single piece of buttered white bread, covered in fried onion and probably tomato sauce.

We have plenty of it in Australia still, no shortage there.

Then you fold up the piece of bread into a triangle and it's served on a thin, absorbent, useless paper napkin.

We then have cake stalls.

We sell $2 soft drinks or pop as you call it in the UK or soda as you call it in America.

Sometimes they even have a terrible local duo.

playing covers of the Wren Brands.

It's a pleasure to line up.

You hope the line doesn't move too quickly so you can get another sausage sizzle when the fresh batch of sausages come through, not the ones that have been sitting there for an hour and a half.

We also call it since in the last five years it's been named the democracy sausage.

It has its own finging emoji on Australian Election Day.

You write hashtag democracy sausage, you get a little sausage sizzle in the corner.

Well the sausage is surely the greatest possible emblem for democracy because it's generally best not to know what happens behind the scenes.

And it's also made up of little bits and pieces of all different parts of the body.

And it's put together in a nice tight sack and it's tight at the end.

And what is a nation if not a sausage?

Testify.

Thank you.

NATO,

last couple of times you've been on, you've told us about the strike action you've been involved in,

involving medical staff in

California.

Can you give us an update on that?

Yeah, Andy.

So, Felicity, you may not know this about me.

I am the America's only semi-functional hybrid of comedian and union organizer.

That gives me a bumble.

I love it.

So, regular listeners to the bugle will remember back in October, the bugle had a fully unjustifiable break in the stream of bullshit so that I could report live from a healthcare worker strike in Oakland, California.

I had organized 3,000 healthcare workers in the public health system to walk out.

And

that was back in October.

When my twins were born, my wife and I were both deliriously tired and also had postpartum delusions of grandeur.

Like

when the babies were born and we hadn't slept for more than two hours at a time, and then Independence Day came on the television.

And I was like, yeah, I could defeat an alien invasion for these babies.

Like, that's how striking feels.

And if you've never done it, I recommend it.

Just people are like, what what are you striking over?

And I'm like,

striking, yo.

Like, what do you mean, striking over?

Just to do it.

So the strike ended, but the negotiations continued until today, actually.

So

today, we just finished a week of voting to ratify the new union contract.

I'm a little bit punchy, having just helped settle the contract after a 14-month battle through the pandemic.

I'm incredibly proud of our campaign because we didn't just win.

We got a raise

for the workers

and new safety protections.

But in addition, in the course of the, as a result of the strike, we also wiped out the entire senior leadership and governing board of the public health system because they were incompetent and corrupt.

All the bosses got fired.

It was a historic strike, and I wanted Bugle listeners to know that it ended in success.

The public health workers, mostly, it's a workforce that's 80% people of color, many low-wage workers

feel like it's the best most successful union contract they've had in 25 years I have no jokes I'm so happy and so excited and so proud of you even though it doesn't affect me at all it's just like

yeah to be able to affect change in such a

widely underfunded, underappreciated and vital service, like essential, vital service right now, especially is extraordinary.

Congratulations, Nato.

I've also been very busy away from comedy.

I now have an Excel spreadsheet in which I can compare all Test cricketers against their teammates, opponents, and contemporaries.

So we've all been making good use of our spare time.

Yeah, we get it, NATO.

Like you've done some stuff.

Andy has too, okay?

Come on.

A final bit of American news.

More Joe Biden news.

He's starting to take steps to address the issue of gun violence in America, describe the epidemic of shootings in America as, quotes, an international embarrassment

rather than, as his predecessor described it, a source of patriotic pride.

I guess there's two sides to every potato, or even every potato.

I mean,

he's cracking down on ghost guns, which are guns assembled from kits that can't be traced because each individual component isn't technically part of a gun.

And this is presumably exactly what the founding fathers were trying to protect when they drafted the Second Amendment.

It wasn't just about having your well-regulated militias.

It was also the right to construct a lethal implement from various bits and bobs lying around your house.

Yeah, and it's it's uh and they're they're they're they're ghosts, so they're magic.

It's uh

boo,

and then you shoot someone.

That's how it works.

Um

yeah, this new initiative would get in the way of our national murder-suicide pact that we have with ourselves.

Uh

it's gun gun violence in America is so weird.

It's I feel like it's the peak of white privilege.

Like, if you spend any amount of time in the third world where they have a lot of violence and then you try to explain mass shootings, it's completely confounding to them.

Like, they're like, oh, yeah, of course, sure.

You need guns to defend your village from marwading Jonjaweed militias and kidnappers.

Uh-oh, no, that's not what you're using for.

Oh, well, then, of course, you need guns because you're starving and you need to steal food.

Uh-oh, oh, no?

So what do you need the guns for?

I'm sorry, what?

Come again?

You need guns because you're mad the vice president of the United States is a Jamaican Indian lady who's good at the electric slide.

Like,

clearly you have too much food.

Yeah, it's usually a girl said no to me too many times.

That's been the base of it, a lot of it.

The amount of misogyny.

And I use the word misogyny in its most truest form, the hatred of women, the amount of mass shootings that have been based on someone who has been rejected.

And we just, this is not a joke.

We need to deal, we need to teach young men how to deal with shame and their feelings and rejection.

And none of that is about the feminization of men.

It is about understanding the human condition and that all of those feelings are part of all people and that we all have to learn.

You know, women learn to deal with shame.

Sure, sometimes it's putting a lot of food in their mouth.

Sometimes it's watching every Julia Roberts movie there is.

It doesn't, you find a way, but guns are not the answer.

Guns, no, you sit down and you write a country in Western song or a poem.

That's that's what do that instead.

You get into stand-up comedy.

That's right.

You're telling me there's misogynists in stand-up comedy?

Come on now.

Breaking news.

Why is it that Biden is caving in to the unpatriotic stop innocent people being moaned down by gun-toting lunatics lobby?

I mean, it's, you know, he's rolling over, NATO, before the woke conspiracy's illiberal efforts to allow children to go to school without the numbing fear of sudden death haunting their every lesson.

It's a great capitulation by the new president.

So,

one of the things about raising children in the United States is

my kids, starting at age five,

you know,

started experiencing school lockdowns, like where there was, you know, that police were chasing someone through the neighborhood and they were worried about a shootout.

And so the school had to go into lockdown mode.

And so my kids have learned how to assess the degree of danger from different types of lockdown.

And, you know, that's that's do you is that more a more useful thing than

than learning, you know,

xylem, phylum, chimbin,

species, genus, whatever?

Sports news now.

And Felicity, you are

the Bugles

wedgie, aggravated sporting injuries correspondent.

It's been a...

busy, busy time for you this week, I know.

Yeah, and a tough day for journalism.

There was a football game in Australia the NRL the National Rugby League and

a fullback Dylan Walker got tackled and

was given what one of the commentators called an atomic wedgie

then what happened is the Dylan went to reach for what they thought was just pulling his pants back up

but then looked like he was in extreme pain effectively what happened it looked like a guy got tackled so badly by a wedgie that he then had to go off the pitch or the field.

What actually happened, two things.

One, he pulled a hammy.

His hamstring went, and that's why.

But also,

I'm really upset that this has been called a wedgie by the commentators and by the journalists.

His pants got pulled down.

That's a dacking.

That's not a wedgie.

A wedgie goes up.

Everyone knows a wedgie goes up.

What injury are you going to cause by pulling his pants down?

You're not getting like, oh, I've pulled my embarrassment muscle.

Oh, no i've strained my dignity it doesn't physically hurt to pull your pants down pull your pants up we all know goes right up the crack right up the crack and it hurts it can smart a dacking hurts inside but a wedgie hurts outside going in right

i think scientifically

i could imagine a scenario it seems like a marginal case but i could imagine a scenario it depends on how big your balls are um where if if depending

this is probably a math problem, but

with dependent, there's

the ratio of the relationship of the size of the balls and the speed and

intensity of the dacking is what you called it.

And what's the side to side?

Because that's how Newton discovered the Newton's cradle, I think, wasn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, now I understand what you're saying.

You're saying that a...

a firm graze or a bang by the dacking could cause injury.

I thought you were talking about the wedgie and how to make it even more atomic.

If you had massive balls and a very small taint, they could be caught up in that equation as well.

And I mean, we see this with, you know, clearly a lot of thought goes into the design of

trousers and shorts for use and top-level sport.

And I don't know if, I mean, the rugby league, rugby league is a violent, physically violent game.

Is the wedgie a legal?

Well, no, I end off the pitch, actually.

Very much so.

I mean, is the wedgie a legal maneuver?

No, no.

I'm not sure if you remember.

It was probably

15 years ago now.

It might have been 20, but there was

an NRL player whose move was to stick his thumb up the butthole of his opponents.

That was one of his moves.

And he ended up being booted from the league.

Right.

Because no one could see it.

And of course, the shame around the homophobia and male assault, no one's going to go, he stuck his finger up my ass.

They go, oh, yeah, sure, he did.

You wanted him to, you know, because Australia

pretty much after a tackle rather than chasing someone down the wing.

Yeah, he didn't, he's not a hitchhiker, he doesn't have his thumb out.

It's a last-minute move that he pulls in, like he tackles, and as he's going down, he went,

I know it's ironic that the popping noise happened when he went in, but that's that's how tight.

I'm going to stop that sentence.

Oh, we're learning, we're learning.

That's what I do, Andy.

I'm here to teach.

I'm a teacher.

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

Before we go, a quick other

sports story.

It's the start of the Major League Apprehension Season, and we go over now to join our marginal sports correspondent in America, Woll.

Yes, Andy, the Major League Apprehension Season is about to begin.

It has a particular edge this year as we emerge tentatively from lockdown and the season opening clash between the Boston Tremblers and the Anaheim and the Ants could set the tone for what many people are predicting could be the most competitive season in MLA history.

The Tremblers reigning MLA East champions of course after being too concerned to fulfill any of their fixtures in the 2020 season.

They bring new signing Pomellis Jarque into a potent lineup.

Jark expected to take on the Ants future Hall of Famer, Dressandra Gauloin and the head-to-head fluster.

Jacques reportedly set to unveil a new being so wary of social contacts as to be even more antisocial after lockdown than during it.

But will that have enough broad heft to overcome Gorwan's well-honed range of existential concerns about the future of the planet?

Classic contrast of styles and tactics in the offing there, Andy.

Elsewhere this opening weekend, the Nevada negative Vipsters and Miami Fret meet at the Florida Forbododrome.

Look out for the Vipsters top draft, Pic Culian Plorist, who was so impressively negative about his impending MLA debut at the press conference on Thursday.

He looked to be banging form there, Andy.

And the Nashville Butterflies, they'll be coming out in their cold sweats against the Jacksonville chitterers, whose reluctance to try new foods and wariness of all social change might not please the neutrals, but it's always hard to beat.

So exciting season, set to start this weekend.

Back to you with the studio, Andy.

Well, that brings us to the end of

this week's bugle.

A pleasure having you both on.

Any shows or other things to plug?

I actually, if there's any Australian listeners, there is a,

I'm in a drama series.

I'm in a very sensible drama series called Wakefield, which is available on iView in Australia or available on iView if you have a VPN anywhere else in the world.

It's very illegal.

Don't do it.

But I'm just saying that option is there.

And

it's going very well.

All episodes are available and then it'll be on TV on the 18th of April in Australia on the ABC.

No Tony shows coming up?

No live shows coming up.

You can check out, there's another podcast that I go on regularly called The Habituation Room with Francesca Fiorentini,

where we have

comedic interviews with prominent left-wing thinkers.

So

check that out.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

We are reverting to Monday recordings for the next couple of months as the news quiz is back on Radio 4.

You can find that on BBC Sounds or on your radio, or just listening to the echo from the clouds.

That starts again next week.

Our next recording is Monday, the 19th of April, with for the first time Chris Addison guesting on the bugle.

Do tune in for that.

In the meantime, we will play you out with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers to join them.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

After strolling down the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles-renowned West Hollywood and finding herself a mile and a half from where she started, Stephanie Grace got to thinking that a more exciting road for a stroll would instead be the Mobius Strip, on which you would walk the same distance as the Sunset Strip, but end up more usefully back where you started and, more excitingly, upside down.

Stephanie says, I think it could be a real boost for the Los Angeles tourist industry.

Everyone would want at least one go on it.

Caleb Kogan sometimes passes the time by holding knockout tournaments to ascertain the most useful household implement and is currently building up towards a potentially classic semi-final showdown between Spoon and Trowl.

Hard to call this one, pundits Caleb.

After Spoon beat Tape Measure in the quarters, I thought it was nailed on for a final spot.

But Trowl is always underrated and will be full of confidence after beating Hammer in the quarters of course.

Praveen Das, a keen observer of Caleb's tournament, tips Spoon to win through to the semis.

Yes, the trowel is one of the all-time gardening implements, says Praveen, and can actually be surprisingly useful around the house, in particular for serving salads, removing somnolent bees and diverting small water leaks.

The spoon has to be favourite though, as well as its core meal-time function, it can do a trowel-like job in the garden and entertain children and adults when buffed up and used as a funny mirror.

Monica Francis wishes the syllable zinc had not been wasted on a metal.

There can't be many more satisfying syllables to say than zinc, says Monica.

I feel it should have a multitude of uses rather than just being a label for a disappointingly brittle metal that isn't nearly as shiny as the name zinc suggests it should be.

It should be an adjective for something simultaneously invigorating but fun.

That was an absolutely zinc day out at the seaside for example.

Susan Bursing is absolutely on the same page as Monica.

Zincing, I feel, should be a verb meaning to slip, fall, slide and bump into something, but emerge uninjured and amused, says Susan.

I absolutely zinced off my bike into the local greengrocer store at the market yesterday.

Watermelons everywhere.

That would be an example.

I would also suggest zincing as a term for a delicately played snooker shot.

Ronnie was in a little bit of trouble there, but he's played a lovely little zinc on the blue and now Elon needs snookers.

And finally, Ellen Warren chips in with her periodic table word wasting gripe, claiming molybdenum is also a disappointingly attributed term.

Obviously, says Ellen, molybdenum shouldn't be an obscure element.

It should be an extinct, large, lugubrious, shuffly type animal that hibernated for 48 weeks of the year and slept 23 hours a day for the other month.

Furthermore, while I've got the periodic table at hand, antimony is quite clearly a missing cryptocurrency and arsenic is what happens when you sit on a pair of unlicensed scissors.

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.